"la practica rende perfetti…"
Lizette all but threw herself at Damon when she kissed him. She threw her arms around his neck and kissed his mouth much like the way they had once only done in secret. But this time,
there was no shame or holding back. And Damon, so stunned by the kiss, was unable to react quickly enough and fell back against the floor, his arms wrapped tightly around her waist as
he kissed her back, causing her to giggle. Upon hearing her giggle for the first time in more than five hundred years, Damon smirked against her lips and surrendered to instinct. And in
doing so, he ran his hands up the back of her blouse and traced the contours of her spine until he found the clasp of her bra.
"Dear God, please say this is going to be easier to get off than that damned corset…" he mumbled against the warm flesh along her collar. Lizette laughed and moaned as he rolled over
to pin her to the floor and slowly unbuttoned her blouse to reveal the lacey strip of ivory fabric that covered her breasts, causing her to arch her back off the floor to reach him. Unsure of
how to touch her, he kissed the space between her breasts and then fingered along her spine to unclasp her bra.
He couldn't describe it… it was all so foreign to him. He had experienced these feelings before… and yet they were all still so new to him… She unfastened his belt as she breathed heavily
against his throat in desire… "Faire l'amour avec moi, Damon…" She whispered in his ear as she kissed along the line of his jaw, much like the way she had done the first time she had
asked him to make love to her. And he so wanted to, but he did not know if he could…
"I… I'm sorry, but I- I'm afraid this is all still very foreign to me-" Lizette interrupted him, placing a finger to his lips to silence him and then with a kiss. He did not know how she did it,
what sort of enchantment she had placed him under, but he hoped that she never lifted this impossible spell. These strange waves of pleasure washed over his body as she kissed him
and he wanted more... he wanted to kiss more than just her mouth and to touch more than her face… She made him feel like a man again… as though it were just the way it had once
been… where all that was important was that he loved her. Back in the days when that was enough, back when their love was all that mattered. For the first time in half a millennia, there
was no vampire present. Fore he was a man, and she was a woman, just the way they had once been. As of this moment, he was a young man once again, not a day over twenty-six…
and she was but the same young maiden that had once fallen so passionately in love with him. As of now, that was all that mattered… and he wanted her. In any way, shape, or form
that a man could ever want a woman… and he suddenly felt that he had the power to take her as a woman…
It was very much the same as the first time, and yet it was nothing like it, it was all the better… they shared blood as they lay naked in eachother's arms. After having somehow ended up
in an upstairs bedroom somewhere in the heat of their passion… Though neither Damon nor Lizette could recall for sure just when they had made the move up the stairs, having been so
tightly embraced by their desires, they all but left reality behind them as they floated into oblivion...
Lizette lay on her side on the bed, gazing out at the full moon outside the window. Damon lay by her side, his arm wrapped round her waist in a protective mannor and his face nuzzled
into her raven locks. Lizette was absently tracing random shapes into his arm with her fingertips. Her mind was wondering, as it always was. She was reliving the last time he had held
her in his arms this way. She remembered the last night she had spent with him… she had been human… and he had been dead… A tear leaked from her eye as she was haunted by the
memories of laying on the bed beside his body… and taking his hand and placing it on the slight bump on her lower abdomen… and the words that she had whispered to his lifeless form…
not knowing that had she only waited for another fortnight, he would live and breathe again… more or less… though clearly, Destin had had other plans…
She was amazed by what they had done… by what they had accomplished… afterall, vampires could not procreate, therefore they could not… well… fornicate… but still, they had somehow
managed such an impossible task as this… They had made love, and once again, she had cried… and once again, he tried to apologize, though nearly on the verge of tears himself. And,
once again, she hushed him with a kiss and said, "Don't be sorry, my lamb. Afterall… La practica rende perfetti…" and how very right she was… Afterall, with a little practice, they just might
accomplish perfection… or at least whatever perfection truly exists in a world such as this one. Lizette's mind continued to wander aimlessly through the unconscious dreamland that
seldom quieted in her restless thoughts and she reconciled in the countless memories that to this day continued to haunt her…
According to ancient texts and manuscripts that date back to the sixteenth century and earlier, there is an old legend, set in Florence that tells the tale of a young maiden who loses her
beloved in battle… Upon receiving word of her beloved's death, the young maiden removes herself from the rest of the world, and for a fortnight was left undisturbed. T'was only upon the
fourteenth evening, post the wake and burial, that a young servant girl dared to intrude upon the grieving maiden's solitude. Though was only to find that the young maiden was gone,
and was nowhere to be seen or heard from for another three days… when her body was discovered face down in the grassy terrain by the entrance to her lover's tomb…
But the story leaves out so many crucial elements and has been so severely twisted throughout the centuries that it scarcely tells the same tale... It was this very story that became the
origin to countless tragic love stories throughout all of history… but what no one seems to remember now is that this original story came from reality… And to start off the more accurate
telling of the ancient tale, the young maiden was not discovered outside of her lover's tomb… in fact, she was not discovered anywhere. It was just assumed that she had fled the country
to mourn her lover's death elsewhere, perhaps to her birthplace of what is now Paris? It was not until about the seventeenth century that people began to reshape the maiden's
mysterious disappearance into her death. But that was not accurate either, no. The young maiden remained in Florence until the date of her death indeed, though it was not so quick to
reach her as so stated in the ancient tale. Fore the young maiden, though not married, had been withchild and had therefore been banished from her home in Paris. And though she had
been quick to return to Florence, she had not been quick enough, fore her lover had already fallen in a final duel… and so once again, she was left alone… and she would remain so 'til
come round the next harvest-moon, where she should birth a son to be named for her dear departed lover…
And it was these memories that still haunt her to this day… though she had died less than a fortnight post the child's baptism due from the many complications brought upon her from the
child's birth, she had never really remained that way… Her kind had grown through many different names throughout all of recorded history and long before it, "les morts sans repos" or
the "restless dead" being one of the more commonly used during that time... and yet the memories of the ancient babe continued to haunt her, still fresh in her mind as the day she had
birthed him… and would remain so for all of eternity…
Lizette prayed for death as another wave of excruciating pain tore through her body, already so weak from the traumatic loss of blood. She imagined that there was a midwife there to console her,
but there was none. No one was with her… and no one knew that she was here… over the past months, she had watched one by one as the servants left the great manor, the last to leave was
Mademoiselle Greta, though even she had been gone for a full moon cycle now… Lizette truly was alone… and terrified…
She had settled herself in Damon's bedchambers on the night upon her arrival from Paris, and was now much too weak to move anywhere else. She had prepared herself for this moment as much
as she could, though she knew nothing of childbirth… all that she knew she had learned from her readings of la sacré Bible… and also what Mademoiselle Greta had said…
"You may use this to cut the cord..." she had said as she handed Lizette a dagger with inscriptions in the blade that she could not read. And she had had no idea just what "cord" that
Mademoiselle Greta had been talking about, and still did not. Nevertheless, she had boiled the dagger and kept it on the table that she had moved by the bed. On the table, she also kept freshly
washed linens to wrap the babe in, a water basin and a sponge to keep her own temperature down and whatever other use it may come in later… But now it was time… she could feel it… and
suddenly,
"Arrrggghhhh…!" Lizette cried as the contractions grew stronger and she grasped to hold onto her own legs. She had never known such pain as this, she felt surely she would have fainted by now,
but this was no time to be ladylike! For God's sake she was having a baby! She screamed again and again and again… for a total of eight and a half hours, she screamed and cried and prayed and
all but begged for the pain to end… when at last…
"Oh! Oh…!" she gasped as she saw the babe's tiny head emerge and she continued to push, despite the excruciating pain, she was in a state of shock as the babe's shoulders came out and she
grasped the tiny babe's torso and gently pulled it the rest of the way out and onto her naked breast. She stared at the tiny infant babe that she, incredibly, had carried in her womb for all this
time… and she was amazed by the wonder of it all… and it was a boy…
"Oh… Damon… un fils! Je vous ai donné un fils!" she wept quietly as she tenderly stroked the babe's black hair, which had clearly been inherited from his father. His eyes were blue, yet that could
mean anything… Fore most babes had blue eyes when they were born… she remembered the midwife saying that to her as a child when Stefan had been born. She and Damon had leaned over the
cradle to get a good look at the newest addition to the Salvatore family. She had said noted that the infant had had blue eyes. "Bleu! Ses yeux sont bleus! Comme madame!" and she had clapped
her hands when the midwife had told her "You know, Signorina, that most babies have blue eyes when they are born…" So Lizette had no way of knowing just what color the babe's eyes would
turn out to be; only time could tell. But she so wished that he would have inherited Damon's …
She grasped the damp sponge from the table by the bed and tenderly wiped at the mucusy substance that covered the tiny babe, cuddling him in her arms, and stroking his tiny features. "Mon
bébé adoré…" she cooed…