Days Will Run Away

By: Tracy Cook

Disclaimer: I own nothing. These characters belong to the creators of Vampire Diaries.

Couple: Bonnie/Damon

Rating: M

Warning : This fic will have lots of murder and violence and smut!

Author's Note : This fic will not have vampires in it! It will be completely AU and based off of the plot of the video game Fallout 4!

Chapter Two

Masks

'I love the way they tell us, this is who you should be.

We put our faces on...just like a mask.'

Blue eyes snapped wide open. Panic set in as he tried to look around, tried to move his neck, tried to feel his body. He couldn't feel anything. He ventured to lift his fingers like he once had, only they didn't move. Mind foggy and memories vague.

Had he fallen and hit his head? Did he have a concussion? Was he paralyzed?

'What the hell is going on?'

"His skin is almost ready, sir."

"Good, make sure it fits the model before you put it on. We don't need another defect."

His skin? What were these people talking about? Damon listened closely to the foreign voices as they continued to explain what they were doing. Interlaced with the sounds of machinery in the background. Metal grinding against metal. Hammers, gears, and drills playing in an orchestra around them.

"All that's left is the face."

"This is the most important part." The other man insisted, "If the seams don't stretch around the model and connect, then people will be able to tell what he is."

Damon went to furrow his brow in confusion at the statements, but it appeared he couldn't do that either. He couldn't feel his face. All he could do was sit and gape in horror as the men lifted up something that looked like a mask-a mask of his own face.

Flesh that imitated flesh so closely no one could ever tell the difference.

He could see the pores dancing along the skin. Slight flaws and imperfections he recognized from the mirror. And then the mask was being flipped around and what he saw left him sick to his stomach. If he even had a stomach still.

Veins and blood and cartilage. Holes where the eyes should be.

That was when it registered. This wasn't a mask made of rubber bought at some Halloween costume shop. What they were holding up was authentic skin. His skin carved from his own face and placed on a "model," whatever that meant.

Skin was being draped over his face and molded into place. Connected and stitched up at the seams behind his ears and along his chin. Only, there seemed to be a problem because one of the men was shouting, "It isn't fitting!"

"Make it fit. You know how the boss gets when we have to throw out Hybrids."

'Hybrids?' Damon was perplexed when they used that word to describe him. He wasn't one of those things. He was a man. He'd been born and raised with a family. An absentee mother and an alcoholic father. A baby brother. He wasn't a robot.

"I think it looks good enough. Turn it on and we'll see."

One of the men moved behind him and started to fiddle around with something hidden beneath Damon's ear. Just like that, his skull was filling with a bright white light. It seemed to seep into his eyelids and fill his entire line of vission. Washing away the memories he had of his family. He suddenly couldn't recall what his brother's face looked like. His parents' names. He couldn't remember anything from his past life.

When the light dissipated he came to. Fully functional and capable of moving his body again.

He stretched his fingers out and lifted his hand, holding it up to look it over. Aside from a few stitches here and there, it looked just like a hand should. Fingers fitted onto a metal frame like a glove. He'd lost all sense of his previous humanity and now he knew what he was. A Hybrid. A machine. Curling his fingers came easily.

"This one isn't gonna pass inspection."

"There are only a few tears in the skin, he'll be fine."

One of the men turned to face him now. Looking him over closely. Examining every inch of his body before telling him, "Stand to your feet, Damon."

Damon furrowed his brow and this time he felt it. Skin bending to his will. It took a second to gather himself and remember how to stand without falling over, but after a few minutes of bracing himself, he was able to stand without any help.

He felt lost. Like a newborn baby being birthed into the world for the first time.

Incapable of understanding where he belonged or what he was. Was he man or was he machine? He had feelings. A heart hammering beneath his rib-cage like a man. His skin was real. Yet, his insides weren't that of a normal human.

"I think he'll pass."

Damon blinked a few times, feeling the moisture wet his eyeballs. Sounds solely background music to his own situation. Taking his first steps were difficult and clumsy, but he caught on faster than a child. And then he was catching something appalling out of the corner of his eye.

His reflection echoed off the cold steel of a machine.

He blinked a few times in disbelief, taking a step forward and looking over the image reflected back at him. Lifting his chin to the side. Same strong jawline. Same vivid blue eyes. Almost perfection. It was remarkable that they could make a machine look so human. Only, as he took a glance around at the other Hybrids being created, he noticed a flaw in himself.

The skin beneath his ear all the way down his neck wasn't attached. There was a gaping hole showing off the wires, sprockets, and gears that made him up.

"No way he's gonna pass."

"What do you mean?" Damon asked, his voice remarkably similar to a human. He didn't understand what these men were talking about. He wasn't going to pass what? And what would happen if he didn't pass?

"Calm down, Damon." The man spoke in a soothing tone as he moved closer to the Hybrid, gently patting his back to reassure him. "He's wrong. You'll pass inspection. You only have a few minor detail flaws."

'Did you think your were right-side in,

Maybe inside out?'

What felt like hours had passed.

Hours since she watched her daughter be ripped from the pod and taken away.

The sheet of ice dancing along her skin was dissolving. Droplets of water rolling down over her chin and down her slender throat. She was still wearing the clothes she had on that day, however long ago.

"Sheila!" Bonnie screamed at the top of her lungs, more tears erupting from green eyes as she recalled what had just happened. It wasn't supposed to be like this. They were supposed to go underground and live a normal life as a family. That's all she ever wanted. All she was ever fighting for.

"Sheila! Kol!" Her voice quavered and cracked under the weight of emotion. Bones finally thawing enough to allow her motion back.

"Let me out!"

Her voice echoed off the metal walls of the containment vessel, bouncing around and nearly deafening her, but she didn't silence herself. Someone had to hear her, right? Someone had to save her. She couldn't die like this. Trapped in a pod. She had to get out and find her daughter. Rescue her from those men.

She couldn't just give up. It wasn't in Bonnie Bennett's nature.

So, she just kept pounding against the door. Ramming her small body into it. Banging her fists against the circular window. And sending up prayers to the Lord and Grams to help her out.

"Please." Her voice was a broken whimper. "Please. God, please."

Another bang against the steel door with the weight of her body and the door was creaking loudly before popping open. Bonnie was so unprepared for this that she stumbled out of the pod and fell onto the concrete. Barely able to catch herself due to the condition of her muscles. Worn down and unused for-how long? She didn't know.

What hit her first was the overwhelming stench.

Death and decay. Thick and stagnant in the air. Sweeping in through her nostrils and filling her lungs. She couldn't help but gag and cough.

Pushing herself to shaky legs she leant against the pod to stable herself until she'd readjusted. It felt like years since her body had been fully functioning. Muscles hanging from brittle bone and weak. She was emaciated.

'What is that smell?'

Bonnie didn't really want to know the answer to the question.

Eyes fixed on the vessel that had once held her daughter, she licked over heart-shaped lips and pondered on what to do. Kol had been in the pod next to her own. If she could somehow pry it open then at least she would have that hope to cling onto.

"Kol." She muttered to herself, swallowing hard and pushing away from the pod.

Bonnie tripped over her feet a few times before gathering her composure and re-teaching herself the basics of walking. It felt like she was carrying the weight of the world on unsteady knees. But, she needed to see him again. Needed to know that he was still alive and breathing.

"Please." She pleaded, standing up on her tiptoes and glancing through the circular window in his capsule. Hands shaking against metal on either side of the glass. What she saw caused her brow to furrow.

It was empty.

"What?" She voiced her confusion. "Where is he?"

Where would he have gone? Did they take him like they had Sheila? Why wouldn't he fight back? Why wouldn't he come and find her? Was he dead? All of these questions seemed to cascade through her at once. Bouncing around in her skull and only serving to further conflict her.

If Kol was out there alive he had to be trying to find her.

Maybe he had been awake when they took Sheila and he had escaped earlier and gone off to find her? 'Why wouldn't he get me out first?' Her mind nagged.

It didn't really matter now. All that mattered was getting the hell out of the Vault and finding her way to the surface. If she stopped to feel the sorrow rumbling deep in her gut then she would fall apart, and she couldn't do that.

She needed to be strong for the people she loved.

As she walked the hallway filled with vessels, she noted something off-putting. All of the other pods weren't empty like Kol's had been. No. They were worse. Bodies had been left to rot in them. Frozen in poses of desperation, trying to claw their way out. Skin slowly decomposing. Eyes lacking color.

Everyone around her was dead.

The Vault had become a modern-day catacomb.

"Shit!" Bonnie proclaimed as she toppled over something sprawled out on the ground. Falling to her hands and knees and almost crashing her jaw into concrete. It took a second to calm her breathing and then she was glancing over her shoulder to see what she had tripped over. Or, a better word, who she had tripped over.

Leaning up against one of the vaults with his neck cranked to the side in an inhuman way was one of the workers from the vault. Jaw hanging open, teeth rotting, skin hardly there any longer. He'd been dead for a long time. And he reeked of spoiled flesh.

Her ears perked up and she shot up abruptly when she heard a low screeching noise accompanied with skittering feet.

"What the-" Bonnie frantically glanced around the hallway, reaching for the guard's club and gripping it tightly. Preparing to hit whatever was making the strange noises.

Again, she was pushing herself to her feet. Holding the club defensively in her hand and looking around for any sign of whoever or whatever it was. Heart thundering painfully in her chest and vibrating throughout her body.

"Wh-who's there?"

'It doesn't matter who's to blame,

When all of the victims lose their names.'

"You call THIS a Hybrid? Laughable." With that, the man did laugh. Shaking his head in frustration with their utter stupidity. How many "defects" were they planning on making before they figured it out? "Toss him out in the alley and turn off the switch."

'Turn off what switch?'

Damon Salvatore had never been an easily frightened man. He was slowly forgetting most of his human memories, but he still remembered that. His personality still firmly rooted in the machine he'd become. But, those words terrified him.

His mind went straight to the switch behind his ear that they had used to turn him on. If they flipped that switch off then what would happen to him? He would just be a pile of rotten flesh and rusty parts thrown in the garbage.

Struggling against them he tried to escape.

Pushing at their chests and clawing at their eyes, but it was to no avail. With one strong heave they were tossing the defective robot over the edge of the building and into the alleyway out back.

A three story fall.

'Maybe it's already too late, to tell if its luck or if its fate.'


Author's Note :

Another short chapter, I'm sorry. :( Life is crazy all the time but I'm writing again and easing back into it and hopefully y'all like this one! It's more a filler chapter and yeah the next chapter will show us the surface, what happened with Stefan, and Damon's outcome! So should be longer! :) Where do y'all think Kol is? What happened to Sheila? What is coming after Bonnie? Thoughts? Predictions?

Love you guys!

-Tracy Cook-