A/N: To everyone who has reviewed and/or favourited and put this story on alert: thank you. I hope you enjoy this next chapter ;)

First encounter with a ghost

Alaric knew something was wrong as soon as he saw Damon. Or more to the point as soon as he saw Damon with blood darkening the sclera of his eyes and veins prominent across the delicate skin of his cheeks; the fangs indenting his bottom lip were also a giveaway that the elder Salvatore was feeling a mite...vampy. Still Damon didn't jump him where he stood and while Alaric's hand moved towards the vial of concentrated vervain essence he kept in his pants pocket (just because he voluntarily hung out with vampires was no reason to be careless) he didn't turn tail and run. Admittedly this was mostly so he didn't trigger in Damon the predator urge to chase prey more than it was a show of bravado or genuine confidence that the vampire wouldn't hurt him.

"Damon?" He queried noticing the slightly puzzled look on the other man's face now that he could see beyond the vampire tells. "Is something wrong?" He almost rolled his eyes at that. Obviously something was wrong because Damon was silent, staring at him in a way he'd never seen before and fanged. Dazedly it occurred to Alaric that he had never actually seen Damon with his 'vamp-face' on. Interestingly his...sometime ally...usually did his killing looking disturbingly human. Alaric had always thought that was one of Damon's more unnerving characteristics, which was saying something considering the man was a borderline psychotic on his good days and a lethal force of nature on his worst. Now however he had to amend this view, vamped-out (silent and non-smirking) Damon was much more unnerving.

"I..." Alaric watched, fascinated, as Damon stirred, tongue darting out around his fangs as he licked his lips in a gesture that smacked of nervousness. Nervous! Damon sounded nervous; Alaric hadn't thought the vampire was capable of nerves. This was a man who managed to be sarcastic while being tortured and mutilated, after all. He watched, unblinking, as Damon cleared his throat, which sounded raw, and spoke again, still wearing a strangely muted but nevertheless befuddled look on his face that Alaric was sure he'd never seen before.

"Forgive me sir, but you appear to have me at a disadvantage. Have we met?"

What? Alaric almost reeled back in surprise. It wasn't so much the words (although they were completely unlike Damon. Sir? Damon called him sir?) It was also the tone. The stiff, stilted delivery, the way Damon drew back his shoulders and stood a little straighter, and the flicker of something like unease creeping into those bloodied eyes. He spluttered out something about this being a joke, just waiting for that shit-eater grin to smother Damon's face and for the other to dance forward and crow about how he had Alaric going there, didn't he, and – well- to basically be Damon being his usually dick self. Yet something in his hindbrain told him this wasn't a joke even before Damon pulled back his lips in a (really creepy) fanged grimace and insisted that he was serious and, by the way, he was suffering a bout of amnesia as well.

"Well damn; this can't be good."

Now Alaric liked to think he was a man who could roll with the punches, go with the flow, be one with the twists and turns life threw at him. After all he was sort-of friends with the man who had slept with, killed, and turned his wife into a vampire – but even he needed a moment to get his head around this development. Unfortunately it looked like the increasingly agitated vampire pacing the floor of the boarding house parlour was looking to him to be the voice of reason in the midst of this mess.

"...And you see sir, I'm not sure quite how I came to be here. My head pains me and I thought perhaps I had drunk too much, but now I cannot remember a single facet of the night previous and that is not normal. I can hold my liquor sir; I was one of General Groom's boys – it was considered mandatory that a solider be able to hold his whiskey."

Damon paced by one of the wide windows of the parlour, his fingers tangling in the heavy drapes almost unconsciously. He turned a beseeching look upon Alaric. "Sir, you seem to know me. Tell me, who are you? How is that we have met – and do you know why I cannot remember?"

"I...uh...my name's Alaric Saltzman." He began mind spinning as he tried to understand what on Earth was going on. "We're sort of...well, I guess we're sort of friends." He winced, it was one thing to accept privately, on an intellectual level, that he and Damon were – friendly – with each other and that it was unlikely that they'd ever try and kill each other again, but it was another to say it out loud. This was especially true as Damon tended to react badly to the mere intimation that he was capable of friendship or that he desired the company of others.

"Friends?" The vampire stopped blurring around the room like a trapped blue-bottle fly and turned to face Alaric. He cocked his head to the side, his eyes still bloody and his skin still mottled by the faint tracery of darkened veins, which gave the always predatory gesture a slightly more feral quality than usual. Until the man smiled, that is, "Oh, I'm glad to hear it."

He blurred forward and Alaric almost fell into one of the wingback chairs as Damon stood right in his personal space and grabbed one of his hands, shaking it firmly while grasping his forearm with his free hand. "Did we serve together, Alaric? Is that how we met, because I am sure there are no Saltzmans living in town...and may I call you Ric?" The jovial grin alighting Damon's face would have been a little more effective without the addition of fangs, but it almost seemed like Damon hadn't noticed them or the fact that he was cutting his own lips, so Alaric decided that he probably wasn't about to rip his throat out right this moment.

"...You usually do call me Ric," He said awkwardly, mind busy processing everything Damon had said so far for clues as to what was wrong with him – because clearly there was something very wrong with the vampire. "And no, there are no other Saltzmans in Mystic Falls." He paused and carefully extracted his arm from Damon's grip and after a moment the other man caught a clue and stepped back a polite distance, looking a little abashed at his abuse of boundaries (which was so unlike him Alaric immediately chalked it up as another clue that Damon was not himself).

He cleared his throat and attempted a reassuring smile he was sure ended up more like a sickened grimace. "Why don't you tell me what you do remember, Damon; I can try and fill in the gaps that way."

Blood stained eyes widened and another bright and engaging grin lit up his face, "Good idea." Damon started pacing again as he spoke. "Well the year is...it is...I came home from the army...and..." The vampire frowned words petering out and expression falling. He lifted one hand to rake fingers through his dark bangs. "I...Damnit! My head hurts!" Whirling around suddenly Damon's arm lashed out with blinding speed and before Alaric knew it an ornate Tiffany lamp was lying in pieces across the room – having been hurled at the far wall too fast for him to follow. Alaric's hand had already grabbed up the vial of vervain as Damon spun on him, face twisting in an animalistic snarl.

"This noise is abominable."

An end table joined the shards of broken lamp across the room as Damon grabbed at his head with both hands and resumed his pacing. "There is this...this...goddamned thumping noise and it keeps getting louder and faster and it's...it's driving me to distraction!"

Alaric swallowed, throat pulsing as his heartbeat ratcheted up a notch. His eyes swept around the room for any convenient weaponry and he spied an old cavalry officer's sword mounted to the wall near the entranceway. Eyeing Damon all the while he started to edge towards the sword – and the front door.

Across the room, seemingly oblivious to Alaric's intentions, Damon was still ranting. "It is...it is like someone has placed a metronome inside my skull; all I can hear is this rhythmic beat. It..." The vampire's head jerked up, his spine went rigid and his neck turned slowly, bringing the vampire's head with it, all in one movement. Alaric froze, a few feet from the cavalry sword. He watched as crimson and blue eyes narrowed fixedly on him. "It's coming from you." The vampire growled.

The roof of Alaric's mouth was so dry he wasn't sure he would be able to make a sound. "It's my heart." He croaked, coughing and speaking a little louder. "You're hearing my heart beat."

The vampire blinked, body uncoiling from the predatory near crouch he had fallen into seemingly without conscious thought. "I beg your pardon?"

If he hadn't been facing down a vampire who was possibly even more deranged than his usual self at this moment, Alaric might have found the slightly scandalised and incredulous look adorning Damon's face funny. As it was he merely maintained eye contact and kept his voice low and steady. "It's true. What you're hearing is my heartbeat. It picked up because I was...nervous."

Damon's face creased in utter confusion, "But you're all the way over there. How could I possibly hear your heartbeat? How could it be so loud? It's almost deafening me."

"You're a vampire," Alaric said, gently, even as he readied his muscles to run like hell if Damon so much as twitched in his direction.

"That's absurd," the vampire snapped looking almost offended, his posture becoming stiff and unnatural, rather like a man squaring up to answer a challenge against his honour. "I am not a..." he trailed off then, one hand lifting to touch fingers to his lips, or more accurately to the sharpened teeth nipping the skin. To Alaric the range of expression that passed like a summer rain storm across the other man's face was truly intriguing. There was shock, recognition, something like burgeoning delight, then a complex mixture of worry and doubt – and those were just the recognisable emotional outputs he could read. Finally Damon's expressive face settled on a look of blank anxiety.

"Excuse me," the vampire muttered, ducking his head abashedly before blurring out of the parlour right past Alaric. Alaric immediately (and perhaps stupidly) turned to follow the vampire who disappeared into the downstairs restroom. From the doorway Alaric watched, with open bemusement, as Damon examined his vampiric countenance with wide startled eyes. "Mary mother of God," he breathed out, not irreverently. "I Turned. I really Turned...but I...but she said I must die before..." in the reflective surface of the mirror Alaric could see dawning recognition. "I...died."

Alaric winced, "Yes...you've um...you've been dead for a, well, let's just say it's been a while."

The look Damon gave him when the confused vampire finally turned away from the mirror was bound to haunt Alaric for a long time to come. There was something so...naked...about it. It wasn't exactly horror, nor was there much in the way of grief, but instead Damon looked drawn and wane. His shoulders slumped, and he sagged in on himself. It was like all the life and animation left his body as he hung his head, hands loose and limp at his sides. Then something at once fired to life and hardened in those blood rimmed eyes. "Katherine," Damon breathed out head snapping up. "Where is Katherine?"

In a flash he was in Alaric's face again, hands like steel clutching at Alaric's shoulders as he shoved him into the wall outside the restroom. "Tell me," eyes blazing, Damon's intensity hit him like a wrecking ball, "Where is she? Where is Katherine? Why would she not be here? If I'm Turned then she must have..." Damon gnawed on his bottom lip even as he spat out words like bullets, "She said this was the only way we could be together. She was to show me the world. She promised." Alaric winced as Damon's fingers convulsed reflexively around his shoulders and he kept the vervain palmed in his hand. He wouldn't use it until absolutely necessary, but if Damon didn't let him go soon...

"Ric," the vampire spoke his name as if it was foreign to him, "if you are my friend you will tell me where Katherine is, or so help me..."

Shit, shit, shit; there was no way in hell Alaric was going to tell Damon the whole sorry story about Katherine and how badly she had played him. He might have a ring that gave him a mortality free pass but that didn't mean he enjoyed being stabbed, bitten, or otherwise murdered...and that was certainly what would happen if he told Damon the woman he had given up his life for one hundred and forty-six years ago had only ever lied to and used him. The first time he found out Damon had lost it completely and ended up snapping Jeremy Gilbert's neck, Alaric highly doubted the vampire would handle the situation any better a second time around. And the only available neck to snap this time was Alaric's own.

Alaric opened his mouth planning to say anything to buy time while completely ready to chuck the content of the vial into Damon's eyes before getting the fuck out of the boarding house when a sharp buzzing noise sliced through the charged atmosphere. Damon flinched, releasing Alaric and stepping back, before groping for his jeans back pocket and pulling out his ringing cell phone.

"What the hell is this?" The bemused vampire asked him, holding the phone in the same way Alaric might handle a grenade without its pin. His face twisted into an odd grimace. "And why was it...vibrating...in my trousers?"

Blue eyes stared into his expectantly and, completely inappropriately, all Alaric could think to do in response was to burst into peals of (near hysterical) laughter.