Translated by K.
August, 1953, Mystic Falls
The sun was shining with its entire power and burned my skin. No cloud covered the sky and even through my immensely darkened and reflecting sunglasses every reflection hit me like a needle put right into my eyes.
It was possibly the worst day for my return to the world of the living. After this long period in which I had moved only in darkness and nighttime, as actually designated for my kind, the sun seemed even more merciless than before.
But it was time and if I backed down now, I would probably find no motivation to secure my position amongst humans for the next few years.
It was hard, being the only one of my kind who had sworn of his nature and having no one to understand your incentive, but being alone was even harder.
Therefore I'd set forth to my hometown, where everything had started, back to the place which had meant the world to me many, many years ago.
Since my last stay here enough years had gone by - a whole century to be exact – so that there could be no living person left who would be able to recognize my eternal youth.
I had come here as a traveler, as a stranger with roots in this city I couldn't and wouldn't deny.
There was something weird about small towns in the States. No one visited them without a reason and no one would stop asking questions as long as he didn't know the reason for the stay. Therefore I didn't have any other options besides visiting my last living relative and stay with him for a while, as his nephew who needed some distance from home on his way to adulthood.
I walked through the streets and noticed how much this city had changed. But what had I expected?
That time had stopped at this place while in dark nights I'd experienced the change in foreign cities?
While passing by I glanced at the window display of a kiosk and stopped dead at one of the headlines.
"Another animal attack. City council assumes wolf pack in the forest."
This couldn't be a coincidence. Of course it sometimes happened that a ranger or careless joggers were attacked by a big predator, but it was extremely rare. Especially in this particular town, it was highly unlikely that this predator was an animal.
Besides, on my last hunting trip, which had been less than twelve hours ago, I hadn't seen any wolves, neither have I heard their nightly conversation.
Obviously I wasn't the only hunter who decided to pay a visit to Mystic Falls and that was a fact, which really disturbed me.
My steps gaining speed as I ran down the street - it was more difficult than I would have imagined to keep a human pace, if you suddenly felt stares on the back of your neck and if you wanted nothing more than to turn around and curse loudly, but you had to wait until the audience consisted of nothing else than plants and bugs.
This was how my trip to civilization should end then; with a sprint into the forest.
Only when I heard the soft crunch of dried, old leaves under my feet,
while the moss deadened my steps, did I slow down, before I stopped completely
„What do you want, Damon? "
I addressed him, even before I had a proof of him being the one who had followed me, but as I turned around the gaze of his dark, almost black eyes, meet mine. And his lips formed one of those maliciously false smiles as he welcomingly unfolded his arms and took one step towards me.
"It's nice to see you too, Stefan!" then his voice changed into a deeper and also hollower one.
"What have you been up to the last twenty years, Damon?" Now both eyebrows rose and his voice got higher again.
"How nice of you to ask. I was having only half as much funas we used to have."
"Seriously, what do you want?"
"I want to spend some of those sweet, brotherly moments with you, brother!"
Now it was my turn to look at him bewildered as I rose my brows.
"I thought we could start at the beginning. Back to the roots, where everything started, you know. You like me, and I like you and the whole world's full of flowers."
"Are you drunk?"
He was speaking like a lunatic. Finally the transformation was complete, after I had considered him a maniac all the time.
"Nope…" He took another step into my direction and his smile got, if possible, even more malicious. Yes, that was the Damon I remembered.
"Why are you so suspicious? After all it is you, who doesn't deserve the trust that was given to you."
He knew exactly where to point his words, where to find this place, that was covered only by the leaf of the linden tree. I have had enough time to become resistant to him, invulnerable, so to speak.
But then he showed up, abruptly and unpredictably and opened wounds that had long healed.
"Enough of that! Where is the blond … dolly-bird who accompanied you the last time?"
He couldn't be serious, could he?
Otherwise, as ridiculous as what he sometimes did and said might seem, I had learned the hard way that he was always dead serious about it.
Every joke, every sentence; you were better off weighing his words so that you didn't fail to notice the bomb amongst the smut.
"Her name is Lexi, and she is not my dolly-bird!"
"Too bad, she would've been a really nice dolly-bird."
He was smiling and I was surprised once again how somebody who obviously was the master of smalltalk, could be filled with so many intrigues.
"Anyways, why would you care about it?"
I couldn't see where this conversation was heading to, but I was about to find out.
"We are brothers, Stefan, and brothers share…"
A snarl left my throat and I could feel the way my face changed.
My sharp teeth pressed themselves against my lips and waited impatiently to perforate warm skin, while my eyes tightened and I focused Damon with the gaze of a hunter who was about to strike.
"You would be better off if you didn't do that!" He began to move slowly first to the left, then to the right and circled me with apparently neglected defense.
All he wanted was for me to lose control and /with that give him a reason to tighten his fingers around my throat.
I took a deep breath and as the oxygen reached my lungs, I felt myself become calm again and my facial expression changed back to normal.
There was a short flash of disappointment across Damon's face, but the following smile didn't give away how much my self-control pissed him off.
"Be glad, Lexi didn't hear you," I returned to our previous topic.
"You mean the whole 'I'm older and therefore stronger than you'-thing´?" His voice went almost squeaky as he tried to imitate her. "Boohoo, now I am afraid!"
He laughed coldly and placed a hand on my shoulder.
"If you look at it from that angle, you are older than me, too, little brother!"
The unnatural frequent repetition of the simple fact that we were brothers, made me shiver internally.
"Only a few minutes of course, you just died faster than me. I was always the stronger one of the two of us. After all…."
He paused a short while and drew back a few steps. His face displayed the highest enjoyment.
"...was it of any use to you? The answer is –no!"
"I'm asking you once again, what do you want, Damon?"
I was almost fed up with him.
"Have you listened to me at all?"
"I did, but I haven't heard anything I'm about to believe. Why did you come here of all places? Why did you come the same day I did?"
Now it was my turn to circle around him, but he didn't bother to follow my movements with his eyes and to turn around in order not to turn his back on me. He was just standing there, smugly; he was totally motionless and grinning madly about something I did not know, but I was about to find out.
"I intend to stay here for a while. Maybe a year, maybe three or four and therefore I have no use for you!"
"Where EXACTLY did you intend to stay?"
"With our 'uncle'…"
"You mean great-great-…grandnephew?" he interrupted me, but I was not as easily distracted as he thought.
"…the old house is still standing and there is enough room for me. Not for you!"
"Oh, that…that was mean, I'm hurt!" For a split second he really seemed to be aggrieved but then his expression hardened again.
"Do you really believe anyone would care about some dead bodies in the woods while our brave soldiers fall at war in Europe? Thousands of people die, Stefan; that is terrible!" He nodded with pitifully punched lips; however it seemed more like a convulsively suppressed laughter on his face.
"There hasn't been war in Europe for about eight years." Didn't he read the newspaper or did he actually care that little about the human world, as long as there were enough people he could inconspicuously - or not - pick up at bars at night to firstly sleep with and then suck them dry?
"Oh, shut up! There is always war somewhere."
"Yes, but not in Europe. Besides you should know best that war somewhere in the world doesn't prevent people from starting a witch-hunt right in front of their own houses."
"Lucky us; we are no witches!"
He never answered seriously nevertheless his jokes were always deadly serious – just as he himself.
"What about Korea? Isn't there a terrible war, which distracts the people?"
Why couldn't he just let it go? The Civil War in our own country couldn't prevent an amount of mysterious deaths leading to a hunt on our kind. Why should one in a foreign country do so?
"Not anymore!"
"Fantastic!" He applauded and for a moment he actually looked as if he really was happy about that fact.
"I have always considered it as the world's biggest waste. Soldiers giving their lives and their blood soaking the earth… that's tragic!"
With this solemn speech he would have certainly managed to convince one or another person of him being an extremely pacifistic human. Except for the fact that referring to him as a human fit the same way as referring to him as a pacifist.
"Since when do you care? I presume you would've liked to play earth at a battlefield and would have helped the soldiers to fulfill their duty of dying for their country."
"And since when, Stefan, are you that clever?"
"Since the day you became that predictable!"
That was a lie. Damon was a lot of things but he never ever was entirely predictable. If there were an eventuality that was cruel and one that you could have called 'normal', Damon would always take the horrid one.
THAT was the only thing you could be absolutely sure about.
But with that my question from the beginning wasn't answered yet. What the hell did he want from me?
"I was lonely, Stefan. Everyone, I ever had, you took from me!"
What did he mean by that?
Was HE, of all people in the world, trying to make me feel guilty?
It wasn't like there weren't enough things on my mind that tormented me or decisions torturing me, things I regretted and which haunted me, but concerning my brother all my feelings of guilt evaporated.
Normally.
But as I looked up and my gaze met his, it was his look that went through my body like a cold shiver.
Could this be some blur of real sorrow? The honest quest for somebody, who would accompany him, and this somebody should be me, his most-hated enemy and his only friend?
"I really thought I could come here, and we could start over. We could've had a little bit of fun. Actually I'm a really nice person, soft on the edges, hard as stone inside… or should it be the other way round?" He made a short dramatic pause "I really thought I could forgive you…"
I wanted to laugh at the absurdity of him being the one who had to forgive anything, after everything he had done, but I didn't get a chance for that and my laughter was nipped in the bud and changed into a raspy moan.
Pain flooded my senses and Damon's black pupils were more hateful and darker than I had ever seen them; I was facing wrath itself.
He bend forward as he shoved the dismantled branch into my side again and whispered in an almost brotherly and lovely way "…but I can't forgive you!"
I spat on the ground and tried to gasp some air, but the pain made my body wince in horrid spasms and not until he extricated the branch from my rips – not without breaking a few of them -and stepped aside was it that I regained control over my body, which had fell to the ground without the support of the branch, so that I could spit out one sentence.
"You would be better to leave…"
"You are in no position to order me around right now." He rotated the branch between his hands and watched with amazement as my blood dripped in slow-motion.
"Just Go and leave me alone!" I tried to pick myself up, because I felt my wound had already started to heal, but this terrible pain would stay for a while. That was typical of injuries caused by wood; and all that was making it hard to focus my senses to see if Damon would try to stab me again.
"O Stefan, YOU will never be alone." He kneeled down next to me and put one hand on my shoulder, which pressed my body with brute force against the ground.
"We are brothers, after all! And every time you may think you are alone, I will be there to keep you company."
A definite threat that I couldn't or didn't want to respond to.
Instead I stayed on the ground holding myself up with an elbow and gasping for breath as he simply turned around and left.
Very slowly, one step after another and without looking back he said:
"We will meet again. And every time we do, I'll just be patiently waiting for an opportunity to gain revenge for everything you've done!"
Then he was gone and left me with the question why he hadn't plunged the wood straight through my heart.
The End.