Quick recap:
Chapter 1 saw a down-on-his-luck Damon manipulated his way into a romance with an older, somewhat bigoted, widow - Eleanor Critchlow. He wanted her for her money and proposed to keep her strung along, but she fell in love for real even though she knew he was just using her. Both her sons objected to the union; and Damon was left in an ugly situation which meant no way out of the marriage.
Chapter 2 sees Stefan encounter a widow, of a very different nature.
I am sure I have strayed a wee bit/a lot from the show here – but I hope you will forgive me and come back for Chapter 3 which returns to the current day and ties everything together (I think!).
As before, I should mention that I am British; so please forgive any factual inaccuracies on account of my trying to write a story set in the US. I hope I am not just embarrassing myself. Mind you, I say that every time I post….
Dowager
Chapter 2: The Harder they Fall
She sat up at the foot of the bed and let the sheet fall from her body. He traced a finger lazily down her back through the little beads of sweat. They had had an interesting morning thus far. She turned to face him and smiled.
"Stefan, when we get married, can we have a choir?"
He laughed at the earnestness of her question.
"Of course, anything you want."
"And will there be flower girls?"
"Oh, at least a dozen. Maybe two." He said, catching on to her game. She went into the adjoining room and put a nightgown on, coming back briefly to lean down to kiss him.
"And an organist?"
"Just one? How about a whole orchestra?"
That made her smile. He reached for her hand and she let him pull her back down next to him. They kissed.
"Will I wear white?" she said, pulling away. Something in the tone of her voice had changed; he didn't respond immediately, but kissed her on the forehead whilst he considered the best way to answer.
"You know what," he said, "not only will you wear white, but so will I. And we'll make everybody else wear white too. Even the preacher." She giggled at that and wriggled out of his arms, got up to go to the doorway and looked back at him.
"I'm going to see if the bathroom is free - run a bath."
Stefan nodded and she left. He threw his hands behind his head and lay back on the bed. Outside he could hear the chants of the protesters. It was getting louder, so the crowd was obviously growing. The rally was taking place a good few miles away from her apartment block, but he was anxious to know if things were getting out of control. Most of the protests did.
He could hear banging on the door of the neighboring apartment and a girl was shouting incoherently to the occupier. The gist of her complaint seemed to be 'where the hell was her weed?' Stefan wrinkled his nose, he wanted to get his girl out of this hole, but she wouldn't go no matter how many times he asked.
Moments later he heard the sound of running water and he knew she had reserved the bathroom. Sure enough, their door opened and she stepped back in.
"Bathroom's free." She said. "Come on."
He roused himself reluctantly from the bed, pulled on his clothes and followed her down the hallway.
"Oh, I forgot the towels," she turned back towards her door.
He carried on to the bathroom, where to his horror, he found a stranger urinating into the cracked toilet.
"What the hell?"
"Oh, sorry man, I heard the bath running and I was desperate. I just thought I'd slip in here quickly."
He finished in his own good time, then washed up in their bath water. He offered to shake hands with Stefan as he passed him in the doorway, but was met with a contemptuous look. The stranger shrugged and shuffled off back down the corridor. Stefan went to the tub and pulled out the plug.
"Hey!", she protested, entering the bathroom just at that moment, "What are you doing? They'll kill me if we run out of hot water again."
He apologized and reluctantly put the plug back in. At that moment, the copper pipes began to clank alarmingly and the water from the faucet began to run red.
"Oh, not again!" she hissed and taking a loose plank from beneath the tub, hit the pipes heartily. The water began to run clear. She smiled.
"Well, it may not be heaven," she said in a sing-song voice, "but it's home."
"It's a dump." He protested sulkily, seeing nothing humorous in the situation at all. "Why won't you let me take you out of here?"
"Look, you don't have to come here." She said seriously and leant down to stir the pink-tinged water with her hand.
He raised his eyebrows and turned away from her – why did she always have to start this fight over and over again? What she actually meant was, 'You don't have to be with me.' Sooner or later it always came back to that. Their relationship, their never-ending problems, did it really boil down to one thing?
"Shelley, don't." He said, setting his mouth firmly. She whipped her head around to him.
"Don't what? Don't remind you that this thing between you and me is madness? Don't remind you that it could get us both killed?"
At that, he walked from the bathroom and slammed the door shut behind him as hard as he could. One of the neighboring apartments yelled out in protest as the ancient glass reverberated violently in its cracked putty frame.
"Screw you buddy!" He shouted to the invisible complainant and marched from that shitty apartment as fast as his legs could carry him.
As soon as he hit the street he knew the situation had grown larger and faster than he had anticipated. Streams of people were heading towards the rally; they were angry and vocal. How had he not heard this? He guessed he hadn't really wanted to; he wanted to lie around in bed with his girl all day and shut out the problems of the outside world.
As he turned onto Rowan, he felt like a tiny salmon trying to swim upstream. A police roadblock on 34th had driven many people to take this route, which would be a ten block detour for most. He finally began to understand that it didn't matter how many times they tried to stop people, that they would continue to come and walk all night if they had to.
Some young-guns shoved into him, thrusting their placards in his face. They wore their t-shirts tied around their heads and their chests were bare. They chanted slogans as they lolled ahead. He stepped aside and let them pass.
He looked up and noticed a broken fire escape on the far side of the building that he was skirting along. One easy leap would be all it would take to reach the railings, but he couldn't risk being seen to use his vampire skills as there were just too many people around. Getting around by rooftop would have been ideal on a day like today. After all, who would think to look up when there was so much happening at street level?
He could hear chanting up ahead, a call followed by a response. There was jeering and shouting. In the distance, he could hear sirens. A lot of them. He zipped his jacket and flicked up his collar; for some reason, it made him feel more confident. A whole family walked past. From pop to the youngest toddler, they all carried placards. They stared at him silently as they moved away, sucked into the heart of the crowd.
He tried to cut up the alley behind the main block, but could see he would have to push through a collective huddle of men there and he was definitely not welcome. He could feel their eyes bore through him. He circled back and as soon as he hit the main street again, he was swept into a massive crowd.
As he was hurried along, he worried about Shelley. He hoped she had taken her bath and gone back to bed to sulk. He couldn't bare the thought that she would actually join the protest just when it looked like it might get dangerous.
'Rights?' She had said whenever he had brought it up, 'What do they know about rights? What about the right to stay alive?'
He hoped today wasn't the day when she finally changed her mind and joined them.
The crowd pushed him all the way along Main Street. He decided that the only sensible thing to do would be to stop fighting it and go with it. After what seemed like an age of being jostled, elbowed and turned away at roadblocks, he finally made it to where they were all heading: the rally.
Even though he had been pushed along in massive hordes, he still hadn't expected it to be like this. There were people as far as the eye could see in every direction, all gathered for a common purpose. Who could ignore protest on this scale? It was phenomenal.
The speaker on stage was miked up, but the sound was echoey, delayed and mired by feedback. It was hard to make out what was being said, yet alone who was saying it. From back here, almost a mile from the main stage, the audience were having their own conversations about the right and wrong ways to bring about change. Seemed like most everyone knew the answer, and yet every answer was different. Some healthy, good-hearted arguments were breaking out around him, as well as a handful of jokers heckling the stage.
On his right, a family had stubbornly created themselves a space in the crowd for their picnic and the children were helping themselves to food. The older matriarchs were running things like a tight ship, not letting the kids get away with a single thing more than they were allowed to have.
To his left, not two hundred yards away, were a row of cops chewing gum and brandishing night sticks. They had their cars lined up behind them like the second line of defense. The cops flicked their eyes over the crowd and called out to each other, adopting semi-casual stances that failed to convince anyone that they were relaxed. They were outnumbered, but they had all the power and the crowd knew it. Each kept a healthy distance from each other in an uneasy standoff.
The crowd around him had actually settled into the spirit of easy discourse. They were chatty and frivolous and when chants began near the stage, they rippled back to these people, who lifted their voices with gusto around him. After a while, he forgot to feel self-conscious and began to join in. The old grandma from the picnic group next to him tapped him on the leg.
"You want some chicken?" she offered.
He was about to refuse, when he realized this wasn't something he should say no to. It was someone reaching out to him, telling him he wasn't alone and that they appreciated the fact he was there to join them.
"Why sure ma'am, that'd be nice."
When the speaker they were all here to see came to the stage, the crowd erupted so heartily that it was five minutes before he could speak. The sense of excitement was palpable. He raised his hand for silence and a hush fell over the crowd almost instantly; it was respect on a level unlike anything Stefan had seen before. Even though it took a minute for the speaker's words to reach the back, when he finished a sentence, the front of the crowd were already cheering. Each sentence went on like this, with rolling applause from the front of the crowd backwards. His audience openly wept.
"Hallelujah, bless the Lord!" the ladies cried and their men punched the air.
Vampires weren't prone to emotion, but Stefan felt this day firmly carve a place into his memory.
After so many hours of marching, gathering and listening, the people were tired but elated. As the dusk began to fall, the crowd started to break up and move on.
"Leon, you come down off Stefan's shoulders now. We gotta go home." Said the lady who had offered him chicken. Her name was Aida Brown and over the course of the afternoon he had gotten to know her a little, even taking her youngest grandson up on his shoulders so he could see the stage.
Aida wanted to retrieve the boy, so Stefan bent to put the child on the ground. As he straightened up, Aida took hold of his forearm and squeezed it tight.
"You and I," she said, "we say we are too old and set in our ways, but things have to change now, for him."
It was a curious statement, laced with significance. He knew she was asking him to make a promise. She had hold of his arm, so he mirrored the movement and they became clasped together. He looked into her milky eyes as if to find the true meaning of her words and when he felt he understood what was being asked of him, he gave her a single nod. She nodded back and let go of him.
It was the last he saw of Aida Brown and her family. They drifted away after that, drawn into the slow-dispersing crowd.
Stefan felt shaken by the day's events. As spontaneous singing rang out amongst the walkers, a protest song here, a psalm there, the sentiment of it hit him hard. He released he had never understood what the whole movement had been about before, not really. He had never tried to get to grips with it on a human level – why would he? But today he saw that it wasn't just people fighting for something, but it was a past they were rejecting. Maybe even his past.
Aida had seen it; he didn't know how she had, but she had looked into his eyes and found him there. He was ashamed of some of what she may have seen and so he took his promise to her as seriously as any blood oath. He would honor her will for change to his dying day, no matter when that day came. There were so many things he wanted to start with, but he knew which should be the first.
He had to speak to Shelley - poor Shelley whose husband had been killed just days after they were married. A case of being 'in the wrong place at the wrong time' he had heard. He had never understood her bitterness and anger towards the protests before now. Today though, he understood it all; he knew why she hated the movement, it was because it took Charlie away from her. But she had to make her peace with it. He had to find her and let her know.
Now things were returning to normal, he had found a moment with no-one around to leap up to the rooftops and make quick progress above the city. Every now and again he looked down and saw the people en-masse making their way back to their homes. When he finally got to her apartment, it was in darkness and he cursed himself for his previous petulance in walking out like that. He wrote a brief note on a scrap of paper he found in his pocket, which he pinned under a flaking scrap of paint on her door and turned to leave.
"Come crawling back have you? She doesn't want to see you, you know."
Stefan turned around to see a girl he didn't know confronting him. He looked bemused, but before he could speak, Shelley's voice rang out from the girl's apartment.
"Its okay, Marion, I want to see him." He sprang to their door and called past Marion's shoulder into the room she was using her body to block him from entering.
"Shelley?" he called into the apartment, "Can we talk?"
"I suppose you can go in." Marion muttered and he stepped past her over the threshold. She needed have blocked him so wholeheartedly with her body, he couldn't have gotten in without her invitation anyway.
"Do you want me to stay?" Marion called to Shelley, who he found curled up on Marion's sofa, with a box of opened tissues in front of her.
"No, it's fine."
"Sure, I'll go down to Bill's, but if you need me – you just holler, okay?"
She gave Stefan an evil look, before closing her own front door. Stefan walked over to Shelley and hugged her, his hands burying themselves in her downy soft hair.
"I'm sorry." He said simply.
"It's okay. I'm sorry too." She sniffed, tears running down her face. He sat down beside her and offered her the box of tissues - she indicated she held one already.
"Shelley, I wanted to tell you, I was there today. At the rally."
She nodded.
"So was I, Stefan." He looked at her with surprise.
"You were?"
"Mm-hmm. I just couldn't bear it before, you know. The pain. Our young men, so full of fire." She began.
He settled down into the chair beside her. "You mean, Charlie?"
She nodded. She had never really told him the full story before. He knew she was a widow when he met her and that she had not long been married before her husband was killed; but he didn't know the detail.
"Charlie…" she hesitated when she said his name, afraid that tears would overcome her again. Stefan gave her a glass of water and she began again. "I knew what Charlie was when I met him. He said nothing ever came of silent protest and that people had to act if they wanted to change things." She shook her head. "Him and his friends, they were locked up - beaten. I spent so much time at the courthouse, I barely saw my own home."
"Did you take part?" He asked.
"I printed leaflets, all the women did, but mostly we'd find ways to raise bail." She shook her head.
"One night, he came to my door badly beaten, his face covered in bruises, his arm broke. The police set dogs on them, he said. I was so worried, I made him promise not to stir things up, but he just couldn't sit it out." She sighed at the bitter memory.
"We married not long after that. They were all there at the wedding, his men, lined up on the back row. I think I hated them from that moment, for I knew they would take him away from me. I knew it." She sniffed, but drank some water and continued.
"His arm had not long been mended, and so he went out that day – agitating. I confronted him before he left, but he only said, 'We're starting to get somewhere! Can't you feel it?', but all I knew was that he was leaving me alone again. He never came home that night… At four in the morning they knocked on my door, caps in hand. I cursed their name and their stupid cause. I didn't want no more part of it."
She paused and took control of her breathing. He reached out and took her hand.
"So I got away from everyone and everything that reminded me of him. And here I was, and then there you were… Skinny white boy from Mystic Falls, wherever the hell that is. Always pestering me and following me around and wearing me down with that damn charm. Charm in spades." She gave him a sly, sad smile and he squeezed her hand.
"I think I only went with you, because you weren't him," she admitted, "you weren't tied up in this thing. But what we are doing is equally dangerous. Perhaps more so, you have to know that."
He nodded slowly, acknowledging the truth of it for once.
"I don't have people no more," she continued, "I moved away from all that. But if we were ever to even find someone to marry us, how would we live? Where would we live? No-one would accept us."
"But people like Charlie, they're changing things." He argued. "It's working – you saw it yourself today."
"I saw a whole lotta people saying a whole lotta things. I didn't see no change. You and I will still get spat at on the street. And what about if I were to fall pregnant? What about our children?"
He turned away guiltily at that. There was one problem she would never have to worry about. He sighed. He loved her, but he knew he could never persuade her this way. She hated words, rhetoric. He needed to act.
He took both her hands in his own and looked at her.
"If you want to be with me, we will make it work. I can protect you. You know that."
She shook her head. "I've seen hate," she began, "I've seen more than I can stand of it. You know I love you Stefan, but you can't protect me from that."
He dropped her hands and felt anger rising to the surface again. He stood up.
"If I find someone who will marry us, will you live with me as man and wife?"
"I want to…", the word 'but' was heavily implied.
"Change doesn't start outside these walls Shelley, it starts inside us. I think Charlie understood that."
She looked up at him and saw that he burned with a furious intent. Today had gotten him all riled up, that was for sure. For a quiet life, she nodded.
"Why not? Let's start a revolution." She said, her eyes filled with disbelief.
It took him weeks to find the right place. It was a simple fact that interracial marriages were banned. Virginia amongst others, had been talking about change, but nothing had come of it yet. He found a place down south, where if you paid enough money, they looked the other way. "We have our own laws in border country" the pastor had said, as he pocketed the fat wedge of cash Stefan had bribed him with.
He went to look at the chapel itself. It was a sorry affair, a white-washed timber shack sat squat in the centre of a countryside dustbowl. There wasn't much around, a couple of run-down houses holding families who spilled out the sides. He sucked his teeth. It would have to do. Perhaps with some ribbon and some flowers?… He didn't have a whole lot of money at the moment and most of what he had did have, had gone on buying the marriage license. Even then, he had had to compel the woman behind the counter who was fretting about it all.
He had driven her there himself in a borrowed car. They had been two days on the road already and on the day itself they got up at four in the morning to get there by lunch. The heat was baking; the best part of ninety, ninety-five, degrees. He stopped for gas and as the boy came out to fill her up and wash their windows, Stefan watched Shelley fan herself. She looked pretty in her rose pink dress. He told her she could wear white if she wanted to, but she insisted it wasn't right. He took out a handkerchief and faked wiping sweat from his brow. The boy had a leg in calipers and was taking an interminable amount of time to make his way around the car. He limped to Stefan's window.
"Will that be all, sir?" Stefan told him that it was and tipped him. The boy flicked his wide eyes between him and his fiancé. He started the engine and was happy to get on the road again.
He realized that neither of them had spoken in the best part of two hours and so he reached for her hand and gave it a squeeze. He found that she was shaking.
When they pulled up, the money he had given to the pastor to spruce the place up had obviously lined his own pocket, as aside from some rather sad looking daisies tied to the gate posts, there was little else to recommend it. Still, as he opened her door for her she didn't say anything. She got out of the car, brushed herself down and straightened her bonnet. Then she froze.
"Stefan, I can hear voices inside." He had been so busy fussing around her that he had failed to notice. But now she said it, he realized that something was indeed wrong with this picture.
"Is someone else here already? Are we early?"
"No. This is our time."
He fixed a grim look on his face and marched ahead of her to find out what was going on. The church door was open and the pastor inside was busy reading someone else's vows. His voice droned on as the few guests inside swatted away the flies.
Stefan stood in the entrance, waiting to get accustomed to the light. His body was silhouetted in the doorway and it cast a long shadow down the aisle. The pastor raised his hands to his eyes to see who it was.
"Why come on in son, don't just stand there." He said.
Stefan stepped into the gloom of the church with its heat and its flies and tired looking flowers. The would-be bride and groom turned to face him… Who was this interrupting their ceremony?
The groom fixed his eyes on the stranger. Slowly he began to make him out, his features as familiar as his own.
"Stefan?" he said. "Is that you?"
"Damon!" Stefan exclaimed.
"What in Sam Hill are you doing here?"