Author's Note

July 2018: I originally took this story down when it Amazon made a deal with the TVD copyright holder to allow fanfic writers to legally publish books of their TVD fanfic under the Kindle Worlds program. They assured us the program would soon expand from the USA to the international market, and despite the over 100 emails I harassed the Kindle Worlds department with, that never happened. This month, Kindle Worlds closed its doors and the rights to my stories came back to me, and now I'm happy to be able to share these stories with my international readers again, sex scenes and all.

Thank you to all the amazing readers who bought the books from Kindle Worlds and helped support the thousands of hours I put into crafting these stories. It's been a wonderful ride and I'm so grateful to all of you. That foray into publishing helped launch my original fiction career, and now I have original fiction books up for sale! If you'd like to see any of those, check out michellehazenbooks dot com. Either way, enjoy this and all my other fanfic stories that will soon be back up on the site (Desperate Love trilogy (S4 retelling), Happily Ever After: Salvatore Style (book length epilogue/prank war following Desperate Love), In Time We Trust trilogy (S5 retelling), and Sanguine Veritas.)

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The title is Latin, roughly translated as "Truth in Blood." The story starts in episode 4x02, "Memorial" during the Damon and Elena bloodsharing scene in the bathroom of the Grill. I extend and expand what we saw of the scene, and then from there, the story goes in a completely new direction. Happy reading!

Chapter 1: Understanding

ELENA

I am shaking with hunger, so I don't realize until he locks the door behind us that Damon has just pulled me into the bathroom at the Grill. I'm alone with him, which is the exact situation I have been avoiding since my transition. I couldn't always trust myself around him as a human. As a vampire, I figured it was better not to risk it.

"What are you doing?" I ask nervously.

I can't keep animal blood down, and I'm afraid to feed off a human, and I really fail to see how being alone in a locked room with Damon Salvatore is going to solve either of those problems. I chose Stefan, but I knew that wouldn't automatically cool off what was between Damon and me. Which made it all the more important, with my volatile new nature, to be nowhere near him.

"Giving you what you need," he says shortly.

Is he really crazy enough to think we can just have sex right now?

I glance at the door, heat rising in my body even as I try to think of how I should respond. It isn't until he bites into his hand that I realize for once he didn't mean something in a sexual way.

The blood welling up into his palm distracts me from the blush starting in my cheeks and my mouth goes dry and tingly as my hunger accelerates into starvation.

"Drink," he growls.

"What?"

Vampire blood? Would that work? Would it help? I can't look away from his hand and I'm fully aware that I'm not thinking clearly, but that doesn't make me able to do anything about it.

"You're a new vampire Elena: you need warm blood from the vein. Maybe this will do the trick."

I'm shifting back and forth, unable to keep still. I'm starving for blood, but what pools in his offered palm doesn't just smell like blood. It smells like Damon and that makes it twice as dangerous.

"Or not. Just don't tell Stefan," he says tersely, avoiding my eyes.

That rings alarm bells in my mind even through the fog of bloodlust.

"Why not?"

Damon's gaze locks onto me with an intensity that is too intimate for what we are allowed to have together. "Because blood sharing is kind of…personal."

God, the smell of him is incredible. I am going to have to drink or run, but I can't keep myself still for a second longer.

"What do you mean it's personal?" I manage to ask, knowing that even if I don't care right now, I should care.

"Just drink!" he snaps impatiently and I remember how worried he's been about me since my transition.

The last bit of my conscience that I can still hear over my raging hunger whispers that he may not want to do this with me, that he's just offering because he is scared that I'll starve. I search his face, looking for hesitation, but there is none. Just desire. He wants me to do this.

He nods once and nothing else matters. If it did, I doubt I could hold back anyway.

I take his hand, at least trying not to be an animal about it, and bring it to my mouth as slowly as I can bear.

It feels so good to give in, to let my fangs lengthen into their true form. It feels good to bite him, my canines pushing into his flesh even though I don't need to release more blood. He's already given me what I need. As usual.

It's funny that as much as I have been obsessed with blood lately, needing it and not wanting to need it, that I'm not prepared for the taste. I guessed it would taste like that guard at the Young farm: like scratching an itch. Coppery, a bit dusty. Necessary.

Damon's blood tastes fierce. The predator in me is singing.

He tastes wild, and gentle. Sweet edged with tartness. Dark chocolate spiced with wine. Sharp teeth and hard, protective hands. The scent, the feel of his skin, all the contradictions of him are pouring into me, moving through my throat, my veins.

I'm never going to get enough of this, of him. I'm so far gone I don't even consider what that means.

There's a jolt as we stagger back into the wall, both of us too caught up in each other to maintain balance in something as unimportant as legs.

Sex and confidence, loneliness and uncertainty.

My body curls naturally into his chest, his big hand stroking my hair as if we're embracing, as if we're giving and receiving love instead of blood. Maybe we are.

His hand on my hair pulls at something deep in my belly, makes my scalp come alive with a tingling burst. The brush of my forehead against his throat is as bright and intense as sex.

His touch and his blood are a protection spell, drugging all my new fears about being a vampire into complacency.

A vampire is what Damon is. He will help me. He won't let me fail at this. He never forsakes me, in the end.

It feels so good not to be scared that I'm going to hurt someone, or be disgusting. Damon won't be repulsed by what I am now. I wonder why the ferocity of my feeding is making him so gentle and I'm glad that I need to feed so I can pretend I don't know how he's holding me. I can pretend I don't want him to touch me like he is.

But I do.

# # #

DAMON

I'm quivering with how good, how right this feels and that is obscene considering the reality of what I'm doing.

This is the pity fuck of blood sharing. It's a crumb I'm throwing myself because a moment is all I can get. I've offered myself to this girl dozens of ways and this time is going to end the same as all the rest. She's going to give me one wide-eyed look of scared confusion and then she's going to take off because what I'm offering is either not enough or too much for her.

I wish I knew which it was. I wish I didn't care.

I shudder with the sweetness that pours through my body, unaffected by my dark thoughts. My hand tightens in her hair.

It took me a long time to get why it feels so good to have your blood taken like this. It's a heady thing, to be fully understood. It's intoxicating.

It's better when the person doesn't ditch you afterwards.

It's intimate because what you are is written in your blood and vampires can taste it when we feed. Because vampires are so much more than people, drinking from them is like reading a newspaper in bold, large type. When you drink human blood the same truths are written, but lightly, with small letters and vague sentences.

That's why killing is so enticing. It is what cannibalism was always meant to be. You're consuming another person in the fullest sense of the word.

# # #

ELENA

Maybe it is because he is giving it to me to save me, from death and guilt and myself, but Damon's blood tastes of love. I don't know if the emotion is his or my own. I'm afraid it's both. I'm terrified it's both.

His blood is lighting up my whole body and I feel like I opened my eyes for the first time directly into the sun. Only instead of being blinded by it, I can see the details, the wretched beauty that humans can't handle, can't hold. Can't bear.

I can see Damon better with my eyes closed, with his blood in my mouth, than I could ever see him when I looked at him. He is everything I couldn't face or accept or even conceive of last week when I made that terrible, cruel phone call to tell him my choice was made.

My head is spinning and I lean a little closer to him, balancing against his body, and I feel his response to me. My eyes fly open. I know I shouldn't feel this part of him, that I need to stop this and run while I still can, but I'm still feeding.

My tongue tastes of sex, dirty and beautiful.

Deliciously forbidden fantasies run through my head. I can't stop thinking about all the erotic things I've ever dreamed of him doing to me. I can remember all too clearly how he looked on my birthday, naked in the foyer of the boarding house while he smiled arrogantly at me, his muscles adorned with bubbles from the bath.

I'm hopelessly turned on and I know I have to get this under control right away or I know where I will end up. That will only hurt all of us more in the end even if right now it would make me feel so, so good. Better than food or breathing. Better than a ring that lets me walk in the sunlight. Better than blood.

The only way I make myself stop is that I don't deserve the gift of his blood after what I've done to him.

I run my tongue over his palm, savoring one last taste like I am condemned. I pry my body away from his. I don't dare look at him, even for a second. I'm in more danger alone with Damon than I was in that whole room of mortal, fragile humans with my bloodlust running wild.

I pull away from his kind hands and those overwhelming glacier-blue eyes. I spin to face the wall, pressing my palms against it so hard that I can feel the tiles bend against the force of me. I push my forehead against the tiles too, trying to shackle myself to the safety of this inanimate surface.

In Denver, it was unbearable, wanting him. Resisting him, impossible. Now with heightened everything, I'm lost, and I do what I always do when I'm lost.

"Damon, I need your help."

He's turned to stay close and though no part of him touches me, I can feel him everywhere. He stands just behind me, the distance between our skin calibrated and cataloged to the millimeter by my overly efficient vampire brain and senses.

"What do you need, Elena?" The emphasis on the word need is so slight I wouldn't have heard it a week ago. The velvet whisper of his tone licks me and I shiver from head to heels.

"Stop me. Don't let me…"

"Don't let you what?"

My tongue is dry as dust and it tastes of him. I can smell him on my lips.

His hands slide over mine, his skin rasping against mine in a symphony of sensation. Our hands press together against the wall. No other part of us touches.

My unsubtle vampire emotions are cutting through my confusion in one way: I know for absolute certain that I want Damon, in more ways than I want to want him. I just wish the loudspeaker of my heart would let me know what the hell I am supposed to do about it.

I need to babble, to make a speech explaining why we can't do this now, to make him understand so he can stop me even though I know asking Damon to help me resist him is like asking kerosene to put out a fire.

But to talk I need to be able to breathe and I can not.

Maybe if I hold very, very still, he will do beautiful things to me and I can pretend I'm not responsible, that it isn't my fault. That it wasn't my willpower that flatly refused when I asked it to keep me away from Damon.

My eyes are closed and I reach deep inside myself, past my crazed maze of desires, past my responsibilities and all my ideas of right and wrong and I try to remember who I am.

# # #

DAMON

My body hovers just behind hers. She is silent, but the heaving of her breath and the frantic drum of her heartbeat fill my ears.

It is an impressive measure of her resolve that we aren't both naked while I take her right here against the wall. She is incredibly aroused.

I'm not surprised. I'm not even particularly flattered. I've known since the day we met that she was physically attracted to me.

I wonder cynically if she would think the perfect man was Stefan's mind in my body. She doesn't have the same response to him, and he knows it. It is impossible to lie to vampire senses about something as basic as attraction. It's major fuel for his rage and jealousy toward me, though I doubt he's ever brought it up to Elena. How emasculating that would be.

Not quite so bad, I think, as knowing that she wants to jump me and is making a literally superhuman effort not to because she doesn't like who I am as much as how I look.

Still, my heart is cut clean out of my chest by the intimacy of the blood sharing, and all the cynicism and sarcasm in the world aren't enough to convince me to step away from her yet. My body leans toward hers as if we are held here by something stronger and more basic than bloodlust, against the best interests of our emotions, our futures, ourselves.

"Don't let me touch you," she breathes, finally, the sweetness of her voice making acid irony of her words.

"Why would you ask me that, Elena?" My voice is like a whip, cracking against her skin. Maybe if I pour all my cruelty, all my bitterness into it, then it will release the hold she has over me and let me step away. Maybe even leave this room under my own power before she has a chance to run from me. Again.

I'm probably not that lucky.

"Because you're my friend," she says achingly.

There might be a God after all, because that does it. I manage three steps away, nearly all the way to the opposite wall, blistering her back with my eyes.

"I may not have many friends, Elena, but I do know that a real friend isn't someone who only shows up when they need something from you."

She turns at that so I see her expression change, a different part of her nature taking over and her inner bi-polar vampire stoking this new fire to the same heights as the old.

I know what she's about to say. I was right the first time. There is no God. This is pure devil. Pure demon temptation and I have long been a sinner.

"Do you want my blood?" she offers softly.

"What?" I'm stalling, hoping that my body at least will recognize the trap and see itself out the door since my brain and my body are perfectly happy to stay in here, letting her torture me.

She holds out her wrist in treacherously innocent generosity, her earth-colored eyes earnest.

"You gave me your blood. You're right. I always take from you. I never give back. Let me give you something back."

"Why?" My voice rasps like someone has been cleaning my esophagus with a wire brush.

"Yours tasted–" She swallows. "Good. Maybe mine will taste good to you. I know you're not hungry like I was hungry, but you're right."

Her eyes are full of guilt. Man, did I push the wrong button. That was the missile launch button, not the ejector seat. My mistake, and I'll go down in flames for it in more ways than one.

"I've been selfish too many times with you," she says.

I wonder, now that the compulsion has worn off, if she remembers my words and she just twisted them to deliberately hurt me.

I love you. That's why I can't be selfish with you.

Is it possible that this is actually Katherine impersonating Elena? No, even Katherine can't do a mind-fuck like this. To cut this deep, you have to be totally unaware of the evil of your actions, so you can't be blamed for them, no matter how terrible they are.

So all the hatred I can muster to fight this hurt festers in my own chest, at my own lack of self-preservation for keeping me in this room with my own walking, talking Kryptonite.

"God, I didn't even say anything, did I?" she says in horror, her hand coming up to cover her mouth, which she's already licked clean of my blood. The thought of that makes my abs tighten with arousal, even in the midst of all of this.

"When you kicked me out of Ric's seat, I didn't tell you how sorry I was, or ask how you were doing." Her eyes fill with tears. "I don't need to kill anybody. I'm already becoming a despicable person."

Oh damn it. Her tears kick my casual persona back into gear, and I can be thankful for that at least. "Nah. I'm just being a dick," I tell her. "Don't take it personally. No one else does."

"No," she says fiercely. "You're not. You're trying to take care of me, like you always do. Even when I'm too focused on my own needs to support you after you lost your best friend."

I shift uncomfortably. I may have impulsively sent her on a guilt trip, but she's not the only one being selfish. I know my blood won't help her. Vampire blood is tasty, but it's like water. It'll fill you up, but it doesn't give you what you need. I was just being…fuck, I don't even know.

The time when I am going to have to force Elena and Stefan to deal with the facts of life and vampire nutrition is coming very soon. Fortunately, I was born to play bad cop. If it were any more cliché, Stefan would be blonde.

Elena's coming closer. Shit, that was so not the plan.

"Damon, give me another chance." She holds out her wrist. "I am going to be a better friend to you. Let me start with this. It's only fair."

I shake my head harshly. She doesn't get it yet: after one time you're so overwhelmed with sensation it's difficult to understand everything that's involved when you share your blood with another person.

"Come back when you know what you're asking for," I tell her bluntly.

"You let me do it to you," she says, and I am definitely not thinking of all the sexual layers of meaning I could give those words.

"I knew what I was getting into," I say.

My shoulders hit the wall behind me before I realize I'm backing up. When did I get to be such a pussy? Am I actually running from Elena? If I wanted to make running useful, I would do it straight out the bathroom door and not stop until I hit the coast. But I can't look away.

Her wrist is a lure dangling in front of my hungry mouth. To see if there is any part of her I've missed, a corner I could see that I haven't known before, that she hasn't shared with me. The atavistic, masculine thrill of taking her, part of her becoming part of me. Having her in my veins.

It feels like she's there already.

"I want to know what it felt like to you," she says, her eyes too innocent to be fastened on my mouth the way they are.

I'm a fucking goner.

And as usual, if I'm going to go, I'm going to go big.

She's so close already that she's practically inside my shirt. It is so effortless to sweep her glossy hair back from the curve of her neck, to feel my fangs lengthen, eager to sink deep into her.

The devil keeps the hinges on the door to hell well oiled.

It is the most natural thing in the world to trace her jugular with my tongue, letting her heartbeat give me a drumroll before I pierce her skin, biting as ferociously as I always wanted to because I can't hurt her now.

I take one mouthful of her blood and it goes straight to my head, the strongest drink I've ever had in my long life. It's like tasting God.

If someone were to ask me what was at the core of Elena, what her one keystone attribute was, I would have answered that it was her ability to love. Well, actually, I'd have told them to fuck off with their psychobabble bullshit, but I would have known the answer just the same. I guess I'd just never thought about the implications of that until I tasted it in her.

All the love in my life is focused on one point: Elena. It is strong, too strong for comfort, for objectivity, for happiness.

Now, I realize she loves just as strongly, but in every direction. For me, for Stefan, for Jeremy and Bonnie and Matt and Caroline and people she barely knows and people she's never met and people who are dead and gone. She feels all their pain, and she's paralyzed by it.

Not by confusion. Not by indecision. By the fact that she can't hurt anyone, and it's impossible not to. If you make one person happy, it usually hurts another. In her life, this happens every day, all day long, and it's bleeding her dry.

Her taste is gilding my tongue but all that love, all that guilt and pain scares the shit out of me.

I push her away. "How do you live like that?" I ask her, horrified.

Hurt registers in her face.

"What?" she whispers. She's not used to rejection, not from me. Not from anyone, probably.

"Nothing. That's enough. We're even. Now run along back to your little boyfriend." I shoo her with one hand.

I don't want to understand. I never really wanted to understand why she stayed with Stefan, but now I see. She wouldn't be able to live with his pain.

She tilts her head, trying to figure me out. Finally she says, "I know you're upset about me becoming a vampire, and because Ric is gone."

She apparently has decided it was her comment about Ric that set me off. The girl is perpetually clueless.

"You don't know shit," I snap. I'm raw from what I saw in her, and because giving her my blood is like showing up naked in somebody's room and getting thrown the fuck out. Only it isn't your body that is naked. It's your soul.

I can't even blame her. If the reactions of everyone in my life are any indication, my body's a lot prettier than my soul.

"I'm so sorry, Damon," she says with misguided gentleness. "You are going to have to move on, open up to let other people fill his chair eventually."

Fortunately, that makes me mad for a whole new reason.

"You don't get it, Elena. When somebody dies, their chair is always empty. Forever. That's what it means." I shove the words at her brutally. "And putting flowers on it doesn't fill it, and neither does getting a bigger fucking table so that you can end up with more empty fucking chairs. Don't lecture me about death. I've known more of it than you ever will."

As soon as the last sentence leaves my mouth, I realize she's a vampire now, and she is going to know every nasty truth about death that I know. She doesn't even have the grace to only care about a select few, like I do. She cares about everyone. The six deaths of people close to her in the last year are only the appetizer in an infinite and disgusting buffet.

I won't apologize. She's going to have to get stronger if she's going to make it. That means Stefan and I need to man up and stop shielding her from everything. But, God, the things she's going to have to see now. The things she's going to have to do.

"Elena…" I didn't mean to say that, didn't mean to say anything.

Her eyes soften at my tone and she reaches for me. I don't know what she intends to do and I am not going to find out. My exit from this sideshow is far, far overdue. I turn so her hand misses me, as if her every cell is full of toxic vervain.

I'm going to have to wash the taste of her tragic blood out of my mouth with a truckload of whiskey.

"I hope that blood settles your poor widdle tummy," I mock, every part of my body feeling poisoned by the last hour of my shitty life. "Oh wait, you've never been able to stomach anything about me."

Including the fact that I'm a vampire, and it is so much harder for her to hide her opinion now that she hates herself for being one too. I slam the door behind me too hard and the doorframe cracks into pieces. I leave it behind, just so much more collateral damage.

My self-destructive streak used to be a lot more fun.