March 3, 2013

Despite the labeling, I would not necessarily call this a romance. Actually, I'm trying to portray Damon and Bonnie's relationship in a realistic manner. I find it hilarious when people just gloss over all the destruction that Damon caused and how much, (at the beginning) Bonnie was terrified of him. I don't think it fits self-righteous Bonnie's character to forgive and forget so easily. Not to mention he pretty much screwed over all the female figures in her family.

Hopefully, I will be able to portray their relationship in a realistic sense, though only reviews will tell me if I fail or succeed! On that note, I present you…

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Like Falling Stars in February

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Chapter One

or

In Which a Dashing Young Man Meets His Annoying Solution

The vampire walked through the woods on steady feet. Over the centuries, this particular path had been carved into the ground by the same family. Indentions from where the rain had fallen last night were as smooth and pliable as clay. He wished that the rain on the tip of falling from the overhanging clouds would stay airborne a little longer. Unlike during the winter months where if were to fall, it would at least be cooling; during the summer months, it would just be uncomfortable. The rain would coalesce on his skin and the clear drops would just compound the moisture already heavy in the air.

He sighed and missed the low-hanging branch that thwacked him in the face. This is why he hated the South and the Eastern seaboard in general. Water would not evaporate before the next rainfall and the air would remain muggy.

Damon paused; the breeze finally reappeared and within its flow, pine needles and sap. His chest expanded as he further inhaled the scent on the wind. There! The fragrance of caramel and of clay was immersed in the forest's perfume. He ignored the overwhelming smell of the trees and focused on the evasive incense; his body turned slightly to the south.

With a faster pace, he allowed his feet to travel along the ethereal trail left behind. Trees and bushes blurred past him as he kept his eyes forward. When he clearly saw the girl, he immediately paused and stated, "Wow, you look absolutely silly."

The little Bennett witch calculatedly stared at him with both hands on her head. The little girl had no shoes on and was wearing summery green shorts and a bluish tank top. The ground was covered with stamped pine needles in what was obviously a cleared space. A bulky boom box radio was nestled in the trunk of the tree and continued to blare some repetitive song. She was alone. Her curly head slightly tilted as if to assess him and decide if he were worth her time. Deeming him to be unthreatening (clearly, she was ignorant of her family's heritage) she went back to her self-appointed task.

It was not until the third verse in the annoying song that he realized she was dancing (or at least attempting) to the Macarena. Her jerky movements tried to follow the specific order in the well-known song but it seemed as if she only saw the dance one time. During a dream. When she was drunk. After her fifth attempt to fully complete the silly dance, Damon could not help but propose, "I could show you how to do the dance."

She did not spare him one glance and continued her macabre version.

"You're just going to ignore me? I'm giving you very valuable opportunity here to not embarrass yourself in front of your fellow preschoolers."

Pine needles and dirt crunching underfoot were the only vocal response he received. He literally saw her nose rise in the air and her eyes tightly screw shut. The song was nearing the end and she was still doing a near perfect rendition of the hokey-pokey but a horrible form of the Macarena.

The dance was actually rather annoying and he hated when it came on in the clubs. The only reason he was offering was to gain the confidence of the little witch. He might have promised Emily to protect her descendants, but that did not necessarily mean that they trusted him. It was best to befriend them when they were young and then nicely ask them to open the tomb were Katherine was trapped. "Come on, short stack! Toss me a bone!"

The horrid song finally ended and the girl spun on her toes to the radio. Damon belatedly realized that the supposed radio was actually some oversized cassette player. As she squatted in front of it, light fingers pressed the rewind button and turned up the volume. Great. While she (and now himself, he guessed) were waiting for it to get back to the beginning, she promptly asked, "Is your name Scooby Dooby Doo?"

"Umm…No?" Finally hearing hear voice was the reason that his answer was hardly witty.

Green eyes pierced him as she continued, "Astro?" He felt his arms automatically beginning to cross as the trace of a frown flashed across his face; eyebrows scrunched together in confusion.

"Nooo.." he drew out the word.

"Shiloh?"

"Of course not, but I don't see where you going with this." He quickly paced forward and abandoned his branch covering completely. The child, to her credit, just flinched slightly and pretended to remember that she should probably press play on the radio. She turned back to the electronic and pressed play and then pause.

Shoulders slumped in as she recalled, "Grams says that I'm not supposed to talk to strangers."

"Oh." The proverbial wind was taken from his sails and his posture deflated. He then remembered that he was supposed to be befriending her, not frightening her. Damon slowly sank to the ground but not before scooting towards her a couple of inches. Needles poked through his faded jeans but he ignored the irritation with practiced ease. "So?" he prompted.

"So…?" She repeated, her head turning to glance at him and throw the question back at him. Emerald eyes flitted from his face to her cassette player in a silent warning to the amount of time she was allotting him.

Damned brat. This was why he hated children. They whined about getting their way and forced mature adults to cater to their every whim. Then, they asked stupid questions to understand every nuance of the conversation when, in reality, they should just shut up and obey and trust that capable adults knew what they were talking about.

He smiled and sweetly asked, "What's your name?"

"Oh." Her little face pinched together before calmly explaining that she could not tell him her name.

The smile froze on his face and his left eye started to slightly twitch. "Why not?"

She uncomfortably grabbed three branches and started fluidly braiding them together. One pine, two eucalypts, he absently noted. She neither answered his question nor looked him in the eye.

"See," he said, leaning his body forward and patting the curly, dark hair in a show of affable kindness, "I'm hoping that your impressionable little mind will forget me in a couple of years and we'll be able to start over in a couple more years. So, if you could just tell me your name..."

Damon jerked his hand as the girl abruptly sat up. She stiffly brushed her shorts from some indistinguishable dirt speck and flounced toward the music player. The radio was rather hefty and she was forced to pick it up with both of her dirt-streaked hands. The rather awkward shape forced her to assume a waddling stance. She turned towards where he assumed she lived. Though Damon was more than capable of helping, he wasn't offering and she wasn't asking. The slight fear she showed earlier was absent as she waddled past him with the air of a regal queen.

He perversely enjoyed her struggle before calling out, "Where are you going?"

"I'm not supposed to. Talk. To. Strangers." Her self-imposed march did not break stride as she gave the flippant remark. The vampire spared one last glance for the created clearing before effortlessly catching up with the kid.

"Well, give me your name and I'll give you mine," he reasoned, "then we won't be strangers! That's half of a friendship, right?" I'm pretty sure the best way to beat a child is to outsmart them. Confound them with logic and watch them squirm as they are forced to concede your point. He quickly hid his smirk when he saw the little Bennett glancing at him out of the corner of his eye.

When she was satisfied that Damon was not joking, she carefully contemplated it before saying, "No."

This time, her short response did not deter him in the slightest and he easily asked, "What else is there to friendship?" He slowed his pace even further as her march slowed to practically a crawl.

"Knowing stuff about the other person." The eye twitch was definitely back. There went his plans for the rest of the day to explore old haunts and sample some different types of bourbon. Time to turn the conversation back on her.

"Okay, tell me about yourself." There was no way that he was going to lose to some self-righteous—

"No."

"Alright you're beginning to sound like a broken record, squirt. How about I tell you a little fact about myself?"

Unsure of herself, she gave a slow, drawn out, "…Okay…" before she came to halt and painstakingly carefully set down her load. Then, she sat crisscross on the soft, scented ground and rested her elbows on her knees. She did all of this with the rapt, serious attention of a graduate student preparing to take notes on their thesis; Damon had to bite his lip from laughing outright. He doubted humor would have alleviated her solemn air and suspected that she would just leave at any perceived slight. He made a show of sitting across from her and ruffling her hair. She ignored his actions and waited patiently for the response.

"I'm very, very old."

She pouted as his answer made her livid. "No! That's cheating! That doesn't count! All grown-ups say that. For Show-and-Tell, Tyler Lockwood brought a dead cricket he found by the creek. Everyone knows that's boring, so all the kids at recess ignored him." She giggled, "He was so mad." Damon's baiting must have been working because she did not get up to leave.

"And I just remembered the cruelty of children," he mumbled. A blustery day, skipping flat stones, and Stefan's crumpled, babyish face flashed through his mind.

"What?" He would have smirked at her for her perplexed face if he wasn't already, one, trying to get her to like him and, two, he didn't already feel the tendrils of annoyance creeping into his mind. Of all the oddness of a strange man watching her, alone, in the woods, this was what she found confounding? Maybe because of her upbringing, she's use to strange stuff…

"Nothing. I just thought it was funny that that's the most I've hard you say yet. Anyways, I feel as if we already know sooooo much about each other. Are we friends yet?"

"Nope!" She pointed her dirt, sticky fingers at him and looked him square in the eye when she stated, "You gotta give me real diddly-squat." She had to take some amount of pleasure from answering him in the negative because Damon did not know anyone who so easily climbed up the charts of Most Annoying Person. She was hardly even trying and she was approaching Stefan-level of Annoying. That was not even taking into account her age and that Stefan was more than a hundred years plus her senior.

"Diddly?"

"Yup," she nodded so vigorously that he was slightly surprised that her head did not fly off her neck. "Grams says that Papa doesn't know diddly-squat about magic or anything else. So, if you give me diddly-squat I'll consider it."

"Wow, great grammar; it sounds like Grams is still the same little, interfering b—"

"Watch your mouth," she said severely. This time, her disgustingly sappy fingers poked him in the chest, leaving a thin bridge of golden amber connecting them. He could not stop his nose from scrunching together in revulsion. "When you say mean things, you're asking for a can of butt-whooping."

"Self-righteous little thing, aren't you? I was just going to say busybody," he quipped innocently. The skeptical, green eye she pinned him with inadvertently gave him what her opinion of his response was.

"Okay, okay." He said, placating. "Sheesh… Well, based on our conversation, I know that you have a grandmother and a father." A foxy grin appeared as the witch attempted to decipher if how he got his information would be considered cheating. She gave a brief, unsure nod, indicating that he should continue. Her ending opinion would decide if the information he presented was acceptable.

Well, that could be a problem. He already knew about her grandmother—he met her about fifty years prior. The extent of his knowledge stopped with that particular Bennett witch. He could have told her practically anything about her ancestors but he doubted that she would believe her. He was stuck.

It was not until he was floundering for another factoid, did he notice that the little girl was looking longingly at the discarded, forlorn radio. Ah-ha! Having a short attention span sucked for little kids, but it just gave him a clue. "Alright, I know that you can't dance the Macarena!"

Surprisingly, she gave him a hurt look. "So?"

He forged forward, "I can show you how to do it." He fluidly stood to his feet, brushed his backside and offered his hand. Neither were shocked when she ignored the offered hand.

Instead, she timidly asked "Really?" Like she was expecting the adult to laugh at her; her huge, jade orbs gazed at him hopefully. The mugginess that he had ignored up to that point made him brutally aware as he shifted uncomfortably from side to side. Damon felt a small pang of pity for this strange little girl dancing alone in the forest. What had seemed hilarious at the time (she really must have only seen the dance one time) echoed of seclusion; wasn't she at the age where kids gathered and played on the streets while parents watched from the comfort of their porch? So far, she only really talked about her dad, some kid named Tyler Lockwood, and her grandmother. Family and trouble-makers were not exactly normal playmates. She must be really lonely to happily interact with him.

He shook his head and immediately emptied all feelings of pity. She was only a means to an end. As long as she could fulfill Emily's promise, he owed her nothing else, neither comfort nor pity. "Yeah, what are friends for?"

"Okay. Show me but stay right there." She happily stood up, but remained in a laidback stance, waiting to watch and judge.

After giving her a dumbfounded stare he whined, "Aww, but it's more fun if we do it together."

Silence. Her arms crossed in an annoyed position and she rocked back and forth with impatience.

"Okay," he mollified, "don't look so cross." After motioning to her to press play, the little witch practically bounced to the radio with a gleeful face. Like a light switch, her face went from demonically exuberant to comically introspective.

With an appropriately reciprocal somber expression, he stuck his arms out with the precision of a typewriter. Left palm down. Right palm down. Left palm up. Right palm up. Faster and faster, his movements became a flurried commotion. He decided to add a spin and eventually was outpacing the song.

Because of his vampiric hearing, he knew that any wild life that had mustered the courage to explore the immediate vicinity quickly vacated. Overriding the undercurrent of fear and panic came the chiming of bells.

No, that was the sound of the Bennett witch laughing. Only a five year-old could laugh with that reckless wild abandon, not fearing being judged. He paused for a moment (maybe longer) in his dance to see the extraordinary event of this peculiar child acting her age. Honey lips were parted as caramel arms clutched her shaking sides. Damon wondered if he should be affronted that his dancing was that hilarious but then reminded himself that he did not care what a kid thought of him.

"And that's how you do the Macarena." He said anticlimactically.

"Oh. Okay, thank you." After wiping her nose and scrubbing furiously at her eyes, she gave a quick nod of approval. She skipped to the radio and turned off. This time she rested it on her nonexistent left hip and clutched it with both hands.

"Hey, where are you going?"

"Home." Her eyes were sparkling as she turned in the direction of her house. "It's almost dinner time." His eyebrows quirked as he noticed for the first time that sun indeed was almost down. Celestial lights were beginning to unveil themselves in the azure sky and the temperature was slightly dropping to a less suffocating level. Cicadas began their tuneless hum and brushing pine needles began their slight harmony.

This time, he did not follow (with my luck, that old witch is probably looking for the brat now and I'd probably run into her); instead, he called out: "But we had a deal, squirt! Your name for the dance lessons!"

"No, it was my name for yours. The dancing was because you're nice." she corrected. Her slow shuffle was beginning to transform into a slight jog as she realized that she was really supposed to be home now.

If Damon told her his name, she might tell someone else or her grandma; he risked the chance of someone recognizing it and leading the council breathing down his neck. Strangely enough, he did not want to give her a pseudonym. She could probably tell I'm lying, he reasoned. He would rather that her strange day would recede into the foggy depths of childhood memories. "…I'm not going to do that."

"Alright, bye." She obligingly gave him a free slight smile.

"See you around," he drawled cautiously.

"I don't talk to strangers," she reminded patiently.

She didn't even spare the odd stranger a backwards glance.

Silence echoed across the trees and was only slowed down by the humidity in the air. Animals began to lumber from their dens, preparing to prowl during the twilight. The vampire was left alone in the forest.

He continued to watch the curly head struggle with her load until the pines blocked his view. Even then, he concentrated his hearing so that he could hear when she got to her house. After hearing the exclamation of a more mature voice and the beginnings of a scolding, he blocked out the voices. He remained motionless for a few more beats before humphingand turning on his heels in the direction of the Salvatore boarding , getting Katherine out of the tomb was beginning to look a lot harder. And, if Damon were honest with himself, at least a little more amusing.

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Ha, I think I'm going to have fun with this story. I love their interactions with each other and the snark-to-snark combat! The Bamon was strong in this past week's episode.

So, I decided that this is going to be a five chapter story. Hopefully, I'll be updating next Sunday. Please review!

Thus, I depart.