Graves are for the living, not the dead. It gives us something to concentrate on instead of the fact that our loved one is rotting under the ground. Or at least, that's what she liked to thing as looked down at her mother's headstone.
"Everything hurts." She said.
He put his chin on the top of her head. "I know." He wrapped both arms around her just above her chest and pulled her against him. She in turn, wrapped her arms around his torso.
"Do you think she'd be proud of us?" She questioned as she lifted her head off his chest.
"Your mother was a very strange woman, I'm afraid I can't answer that."
That made her laugh, a soulful throaty laugh. She had to hide her face in his chest to stop from scaring all the animals away.
When she recovered from her laughing fit, Damon had broke away from her embrace and held her by her shoulders. "There's only a few hours left before you have to make a decision. The second you stop questioning yourself is the second that you become the monster. Every time you go over the edge, I'll be right there to pull you back. Do you understand me? No matter where you go, I will always find you."
She nodded silently, smiling softly.
She knew the universe has a sense of irony, and sometimes you get reminded just how sadistic that can be. Love mattered, in the end. A house without love would always fall, maybe not today or tomorrow, but in the end without love nothing could endure. And the moment you care that much, a man has you. He owns a little piece of your soul, and he can beat you to death with it. She had signed a piece of her soul over to him the minute she let him into her bedroom window.
She had been sustaining herself for the past day by drinking the blood of the person that had killed her. But now, time was slowly eating away at her and she needed to make her choice; did she want to live out the rest of eternity with the man she loved or did she want to die and be put next to her mother with a headstone of her own that read; here lies Celeste, she'll always be with us, whenever we see black birds.
"I've made my decision."
Damon had smiled at her. He had accepted whatever her choice may have been. But he had hoped with all his being that she'd pick to stay with him.
Sometime later, she had lost track of time as her body began to tear itself apart without the prescence of human blood, Celeste was drinking from one of the maids from her home. And as soon as her thirst was quenched, Damon had compelled her and healed her, letting her go on her merry ol' way.
And that was the end of it.
She was now a vampire.
It was sometime after the sun set behind the horizon, did Damon realize that Celeste was waking from her slumber. Setting his book down, He went over to her and sat on the edge of the bed. Dark eyes peered from under dark eyelashes as she began to come around. When she looked up, however, she wasn't expecting who she saw.
Damon smirked. "Welcome back to the land of the living, Sleeping Beauty."
She stared at Damon and it wasn't the beauty of him that made her love him, it was just him. It was love made up of a thousand touches, a million conversations, a trillion shared looks. A love made up of danger shared, enemies conquered, a determination to neither of them would change the other, even if they could. She loved Damon, all of him, because if she took away the plottings, the labyrinth of his mind, it would lessen him, make him someone else. And then where would she be? Sometimes you deal with the devil not because you want to, but because if you don't, someone else will.
"If you're too damn stubborn to let yourself cry, then let your body find other ways to let it out."
She swung her arms around his neck, hugging him closer to her. And she held him there, never wanting to let go of him.
Surprisingly, Damon automatically hugged her back.
She retracted herself from his body and before he could say another word, she had kissed him, full on the lips, very passionately, exactly the same way she did when she realized that her transisition had worked and she was going to see another day - with him. She had kissed him with everything she had in her.
Damon didn't resist her advance.
How could he? He'd been waiting for this moment since she arrived. Anyone who says love is free has never truly been in love. Your lover will need comfort. Your spouse will have bad days. Your child will have their heart broken, more than once and you will be expected to help pick up the pieces. Your beloved pets become a parade of joy and loss. Love costs, sometimes it costs everything you have, and sometimes it costs more. On those days you weigh the joy you gain against the pain; you weigh the energy given from the loving and the energy lost from the duties that love places upon us. Love can be the most expensive thing in the world. If it's worth it, great, but if not, then love does not conquer all, sometimes you are conquered by it. You are laid waste before the breathtaking pain of it, and crushed under the weight of it's obligations.
Some moments are perfect, and then someone comes along and fucks it up. Ain't it always the way? Elena had walked in on them and Celeste was the first to break the kiss.
"Don't you ever knock?"
Elena glared at her, but said nothing as she dropped a few blood bags on the bedside table and then turned and left.
