Re-uploaded in February 2017.
The moon's pale light spilled into the room through the half-open window and a soft breeze stirred the curtains. Dark tree branches brushed the glass, scratching, humming a low roundelay.
Caroline woke up with a sense of contentment. She was growing comfortable in her own smooth, forever young skin, and there was something else, a feeling of belonging that was entirely new.
She looked around her, at the unfamiliar paneled walls, and then her gaze fell on him.
His dark hair partially covered the pillow, prickling against her arm, the crisp white sheets draped about his waist, exposing his bare chest. Her eyes widened as she recalled their argument and everything that had followed. Were she human, her cheeks would have heated at the memory. He had consumed her, possessed every inch of her body, and she had wanted him to. To say she got carried away was a massive understatement.
Her guard had been weakening for a while, she knew that. Physical proximity was like a wave repeatedly breaking against her boundaries. But what did he want from her, anyway? Certainly not romance, especially given their history. One last fumble in the dark for old times' sake or to continue to sleep together until something better came along? Or, rather, until he up and left, like he was already planning to do.
She should beat him to it, reject him, bruise his ego like he did hers last year. Yet she felt a pull to him that had nothing to do with compulsion. This new Damon was just as powerful and dangerous as the original version, but just as he had become more balanced, she had grown accustomed to the gore and shadows that defined their existence. It seemed somehow they finally met halfway.
Knowing he would be gone soon, she saw no point in abstinence or petty revenge now. She might as well admit to herself that she wanted him, and last night he seemed to want her just as much.
Pulling her lush hair to the side to untangle any knots with her fingers, she looked down at his sleeping form. His square jaw spoke to his determined will, his ashen skin matched his aloof attitude and he was so good looking women would stand in line for a chance with him. Why fight this?
She lightly tickled his nose with the ends of her hair, suppressing a giggle when his nose twitched and his eyes fluttered beneath his lids. Then, before she knew what was happening, he had rolled on his side and grabbed her arm, pinning her to the bed. She huffed, trying to seem unimpressed with his reflexes, although a warm feeling stole over her with the contact.
"I was beginning to think you would sleep all day."
"Long night," he replied, leaning down to nuzzle her neck.
She could practically feel his cocky smirk against her skin when she let out a sigh, and then his lips found hers, in a deliberate, lazy ravishment of her mouth. It was just no use resisting him sometimes.
"How's your hand?" she asked when they finally broke the kiss.
They both glanced at where the infected wound had been hours earlier and only saw his unblemished skin. She hesitated. "You don't feel anything different?"
"No. I can't think of a stronger medicine than vampire blood," he said. "My own blood doesn't feel any weaker, but I can always turn somebody to find out."
He quirked his eyebrows, teasing her. Whatever was in that bite, retarding his healing process, receded in the end. Though maybe she shouldn't have drunk his blood that soon, before they made sure it was safe.
"Oh, no, you won't," she countered quickly. Siring without checking with the higher-ups first was precisely what got him into trouble in the first place. "We can have Bonnie work her magic when we're back home."
He shrugged, accepting her solution. "The perks of having a go-to witch."
He considered asking how she was feeling this morning, after her ordeal in the castle, but thought better of it. Enough of discussing last night's events, it wasn't exactly morning-after conversation material.
Speaking of which, he was mildly surprised waking up in bed with her didn't feel nearly as awkward as he had expected. Deciding to have another go before her neurosis made an appearance, he swiftly pulled her on top of him so that she straddled his hips.
She let out a hitched gasp, her breasts bouncing, and he took in every curve of her naked body. It only made him want to devour her, like the proverbial wolf.
Caroline was startled by the almost feral look on his face, but her body immediately tingled to awareness. She was never this responsive, except with him.
"What are you doing?" she asked, mostly just to divert his attention from the fact that he could elicit such reactions from her so easily.
He smirked, his hands resting on her hips, digging into her skin, as his hardness pressed against her core. "I'm celebrating the fact that we're not bound by trivial human limitations."
With supernatural speed, he pushed himself up to a sitting position and brought her legs to either side of his hips. She wrapped her arms around his neck for balance and his mouth hovered over hers. He didn't miss how she unconsciously licked her lips in anticipation.
Instead of indulging her, he buried his face in the valley between her glorious tits and she bit back a moan. Her hands ran over his back as she moved against his erection, invitingly. She saw him emerge, eyes hooded with desire, and he finally brought his mouth down to hers for a deep kiss.
Growing impatient, she arched up and sank down, taking him inside her. Ever since their first time, he wouldn't take her until she was aching for it, but that never took very long, anyway.
He groaned her name before taking over and dictating the pace. Damon was never very gentle, but, if human Caroline had been feisty, Vampire Barbie could certainly keep up; neither of them had to hold back.
She had her eyes closed as he traced her parting lips, and her tongue darted out to lick his index finger, luring it inside her mouth. She didn't bite it as he expected but sucked it with enthusiasm as he watched her intently.
When she looked at him under the fringe of long lashes, he pulled his finger, using his hand to hold her head and bring it closer. He finally claimed her mouth in a wet kiss before slamming against her, and she lost track of time and space. If this was his idea of compensation for past mistakes, he was free to continue to atone.
The refuge in the suburbs turned out to be a nice interlude in that crazy busy week. Damon didn't seem in a hurry to report back to the elder vampires, and she enjoyed the break.
She fell asleep after their morning activities and woke up in an empty room. It was like he had never been there and she had only dreamed about it. He could have waited for her, it was bad form to leave her to wake up alone in a strange place. Then again, Damon could play hero from time to time, but he was still a stranger to common courtesy.
Later, when she made her way downstairs, she found Stefan slouched on the couch, with Alaric nursing a glass of bourbon by the unlit fireplace.
The flat-screen television incorporated in the living room wall was on the local news when a bulletin interrupted the regular programming. The words "Gimghoul burglary" ran at the bottom of the screen as the newscaster narrated the vandalization of the historic property.
"Police don't have any suspects at this time," said the anchor, "but they're pretty sure it was you."
She did a double take. Clearly, she needed to feed, ASAP.
"So I guess we're staying another day to see this story unfold," Stefan said to her. "Make sure there won't be any problems with the authorities."
Caroline nodded. Better to err on the side of caution.
He continued to flip through the channels, engaging in an argument with the teacher about the merits of movie remakes. Considering she wasn't even born when the first Transformers came out, she had no contribution to make.
In the kitchen, Damon and Enzo were talking, the latter leaning casually against the wall and the former looking inside the fridge.
"Hey, sleeping beauty," Enzo greeted when she shuffled into the kitchen. Well, maybe he wasn't so bad, after all.
Damon shut the fridge and ripped open a blood bag, emptying it in a glass. "Looking for this?" he asked, arching an eyebrow. He already knew she'd be hungry. "Not the finest, but it's the easiest way to eat around here."
"My treat," Enzo informed her as the elder Salvatore slid the glass on the island, towards her. "Blood bank delivery. Damon said you're no veggie."
She looked up at Damon, but he had already turned around to collect another bag for himself. She caught Enzo's dark eyes traveling from her to Damon with a knowing smirk. She so wanted to smack him over the head. With a shovel, or something.
"So," he said to the friend he hadn't seen in so long, "you're back to Mystic Falls, Virginia."
Caroline half expected Damon to say something to the effect of "not for long", but he shrugged.
"Unfinished businesses."
Enzo nodded. "They say the killer always returns to the scenes of his crimes," he said and earned a glare from Damon. "But you stayed, this time."
"The time had never been right before, and now it is," the raven-haired vampire replied and Caroline held a breath, even though he wasn't looking at her.
Damon finished his drink and pushed past his friend on his way out of the kitchen. Enzo rounded on Caroline.
"You still breathe," he observed accusingly.
"What? Old habits die hard," she said defensively and the other vampire snickered.
"So, clue me in on last night's adventure," Enzo said, when he joined the others in the living room, followed by the blonde.
Taking a seat in an armchair, Damon gave them an abridged version of the past days' events. "The word on the street," he told them, "is that this blood disease supposedly affects vampires and all the leads pointed to campus. I hadn't been there for at least 90 years."
She noticed Stefan was listening silently, probably waiting for his brother to slip up in his rehearsed story. She sat on the couch to Damon's left, a coffee table between them.
"UNC?" Enzo frowned as if trying to remember something. He looked up. "Think I know someone on the faculty there. Ol' Peter Dromgoole. A walking legend."
"He's not really walking anymore. He's offed himself, back to ashes, literally."
Enzo's eyebrows shot up and even Stefan's expression shifted from suspicious back to brooding. Caroline hadn't met the late vampire, but Damon had mentioned he was a fixture in the university.
"To be redeemed from fire by fire,"* Alaric muttered downing the amber liquid in his glass.
The blonde shuddered. Was that really the price of redemption for the likes of them?
"Huh, and what did you find out?" Enzo asked Damon.
"It turned out the whole thing was the work of some vampire supremacist cult. Called themselves a brotherhood or something."
Enzo sat upright. "A cult? But wait a minute, what kind of disease could infect vampires? We're already-"
"Yeah, yeah." Damon waved him off. "Don't ask me. I call bullshit on the entire thing."
"Well," Caroline said, fidgeting. "The Bishop - that's what he called himself - said it weakens our blood and that enlightenment was the cure." She decided not to go into detail, realizing she should have talked to Damon about it in private. They had been too busy with other things.
"What the fuck does that even mean?" Damon muttered, rolling his eyes.
"Hard to know for sure," Alaric chimed in. "The disease could make your blood thinner, weakening your supernatural powers, or it could damage either your flesh or mental faculties. Also, feeding on sick humans could be poisonous."
Caroline held up a hand to halt him. "Excuse me, but there's no way in hell I would feed on one of those creatures."
"I see your hand healed," Stefan observed, gesturing in the other Salvatore's general direction. He couldn't remember which hand was it, but they both looked fine now.
"Hold on," Enzo said. "I saw your hand yesterday. Were you bitten or something?"
Damon scowled, not keen on being reminded of how he had been munched on by the zombie-like diseased.
"Ironically, those humans tended to bite."
"I remember now," Enzo said. "You had some nasty wound in your arm yesterday. Shouldn't your body have healed by the time you got here?"
"So it took longer than normal to heal, big deal. As you can see, there isn't permanent damage."
Caroline wanted to scoff. Who knew if he would have regenerated without drinking vampire blood. Her blood. So they actually didn't know if the virus could have long-term effects on vampires or not.
But, of course, it'd be unwise to mention that she had shared her blood with him. It seemed like something too intimate to be justified to other people. A taboo of sorts. Stefan and the others would jump down Damon's throat if they so much as suspected he had fed on her.
"So, no lingering symptoms?" Stefan insisted.
"Don't look so disappointed," Damon retorted, pulling the Brotherhood's crumpled card out of his back pocket and handing it to Enzo. "Anyway, those idiots had to be stopped before they ended up exposing us all. Next thing you know, you'd have CDC people all over town."
"I should have tagged along, you know, to blow off some steam," Enzo commented, returning the card and reaching for the remote. "And I think you scored big with Therese Voermann, the head vamp downtown. I heard she's been trying to stake a claim to Chapel Hill for months and I think you just might have cleared her path."
That caught Caroline's attention. How convenient for Therese Voermann that her personal interests and the well being of the local undead society happened to converge. When she looked over at Damon, she saw him purse his lips. "Funny, that," was all he said before pouring himself a shot of Bourbon and drinking it down neat.
"I'm a vampire! I'm a vampire!"
The TV screen bloomed into dark-colored photography as a hysterical Nicolas Cage revealed his identity in Vampire's Kiss.
"Vampires pretending to be humans pretending to be vampires," Enzo observed.
"Nicolas Cage?" Stefan asked skeptically. "You're not serious."
"I'm dead serious," Enzo gravely responded. "Everybody knows that."
"You're okay, aren't you?" Alaric asked Caroline. "No festering bites?"
She sighed, smoothing out her dress. "Nope, I think I have better reflexes than Damon."
She tried not to think too much about Terror in Battle Park the night before and the sickening sound of decapitation, but she did feel some satisfaction in realizing her abilities stretched beyond cheerleading stunts.
"Then I guess there was no need for a rescue mission," Damon said, rolling his eyes, though she had handled the surge of the diseased well enough.
"Well, the firepower was appreciated," she said. "That Bishop was freakishly strong. I'm sorry to say this, but you guys would so lose in a fist fight with him."
"He was probably very old," Stefan offered.
"Either that or he had some kind of power diet." Alaric squinted. "After all, the main source of a vampire's power is the blood they ingest."
Damon's head snapped in her direction then and it seemed all thoughts of the Voermann sisters fled his mind as the significance of those words dawned on him. Something flickered in his eyes, something that looked suspiciously like concern that she'd been alone with a vampire who shared Ethan Crane's cannibalistic inclinations.
Alaric's voice pulled them back to the ongoing conversation. "You know, in the early 19th century there were covens of vampires in Eastern Europe known for preying on humans and on their fellow bloodsuckers."
Her nails dug into the couch's arm. Why wouldn't Ric just shut up?
"Vampires that prey on vampires," murmured Stefan, raising a brow. "I guess it would be a vampire's version of cannibalism."
"What?" She gave a nervous laugh. "Cannibalism would be vampires' version of cannibalism."
She met Damon's eyes expecting some support, but he avoided looking in her direction. They really had to talk about her run-in with the Bishop.
The teacher then shrugged. "It's like that with some predators. Like snakes that prey on other snakes."
"Snakes?" Enzo repeated, indignantly. "Hey, I take offense to that."
"You take offense to what? I've seen you feed on mice." Damon leaned back on the couch, nursing another glass. "I know you don't get out often, but polite vampire society looks down on that kind of thing."
Enzo was about to reply when his gaze strayed towards the window. He noticed the night was falling, a lazy grin spreading over his features.
"I'm only a prisoner in this house during the days, my friend. Interesting things happen at night."
The solemn groan of the clock in the corner dispersed the group at seven. Their host left to align himself with the dark, breezy atmosphere of the neighborhood after dusk, and the human and the elder Salvatore opened a new bottle of Bourbon.
Caroline sat outside on the porch. It was a crisp cool evening and there weren't many people out. Cars rolled by slowly, others sat parked, lonely on the street.
A moment later, Stefan joined her quietly. "It looks almost peaceful out here," he commented.
A small smile graced her features. "It's a nice change."
"Everything okay with you and Damon?" He couldn't help prying a little.
She shot him a sidelong glance. "Why are you asking that?"
"Nobody even knew you were on speaking terms until you decided to take a road trip together," he shrugged. "And yesterday it looked like you were trying to get away from him," he added, referring to her taking off with Alaric to the Brotherhood's headquarters, leaving him and Damon behind.
"I was mad at something, I can't even remember what," she replied evenly.
Stefan nodded, deciding to play along. "I guess it wasn't important, then."
He meant it, in a way. He had seen how relieved Damon looked when they found her in one piece. He was convinced his brother wouldn't want to do anything to hurt her, but that didn't mean it wouldn't happen anyway.
"Damon's friend, Peter, he killed himself?" she asked after a moment of hesitation.
He nodded. "It happens to some. Forever is a long time."
She let it sink in before firing another question. "Did you know Enzo?"
"There's a lot about Damon's life I know nothing about," he replied, looking pointedly at her. "Like the past couple of days."
Stefan thought he saw something akin to alarm flicker in her eyes before she cracked another smile. "You and Alaric made it in time for all the action."
At that, he couldn't help but wonder if that had been all the action. It was hard to believe that the past few nights had been completely uneventful for the vampires on the move, but he had no way of knowing what they had been up to unless one of them spilled it.
After turning, Damon had fallen into the darkness and hit the bottom. In the past few months, however, he seemed to have flipped the switch back on and regained some of his humanity. Stefan dared hope he and Damon could work on mending their own blood ties and that his brother would recover more and more of his humanity over time, but right then they still didn't trust each other.
"I'm in no more danger here than I was in, in Mystic Falls," Caroline said, taking in his silence and deep frown. "So you really have nothing to worry about. I'll be back home soon."
Stefan seemed like he wanted to say something, but he couldn't argue with her there. Every day in Mystic Falls was a clusterfuck and he knew he couldn't protect her. He could try, he would try, but he had a lot on his hands and he couldn't honestly say he'd do a better job than Damon.
"It's important that you see vampires in the real world," he acknowledged. "There's far too many of them to be avoided nowadays. I'm just not sure Damon should be the one walking you through this process," he admitted.
He still worried about exposing a newly turned vampire to his brother's self-destructive behavior, even if present time Damon was a ball of sunshine compared to the vampire who arrived in Mystic Falls over a year ago. Yes, Damon had come a long way and Caroline obviously held sway over him, but the fact that she was now drinking human blood on a regular basis showed that she was pervious to his influence.
"I know what he's capable of," she assured him.
"He's a reformed serial killer, Caroline."
"He's a vampire, Stefan. We're all potential serial killers."
He clicked his tongue. Touché.
"You two grew close in the span of three days," he said, changing tactics. "Can't say I'm surprised. I think I knew he had a soft spot for you before he realized it himself."
She blinked before looking away to face the houses that stood pompously on each side of the street. "It's the sire bond that makes him feel responsible-"
"Protective, you mean," he said, a smirk on his face. Somehow, dangerous though Damon could be, he had proved time and again that he would bail his friends out of sticky situations if need be. But his feelings for her ran deeper. "I don't know if you noticed it, but he despises Matt and he really hates Tyler."
She laughed awkwardly. "It's Damon we're talking about here. When has he ever been friendly to anybody?"
Both of them lowered their gaze to the ground, staring at the distorted shadow of their bodies on the stairs.
"I'm still not sure what Damon came here for, but if this is something you need to do- I trust you would tell me if there was anything wrong. If either one of you were in trouble."
He turned to look at her and, contradicting his own words, he felt very little confidence in her silent nod. He sighed. Caroline was fiercely loyal to those she cared about and she wouldn't betray Damon's secrets. If he wanted to find out what was going on, he would have to talk to his own brother. Easier said than done.
"Like I said before, I'm here if you need me. And so are your friends."
"And the way you just worked that into the conversation... smooth," she joked, her lips curving into a smile. Truth be told, she was starting to miss Elena and Bonnie.
"I know it feels like nothing is ever going to be the same," he said, looking up to watch the moon rise between the passing clouds. "But the people who loved you all your life are still there to support you. So don't shut them out completely."
* The dove descending breaks the air
With flame of incandescent terror
Of which the tongues declare
The one discharge from sin and error.
The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre of pyre-
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar Name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.
- T. S. Eliot.