Disclaimer: I do not own The Vampire Diaries nor its characters. They belong to L.J. Smith, Kevin Williamson, Julie Plec, The CW Network, and whoever else.
Note/Warning: Written for tvd_hiatus at LiveJournal, for the prompt, "Jeremy/Anna - we could leave a trail of broken hearts and torn out throats in our wake, so long as we remember not to feel.", and was beta'd by savage_lunacy. This was so much fun to write. Very dark, twisted, and different for Jeremy/Anna - but a blast to do. XD An AU if Jeremy left with Anna and let her turn him. Feedback greatly appreciated!
There's a Thunder in Our Hearts, Baby
"I can see her dying," he chokes out.
Doesn't take a genuis to know who he's seeing die right before his eyes. Doesn't take a genuis to know that there's compulsion coming unglued in his mind.
It's an hour past midnight, and they've stopped in Raleigh.
Blood rushes to his eyes, and his fists beat against the side of the car; nails leave scratches in the paint, through the metal.
Anna holds out another bottle of blood.
"Help me make it stop," he pleads. He is in front of her before he's even finished speaking. He clutches her, hands clasping and face pressed to her hair. "Make it stop, Anna, please." He is at once a lost boy and a rabid monster.
She had promised to help him turn it off (but she had been hoping that maybe they could get past this without flipping the switch that might tear the boy she loves out from her grasp).
Jeremy is crying and his fangs are digging into her neck, because he is full of emotion and confusion - and all she can think of is her mother lifeless and ashen on the floor.
She tells him how to turn it off.
Anna knows how to turn it off. She simply never did it. For centuries she didn't have to; and by the time she was a wreck of emotions, she was too old for it to work properly.
Try as she might, the horror and the grief and the bitterness kept worming their way through her heartlessness.
It was easy to keep from falling for boys, even ones she laid with and used. It was easy to keep from feeling for the people she had to go through to get closer and closer to letting her mother out.
But it was impossible to pretend she never felt at all; that she didn't hide a storm of grief and loss and need and love and anger.
So when Jeremy is carefree and wild and savage like an animal that knows no better because in its world a conscience does not exist, Anna is hesitant and uncertain. There is a pull between them; she has no one else save Jeremy.
It scares her though, how easy he is making it for her to shut herself down and go along for the ride.
"I can see her dying," he murmurs while staring at the corpse of a girl. He drained her dry and watched the life fade from her eyes.
(And Anna did nothing but stand back and watch with a sickening fascination.)
The girl is leggy with dirty blonde hair, and needlemarks everywhere. Her blood on Jeremy's tongue is tainted and harsh with liquor and heroin.
Doesn't take a genuis to figure out why he picked her.
Jeremy's tastes have become bitter and almost masochistic (if not for the fact that he simply does not feel a thing anymore). He is wild and lost, the drugged out boy that Anna disregarded when she first arrived in Mystic Falls for the second time.
(She wonders now why she wasn't interested in him back then. She'll wonder later why she's interested in him now.)
"Then look away," Anna whispers, slipping her hand around his.
Jeremy grins and pushes her against the wall. (He takes control where he used to give it.) "I don't think I want to," he growls into her mouth, but he does not look at the girl again while they fuck like animals in the alleyway.
Once upon a time, Anna did not want to be a killer. She did not want to be a monster, and the thought of Jeremy Gilbert of all people seeing her that way terrified her so much that it hurt.
Now she sits astride a boy not much older than Jeremy, her fangs so deeply embedded in his throat she could easily rip through the flesh from ear to ear. Blood is trickling down in rivulets, pooling on the bed sheets and staining through to the mattress.
Her perfect boy is watching with hungry eyes, and she feels those last, few, shuddering breaths escape her meal.
There is a twisted, sick need burning her gut. Shame and remorse are forgotten in the haze of the lust; she's soaking wet for her lost boy.
Once upon a time she had felt like Peter Pan, collecting lost boys and giving them purpose but ultimately forgetting them after they fell. And he was her Wendy, the one that would always stay in her mind fading slower than any other.
Somewhere along the way he became Pan, and she's the demented pixie that cannot let him go.
"Sticky sweet," he groans when he licks the blood trailing down her chin.
Deep in the back of her mind, Anna knows there will not be a happily ever after.
"We should go back," he says after almost an hour of silence.
They are covered in blood, and their bed is wet with the sticky crimson and sweat. There are a couple of bodies at their feet, the meals they devoured before the hunger switched, and they could not get enough of each other.
Doesn't take a genuis to know where they should go back to. Doesn't take a genuis to know why.
They've been sleeping more lately (invading each other's dreams, where emotions still run rampant, and dead bodies still haunt them).
"I don't think that's a good idea," she whispers. Her tongue is absently licking at the lines of dried blood running down his side, trying half-heartedly not to let dangerous things back in.
"We could kill him."
Doesn't take a genuis to know who 'him' is.
"I see him in your dreams." ('I feel hatred vicariously through you, soaking it up when you're open and drowning in it.')
"We shouldn't, Jeremy," she says - and suddenly she is over five hundred again, she can feel again. She hates being a monster again. Everything comes crashing down, because her Jeremy would never want to hurt his own flesh and blood no matter how horrible a person they were.
What have I made you?
Jeremy doesn't speak. He slithers around her until he's behind her, and he fucks her until she doesn't feel anymore. His fingers dig in hard enough to bruise, and don't let go so they can heal.
There are empty promises between them, but his skin burns her until they mesh.
It would all be so much easier if she still hated him. If she could look at him and still see only Jonathan, weak and nervous and pathetic. If she craved his blood split everywhere and all over.
"I'll make it better, Anna," he tells her.
Funny, wasn't that what she promised to do for him long, long ago?
"I swear, I'll make it better, just don't go." His fingers are in her hair, she can feel his nails digging into his skin. There's a madness in his eyes that she helped put there; she tore the crumbling foundations out from under him, and let him rebuild them how he pleased, with no direction.
"I cannot fix you," she whispers. "I can't even fix myself, Jeremy." Her hands are on his cheeks, fingers curl against the tear tracks down his skin. Somewhere along the line she let herself become the replacement for the girl before; drugged out on bloodlust and rushes, living for the high of numbness and perfect moments between their bodies.
(Their hearts are still so disconnected.)
She promised him once she would never do anything to hurt him; the lie tastes sour on her tongue, and she could vomit up all the lovely throats they've eaten.
He digs his nails in until blood tickles her through her hair and down the nape of her neck. "I can still see her dying."
If they could trade each other for the lives they had before, they would.