author's notes: you guys rock, have i mentioned that? hope you all like where this is going! please read & review! -- i added some pictures to my profile for visuals on Amelia -- setting: right after 1x14, goes AU from there.

disclaimer: fic•tion [fíksh'n]: literary works of imagination

MALUM DISCORDIAE (apple of discord)

chapter 8: home sweet home

1864

He's in the dark.

Not the kind he's known ever before in his lifetime. This darkness is all-consuming and pitch-black, around him, in him. It is him. He can't move, because he isn't. He is not. Non-existent. He has no body, no thoughts, no hands to feel around with, and no heart. He doesn't feel in this dark. But it pulls at him, kneading him into a form he's not all too sure will be completely him once the dark is finished with him. The dark fills in whatever is missing. It fills in the lack of him.

When he wakes, he's not breathing, nor does he feel the need to. He sits up, one smooth movement upright, and looks around. There's a woman sitting on the ground next to him, her red hair – it's dark but he can make out the colour – spun in a bun of unruly curls. "What happened?" he asks, without needing the passage of air. "Who are you?" She turns her head to look at him slowly. She'd been watching the smoke rise on the horizon; the church is still burning.

"My name is Amelia," she speaks calmly, looking at him with her green eyes. She looks at him like she's done this before, watched a broken man put back together again and see him wake up in a field that had once held bundles of vervain. He looks around in alarm, suddenly reminded of what had happened. Katherine. "Don't worry." She picks up on his distress easily. "You are safe now."

Her words don't calm him. He remembers; Katherine succumbing to the vervain in his blood, his father urging him to get the sheriff; his brother. Betrayed. He shot his brother, but... but his brother shot him too. He stares down at his chest, his shirt torn and bloodied, but when he reaches for his skin there's no wound. "I..." he starts, but he can't say it. "No. It's impossible," he says, and shakes his head.

Amelia looks at him with the most compassionate eyes he's ever seen. It seems as if she hardly desires to be there herself. "You were already transforming when I got here." She speaks as if she reads his mind. She must be one of them for her to understand so quickly. "There was nothing I could do."

It's only then that he looks at his brother. Will he change too? "And Damon?" he asks carefully.

Amelia turns her head, and looks at Damon; she'd been sitting between the two of them. "He'll wake up again soon." She pushes a dark curl from Damon's face. She doesn't know why she felt compelled to turn him; maybe it was her own loneliness that had spurned her rash decision. People shouldn't be punished for who they love.

Stefan knows that soon, he'll have to make the choice. Feed off a human, or die. Amelia already knows he will choose immortal life. It is the primordial human condition; their minds cannot conceive of a state of non-existence. Immortal life isn't everything, but it is some form of existence. He will not choose death. No one willingly chooses death.

He gets up from the grass, his head spinning. Katherine had told him he'd feel disoriented after transforming. He looks around, his eyes focusing on his surroundings. They've moved since the fight with their father; he's nowhere to be seen, and there's more tree coverage. He figures Amelia must have moved them out of sight of any curious passers-by. He's never seen her before. Does she know Katherine? Is she one of the vampires that has been living in Mystic Falls since Katherine's arrival?

He hears his brother wake up in the grass; it's a subtle change in the air, even though his brother doesn't breathe either. "Damon, everything is alright," Amelia says, her voice as soft as before. She has done this before; she must have. The first thing Damon notices about her are her eyes; they're not fierce, or animalistic. They're human, riddled with sympathy, yet he thinks that maybe, just maybe, he detects incomprehension.

"You..." he starts, but something tells him that he doesn't need to say anything more. She'll know what he means. How he knows is beyond his comprehension, but somehow, in the moment his eyes meet hers, he knows she's the reason he's a vampire now.

"Yes," she says.

He feels at his chest, where he had felt the bullet penetrating his skin, but there's no wound anymore. He knew it'd be like this, Katherine had told him all about it. He'd be in the dark at first, floating, until it accepted him into its folds, and he would become one with it. "Thank you," he breaths, and gets up fast on unsteady legs. He's running before he knows it.

"Damon, don't." The woman is between him and his goal faster than even his vampire eyes can see. He'd seen Katherine move fast, but this woman was faster. She looked older too. But she's in his way, he has to pass, she needs to get out of his way. He needs to find Katherine. "You mustn't let them see you." She grabs his arm when he tries to make a run for it again; the hold on his arm is crushing. "It's too late for those inside, but not for you."

She looks at him with great authority, yet she keeps her voice steady. He looks at the church, burning, and at the woman who gave him his immortal life. His thoughts are reeling. Emily, yes, he needs to find Emily. She promised to keep Katherine safe; she will help him. "Who was she?" the woman asks; he doesn't know her name, but he thinks it won't be long before he does.

"She was..." he shakes his head, his shoulders slumping in defeat. "Everything. She was everything."

Amelia wants to tell him she's sorry, that time will heal his wounds, but she knows how that sounds. She knows in a vampire's life such things are lies. They stand like that for hours, watching the church burn to a cinder. Only Damon knows, that underneath the hot stones, there's a tomb held shut by magic, holding twenty-four vervain-laced vampires chained to the walls.

NOW

He doesn't think he's ever hurt this much in his entire life. The bourbon, running hotly down his throat, does nothing to hurt the scorching ache burning deeper and deeper down to a place where he doesn't want it. How could Amelia have said those things to him, so bluntly, without blinking, without even the pretence of caring?

"It's a little early to be drinking, isn't it?" Katherine joins him in the kitchen. He thinks about how it must be night somewhere in the world, but refrains from saying it, because he knows how incredibly lame that sounds. "Does she mean that much to you?" She admits, she's jealous. Amelia seems to have a bond with both Stefan and Damon that now surpassed her own.

"Not enough to chase after her," he answers scathingly.

Katherine realises the years have made Damon bitter. This is not the same Damon she had once known. This was a vampire, a creature she had to get to know all over again. Maybe Amelia had done her a favour by leaving. "My poor baby boy." She closes the distance between them, and puts a hand on his cheek. He turns and looks at her reluctantly. "All lost and alone in this world. But not to worry now. Mommy's home and..." One of her words makes Damon break away from her. He turns his back on her. "What?" she asks.

It's that word, mom, that he hates. He uses it to tease Amelia, but in truth he hates it. He's never seen her as a parent. Or at the very least he's tried not to. "She was right about one thing," he says, staring blankly out in front of him. "She's the one who turned me."

Yes, Katherine thinks, that was most unfortunate. She could never play the 'I'm your creator' card on Stefan, because he hates what he is and that will never persuade him in his love for her. But it would have been convenient in Damon's case. Still, it won't dissuade her from her eventual goal. "Then you know that bond you have with her is artificial," she says, walking over to him again. She puts a hand on his back. "Our bond is real. Why do you think I waited to turn you?"

At the sound of her words he turns around abruptly, startling Katherine with his speed. "Why didn't you come find me?" Damon asks strongly, his face mere inches away from Katherine's. "One hundred and forty-five years, and not a word. You were in town, weren't you?" his eyes narrow conspicuously. "Was it even Anna that send you here?"

Katherine's eyes darken. "I don't think I like what you're implying," she says, her teeth clenched tightly together.

"I want the truth." Damon grabs her by her shoulders strongly. "About all of this, me, and Stefan. About your wonderful plan for us." He sees her eyes widen in surprise. Oh yes, he knows all about that now. "It's been a century and a half, Katherine, a person hears these things."

She's left to stare up at him for long moments. The years have not just made him bitter, they've made him smarter. She would be impressed if it wasn't so very unfortunate. She'll have to stick with only one of the Salvatore brothers, she thinks. If she tries to get her hands on Stefan too, she will lose both of them. "Stefan means nothing to me," she says, and looks up into his eyes. "I need you to trust me, Damon."

There's that word again, he thinks, trust. He doesn't trust anyone anymore. He's the only person he can count on; especially now that Amelia has decided he's not worth her time anymore. He hopes that wherever she is – it sure as hell won't be Italy – she finds peace with what she did to him.

Katherine is still staring up at him; he can feel her eyes burning more holes in him. "I do," he says, "trust you." He knows he adds it belatedly, and Katherine probably isn't satisfied with the answer, but it's all he can give her. He hugs her, tightly, but only so that he doesn't have to look at her.

She forces the tears down as best she can, to make sure she can see the road ahead, and to stop herself from getting hung up on the ridiculous idea that Damon and her could ever work. What was she thinking involving herself in Damon's life? What was she thinking when she said she'd help Stefan track down other vampires in Mystic Falls? Amelia knows that Stefan likes to see her as some kind of mother figure, but that's not what she is. She's just another vampire, far more empathic than Damon could ever be, but far less righteous than Stefan thinks she is.

Damon and her had worked just fine up until now. They saw each other every few decades, and that was enough. They didn't need any more from each other. They both realised they weren't human anymore, other rules applied to them now and human convention had long since been lost on both of them. Humans were capable of spending their lives with one person. Vampires couldn't have that. Spend enough time with someone and even their smallest flaws become irreconcilable with greater truths. Vampires didn't stay with the same person forever. Katherine had probably known that when she didn't come back for Damon. Now he has to learn that the only way one does. The hard way.

She's known love in her lifetime, many times, each man equally unique, some of them human, most of them vampires. But none of them last, not in the human meaning of the word. Vampires have other ways of maintaining long-lasting relationships. In a vampire's life, the saying absence makes the heart grow fonder is given new meaning. She has a handful of lovers that she sees every now and again, but none that she stays with. She's pretty sure she doesn't even want that with Damon. But she knows that she doesn't want him to become just another lover either.

There's so much going on in her head, that the sound of her tires popping only reaches her when it's too late. Amelia hits the brakes hard, and the car comes to an abrupt halt, the rims of the wheels screeching metallically on the concrete road. What in the hell just happened? Tires don't just pop by themselves. She stumbles out of the car, looking at the deflated tire on her side; it's completely wrecked. She turns around and examines the road.

It's then that she notices the spikes; Amelia goes through her knees and picks up one of the tiny metal stingers scattered across the road. Someone had to have put them there. Were they meant for her? She gets up fast and turns around, intent on getting back in her car, but just then something hard strikes her shoulder, penetrating her skin until it hits bone. Her knees buckle and then her legs are gone from under her; she tumbles to the ground. It's only when she's back-down on the concrete that she manages to look at the wooden stake now protruding her shoulder.

"AH!" she exclaims overtly dramatic, the pain now cutting through her in pulsating waves, and she takes hold of the stake drenched in her blood. Where in hell did that come from?

"Leave it." The threat is accompanied by the tread of boots, and the cocking of a gun she's never seen before. Before her eyes have a chance to focus properly, Alaric Saltzman has placed the high-pressure toy gun against her chest, right above her un-beating heart. If it had beat, Amelia imagines it would be racing.

"Mr Saltzman," Amelia says, settling her head back on the concrete, but doesn't let go of the stake in her shoulder. She'd been skewed by wooden stakes before, but methods for delivery of said stakes were definitely getting more sophisticated. "What can I do for you that you couldn't ask me nicely?" she asks, wincing in pain as she shift slightly on the ground. This is a very uncomfortable position.

"Did you turn Elena?" Alaric asks, not relinquishing the clear advantageous position he has over Amelia now. If she tells him what he needs, he'll kill her. She's just another one of them after all. But Amelia frowns at him. Is it an act, or does she really not know what he's talking about? "Jeremy Gilbert thinks his sister is a vampire," he explains.

Amelia rolls her eyes. Of course. "He must have run into Katherine," she says, but gets a frown from Alaric in return. She admits, she doesn't know exactly how it's possible either. "Elena is her spitting image. But I guarantee you that Elena is still very much human. Stefan would never let anything happen to her."

That much Alaric believes to be true. Stefan Salvatore is not like his brother, or this woman on the ground beneath him. "Who's Katherine?" he asks.

"The great love of Damon's life." His human life.

"What about you?" Alaric asks curiously, a whole new array of questions and opportunities opening before him. If he kills this one, will Damon feel the pain he felt after losing Isabel? "You seem to be pretty close to him."

Amelia snickers, and thinks that really depends on one's definition of the word close. "I made him a vampire," she answers. "That's all."

Alaric flexes his arm, stake pointed straight at Amelia's heart. "I should kill you," he says. Who would miss one vampire? The world would be safer without her in it. And if it's a chance to make Damon hurt, really hurt, he'll gladly take it.

"Go ahead," Amelia mutters, starting to feel light-headed from the blood loss. Alaric eyes go wide in question. She wants to die? "I came here once to die," she explains. In 1864 she came here to die in that church, to burn alongside the other vampires in Mystic Falls. In hindsight, she got the better end of that bargain. "Would be strangely poetic to have it end here." She wonders if anyone will miss her.

Alaric stares down at her, and takes in a breath. "Get up," he sighs. If he kills her, he imagines he'll get on Stefan's bad side too. Right now, Stefan is the only one standing between Damon and him. Amelia scrambles up from the ground unsteadily, her knees shaking as she leans back against the car, breathing heavily.

Amelia grabs the stake in her shoulder tightly, oozing blood, and gives it one hard pull. She feels the joint in her shoulder snap back into place; this time she bites through the pain. The stake hits the ground in a dull thud. Amelia braces herself against the car, feeling her body slowly but surely heal itself. She'll need to feed for it to heal completely. She should rip this guy's head off, she thinks to herself, but she knows that won't go over well with the locals, or Stefan.

"You've got to tell me one thing," Alaric says, and stands back. "How can you walk around in the sunlight?" Amelia stares at him blankly. "What? You don't trust me?" Alaric adds. She wonders where his car is, or if he walked all the way out here to wait for her. Had he known she would try to leave town? He's already shown her he has no intention of killing her; maybe making casual conversation at this point is only polite.

"Lapis lazuli," she answers, liking the feel of the words tumbling from her lips.

"The stone?" Alaric frowns. He's read about it, of course, he is after all a history teacher, and he knows the Ancient Egyptians and even the Romans used it in their jewellery.

Amelia's still leaning back against the hood of her car with one elbow, but she manages to remove the turquoise ring from her ring finger. "It's embedded in the ring." She tosses it over to Alaric; he studies it closely. It's as simple as that? A stone? He stares from Amelia's ring, to his own, and is suddenly reminded how Isabel had told him his would protect him. He never had figured out against what. "As long as we wear it, the sun can't harm us," Amelia continues.

Alaric looks at her questioningly, turning the ring over in his hands, watching how the light from the sun above them plays on the silver encasing. He guesses she doesn't trust him enough to tell him the truth after all. If the ring protects her, then what's protecting her now? It only hits him then. "The tattoo," he realises, remembering what materials were used in tattoos as old as hers. "It's real then?" he asks.

Amelia has to admit she's impressed. He just put two and two together real fast. It also means he's been watching her. What else has he been up to that she doesn't know about? "Yes," is all she answers. She figures she's shared enough secrets for now, as a thank you for sparing her life. Next time he tries something like this, he might not get so lucky. She doesn't kill humans for feeding anymore, but she won't hesitate to do so when one of them threatens her life, or her loved ones.

Just like everyone else that finds out something like this about her, about the lapis lazuli and Amelia's tattoo, Alaric wonders how old she is. But he knows he's worn out his welcome for now; he's gotten everything he can out of her. Soon, she'll be at full strength again and he hopes that somewhere she will find the same mercy Stefan had given him gratuitously. Amelia seems like a whole different kind of animal. "Sorry about the tires," he says, but still walks away, into the trees lining both sides of the road.

Amelia looks back down at her tires; they're completely wrecked. She could call Triple-A to get her car towed back into town, but she imagines that will raise a whole lot of questions she doesn't care to answer right now. So she shifts the car into gear, and pushes it to the side of the road. She decides to go hunting for something first, gather up her strength, and then she'll see about replacing the tires. She consciously decides not to call Stefan or Damon; she can take care of herself.

She suddenly realises she's not too far from the old Fell's Church, or the place where she met Stefan and Damon all those years ago. Since she's going into the woods anyway, it won't hurt to take a trip down memory lane. Like she told Alaric earlier, it's rather poetic to end her trip here, in the same place her very first visit to Mystic Falls had started. It's possible that she'll never return here. Maybe Katherine and Damon will find a way to make things work, who knows, maybe this world will surprise her yet. It's not her place to stand between Damon and his happiness, regardless of her feelings for him, or the way she feels towards Katherine.

And so there she stands, in the same place she'd joined Damon's side all those years ago, asking him who Katherine was. Everything, he'd said, she was everything. It's curious to her now how in his stead she never could have given him that same answer. Damon wasn't everything to her. But he was something, someone she needed in her life, to keep going, to keep living. If faced with the same choice again, she'd turn him again. Maybe because he did hold some kind of power over her, maybe because deep down, she hadn't wanted to die. Maybe Damon had been her excuse. But she knows that's reducing Damon to something far lesser than what he really is.

Her boots rustle the pine-shed needles and cones on the ground as she makes her way towards the church. She's curious about this tomb Stefan had told her about, the same tomb Katherine should have been in. The same tomb that had been Damon's reason for being for so long. There's a little stone staircase that leads down under the church; she descends it slowly, her hands brushing the cold stones lining her path. But she halts clean in her tracks. She sees the pentangle carved into the stone door, but the door is open. This can't be right, Amelia thinks, Stefan told her Bonnie and her grandmother had closed it up again.

There's a fear in her heart that prevents her from entering the dark recesses of the tomb, but her senses tell her that there's not a single vampire down there anymore. How did they get out? Where have they gone? There were supposed to be twenty-something vampires down there, but now the tomb was empty. Could it be that they skipped town? Could it be that easy? Or was that just wishful thinking?

Her mind is racing a million miles an hour as she climbs the short stairs again. When she makes it upstairs again, the forest air clearing her head, there's company waiting for her. Vampires; about twenty-something of them. "How strange," Amelia starts, realising that she's completely surrounded with no way to go. Maybe talking will keep them from tearing her apart, "I was just down there, wondering where everyone had gone, and here you all are." She looks around the circle, noticing one woman in particular, who seems to be leading them. "You're all looking pretty good after being down there for so long."

They also look far too good for them not to be feeding off human blood. "We've been gathering our strength," the woman answers. She's joined by a younger vampire; Anna, Amelia assumes. That makes her mother Pearl.

"Right," Amelia nods, looking for any gaps in the lines. She might be able to get away, if she's fast enough, but she's not at full strength and there are so many of them. "I'll just be off then." She runs, but two vampires grab her arms before she manages to break through the circle. They're strong; they must indeed be feeding on human blood.

"We can't let you go," Pearl says softly. Amelia can sense she's old, but by far not old enough to defeat her in a fight. But then, with an army at hand, who would fight? "Not now that you know about us."

Amelia doesn't struggle against the men restraining her, she's too busy looking for any weapons on the ground. The ground is riddled with broken branches. Just one of those can cause the kind of distraction she needs to get out of there. "Personally I'd be more worried about Katherine," Amelia says, Pearl frowning. Amelia wonders if that is because she doesn't know Katherine is there, or because she doesn't know what Katherine is doing. "Wasn't it her hanky-panky with the Salvatore brothers that got you into this mess in the first place? Two guesses where she is now."

Something resembling realisation dawns in Pearl's eyes. So she knows Katherine is in town. Are they working together? "We still can't let you go."

Amelia figures that talking won't get her anywhere. So she looks at the vampire to her left, and gazes into his eyes. "Let me go," she compels him, and his hold on her is gone almost instantly. That'll show them. Anyone knows that a vampire that's strong enough to compel others like them is a force to be reckoned with. She looks at Pearl strongly. "Let me go, and you'll go unharmed," Amelia says strongly. She knows she can't compel all of them, or stands a chance to fight all of them with her strength not at maximum.

"You can't take all of us," Pearl says. Just what Amelia had been afraid off. "Harper." Another vampire breaks the circle and makes his way towards her. Amelia elbows her attacker in the stomach, grabs his head between both hands, and snaps his neck. She snatches a branch from the forest floor, and forces it into another vampire's chest. In all the commotion and fear that ensues, Amelia makes a run for it.

"Call Katherine," Pearl tells Anna, while she watches Amelia rush away in the distance. Katherine had failed to mention she'd gone around to see the Salvatores again, and that they had a house guest powerful enough to compel other vampires. Katherine would pay for that.

if you can, please let me know what you think!

i've come to realise i really like saying lapis lazuli :) anyway, in case anyone was wondering, the stone can be ground into a dark blue dye, that could conceivably have been used as a pigment in Amelia's tattoo. fun fact: Queen Cleopatra also used the dye as eyeshadow. no kidding.