How I Met:
the hollow grounds of sinners
thebluefrenchhorn
Damon was a lot of things.
Many of which were terrible and twisted and dark and not at all human.
No, never human.
Becoming a vampire had erased that side of him, eroding it for years and years until all that remained was a bitter creature that wore the faces of men.
Or, at least he had thought so.
Because the twist of pain, dull and aching and less like a stake to the heart and more of a deeply buried splinter, begged to differ.
The Scottish countryside in the late summer was truly a sight to behold. Full of lush greenery and wildflowers smiling up towards the afternoon sky. There, the sun rested at high noon before lazily beginning its descent downward, painting the world in amber hues.
It was the type of view Damon once enjoyed, back when the blood he chocked down was his own and he swam through the wretched pits of hellfire that scorched Virgina with crimson stains. The Damon of yesteryear who wasted, dying, in grotesque gardens where bullets and carnage sprouted from the ground like carrion temples. Henry and him and all of the barely of age and terribly young soldiers, fighting for a nation that still lingered within the tailend of its infancy.
All of them, holding onto a feeble flicker of hope to escape a pointless death for a revolution whose end had been for told far before it had ever dared to begin. The breathless wonder encapsulated among the rolling viridian hills and cerulean skies and beneath the golden orb far above them. A fleeting moment of beauty amidst the confines of a war that deserved not a single claim to it.
He had cried at the sight of it. Hands caked in the crimson of his enemies and cousins and brothers whose blood dripped from the ledger resting atop his shoulder and coursing through the twisted mockery of survival he had been granted. And him, falling upon his knees like the wretched sinner he was in those green pastures where no shepherds dared to enter and sheep roamed aimlessly.
He still cried whenever he saw a view akin to it.
Christ, he was crying right now.
Silent and barely noticeable, but still there all the same.
He didn't want to be, but he couldn't help it.
Even after a century and a half, a part of him still clung to the visage, born from a memory that had kept him—not whole, but not irreparably broken—through the somber nights where death came to collect his piteous sacrifices.
Things like that weren't lost easily, no matter how hard one tried.
And Damon had tried a lot.
It didn't matter though.
Damon had always been good at lying, especially to himself.
Author's Note: A brief stop of self-reflection on Damon's Odysseus journey for the great and powerful and so terribly elusive Hariel Potter. Damon may be an asshole, but more to himself than anyone else.