Author's Forward (Chapter 10): 06-27-2011
It's final. The story has a fresh name and a fresh synopsis to go along with the recent developments in plot.
This update is primarily Damon-centric. I've tweaked a little of his history, changed a few facts concerning Katherine's escape from the fire, and introduced another vampire into the mix. Events following this chapter will have absolutely nothing to do with Klaus's curse as it is portrayed in the TV series and hopefully everyone will be kept entertained with the future twists and characters that I have planned (insert maniacal cackle here).
"I'm coming...Jesus Christ, don't get your panties in a knot," he muttered coarsely in response to the interminable sound of knuckles rapping against the front door. Damon hammered down the stairs, looking ornery from the prospect of having to play host to someone so obviously impatient.
This had better be the Grand Inquisitor, he thought. Anyone less and I'll be having myself an early lunch.
He padded over the heirloom rug that stretched itself ceremoniously across both sides of the entrance. Sliding back the deadbolt and pulling open the door, Damon leered into the sunlight, making out the square silhouette of his visitor.
He stood a few inches shorter than Damon, conservatively dressed in an outmoded Brooks Brothers suit that might have been expensive ten or fifteen years ago. It dated him considerably, as did his bowl haircut which overemphasized his angular features to such an extent that he rather resembled a reptile on the cusp of unhinging its jaw. He smiled, though not in a friendly way, the whites of his eyes exceptionally glossy against their wood stained centres.
"Questa e la casa di Salvatore, si?" he spoke the words as fluently as if he were a true Venetian, a creature in contempt of all modernity.
"Yes, this is and I appreciate your...formality, but we can keep it in English, if you don't mind," Damon answered, his curiosity aroused by the visitor's heavy Italian and even more so when he realized that the man wasn't generating a pulse. His odour should have been a dead giveaway, ripe with the presence of old blood and something else too, something akin to the smell of the ground in his father's vineyards, lands that lay on the Tuscany hillside, a soil of ash and dense knobs of clay.
"Very well," he said with another perfunctory smile. "I should introduce myself then. My name is Elijah and please forgive my forwardness, but you...are Damon, yes?"
"As far as I can tell," Damon responded dryly.
The vampire raised one eyebrow in appraisal of him, seemingly nonplused by this attempt at humour. Then, with a dismissive glance, he straightened his posture and continued.
"Good. Then perhaps I might speak with you inside? I've come a long way and would sooner not discuss these matters so frankly in the outdoors."
Damon considered the request for a moment, certain that this enigmatic stranger had not arrived simply to exchange pleasantries. He wondered at the vampire's age, given the archaic flavour of his speech and his etiquette which, by twenty-first century standards, would have been seen as contrived or merely put on for the sake of entertainment. Appearances aside, he was clearly not someone to be tampered with. Damon was sure of that.
"I - ahh...I did have plans, but as long as we make it short..."
Damon stepped aside reluctantly, allowing the vampire entrance.
Elijah quickly strode past him, darting his head round to take in the view from the living room, as though his surroundings were excitingly foreign. Damon was unsettled by this, feeling encroached upon despite the fact that he could barely claim the boarding house as his own permanent residence. It had belonged to his family, one of the few withstanding pieces of history he had left, and Damon held it in fonder regard than he cared to admit. So, it came as no surprise that as Elijah positioned himself neatly in one of the armchairs facing the window and folded his hands across his lap, Damon felt a certain involuntary twist in his bowels.
"Now then, I'm sure you're very anxious to know what this is about. As I said my name is Elijah. I won't bore you with any personal chronicles, as I imagine they would be of little interest to you...I am here solely on the behest of my brother who finds it most pertinent that I address you, the last of two in the Salvatore line, with this issue..."
Damon ambled over to a cabinet housing a large reserve of scotch. He decided that if he was going to be forced to listen to this character drone on as if typecast into some period drama, then alcohol would be the crucial mediator. He retrieved a second glass and raised it in Elijah's direction, but the vampire declined his offer with an imperious wave.
"So...to make this as brief as possible, I'll only provide a small refresher to your memory. I'm very well acquainted with the story of your final birthing...the girl, or rather the vampire, Katerina Petrova, having sired you, though perhaps you knew her then by a different name..."
Damon gave his visitor a calculating stare before treating himself to a mouthful of scotch. He found he was a good deal agitated by Elijah's 'acquaintance' with his history. This was twice in one day now that he'd been confronted by someone knowing far too much for his own liking. Had he invited it? Was he wearing a t-shirt with his life story summarized in point form for all the world to see?
Well, thank god for alcohol if he was, Damon thought.
"Yes...she was Katherine Pierce. Go on," he responded, giving up on making sense of his bad luck and trying to move the conversation along.
"Her reasons, any that she may have given you, for her arrival in Mystic Falls, her family's departure, her orphanage...these were all, I'm sorry to say, counterfeit. It was a...an artifice designed merely to supplicate your father into allowing her to live on this estate. Her true purpose lay in my brother's hopes that she would successfully procure an artifact...known to have passed through Salvatore hands and Guiseppe Salvatore himself. I never fully believed this...and after Katerina s escape-
Damon coughed suddenly, scotch exiting his nose.
"Escape? No. That's impossible. I was there. She burned alongside everyone else in the fire at Fell's Church in eighteen-sixty-four."
Damon recounted the events of that dark night which had been so firmly committed to memory. A millennia had passed since then it seemed, changing him, forever altering his course. Everything that had once sustained him was severed from him. Fate had played his existence like a string of notes with their beauties cut off. His lover, his brother, his father and even his humanity had all been cast into the same pit of flames, rising high like the town's hysteria, in the name of Old Virginia and in the name of their Lord and Saviour. He was cold to it now, but oh, how he had writhed and fought and challenged it then.
Elijah continued.
"While this might be what you wish to recall, I assure you, this is by no means what took place. Katerina did escape...under the assiduous eye of her handmaid, granted - Look, I'm certainly not seeking to disturb you with any of this information but I feel it necessary to tell you that she did pass away some eighteen years ago now. Eh...when I say pass away, it makes things sound so human, doesn't it? Really, it was quite a different state of affairs for her..."
"She had been in Bulgaria for a number of seasons, visiting her homeland, taking a brief respite from my brother's employment, you see, when she was staked in the small town of Nessebar. The culprit was found only days after the murder, swiftly put to the stake himself..."
Damon glared out the window, absently swirling his scotch. He watched the sun as it crested above the glass, into the invisible arch of sky, and felt little.
"So, why are you here then? To fulfill some obligation of hers?"
Damon turned his eyes back to Elijah who held his clasped hands in front of his mouth, two fingers forming a cathedral shape against his lips.
"I am here...to fulfil her obligations, yes, and I am also seeking your assistance. My brother has well exceeded his one-thousandth year and suffers from a kind of...infirmity."
One-thousandth? Good god, he really is the fucking Inquisitor.
Damon suppressed his reaction this time, keeping his drink in his mouth.
"What infirmity are we talking about...and where do I fit into the picture?" he asked, suspicion and mild indignation slowly creeping into his voice.
"I am bound not to speak of his condition...and as surely as you have a brother, you would understand this. But in address of your second question...as I've previously mentioned, there is an artifact once thought to hold a cure for his ailment. It's location has been obscured for as long as we have been searching. In Tuscany, it was rumoured to have made its way into your father's possession, but already he had boarded ship and was making his way to American soil long before we knew the certainty of these claims."
"The artifact I am referring to is a sickle-sword, Sumerian actually...and one of, if not the first of its kind. The inlay...on the dull side of the blade endows it...with certain properties as to -well, I would be speaking out if turn if I said anymore. Do you recall seeing anything like this in your father's hands?"
Damon knew bait when he heard it and he wasn't about to admit to anything that would put him in the position of helping a vampire he'd only just met, particularly this one.
"No. I don't think so...but...when my father immigrated, there were too many items from the estate in Florence to bring over in one trip. He was still having them sent over through the years and I'm positive he had things go missing. You couldn't really trust anyone to organize a shipment like that if you weren't there yourself...as you're probably aware. Not in those days. Not even now," Damon said with a lukewarm smile.
Elijah sized him up like an animal competitor vying for the same patch of ground, his razor-blade stare penetrating every inch of Damon's expression.
"You're certain of this?"
"Pretty sure," Damon responded.
"Well...that is unfortunate. I would have anticipated your father to have kept a better catalogue of his estate, at least concerning this...acquisition. Perhaps you might look into this for me...have a look around and...secure a few more details? It's retrieval would mean a great deal..."
Damon took careful approach in answering. If he simply placated the stranger, Elijah might suspect that he was hiding something but on the other hand, an outright refusal would insight the same reaction. Damon was walking a very thin line.
"I suppose I could check into things...," he finally offered, playing it off as though it were a burden to him, a tedious errand in which he had nothing invested.
"I would appreciate it," Elijah spoke. "Here is a number. Should you find anything, you can reach me day or night, though I must confess...," he continued, retrieving a pen and a scrap of paper from his jacket. "I find the incessant reliance on mobile phones, in this day and age, to be so...nauseating, when we'd gone so long without them. Privacy is always foregone for the sake of convenience, don't you find?
Damon nodded and gave him a false, congenial smile, watching as Elijah scrawled out a set of digits. He folded the paper in half and held it out to Damon. Then he stood, meticulously smoothing out his trousers, nodded back once, and proceeded to make his way towards the door.
Damon followed in toe, his tension slowly easing with the thought of his company's departure, but as Elijah exited the door, he turned to Damon with one last unsettling remark.
"Oh...and Signore Salvatore...please keep this exchange under strict confidentiality. I'd hate to think what ramifications would result from this sort of information being broadcast to just anyone. Do be thorough and see to it that your pet upstairs is made to forget this incident. Human casualties are, after all, so vulgar when one is given the benefit of foresight."
Elena had her ear pressed to the crack of the door. She hadn't been able to make out Elijah's final string of words but she guessed from Damon's reaction, that they had not been something favourable. Loud as thunder, he came rumbling up the stairs, a sound so jarring that it caused the door to tremble against Elena's skull. She quickly scrambled to a standing position, retreating from its threshold moments before the door was swung open.
Damon shot her a black look as he entered, securing the deadbolt behind him and sealing them inside the room. Elena saw the muscles of his jaw flexing in anger and instinctually she retreated a few steps, lengthening the distance between them. Damon paid this very little mind however, as he marched over to the window and gave a rough jerk to either side of the drapes, shutting out the light completely.
He stood with his back turned for several moments, shrouded in the dark and sensing Elena's restlessness, her anxiety as it swarmed the air around him, heating his nostrils. Finally, he spoke.
"How much did you hear?"
Elena struggled to separate the random voices calling out within her mind, reciting the names, places and events as they'd been described to her from her refuge behind the door. She formed the most succinct answer she could and braced herself for its consequences.
"Everything. Well...nearly everything. I couldn't hear him when he was standing outside."
Damon sighed wearily, forced to reconcile with the truth of Elijah's prediction that she had indeed heard more than he'd hoped. His brows were deeply knit, the skin around his knuckles taut, as Damon considered what he might do with this information. It wouldn't service him any to compel her out of the knowledge now, when he'd only begun to scratch the surface of Elena's insights. He ruminated over these, what she had termed 'dreams,' seeking a connection between their advent and the strange visitor who also seemed to know more of his history than Damon could otherwise explain.
A thought suddenly struck him and Damon turned towards her, his eyes gleaming with an occult presence, illuminating his features as brightly as an orange flame.
Elena had never seen his eyes like this before and she didn't dare avert her gaze. She couldn't. His irises drew her in like whirlpools, pulling her down, blunting her emotions.
"I'll only do this once," she heard him say as Damon approached her.
With a dubious frown, Elena tried to lift her legs but found them planted solidly beneath her like mammoth tree trunks, their roots too deeply sunk to wrench up. His hand made contact with her wrist, emitting a strong electric current that seemed to further render her motionless. It was his energy that entered her, travelling through her arm, blistering below the skin and bursting out from her pours.
Elena's features softened then, a tepid feeling settling into her spine as she realized she had neither the strength nor the incentive to fend him off.
Damon had experimented with this on only a handful of occasions. It was true, he had penetrated many minds in the course of his existence, but often this had been done for the sake of a cheap thrill, a gimmick that, over the years, had lost much of its appeal. Now and then it had been helpful in acquiring the odd piece of intelligence, though very rarely had Damon ever needed to pry so deeply that he would resort to the physical establishment of connection.
To see another's memories, to truly see that which was under the mind's greatest lock and key required a more direct form of contact. And so he held her wrist, piercing through its barrier with a subtle, elemental force, becoming her blood and becoming her eyes.
"Show me, Elena...show me what you've seen. Remember your dreams. Mostrami...Tutto quello che sapete," he intoned smoothly and suggestively.
It was a queer and marvellous thing for Damon, to be within this human and to find himself distilling her remembrances as though they were his own. The images came and Damon felt them undermining his usual sense of indifference. This was the peril of entering another's id - the boundaries of one's own thoughts and emotions became indistinguishable from those of the compromised mind. Damon understood this but he also knew he didn't have a choice.
Surrendering his defences, he saw it all in immaculate reconstruction; Ms. Calhoun, the family cook, Katherine in all her regalia, and Collins on his last day, never to reach Magruder. Damon was certain now that no outside force could have generated such inarguable, crystal details. It was something else...surely.
As his hand recoiled, Elena broke from her swoon, her feet giving way below her. Damon spared her from the impact however, springing out an arm to catch her. A long, grievous moan passed her lips, Elena's features slowly reanimating as she leaned into the crook of his shoulder.
"O-hhhh. God, my head...feels like you punched me. Did you...punch me? she asked in a voice that reflected her stupefaction.
"Now, why I do a thing like that?" he returned, laying on the rhetorical sarcasm.
"I think I can...come up with a number of reasons. One - because...you're a callous pig of a vampire...without a shred of...decency," she half-muttered, retracting herself from the support of his frame.
"Well, at least we agree on something," Damon returned with a puckish smirk. He watched Elena hobble over to the mattress in the low light, her clothing in a wild state of disarray and her hair equally so, lying in tangles across her back. He almost smiled to himself in spite of the morning's confusion, conjuring up her former shape, twisting and thrashing in the sweat of their sex.
"Besides, decency is w-aaay overrated and I didn't see you complaining about it last night. In fact...I know exactly how much you enjoyed my 'callous pig of a vampire' self, so don't you even play that card," he taunted.
"Damon...I need to get home. You promised you'd take me home," she entreated him, Elena's demeanour shifting, her soft brown eyes in full supplication now.
"And I intend to," he returned impassively, turning away from a sight that long ago would have had his knees buckling with openly effaced masculinity. These days, his heart really was dictated by callousness, hating to be inwardly touched by a woman's persuasions. Often he thought of Katherine, reliving the ways in which she had abused her influence over him and neglected his affections. It was with a sense of reciprocity, that Damon exerted his own influence, treating the women he bedded and drank from as he had been treated.
Still, he knew that he was in no danger with Elena. Her words were not a decoy for any ulterior motive. She was too fresh and too green to know what her gender was truly capable of and like any of those sweetly sublime wallflowers, she would have probably gone on living her life under the sun, meeting some college kid, half-cocked, bright-eyed and with all of the same ambitions as herself, making babies, doing the laundry, driving the kids to soccer practice, and drinking her sweet iced tea long into the matron years until her little heart ceased to beat.
She might have done all this, he thought. She might have...and perhaps even now there was still a glimmer of that future for her, if he simply returned her to her home, dropped her at the doorstep and bid her a fond and eternal farewell. But how implausible, how naive it was for him to think this, when she might just as equally expose him to...god knows whom or what.
Damon wandered over to a set of double doors sitting adjacent to the room's entrance and switched on the main overhead light. He pulled one door open and made his way into its closet interior.
A thought had been brewing since Elena's collapse, rapidly gaining momentum until it had formed itself into a plan, a scheme that would satisfy his curiosity and carry him to answers. It was a reckless, hair-brained idea and probably something he'd later come to regret, but then again, Damon was nothing if not a full-blooded thrill seeker.
Elena heard the tell-tale sounds of a closet being ransacked. She followed Damon's footsteps, peeking into the small quarters and seeing him stripping clothes off of hangers, piling them atop a partially opened suitcase until the stack was in danger of toppling.
"What are you doing?" Elena asked, as if failing to observe the obvious.
"What does it look like I'm doing? Having tea and sandwiches with the Queen of England?" Damon shot back, stooping to sort and fold each garment.
"You're leaving?" she continued, her features drawn with astonishment.
"N-ooo...we're leaving...and lucky for you, Florentine weather isn't all that different from what you're used to. Give me twenty minutes. I'll have you home to pack. We'll do a little yammering with your aunt, maybe a few curtsies. You can get together some hair product...and then it's goodbye U.S.A., ciao Italia."
Translations:
"Questa e la casa di Salvatore, si?" - This is the Salvatore house, yes?