Inverse Redemption
Disclaimer: Don't own, just playing crazy, crazy games
A/N: This story is set at the end of season two TVD. It contains spoilers up to episode 2:21 but is an AU story that will deviate wildly from canon after the prologue. It is also a story that will be set in 1864 and will focus on Damon, Katherine and Stefan. Characters from present day Mystic Falls (such as Elena) will be mentioned but I don't know yet if they will feature in this story beyond the prologue.
I would also like to dedicate this story to Waltzmatildah whose appreciation of all things D/K helped inspire the idea for this story.
Prologue: Time travel is not one of the five stages of grief
Five days, seven hours and twenty-three minutes. That's how much time had passed since Klaus' ritual sacrifice had been averted and Elena had been spared. Victory had been far from bloodless and marred, as most victories were, in tragedy. Every action had a consequence and every life a price to pay.
The first to pay had been Jenna Sommers; a truly innocent victim in a game far too big for her. Then John Gilbert died to buy back Elena's lost choices and from there the ripple effect of loss took its toll on the others too, one way or the other. Elena, Jeremy, and Alaric felt Jenna's loss the most keenly, but no one was immune. They were all walking wounded when Sheriff Forbes ripped apart what little illusion of safety they had tried to wrap around themselves in the aftermath. In the wake of her actions Caroline, Matt, and Tyler paid their dues in blood and sorrow and sacrifice.
Then it was Damon's turn, although in retrospect, his death was assured before any other. It was just delayed in the execution. Wolf-bitten on the night of the full moon trying to save Caroline Damon kept up the front for the fight against Klaus and the immediate aftermath, but it was only a matter of time before he succumbed. Five days, seven hours and twenty-three minutes to be exact.
He wasn't quite not dead yet but even by the unique standards of most vampires he could hardly be described as living. Ironically compared to Rose, Damon actually had it easy for the first couple of days. Fever, sickness, and a creeping sense of displacement and paranoia that was as much about tying up loose ends and seeking absolution as it was encroaching insanity, were nothing compared to the convulsions, blood vomiting, and gangrenous rotting Rose went through in the space of the first twenty-four hours of the infection.
It was almost enough to encourage the stupidly optimistic among them all – mostly Stefan – to hope that maybe, just maybe, wolf-bites weren't always fatal to vampires. Maybe because Tyler wasn't fully transformed the bite was less potent? Or perhaps Rose had just been damned unlucky and it was worse for her? Stefan even toyed with the idea that Klaus breaking the curse had something to do with the atypical course Damon's infection was taking.
On the fourth day however all hope was lost; because on the fourth day the pain came and swept Damon away.
Stefan had seen and endured any number of ugly, hideous, and even piteous things in his long existence – many of them having some connection to his brother – but the moment he blurred down the basement stair to find Damon in the secure cell (where he'd put him to stop anymore suicide attempts) tearing into the rotted flesh of his left arm was a moment that was going to haunt him for the rest of his eternity.
Lucidity gone Damon had been like a sick animal, wild with pain, tearing at the festering, bloated, cracked and sloughing skin of his arm with nails and fingers and even teeth. He attacked himself as if he wanted to rip his own arm off, smacking his head repeatedly against the solid stone walls of his cell hard enough to shatter his skull all the while making terrible, bestial snarling noises deep in his throat.
Stefan had restrained Damon, tying him to the fold away cot. He'd tried to treat and dress the necrotic mess of splitting, stinking, decaying flesh and tissue that used to be a perfectly serviceable left arm but when he touched Damon's skin, even with a fingertip, he felt it slide and slip and fall apart in wet, oozing pustules. Damon screamed then. He screamed and would not stop. Stefan drugged him with vervain, doped him with whiskey, bourbon, vodka and blood. He tried to talk to Damon, made promises that he would fix this. Fix him. Repeated over and over like a mantra that he could not lose him and that Damon had to hold on.
It was all pointless because in the rare moments his brother was quiet and still, neither screaming in mindless pain nor passed out in fitful oblivion, he would turn blank eyes on Stefan devoid of wit, awareness, or any recognition. He stank of sickness and death and animal fear.
"Stefan."
Elena came to him, pale and gaunt, a woman old and worn in spirit wearing the suddenly ill-fitting body of a very young girl. She came to him where he sat against the clammy wall of the basement corridor right outside Damon's cell. She touched him with chilled fingers and her eyes were bruised with so much loss already.
"Stefan he's in pain." She said; the non-sequitur making altogether too much sense.
Inside the cell Damon lay on his cot, flat on his back, eyes open but staring unseeing at the ceiling. His chest rose in great heaving breaths, rasping and torn, his lips parted and faintly blue from oxygen depletion. His bitten arm was wrapped in stained bandages from fingertip to shoulder and his pallor was chalky, the tell-tale signs of vampire desiccation setting in as, no longer responsive to anything or anyone, he refused all blood.
"He's not getting worse." Stefan told her, numbly reaching up to clasp his own hand over hers as it rested on his shoulder. "He's stabilised. I just need to keep getting some blood into him." He shook his head sharply hearing a buzzing panic in his ears. "There's still time. He's not getting worse."
"Stefan." Elena jerked away from him eyes shooting from Damon in the cell to Stefan and back again. "How can you say that? Look at him. He's suffering." Her voice cracked on the last and she stared hollowly into the open doorway of the cell. Stefan didn't know what she thought or felt; the quick fire dance of emotion over her face seemed alien to him. He wondered if she loved Damon in her own way; he wondered if it even mattered.
"He wouldn't want this." Elena told him with bitter finality as if the scant few months she'd known Damon could compare with Stefan's lifetime of fraternity. "He'd hate this. You know that."
"He's my brother." Stefan said and he thought he'd said those three words so many times in the last five days that they'd lost all meaning – if they ever had any to begin with. Yet he clings to them still. Clings to the knee-jerk, irrational, gut-churning certainty that he cannot, will not, must not let go.
"I know." Elena took a shuddering breath and dropped down beside him, notching her chin on his shoulder. Her breath tickled his neck as she breathed out a half-sob. "I know." She repeated. "But this is cruel Stefan. It's cruel and he…he deserves better." She kissed his shoulder and it stung.
"What are you asking me?" Stefan flinched away from his own question. Elena did not.
"We have to let him go Stefan."
"No." Stefan was up and standing before he realised it. He stared down at Elena unable to recognise her. She was speaking a language he didn't understand. Panic sang a rising chorus in his mind. He was afraid to listen too closely to what that chattering choir was telling him. So he ignored it until all he could hear was the roaring of blood in his ears.
"No." He repeated raking fingers through his hair and turning away from Elena. "I am going to find a way to fix this."
Turning away from Elena meant he had no choice but to look down at his brother's still warm carcass, rotting alive in a cold, dank basement. Damon's blank roaming eyes had closed and Stefan wondered if he dreamed.
"This isn't how it ends," He whispered unable to turn away from what was left of Damon no matter how much he wished he could. "I can't lose him, not now."
"Stefan please," Elena moved up behind him, wrapping her arms around him from behind and pressing her face against the dip of his shoulder blades. "Don't make him suffer anymore." She whispered, her tears burning through the fabric of his shirt like acid mixed vervain. "Let him have peace finally."
"There's still time Elena." He insisted clasping his hands over hers as they stretched around his chest. "There's still time. I'll bring him back. I'll fix all this."
In his cell, lying on sweat and putrid stiffened sheets, Damon moaned, a somnambulant, unintelligible sound and silently, swiftly, treacherously, time ran its course around both brothers, dragging the one away from the other as it had for the best part of two centuries.
"This should never have happened." Stefan told the thick enervating air of the basement. "This isn't how we were supposed to end up." Stefan spoke with a leaden tongue, trying to explain something as nebulous as broken souls and lost destiny, of lives both shattered and unending and bonds savagely torn asunder. Mostly however Stefan wanted Elena at the very least to know about the wailing ghost of reconciliation singing painful threnodies in his mind and of a hope so cruel the loss of it threatened to devour Stefan as surely as the wolf bite ate away at Damon.
All he could say however was as prosaically childish as it was achingly honest.
"I wish there was a way to go back, back to the beginning and change everything. I wish there was a way we could do everything again. Erase the mistakes, the pain, the loss, and start all over again."