CHAPTER FIVE

"If a man has something once, always something of it remains."

~Ernest Hemingway

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Damon's consciousness came back to him in blinks. He found his palm congealed in lake of dark red to the stone floor of his cell. His head was filled with a crushing pain He groaned, moving his arms up to cradle his head and saw the source of the blood: a fresh vertical cuts that ran down both arms from his elbows to his wrists.

He pulled back his arms in unconscious examination, the blood pulsating like lights in a laser show, hunger crept and crawled out of his stomach. The blood was half dried, thick as pudding, but it was the smell that Damon noticed first, the same heady aroma that came to his senses whenever he smelled a willing candidate for his feeding.

He tried to lower and hide his arms but his movements opened the cuts, leaking blood down arms and before he could stop himself, he lapped at the dark stains, biting into his flesh.

He coughed, and threw himself against the wall, shoving a hand down his throat and vomited out all that he had just swallowed down his jeans. He coughed and gaged again, spilling the last vestiges of the blood along with corrosive stomach acid.

"Not enjoying your dinner 20151?" Wes was leant up casually against the reinforced bars of Damon's cell, boldly within arm's length of Damon like he was superior in the knowledge that Damon couldn't touch him. A thick sterile bandage was taped to Wes' neck.

Damon coughed again and growled hatefully at Wes. "You're a sick freak-!"

"I'm a philanthropist," Wes returned simply. "Protecting the world from monsters like you."

"You capture and torture people and get off on it," Damon groaned, using the concrete wall to pull himself to his feet like he was climbing a ladder. He let go of the wall, but fell forward again and caught himself hard and painfully on his hand. a"Who's the real monster?"

"People?" Wes spat the word out like he had chewed rancid milk. "No Damon, your kind is an abomination, an over populated pack of rabid animals circling a civilized society; anything I do to remedy the problem makes me a hero."

Damon blew off a painful sounding laugh, walking slowly towards Wes, the cuts on his arms dripping blood down his finger tips. Wes didn't back up, but still moved to the other side of Damon's cell. "Why don't you tell me that without all the reinforced steel bars?"

"Unfortunately my busy schedule forces me to delegate such menial tasks to my interns," Wes walked down the dark hallway, out of Damon's sight, there was the sounds of a cell door being opened and soon he was back in front of Damon, with the girl from the lab.

Her long hair covered her face; the front of her dress was a stain of bright red blood, and her bare feet stumbled over the floor even though the concrete was smooth. Wes grabbed her chin and forced it up and she flinched away from the florescent bulbs overhead.

"She transitioned an hour ago," Wes stroked the girl's hair. "Fed her myself," he pulled the bandage away from his neck, revealing a half congealed scab with dried stains of blood on the flesh of his neck.

The girl turned to the smell of the blood, the veins behind her eyes darkened and spider webbed out. She moved to lunge, but she did so stumbling, falling against Wes like she was drunk. "What's happening to me?!" her voice was high and scared.

"It's okay sweetheart," Wes pulled her up like she was a child sick with the flu. "It's just the vervain; don't worry, you're doing fine." He turned her head with his hand towards Damon and her breath hitched in fear at the sight of him and all the blood.

Damon jerked out of the fog of his pain when he heard his cell door being unlocked. "What the hell are you doing?"

Wes had the girl in front of him, using her as a shield as he slowly swung the door open. "As much as I want Stefan to be the first true test run of my experiments on you, I need to make sure your new 'abilities' are up to standard before I let you and your little brother have your reunion." He drew out a knife and slashed the girl across the elbow, opening a huge gash into her skin, she screamed and he threw her into the cell, slamming the door shut.

"Don't worry Damon," Wes quickly locked the door before Damon could reach it. "I calculated her dosage of vervain exactly," he glanced down at his watch. "The last of it should be out of her system, now." He looked back up to both of them like he was watching two former students of his at their first real job, yanking the heavy key from the door. "Don't say I never gave you anything."

Wes vanished down the hallway just as Damon lunged at the bars.

Behind him the girl was crying, clutching at her arm. "Why is this happening to me?" The cut was substantial, leaking thickly from her arm pattering to the floor, "I don't understand-"

The smell of the girl's blood enveloped the cell and flooded up Damon's nostrils, his fangs retracted, his breathing came harder. He gripped the bars as tightly as he could, they screamed under the force he used. But in the end the gnawing, starving hunger tore at his stomach and turned him around.

The girl backed away at the predatory look in his eyes. "Please-what's happening?!"

"You're a vampire-" Damon approached with a predatory slowness, the parts of him that still made him human screaming at him, trying to force his steps back, but the parts of him that made him a half starved vampire pulled him forward. "Wes fed you my blood, then he killed you, then he gave you his blood to complete the process."

The girl shook her head with a strangled sob, not believing what he was saying. She backed away more, crying out when she ran out of room to move and hit the concrete wall behind her.

"I can't compel you," Damon was now right on her, the smell of her blood overpowering. "But I need you to stand very. still. Understand?"

The girl shook her head and started to sob. "Please don't hurt me, please don't hurt me!"

Damon's body heaved on a breath as he felt her trembling even without touching her. "I'm sorry," his fangs retracted completely and he lunged at her arm.

She screamed and pushed him away, managing to throw him off of her and into the opposite wall of the cell. She ran from the corner, but had nowhere to run except the other corner of the eight by eight foot cell.

Damon was weakened by pain and torture but he was still over a century older than her. He grabbed her arm and slammed her up against the wall of his cell right next to where he had scratched his initials and tick marks into the concrete.

He lunged at her neck, biting into her carotid, and her horrendous screams echoed around his cell.

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Elena watched the man who had moments ago pointed a gun at her neck, and who had stabbed Stefan in the chest without blinking pull the other man he called his brother to his feet, rolling up his pant leg and swearing at what he saw. He tore a piece off of his own shirt and pressed against the bloody hole to stem the flow. The smell of the man's blood was thick in up her nose.

Elena watched this, still feeling the maw of the Hunter's gun at her back, the injury that was meant for Stefan bleeding out all over the taller man, the one that the other called 'Sam'. She walked towards them, feeling Stefan grab her arm to pull her back, but she pulled out of it and continued until she was standing right in front of the two men.

She bit into her wrist and held it out to 'Sam' "Here, my blood can heal you."

"What the hell are you doing?" Katherine demanded.

"If he really knows where Damon is then we're on the same side for right now," Elena snapped back to her doppelganger.

"They're Hunters Elena!" Katherine insisted. "We're never on the same side!"

"You need to back off!-" the other man growled at Elena and then Katherine from where he stood over Sam. "We're not doing any vamp blood Cure-All's," he produced a knife and lit it red hot with his lighter, removing the cloth and placed it against Sam's skin.

Sam roared, but only slightly, like he was used to this kind of pain. The knife came away and the wound was now black like it had been seared, it was soon rewrapped. There came a tense moment between the two men, like the one who was injured didn't know what to say to the one who had fixed him up.

"What do you know about Augustine?" Elena asked as the black hot wound disappeared behind the Hunter's pant leg.

"You don't get to ask the questions-" the shorter of the two growled at her, which wasn't really short at all because he stood well over six feet tall. His pointed his knife blade at her, still glowing from the heat of the flame.

"It's a covert society-" Sam said, taking a stance with one arm resting on his jeans. The other hunter shot him a glare for talking at all. "They experiment on vampires-"

"Ask him how he knows this," Katherine cut in. "Because he and his cue ball partner tried to sell my alleged dead hot vampire body to them back in the day."

Elena's face contorted into confused shock, so did Stefan and Matt's the latter of whom was standing guard at the door to the service entrance of the bar to keep customer's from coming in.

"What do you mean experiments?" Stefan returned.

"He means torture," Katherine clarified. "I never met the Augustines' personally, but I heard the rumors. Rich family, likes to vivisect vampires in secret labs, see what makes them tick, they rely heavily on donations for their test subjects." Katherine flicked her eyes over to Sam when she said this. "Luckily for me, I came around in time to take out my transport team before I reached the Magic Kingdom."

Stefan's expression fell away from confusion and became shock instead. The images that had been flashing across his head becoming clearer, the gray wall, the bars, the initials in the cement, Damon's pain filled voice. The shock became full on hostility and turned his attention onto the tall Hunter. "You handed over Damon to this place?"

"He's not telling you anything," the shorter Hunter snapped, pointing a finger in Stefan's face, close enough for Stefan to snap off with his fangs.

"Look I trust you as much as you trust me; but I'm not the one who sold out your brother-"

"Sam-"

"Dean," Sam's voice was booming and insistent to the second man that he had finally named. "Augustine didn't just experiment on existing vampires; when they couldn't get enough for their weekly quota, they mass produced backups. Innocent people, turned into Vamps to be cut apart like bio frogs-"

"Jessie," Elena cut in remembering Jessie, attacking Damon, being engineered to feed on Vampires. She turned to Stefan. "He said Wes kept him locked up for two weeks in his lab, and did tests on him; he almost killed Damon-" Elena's voice fell away at the implications of exactly what that meant if Damon was now in Dr. Maxfield's hands. She turned back to face Sam. "Do you know where this place is?"

"It would have to be some place remote-" Stefan said before Sam could even speak. Stefan closed his eyes briefly, trying to piece together where all the elements of his visions, steel bars, concrete cells, stainless steel labs could fit into society without society knowing about it. "Vampires aren't exactly docile about being held captive; they'd have to be kept in reinforced steel cells, far away from any general populations as possible so no one would hear what's going on-"

The image filtered through his mind as a migraine aura. A dark dank hallway, a girl's face, her screaming, somewhere in the distance his brother's voice. There was no glass to break this time, nothing for Stefan to hold onto but his own hand. Hard pops like gunfire echoed around Stefan's ears.

"Stefan!"

Stefan whipped his head instantly to Dean and Sam thinking it was one of them firing off their guns, but Elena didn't move, only looked downward. He followed her horrified gaze to his hand, he had dug his fingers into his palm so tightly that it had dislocated the tarsal bones in his fingers, contorting his hand into a caved in claw formation. He felt Elena close her hands around his, trying to assess what he had done, but he brushed her off this time, walking over to the two men who eyed him like they would kill him at a moment's turn of his behavior.

Which was the same way Stefan was looking at the two of them. "Whatever else you may think of Vampires, I can tell that you're as thrilled about the use of innocent people for scientific experiments as I am about the use of my brother for the same reason." Stefan grabbed his deformed hand and jerked it upwards with a crack, realigning the bones back to their proper position; barely feeling the pain that came from the maneuver.

There was a silence that followed, both the men in front of Stefan staring him down, like opposing soldiers in a battle field.

During World War II, Stefan had driven an ambulance in the battlefields. In the last year of the war, five months before Hitler surrendered to the Allies, he witnessed that same look on the faces of enemy soldiers right before they signaled an aerial attack that blew up his hospital unit tent, killing all 15 wounded men he had been tending too. The explosion had torn his right leg almost completely off, bone and all. His commanding officer had evacuated him and the rest to another unit in the forests of Germany. The surgeons were able to repair his leg; but he was too weak to escape into the woods to feed on any animals; there was blood in abundance all around him, but Stefan did not allow himself to give into the thirst for the blood of his fellow dying soldiers. This resulted in his wounds healing at almost a human rate. He was shipped to Germany, and from there to a hospital in Switzerland, by that time he was half starved. There were no open areas or woods in the city, so he was forced to subsist on the blood of pigeons that came too close to his hospital room window. His daylight ring had been locked away by the hospital staff to 'keep it from being stolen', forcing him to remain indoors, not wanting to risk exposure by wandering out at night. His lack of adequate food kept him from being able to compel the staff into telling him where his ring was. Some of the nuns who ran the hospital nursing staff soon became afraid of the way he watched the birds out the windows sills, and how he avoided the windows and doors during the peak of daylight. They would openly cross themselves in front of him or clutch their rosary beads when he came near them and hurry away, muttering a string of prayers.

The nun's finally forced the hospital head doctor's hand, and forced Stefan out on the first boat bound for America. The ride home bad been hell. He had never sailed a boat in his entire life and killing off any of the crew would have meant he would be stranded at sea. Fish had little to no blood, and the captain's dog was a puppy, not big enough to sate his hunger for very long.

He made it to New York in spring of '46, but by that time the lack of blood had screwed up his body, causing weakness and limping in his injured leg. It made it hard to hunt the fast moving animals in upstate New York. It took a full year to recover his strength; during that entire time he never contacted Damon; feeling his brother's abandonment like a slap in the face; hating Damon for not being there with him like he promised, for making him be alone through all his misery. When his great nephew Joe had called him a years later saying Damon wanted to meet up with them, Stefan had lied and said he was coming; wanting to hurt Damon as much as Damon had hurt him.

But after learning from Damon a year ago why he hadn't joined the war he owed him, more than that, he had to save him, because they were brothers.

"If you two really hunt everything like Katherine says you do. Then you're going to help me find this place down so I can burn it to the ground."