Elena didn't struggle against sleep when it came, a white blanket of snow, lowering over her face. Stefan had told her this would be a long trip, several hours before they got to their destination. It wasn't immediately after they left the convent that the full blow of exhaustion came down on her, and she realized just how worn and empty of strength she was.
Her stay at Sister Maria's convent had been like a long winter night.
But excitement kept her alert at first. Drawing aside the thick red drape that covered the small window in their carriage, Elena peered at the outside world that had been out of her reach for months.
Oh, the sight of nature, the brown patches of earth their wheels rolled quickly past, the leafless branches that seemed to reach out for her, brushing against the carriage.
As the miles flew by, and the convent became more and more concretely a thing of the past, the outline of Elena's imprisonment emerged sharper into the contrasting freedom of the pearl sky where she fixed her gaze presently, and she realized just how she had been ready to die in that attic room, to never see more of the world than those wooden walls.
How she had resignedly said goodbye to human kindness, really, to all human contact save for the barks of the sisters when it was necessary for them to speak to her.
"Here," Stefan said, drawing her out of her awed contemplation of the woods into which their carriage was steadily sinking.
Elena had been too absorbed to see him pull out a basket from beneath their seat. Inside, there were two round pieces of white bread, nothing like the stale hard chunks the sisters would slip through the opening in Elena's attic door, but looking wondrous soft, like clouds. Oranges, whose near-red shade hinted at their juiciness, and a small pot of marmalade glowing amber like a stolen treasure; Elena had never tasted any before.
"Please, have some."
Elena saw her own tentative hand palely reaching for the inside of the basket.
Manners alone weren't what stopped her from outright devouring the food. True, she had been brought up in a severe household, where children were not to touch the goods reserved for more deserving people. The best food Elena ever saw on her table was when the rector came to visit them at breakfast, once a month, and then, she and her brother were only allowed to look at the tasty dishes on display, which were destined, their mother said, to the holiest man they knew.
But Elena used to think, as the elderly man munched down the pieces of buttered bread, boiled eggs and rich milk, that this mouth did not really look holy to her, and hers and her brother's must be terribly irreligious if they were so much below the rector's as her mother upheld.
That morning, alone in a phaeton with a man she didn't know, Elena hardly dared to accept the food he offered, and when she did dare, found that her stomach hardened like a rock at the first mouthfuls.
Her body had grown accustomed to hunger, so that anything more than what had been her daily lot for months now seemed a painful excess.
"Will you not eat?" She asked.
The question sounded rude when she heard it out loud – in truth, the sound of her own voice had acquired a kind of transgressive insolence, after all those months in silence, but Stefan seemed not to notice.
He shook his head without further explanation.
It took Elena maybe twenty minutes just to go through with one piece of bread. When the food had lost her attention, and the pain in her tummy was only mildly distracting, it occurred to her how funny this all looked.
Like one of those stories she'd heard by some of the elderly women in the village, about children being stolen by the fairies. The fairies always appeared in such horse-drawn carriages as she and Stefan were in now. They were either outrageously beautiful or repulsive to look at.
"And mind you don't eat their food!" The warning was always the same one.
But, even after all that had happened to her, Elena wasn't yet superstitious enough that she would think the young man had come to steal her away into some unknown fairy kingdom.
"You're not really a priest, are you?" She wondered.
Stefan smiled.
The black habit on him looked like a disguise, now that they were riding away from the convent, the black wool cloaked around his shoulders, contrasting somewhat with the ice-whiteness of his young face.
"No. I had to find a way to be let in, to take you away from this place."
Elena almost asked, Why? But felt in the end whatever answer he gave would not be satisfying.
She had long learned the pointlessness of asking this one question in particular.
Did God answer Job when he asked him that?
What could it even mean, why, when Elena's whole life had felt like a doomed game of chance, ever since that Voice had pierced the gate of her dreams – a game of hide and seek when the other player always knew where she thought of hiding, when there was never any chance to escape him.
"Are you an angel?"
Stefan laughed. The sound was a miracle of warmth and life, yet not quite humanness, to Elena's ears.
"Why would you ask me that?"
"I don't know. If you're not, I can't think of what you are.
"No," he agreed, and his face looked graver. "You better not."
"How did you know? About the creature that speaks to me? About the Voice?"
His gaze lowered toward the floor of the carriage. "It's, uh – it's going to be a long journey, Elena. Perhaps you should try and rest."
"But I don't –"
She was going to say she didn't feel tired, when she felt the weight of sleep suddenly taunt her eyelids, like a thick mist falling heavily over her eyes, crushing, spellbinding.
Stefan had looked up at her.
The kindness of his face, so young – too young to be a priest, or anything human, really, that could agree with the old sadness in his eyes, the unspeakable suffering.
"I'm sorry. You'll feel better," he said, "once you've had some sleep."
…
That was not the truth, of course, Stefan knew.
As he watched the delicately-breathing girl, spread motionless on the seat of the carriage, he was ever-aware that his efforts to give her a quiet moment of reprieve could only hope to compete with the violent thrust of the creature that had been invading her mind for months.
"Damon," he whispered, as if to speak the name of his brother would weaken his aura of mystical, all-powerful agency.
It was pointless to try and reason with him.
Their last conversation was the lasting proof of that.
Of all the things Damon had done, in his long nightly existence of savage lust for blood and innocence, Stefan didn't think there was a worse crime than this one – the one he still had some hope to prevent.
"Why?" He had asked Damon, when the latter sat smiling in his chamber – the stolen rooms of a family he had put under his spell. "Do you hear me, Damon?"
But his brother had only kept his eyes on the ceiling, with that deviousness animating his handsome face.
"You have no right, you know."
"Oh, for heaven's sake, brother, is it time for another one of your lectures? The last one was – wait, don't tell me. I'd swear it was only last month."
He got to his feet, and Stefan saw that he was holding something in his hands – something like a shawl, brown, unextraordinary, even unattractive, if it wasn't for the last remnants of sweet fragrance that remained imbedded in the woolen fabric.
It had been a month, by then, that Damon had first caught glimpse of the girl in a forgettable English village, and had decided that the sight of her would set his blood aflame, send his mind raving.
What a tedious, terrible task it was to be cursed with such an immortal brother that Stefan always found himself trying to right his wrongs, to erase the violent trauma of his passage, wherever they went.
From the most unknown regions of the world to the rural south of England, Damon would sow nothing but destruction. It wasn't enough that both brothers were bound to devour human lives to maintain their doomed, colorless existence. Damon actually took pleasure in those acts of sin: the naked throat of a blooming girl not only made his mouth water, it twisted it into a voracious grin.
Since the brothers had been made to bear the vampire curse, while Stefan retrenched ever deeper into the dark recesses of penitence and guilt, all that remained of his humanity, Damon had gleefully chosen the opposite pathway. Never did he fail to laugh at his brother when he caught him crawling in his chamber, clawing at the floor with bottomless want. Damon soared higher, ever higher than all the rest of the world, having completely given up on whatever longings might have clawed at him and troubled the apotheosis of his humanity-deprived soul.
"You are something, I'll give you that." Damon said, his fingers mindlessly toying with the scarf, on which the girl's scent was barely a memory now, something you needed to recreate fragment by fragment. "How many times have we been over this? My way of life disgusts you, you hate me? So. Leave me. I'm hardly keeping you chained to my side, am I? No, I'm serious Stefan. Take a break from me. Go on holiday! See the world," he laughed, his shining white smile sending a shiver through Stefan's body. "Find yourself a pretty human mistress, hunger after her and torment yourself even more – that's all you like to do, isn't it? Don't blame me because I don't wish to join your self-flagellating party."
Stefan drew in a long intake of air. No matter that he did not really need the air, now, that it only participated in the simulacrum of life that kept his body alive-looking.
"You have no right," he reiterated, "to torment this young girl."
"Oh, haven't I?" His brother feigned surprise, clutching the shawl closer like a child caught red-handed – red-handed, Damon certainly was. "Are you my judge, baby brother? Are you to delineate my rights, to make me sit in a tribunal when I violate your precious rules? This isn't America."
He pressed the shawl to his mouth and closed his eyes, and Stefan was barely surprised he would give way to such a carnal want in his presence. His eyelids creased as he lost himself in the reconstruction of the girl's aroma, whose scent, whose smile, had penetrated Damon's flesh and bones deeper than anything ever had, only as deep, Stefan believed, as Jesus Christ can enter the souls of Christians.
"And how would you know, huh?" Damon said, when he had raised his face from the shawl. "If you haven't been there to see her yourself, Stefan, how would you know that the girl is going through my relentless torments – that she can't eat or sleep or go to church, can't do anything but weep because I'm filling her mind so full, there's no room left whatsoever for sanity. You know what I think? You envy me, Stefan. You hate me, because I do all the things you don't let yourself do. I want the girl, and I'll take her." He shrugged. "All you can do is whine like a loveless dog outside her bedroom window."
"Her parents are treating her like a prisoner," he said. He had long stopped hoping to awaken his brother's mercy for any being in the world, and yet, he heard himself renew the attempt, revive the old hope, like a devout man trying to convert a heathen. "They're saying she's cursed."
"Mmm," Damon was looking at the shawl again, a plain brown patch, but even cloaked inside it, the girl's beauty had gleamed and reached to their eyes like sharpened diamonds. A face that painters would have sold their souls to see even as a mirage in their dreams, that it might inspire half the beauty it effortlessly signified. The sort of face that made you believe in losing your wits overnight, the sort of face that could stop or start a war.
The brothers were not old enough that they had had the privilege of looking on Helen of Troy. But Stefan thought, if the myth held any truth, it must have been a face like this one.
"I think they're right," Damon sighed.
A sound, like a muted howl, passed Stefan's lips. "Damon –"
"Oh, leave me be, Stefan!" His brother spoke in actual annoyance. His patience, though increased in his immortal life, still wore thin every once in a while. "Honestly. Go on a journey, somewhere far away from here. Curse me with your righteous hate, swear never to see me more, and come back to me when loneliness is driving you half insane. I swear, I won't mind it if I don't see you for another ten years."
Stefan had known from that moment it was pointless to keep up this argument, that burned ruthlessly between he and his brother, and that would keep burning, no matter how hard Stefan wished otherwise.
All he could do, he thought, was bring comfort to his brother's victim, somehow, the poor girl who had not even seen them, that day, at the village, who knew herself to be an object of tyrannical want no more than she knew of the existence of vampires and witches beyond the realm of folklore.
If Damon can enter her mind, then so can I. If he can bring torment, maybe I can bring peace.
But Damon was stronger than himself, of course, as he gorged on human lives with an ogre's appetite, while Stefan contented himself with animals, and only took the amount that was absolutely necessary for him to stay alive.
Or however you would call what he was.
In any case, soon after this conversation, the girl's parents had had her shipped away to a convent, lord only knew where; the villagers had plenty ideas to share with any newcomer, but most only led the brothers on the wrong tracks. By this time, Damon was getting riled enough to rip the head off of anyone unfortunate enough to taunt his increasingly thinning patience.
When the theories of 'convent' and 'Italy' had emerged clearly enough, the Salvatore brothers had thrown themselves after her, Damon eager, and groaning like a beast every night – They think they can keep me away from her, can they? Well, I still feel her. She still feels ME.
And Stefan, pretending to be pacified.
He couldn't say when he had decided he would betray his brother, and launch himself in an attempt to steal Elena back to safety.
Right now, as he watched her sleeping in the carriage, as he watched without restraint the beauty that had driven his brother mad with desire, he thought that surely, 'safety' was still a very remote ideal.
The tiger was still on their tracks.
Close behind them, maybe closer even than Stefan feared.
It was a dangerous wilderness to be thrown into, for a young girl barely seventeen.
And of course, he could never explain to her that his brother was no more a devil than he himself was an angel, that they were just one flesh and blood under the same curse, and that in them both, there was an animal hunger that could be stopped but not destroyed, and that lusted after her.
"Sweet dreams, Elena," he whispered. "And may heaven have mercy on us."
…
End Notes: I've really enjoyed writing this chapter. Please share your thoughts and reactions.