A/N: There be funny business at the end of this chapter. If uncomfortable, skip that part, you'll know when.
Dark Side.
Chapter 13: The Return. Part III.
The desk wasn't calling to her subconscious, but her magic. It is charged with energy, more so than any other object in this room. Immediately, Cassandra understands this is the place where Stefan keeps the really important stuff, things that connect to his one-hundred-and-sixty-two years on this earth more than anything else around her. There's an open journal on the surface, today's entry yet to be written. Cassandra can't help herself.
The diary disappointingly begins in January 1st, 2010. She'd ben hoping to read about everything since Stefan came to Mystic Falls from his own point of view. Still, Cassandra got here on the 30th of that month, so she lowers herself into the chair and begins to leaf through the journal.
She figured it would be a long over-descriptive love letter to Elena Gilbert. Soon, she realizes it is everything but that. Damon is mentioned almost more times than Elena is. At one point, the names seem to start coming together, as well as a deep-rooted jealousy that seems to not stem from overthinking on Stefan's part but actual proof. It's the most engaging read she's found in a while. Stefan has enough writing skill to paint Damon, Elena, and himself in a light that is both veridical and biased. His love for them, the brother he's tried to hate forever and the woman he's convinced he was made for, is so astoundingly clear, it serves as fuel to Cassandra's as well. Stefan's martyr tendencies are there, too, present even when they shouldn't be. Cassandra wonders where he gets that from, certainly not Giuseppe.
It isn't until she reaches an entry from the sixteenth of January that the blood freezes completely in her veins, the first time his narrative has made her feel anything other than warmth. Cassandra straightens on her seat, moving the journal towards the light streaming through the windows. It's unnecessary, of course, her vampire sight would allow her to read even in pitch black darkness.
It is at times like these when I wish Cassandra were alive more than usual. For Damon's sake, more than mine. She always had a way of understanding Damon more than anyone else, more than me, I sometimes think, even if we were inseparable back then. My brother never gave up hope, I know, that Cassandra would be in the tomb, alive. Had I known the tomb even existed, I would have done the same. I fear finding out she wasn't down there was more devastating than Katherine's betrayal, as I know he still hopes to find Katherine someday. I haven't spoken to Damon about it, he always thought he was closest to the both of them, and Elena has no real idea of who she was, but Cassandra's absence in that tomb has deepened her absence in my memory and awaken memories I wish I wasn't forced to remember. I know in my heart that, had she not died, our friendship would have grown stronger, like my friendship with Lexi once was. I miss her terribly.
The passage goes on to talk about how displeased he is with Katherine, followed by an array of theories that would make Holmes proud, except that Cassandra isn't reading anymore. She closes the journal with haste, putting it back where it belongs. That's what you get for intruding, she admonishes herself harshly over the deafening sound of her blood in her ears, the painful thudding of her heart inside her ribs. She'd been hoping to find some embarrassing detail to tease Stefan with later, not that. Never that.
Friends can break your heart as painfully as any lover. Pearl had once told her, weeks before the tomb vampires had been rounded up, with such emotion Cassandra had briefly wondered if Pearl was onto them. She disregarded her words and never thought of them again, until now. Swallowing, she turns back to the desk, desperately seeking a distraction.
There's a Mont Blanc fountain pen, carefully positioned in its holder, shiny black with gold details to it. Clearly, Stefan has a thing for gold. The third drawer is locked, and Cassandra fights the urge to pick the easy lock. She's learned her lesson with the journal. The second drawer, however, is not only unlocked, but already halfway opened. She reaches for it, fingers wrapping around the brass pendant handle, just as a presence appears by the door.
"What are you doing here?" Stefan asks.
Cassandra doesn't have to turn to know he's frowning. She can hear it in his low voice. She shrugs noncommittally. Without turning, she opens the drawer all the way. It is filled with nothing but loose papers and more pens; she even spots a fuchsia ruler.
"My house is big and—empty."
Cassandra quickly rearranges her thoughts, realizing with almost terror she almost admitted the real reason she came: her house is lonely. The silence never bothered her, but lately it feels like the walls are stretching until they seem like an abysm and she's all alone in the vast universe.
"I was bored." Lazily, she browses through the drawer's contents.
"Then watch T.V." Stefan sighs.
"I don't really like T.V." Cassandra shoots back immediately.
"Find a hobby." Stefan finally pushes himself from the doorframe, walking further into his room. "Just, don't snoop around."
Cassandra smiles, hearing the annoyance clearly. Kicking the floor slightly, she swirls around in a half circle, so her head and torso are facing an irritated Stefan, but her hands are still within the drawer.
"Tell that to my grimoire from the 1870s." she raises an eyebrow. "And the fourth drawer on my dresser, plus the upstairs guest room, and both the basement and attic."
Stefan's guarded expression slips considerably, eyes dropping to the floor and dragging his expression down into abashed. Weeks ago, after she'd reluctantly accepted Elena's second invitation to the Gilbert household, Cassandra had returned to an invaded home. Nothing was missing, or misplaced, but the atmosphere felt disrupted, and she could smell Damon and Stefan almost everywhere. Clearly, Elena's insistence hadn't stemmed solely from a desire of friendship, but a way to get the redhead out of her house so the Salvatores could intrude. It had enraged her. She'd almost gone back and killed Elena out of spite. Except that her rage had soon given way to absolute hilarity. Because neither Damon nor Stefan even knew what they were looking for.
"Sorry, we needed to see if we could trust you." Stefan explains.
"What did you think you would find? A notebook titled 'Plans for World Domination 2.0'?" she asks sarcastically at Stefan's absurd reasoning.
"No." Stefan chuckles. "Nothing like that. Damon was just adamant that you were hiding something."
Cassandra hums, refusing to admit this far into the game that Damon was right about that. Still, is, if one were to take into consideration the several facts she insists on keeping quiet about. Besides, if one were to look at things from a rational side… she's not actually doing anything bad, hasn't killed a soul since she got here, none of her actions have hurt anyone that she knows of. She's off the hook, in an unconventional way.
The feeling of something cool and smooth against the pads of her fingertips slams the breaks on her trail of thought so suddenly she forgets to listen to Stefan's question. Index finger goes south, under the corner where metal meets thin cardboard, sticky with dust particles that have entered its very fibers. Whatever this is, it's not something that should belong in this drawer filled to the rim with things Stefan clearly has no real use for: school papers and module handouts and schedules. When she pulls the rectangular item out of the drawer, staring into a photograph that should have been long forgotten and lost, her lips pull upwards into a smirk. Because this is what she'd originally been looking for, teasing material!
"I can´t believe you still have this." Cassandra comments.
She swivels entirely on the chair, facing Stefan with the photograph high up.
"I kept that for, uh, reminiscing." Stefan clears his throat.
"Oh, yeah." She nods, faux-serious. "I bet it kept you company all those lonely nights."
"No, no." Stefan argues, walking over and reaching for the photograph. Cass lowers it out of his way. "That was never its purpose."
"Right…" she drawls the word until it almost doesn't sound like a word anymore. Her voice drips with amused sarcasm.
"Okay, that's enough." Stefan protests, swiftly ducking down and snatching the picture from under the chair's seat.
The only reason she stops dragging the word out is because laughter escapes her. Eventually, Stefan allows a few chuckles as well. He shoves the picture back into the drawer and pushes it closed. Not a tense action coming from embarrassment or shame, but Cassandra knows it's more difficult than he's letting on.
"So," she changes topic. Laughter is still present in her voice. "What's with all the journals? Do you have short-temp memory loss or just imagine yourself the next Ernest Hemmingway?"
"Ernest Hemmingway, really?" Stefan questions, walking to his bed with a scrunched up nose.
He drops on the end of the bed, the mattress dipping softly underneath his weight. Cassandra shrugs. Ernest Hemmingway is a great writer. Stefan clearly doesn't share her opinion.
"Alright, Edgar Allan Poe." She corrects.
"You're one to talk, Virginia Woolf." Stefan scoffs.
"I happen to like Virginia Woolf, so the joke's on you." Cassandra shoots back, left eyebrow raised.
Stefan rolls his eyes slightly. There's a smile on his face, soft and genuine and it makes her smile, too. He opens his mouth, surely about to reply, but whatever witty response he has come up with is one Cassandra never gets to hear. His phone goes off, sudden and loud.
The moment he answers, the light mood within the room vanishes. Because the news the youngest Salvatore is receiving from the other end of the line is everything but good. The call is short; Stefan hangs up with a promise. He turns to meet Cassandra's eyes, his suddenly solemn and pained. She rises to her feet, mouth pressed together in a fine line. Elena Gilbert has just lost the most important person in her whole life. To no other than Damon Salvatore. For a split second, neither of them knows how to react.
Then, they spring into action. Mouths open in unison, words spilling out of their lips.
Cassandra decides to do something when the very distinct sound of glass colliding against something hard, and shattering, reaches her. She enters the living room, peaking around the hallway, half-scared. The fireplace is lit, its flames still high up from the fuel the alcohol gave them. He stands in the middle, between two couches, bourbon bottle still in his right hand, left one half flexed, like his mind didn't even register him throwing the short tumbler glass full of liquor against the fireplace. She notices the empty decanter behind the couch. Clearly, this bourbon bottle is not his first of the night.
She doesn't know this Damon, the one that is harsh and unpredictable, a wild thing slamming against its cage. Dark, dangerous, capable of loving and hurting within the same heartbeat. Stefan asked her to stay and help—because despite this outrageous act, this unforgivable thing Damon has done, Stefan still worries, still loves. And Cassandra finds that so does she—but she's not sure she can actually do anything. She can feel his pain from afar, smell the regret, mixing with expensive bourbon and disgust for himself. There is no helping, not a single thing she can say or do that would lessen this burden.
"What do you want?" Damon demands with biting anger.
That's another new thing to him. This beast is all bite, no bark; usually, it would send her running for the hills, too alike another beast she once held close to her. Instead, it flares up an anger inside of her too foreign, and deadly. Damon is not Niklaus, in his darkest moments couldn't even get near. They're two different species of monsters. Damon's storm is familiar to her, feels almost like home. His darkness is her own. And Cassandra refuses to be controlled by it.
"Jeremy had his ring, he'll be fine in a couple of hours." Cassandra remarks coldly, walking into the room like she owns it.
Damon turns to her, watching her intently as she makes her way down to one of the sofas. She delicately sits down on it, crossing her legs, back straight, and looking at him expectantly.
"I thought you might want to know." she adds. Her left eyebrow lifts up her forehead.
Damon's right shoulder lifts in a noncommitting shrug. His lips form a smirk, blue eyes hooded due to alcohol, or maybe suggestively. Cassandra isn't sure. She doesn't allow herself to show she's affected by it. Not even when Damon takes a step towards her, a step that's arguably quite unstable, and every muscle in her body threatens to tighten on their own accord. She's briefly aware of the twinge behind her lower abdomen and promptly ignores it.
"Well, I don't." Damon argues, gracelessly flopping down beside her on the couch.
He sways slightly before straightening up. He takes another swing from the bottle. God, he's a mess, Cassandra laments, a multidimensional, impossible to clean mess. She doesn't know where to begin, what to do. She's sure she's meant to be doing what Stefan is doing with Elena: fixing. Except she's not sure she can fix this. Specially since she's a little mad at him herself. Jeremy is a child. A troubled child with too much pain for him to categorize and deal with correctly. A child that is beginning to be sort-of-almost okay. Damon just killed a child. And no matter how hard she tries, she can't unthink that's abhorrent.
Her hands drop from her lap unto the smooth dark leather of the three-person Bridgewater sofa, nails digging into it. It helps release some of the fury raging inside of her and, when she finally turns to the man next to her, she doesn't want to gouge his eyes out anymore. Which is good, because they're such pretty eyes. She silently watches Damon gulp down bourbon like the liquor doesn't burn his insides on its way to his stomach, knows deep down he must relish on said stinging, as it presents as an excellent distraction from today's events. When the bottle finally parts from his pink lips and comes to rest between his legs, Cassandra notes three-quarters of the bottle's contents are now gone. The amber liquid swings around the bottle, splashing and reflecting the golden light from the fire.
Her eyes follow the bottle's figure up to its neck, where his fingers are tightly wound. Then his wrist, catches the faint green and blue vein lines and follows them up his arms, noting the taut muscles underneath his skin. Cassandra startingly realizes this is the closest she's been to him in almost a month. It's near intoxicating.
Whatever is swirling in the back of her mind, dribbling into her veins, tightening her stomach and warming her all the way down, vanishes when her eyes find his face. She's a horrible being, because she has spent the last minute doing nothing but appreciate his physique while Damon is clearly experiencing some sort of internal debate. She can't really explain how she knows this, it has something to do with the depth of his eyes, the way they're transfixed on her boot-cladded left foot.
"That's not true." She observes. For the first time since announcing her presence, she allows warmth to seep into her voice.
"Of course, it's true. Haven't you heard? I'm a monster." His smirk is so full of self-loathing Cass's chest hurts.
Clearly, there's no fixing this. No fixing this incessant and irrational need of his to be hated. She's pretty sure another thing Stefan wants her to do is, well, something she's incredibly good at: reprimanding. Instead, she decides to go another way.
"You know, one of the things I've learnt throughout the years,"—Cassandra starts, reaching out for the bottle of bourbon in his hand. Damon fights her hold, but she is stronger than him, and he's forced to let go of the bottle—"is that people don't come in black or white. They are a hundred different shades of grey. You may be harsh, and mean, and a little too quick to snap necks. I won't say you can't be cruel. But you are also… brave and kind, and I don't think I've ever met anyone who loves as strongly as you do. Or who worries as much as you do."
It's not exactly what she'd thought of saying. But as always Damon has made her go off script. Fighting the urge to cringe, she rises the bourbon bottle to her lips and downs half of its content. The amber liquor is smooth, earthy, and it warms her on its way to her stomach. The burning is more of a soft sting than anything else. Damon did not need to know she thinks so much about him that she's basically written a whole article on her findings. Instead of letting the seconds stretch into an uncomfortable silence, paired with a weirded-out stare, Damon gives her an answer within five seconds.
"I don't think the good outweighs the bad in my case." Damon shrugs with one shoulder. He flashes her a sarcastic smile before looking back at the hearth. His eyes find the floor. "I'm not Stefan."
She knows by that he means he's not as easily forgiven.
"I'm not saying you're extenuated of everything you've done, but you know that guilt and regret you're feeling right now? The ones that are drowning you?" Cassandra asks him. Damon looks back up at her, eyes hazy from all the alcohol he's consumed. She wonders if he'll even remember any of this tomorrow. It's unlikely, unless he consumes a pint of blood in the next ten minutes. "Monsters don't feel guilt. They don't know regret."
Her words seem to hurt him even more than he already is, even if she can't see why. This is going nowhere. Damon's too busy drowning in his heartache and guilt and self-loathing to take her words in. No matter what she says, he won't feel better. She can reassure him of the fact that she knows he's not completely lost yet, that deep down he's a somewhat good person, he just needs to learn to think first before acting out, for as long as she wants, and it won't matter. Not tonight when the woman he has loved for a century and a half has just told him she never loved him. Not tonight when he killed Jeremy out of an impulse. Jeremy, the little brother of one of his closest friends. The little brother of the woman he may love.
Running out of ideas, she leaves the bourbon bottle on the floor before reaching out and grasping Damon's hand with her own. In a moment, his eyes find her lips and he's suddenly leaning in, looking for a kiss. It's an action she's familiar with; he did it many times before. She inches back before his lips brush hers.
"Damon."
It's a protest, and a weak attempt at that. Cassandra would be lying if she said she doesn't want it, want him. She's been itching to touch him, feel his skin against hers, since she came back. Has been dying to know how vampirism changed his body. Has been wondering endlessly how much better in the art of love he's become. After all, no one looks so much like sex, without being good at it.
Damon looks up, eyes all pupil surrounded by a slimmer of striking blue. He is drunk and hurting. She's painstakingly sober. Cass knows nothing will come of it, them sleeping together. Still, she doesn't move. He takes that as an invitation.
In one swift moment, his left hand is on her neck and his lips are crashing on her.
He doesn't kiss like he used to, all careful and sweet. He's sure and demanding. Something goes off in her mind, the small nagging feeling that this change might have been her fault. Still, her hands clung to his shirt, lips moving against his just as fiercely, tongue tasting the bourbon inside his mouth. It's almost dizzying.
Wasting no time, she tugs at the buttons of his shirt, basically ripping it off his body. Her hands lose no time roaming around his chest, his back, feeling strong muscle underneath smooth skin. Damon's hands slip under her, effectively flipping her onto her back, the couch cushions dipping underneath her and his body hovering over hers.
There's something… almost primal about this, about the way his hot mouth makes its way down her exposed neck, opened, tongue swirling around the sensitive skin beneath her jaw, blunt teeth nipping softly at the skin right above her jugular. The action brings out a noise out of her, a mix between a moan and a whimper, at the same time she pushes him between her legs, hand clinging to his bottom, her entire body arching until she's completely pressed against him.
She can feel him through his blue jeans, hard with arousal, and she's never ever been happier about wearing a skirt. Damon's fingers tug at her shirt, getting it off her so quickly she'd be surprised if it isn't ruined. She finds she doesn't care if it is. His hands travel around her body, hungrily, wanting, as they flash from the couch, accidentally slamming against the stairs' balustrade.
Cass thinks this right here is fine, with her mouth against his shoulder and her hands tangled in his hair, bucking her hips against him. The motion grants her a low moan out of him as he captures her lips with his again. Oh, yes, he can fuck her right here just fine. Screw Stefan accidentally walking in on them. Somehow, they make it to his room, where he throws her on the bed without a second more of hesitance.
It's not love-making. It's rough sex; nothing but lust and physical satiation. A distraction from the pain Damon is feeling, from the hatred and disappointment he feels for himself. Still, in a strange reversal of things, this is exactly what Cassandra needed. She wonders that maybe she won't survive this. Even if it's not emotional, if there are no loving words, no caressing touches or reverence-filled looks, this right here is more than she bargained for. She can't remember the last time she felt this much pleasure and want and need rolling inside her. He's not dissimilar to a drug. And she's gone a-hundred-and-forty-five years without a fix. Until now.
They furtively meet eyes for a moment that stretches for longer than she'd hoped, with one of her legs thrown over his shoulder, and his arm pushing on the mattress next to her face. Their breath mixes as they pant and moan and move in sync, his blue eyes locking with her green ones in the most intimate and disarming way. She had forgotten he does that. Still, it feels nice to know that a part of him, no matter how small, remains the same. Unconsciously, her lips go up into a sly smirk. She drops her leg from his shoulder, and swiftly flips them over until she's on top, using half of the strength her age provides her with.
She maintains eye-contact, enjoying the way surprise and arousal swim across the blue of his eyes. It makes her stomach flutter, takes her breath away. Cass hopes Damon mistakes the feelings that are probably plain as day on her eyes for pleasure and desire. A thought forms in the back of her head, too vague to become real words, more of a concept than anything. Its meaning, however, is plain as day. She will not be getting over him now.
Cassandra finds that she does not care.
UPDATED: 16/01/2020