How I Met:
luna lovegood, prophet of christ
thebluefrenchhorn
Damon was not a stalker.
No matter what she said.
Damon was not, nor would he ever be, a stalker.
The Katherine situation didn't count.
The blonde twerp wouldn't have been his first pick. In fact, she wouldn't have been his second or third or even fourth pick. But, by the time he found her, Damon wasn't just running out of options—he had none.
He had been searching for the pesky redhead for three weeks now, combing through every London establishment that screamed 'teenage white hipster.' It was undeniably frustrating to be outsmarted by a mortal, particularly one that had divulged his secret so effortlessly before disappearing into the night with every occupant in the pub, Damon included, being none the wiser. Since then, he had spent the majority of his time being acosted by underage women and the occasional teenage boy as he scouted every young adult hotspot. Not that it had done him much good.
By now, it had been over two weeks since the trail he had been following had grown cold—more than cold, freezing in fact—and with that small slip of a girl nowhere in sight, things were drawing to disastrous close that alluded to the onslaught of a mental breakdown within the near future.
All of that considered, Damon felt like he could justify why, when the twiggy blonde with her wide silver eyes and ephermal voice whispered that she could help him find what he was looking for, he jumped upon her with the glee of a starved man.
Metaphorical glee.
He did not eat her.
But, in hindsight, he really wished he had.
"I don't understand why we have to discuss this over tea." Damon said, exchanging a dubious glance with the steaming cup held within his grasp, the emblem of some outdated British band merrily smiling back at him.
"And I don't understand why you don't understand why we need to be discussing these matters over tea," the blonde, Luna Lovegood as she had introduced herself earlier, responded with the same sort of circular logic that had plagued their conversations up until that point. "All the best conversations are held over tea."
She paused, toying with the radish that brazanely dangled from her ear, before turning her wide, evanescent gaze upon him. "I think it has something to do with the warmth," she mused, "it must be, for I can attest that I've always thought better on a warm stomach than a cold one. Then again, it could be what I'm drinking and not the actual temperature of it. Details, details, details, so tricky, aren't they? There was that particular lemongrass blend during fifth year that helped me get through my NEWTS. I can't disregard that..."
She trailed off, tugging on one of her loose waves absentmindedly, a dreamy expression overtaking her features. Her phrasing was odd and winding, rising and falling with no real discretion for rhythm, yet spoken with such conviction that Damon wanted to believe her for a moment.
Not that he did, of course.
Because he wasn't fucking insane.
Which, apparently, was the crux of the problem.
Or, at least, in the blonde's eyes as she regarded him with disappointment.
"You don't believe me, do you?" she murmured, voice full of solemn pity as if he was the one who needed saving in this scenario. Clearly, it was her, but that went unsaid. "It's the nargles, it must be."
A strained smile slid upon Damon's face and he could feel the mug cracking beneath his vampiric strength. "No, I don't believe it's the nargles."
"It must be them then," the girl shook her head despondently, "not believing they are the cause increases the likelihood of them being the culprit by tenfold. Nargles are strange like that."
She leaned back as if she was exceedingly proud to have educated him about such a fact. She probably was, all self-righteous and undoubtably patting herself on the back for successfully introducing him to her cult mentality. I could strangle her, walk her out of here, disappear back to my hotel and no one would know, he reasoned, I could strangle her there, have a nice meal and drop the body in some random dumpster. She's probably doped up on heroin or something. The police would write it off as a trip gone wrong.
But, if Damon did that, it would place him once again into the lovely spot of having zero leads and no concrete direction to move towards. More than that, it would undermine his pacient efforts of prying information out of the air headed blonde before him.
"You can still help me, right?" he urged in an almost desperate manner, searching in vain for some fleeting reason to validate the strange occurance of a lunch he had just put himself through.
"I'm not sure. You need a lot of help." Bitch.
Damon chose to ignore her comment, lest he make good on his precious ponderings. "But can you help me with my search?" he pressed.
"Stop searching?" Luna offered, voice uncertain yet unwavering. "Stalking isn't exactly a healthy habit."
"For the last time, I am not stalking her," Damon stressed, "I don't even know her name. All that I know is that she apparently knows a lot about me which suggests she's the stalker in this case."
Luna shrugged, radiating a disregard that suggested she was above things as petty as his qualms. It only reinforced his urge to wrap his hands around her pretty, little neck. "Her name is Hariel," she said, throwing the name around like it was free candy "and she will find you long before you even get as much of an inkling of where she might be."
Damon frowned. "Why do you say that?"
"Because she's God," Luna answered with the sincerity of a priestess and the disposition of a cult-fanatic that all but screamed at Damon to leave the premises as soon as possible.
He did just that too, standing up dismissively and striding away from the mad girl and her mad ramblings towards the sanity of the outside world. For what a wretched place the universe had shown itself to be, it had nothing upon the cold and unwavering eyes held within that bizarre prophet of a girl.
No lead was better than that freakshow.
"You can't hide from God," the blonde called at his retreating figure.
Her eyes were heavy as they lingered upon him, carrying a weight that no human deserved to possess and, fuck, between her and the redhead he was trying to find, what was England feeding it's young adults? Shrooms? Not that it honestly mattered. Damon wasn't a human. He was a vampire, and for all that Luna Lovegood's eyes were incredibly unsettling, he batted them away from the forefront of his mind with surprising ease.
"God's got nothing on me, baby," he murmured, "I'm motherfucking immortal."
Author's Note: I honestly didn't intend to swear so much in this fic, but Damon gets what Damon wants.