ELENA

My heart gave an extra beat and I felt myself pale. Ignoring him and continuing towards my car, I started searching my pockets for the key. Damon dashed my hopes for a hasty escape, though. He was way faster than me and stepped in my way. "Going for a ride?"

"Leave me alone, Damon!" I said, avoiding his gaze. "I don't want to talk to you right now!" Fumbling with my key, I tried to open the driver's door.

"I don't believe this..." he noted, quietly observing me with crossed arms. "You're actually afraid of me!"

"Well, is that so surprising after what I saw and heard last night?" I asked, feeling slightly defensive.

He raised his brows. "Maybe not surprising. But you have to admit it's silly! I saved your life the other day, remember?"

I managed to open the door at last and felt relieved. "Yes, you did," I admitted. "But how do I know that you don't consider it rightfully yours because of that, to do with as you please?"

"Charming idea!" Damon smirked. "And I just know what I'd do with it right now!" He pushed the door closed and propped himself against it, effectively preventing me from opening it again. I eyed him suspiciously, wondering what he could possibly want from me. "And what would that be?"

"Take you for lunch."

"And dispose of my dead body right here on the parking lot?" I tried to sound sarcastic rather than nervous.

"Very funny!" he replied dryly. "I appreciate your attempt at humor, though." Clearly trying for patience he added: "Now, let me rephrase: I would like for you to accompany me over to this little place down the street and have a coffee with me. You might eat something, if you like. I have eaten earlier already."

"Why?" I simply asked, puzzled.

"Because I was hungry?" He evaded an answer by deliberately misunderstanding my question, which had me wondering – it had been harmless enough. Thinking that I might have found a weak spot in his armor, I felt my own confidence rise again. "Why would you want to have a coffee with me?" I insisted.

Damon rolled his eyes. "Because you're not the worst company in the world, Elena. Besides, I don't have anything to do right now – and neither have you. But that's just an excuse. The main reason is that I think we need to talk." The line sounded familiar, though neither with regard to the person who voiced it nor to the situation. "I don't think we're in that phase of our relationship yet!" I said, fully capable of irony as well.

"It started from a rather unusual point to begin with, so I'm hopeful." The fact that Damon wasn't protesting against the existence of a relationship sparked my curiosity, but also gave me a slightly guilty conscience. "What about Stefan?" I couldn't help thinking out loud, wondering if he shouldn't be included in any talk about last night, and what he'd say about me going anywhere with a professed, human-blood-drinking vampire.

"Uh! I don't want any kind of relationship with him," Damon responded. Then, as if he had followed my private line of thought, added: "I'm sure he'd advise you to stay away from me if he was here now – thank God he isn't! Yet I don't picture you as the type who always acts wisely. Deep down, you long to do something totally unadvised, something daring... like having coffee with a vampire in plain daylight and in a crowded, public place." He gave me an almost playful wink. "Come on, Elena! You sure weren't behaving cowardly yesterday, in a lonely mansion at night, all by yourself with two gruesome monsters. Please? I need some shade!"

God, he could be sweet if he wanted to, turning his boyish charm on or off at will. Dangerous or not, I didn't have much to set against it. "All right then, a coffee," I agreed. Beaten, though not willing to concede defeat, I added: "And I'll have some garlic bread with it."

A short while later we were sitting amiably at an outside table of a small café just a short walk away from campus. I was surprised to find that I was enjoying myself. Damon had been right: It was less freaky to think about what he was in bright sunlight amidst a crowd of people, in a commonplace setting as this, with Damon ordering two coffees and some garlic bread.

"I always thought vampires can't drink anything except for blood..." I said, as if we were talking eating disorders.

"I can eat and drink anything I like. And I happen to like coffee. Besides, caffeine is about the only drug that has an effect on us, taken in its pure form, and that's a blessing. It helps to keep our body temperatures at a degree that humans find non-suspicious."

"The only thing? What about whisky? You seem to like it even more than coffee..."

"Alcohol regretfully doesn't have the same effect on us as on humans. But it does help curb the cravings..."

"You mean you can't get buzzed?"

Damon smirked. "Not by drinking from the bottle! Feeding from an intoxicated human, though..."

"Great!" I cut him off sarcastically. "So your fun is actually doubled by making your victims drunk before finishing them off!"

"I don't necessarily have to kill the people I feed from," Damon pointed out, though not ruling out the possibility. "Getting close enough will do, and alcohol sure does help to inhibit and dull awareness, so I can put other weapons to work."

"Like your power of manipulation?"

Again, that conceited smirk. "Like my good looks. My charms... "

I snorted. "Don't forget to add cockiness!"

"I can afford to be cocky." Indeed. Being incredibly strong, indestructible and psychic might make a person inclined to feel a little superior. "Well, I give you the looks," I consented, playing it down. "You and Stefan – you're fairly attractive."

"Fairly attractive?" He pretended to be insulted. "We're perfect, in the most literal sense. Have you ever heard that beauty is nothing but a perception of symmetry? People normally aren't symmetrical. Vampires are. When we go through the change, everything is altered, all damage undone – no scars, nothing lopsided. No flaws." He turned his perfectly angled face at me and smiled, flashing his pearly whites and allowing me to fully admire his beauty.

"Except for your lack of a healthy tan," I said, trying to find a real flaw and coming up empty.

Damon shrugged. "It's only been very recently that a tan is perceived as something worth acquiring. Up to the middle of the last century, we were all en vogue. And my aristocratic paleness has not placed me at disadvantage yet." Yeah, most likely it hadn't. He surely knew how to make the most of his gifts. If they were gifts at all.

"Still, I don't believe that humans line up to become your dinner just because of your good looks." Or else Bonnie wouldn't flinch every time she got within an arms length of him. "Don't tell me you never use force."

"I usually don't need to resort to violence. All I have to do is convince someone to allow me close enough to the neck to kiss..."

"Meaning you seduce unsuspecting women and attack them out of the blue?"

He arched his eyebrow. "You make it sound so brutish. It doesn't have to be. Besides, after a couple of drinks, most people don't really notice what's going on anymore."

"Sure – like they don't notice when someone is tearing their necks!"

Damon leaned in a little as if confiding a secret. "Believe it or not, Elena, there are woman out there who don't mind a little pain if it comes cloaked in pleasure."

I snorted. "Just my idea of a date: Getting drunk, getting laid, getting bitten."

"You may judge that all you like – although, you can't, really – but you're not going make me feel bad and guilty about it. It's a mutual satisfaction of needs."

I couldn't believe he was actually saying that. "You're lying to them, betraying their trust, using them. How can that not be bad?"

Again, some of his flirtatiousness came through. "Isn't that what girls really want?" he asked with a roguish glint in his eyes. "The bad guy?"

"Definitively not for the long run."

"Well, suits me. I'm definitely not a guy for the long run."

I averted my gaze, pretending to be distracted by the waitress who had just approached with our orders. Was he warning me off again? Why – it's not like I had signaled interest. I surely hadn't. Grateful for not having to reply to that, I offered my thanks to the waitress and took a sip of my coffee. Damon observed me quietly, obviously waiting for another round of questions. Fine, for I still had many. "What about the other myths and theories that abound relating to your lifestyle?" I asked.

"Like what?"

"Are you going to run away screaming if I wave a crucifix at you?"

Damon gave a snort. "Not even if you dip it in holy water and splash it on me."

"So everything in those books and movies – it's all myth?"

"No. It's more than myth – it's most likely the world's most amazing marketing success – and like many others, it was sold by the church. Vampires are a mighty threat to the establishment."

"Why would that be?"

"Well, think of it: We're better looking than humans, we're stronger, and we already have the gift of eternal youth and eternal life – and that's not even considering the fact that we don't need to couple like animals in order to have offspring. We create new vampires, which makes us creators ourselves. Now, who, again, does the church claim to be the crown of creation? Surely humans, considered to be God's chosen race, would have been given the means by their creator to defend themselves against a race of demons, that could only have come to life by the hand of the devil himself! The logical consequence is that vampires must fear holy water and crosses, and people were most willing to believe in the kind of protection the church offered. All you had to do was to make people believe that it actually worked – and the clergy has been successful in making people believe more ridiculous things than that."

"I can see what you mean. But still, they had to have some success, or people wouldn't have bought it."

"You're right. Crucifixes, in the old days, were often made of silver. We can't touch that. It reacts with the sweat film on our skin and becomes something like acid. It burns right through to the bone on prolonged touch. It would have worked equally well with a silver spoon, though. I guess nobody ever tried."

I remembered the blisters on Stefan's fingers when he had tried to put the necklace on me. So that's why he hadn't been able to do it. "What about wooden stakes? Fire?"

Damon raised his brow and fixated me with his eyes. "Are you planning how to kill me?"

I shrugged. "Just weighing my options..."

"Well, anything driven straight into the heart works, it doesn't repair itself fast enough to maintain oxygen supply. Wooden bullets are pretty effective, too. Wounds don't close around wood. You might also want to try decapitation, burning or mutilation." He leaned closer, looking at me with a solemn expression. "Vampires can be killed, Elena. You just have to be thorough and quick in doing it, otherwise we self-heal before the damage is permanent. But we have been as efficiently done away with as we have killed humans."

I pondered asking him how many he had killed, but I didn't, for fear I wouldn't like the answer. Deciding for a more harmless question I asked: "How about sleeping in coffins?"

He knitted his eyebrows. "Now, why would anybody want to sleep in a coffin? Eludes me!"

"It's kind of fitting for a dead person!"

"You think I'm dead? Now, that's really stupid! How could I be dead, sitting here and having this discussion with you? The same laws of physics apply everywhere and to everyone on this planet, and dead people don't walk and talk."

"Well, undead then."

He rolled his eyes. "About as undead as you are. Another word for it is alive!" In an unexpected gesture he reached over and took my hand, pressing it flatly to his chest. "Here, can you feel that?" he asked, holding my hand in place with his own. "That's a heartbeat." Indeed, it was. I could feel it beneath firm flesh and toned muscles that made me itch to explore. I quickly withdrew my hand.

"We are just another species," Damon said, as if he hadn't noticed my reaction, "with a differently functioning metabolism and different nutritional needs. Predators, like many other living beings on this planet. We heal fast – basically, the rejuvenation of our cells never stops, as long as we get everything we need."

"What if you don't get enough blood? Can you be starved to death?"

"No. We just fall into a comatose state which we call death-sleep. At first, there still is a metabolism, but so slow that it would escape notice. Of course, it might have happened quite a few times in history that a presumably dead person was put in a coffin and left for burial. Now if he was in fact a vampire or a vampire in transition, his cells would repair whatever damage occurred, allowing him to 'rise from the dead'. Maybe that created the myth about the 'undead' or the 'sleeping in coffins'. I much prefer my bed."

"You said 'at first'. What happens if you still don't get any blood?"

"We dry up and mummify until we do." Uh! Not a topic to delve on while eating. I stopped myself from pondering further, concentrating on what else I believed to know about vampires. "What about this?" I asked, picking up the garlic bread. "Does that offer some sort of protection?"

"Well, they do say it's good for your immune system and your heart..." How typically Damon. Count on him to make a joke of everything.

"You know what I mean – vampires are supposed to recoil at the smell of garlic."

"I don't like to smell garlic, or any other kind of onion type vegetable. But it's not gonna help you if you just wave it at me. I can smell it in your blood, though, and that will make me less inclined to feed from you. It's not easily digested. Most vamps get cramps from it."

I took a bite of the bread and chewed with relish, enjoying his obvious dislike. "Good!" I said, after having finished. "If I ever decide to actually have dinner with you, let's make it Italian."

I instantly regretted that I had involuntarily turned the issue back to that, for his eyes got that glint again. He brought his head closer to mine and lowered his voice by a half note. "If you think you need to have Italian food on a date with me, then you shouldn't suggest going out with me."

"I wasn't," I quickly assured. "Suggesting it, I mean." Wanting to, maybe. Despite his warnings. His eyebrow rose. "Sure!" he said, and continued to stare at me with a cryptic expression. I was relieved when the waitress showed remarkable timing and came back to refill our water glasses.

"So – how come you can even walk around in plain daylight?" I mused, bringing my mind back to more innocent issues. "I thought you're supposed to burn to ashes."

"Writer's imagination!" Damon replied dismissively. "Although direct sunlight on unprotected skin sure feels like we are! We're just hypersensitive to UV-light, and direct exposure can cause third degree burns within a short time. But as long as I keep most of my body covered and stay in the shade, I'm okay. Bless the guy who invented sunblock! You can't imagine what it was like in the old days..."

"Just how old are you, exactly?"

"Isn't that a tactless question to ask?"

"Only if you were a woman."

"I'll turn a hundred and seventy-four in November."

"Oh." That had me speechless for a moment, though I couldn't say what I had expected. He had been born around 1840 then. For the first time, the implications of eternal life struck me. How did one cope with seeing generation after generation of people come and go? How did one cope with losing his loved ones over and over again?

I cleared my throat, which had constricted for a moment. "How troublesome that must be!" I said, playing it light. "How do you get all the candles on the cake?"

"Believe me, after a hundred and fifty, you don't really celebrate anymore." There was a hidden pain and sadness behind his words that was impossible to ignore.

"I can imagine it must be truly horrible," I said softly, feeling suddenly sorry for him. "To see all the people you love grow old and die... how do you manage?"

"Simple enough," Damon said, "don't love."

I stared at him in disbelief, remembering suddenly what he had said about that at the dinner party. "You can't seriously mean that! Haven't you ever been in love? I'm sorry – I hope you don't mind me asking that..."

"I don't." He shrugged. "As long as you don't mind me not answering that."

"Why – did it end badly?"

"It always ends badly." Wow. That did come out gloomy. He must really have had some hurtful experiences if he was that pessimistic when it came to relationships. I felt I had to object to that. "Not every relationship is doomed to end."

"Sure it is!" Damon insisted. "Everything is doomed to end – in death!"

"But before that, there is a long life to live!"

"The human life span is pitifully short."

"I guess that depends on perspective! There are people who live without ever really living at all – without loving and caring for anybody. Those lives are basically wasted to begin with. It's only the relationships we have that make them worthwhile."

"Until death doth part them?" He scoffed. "Obviously, you're a believer – a big romanticist..."

"I don't think I am. The truth is, I sometimes have my doubts, too. So far, at least, it has never worked out for me."

He gave me a curious look. "Not even with Stefan?"

"Now, I'm not gonna discuss Stefan with you, of all people."

"Yeah, maybe we'd better not discuss him – just forget about him altogether." The twinkle in his eyes clearly conveyed the double meaning of his words. There was more to it, though. He kept his mesmerizing gaze on me, almost as if meaning to hypnotize me. I drew back, remembering what Damon had said about his mind-altering powers. Could he really make me forget things – including Stefan, just by staring at me like that? Or manipulate me into doing something I didn't really want to?

"Is that why I'm sitting here with you now?" I asked, suspicious now. "Did you use your mind-powers on me to get me to come with you?"

Damon frowned. "You think I needed to manipulate you for that? Why, Elena – is it so surprising and so unacceptable for you to think that you might actually be sitting here with me because you wanted to?" Again, I cowardly averted my eyes from that penetrating gaze of his; those unbelievably blue eyes that always seemed to strip your soul bare.

"I can't change the way people feel about something," he finally replied, not insisting that I answer his question. Or maybe I had unconsciously already answered it. "I can just try to make people forget certain things, by pushing them back and hiding them somewhere, deep below the surface."

"So you can erase people's minds?"

"No. I can only successfully hide a specific memory – one that people long to forget. Like realizing that a vampire just fed on them. Anything painful, scary or threatening that freaks them out. If they don't want it to be real, it's easy to convince them that it's not."

"Then why didn't you or Stefan use that trick on me, yesterday?"

"He – because he can't. Like I said – just feeding from animals makes you weak. I – well, because I didn't want to. It's kind of nice to have someone knowing – we wouldn't be having this nice chat, otherwise." Damon gave me a complacent smile before he put on his somber face again. "Besides, I don't think it would have worked, anyway. You were far too suspicious even before that. I would have needed to erase all those little, nagging thoughts that had at some point surfaced in your mind, which would proved difficult, given that each of them by itself wasn't freaky enough to make you long to forget it. It would have required deep and serious messing, and you never know how a human brain reacts to that. Last but not least, I had the distinct impression you wanted to know."

"Yes, I did. Although I'm not so sure now." I frowned, getting back to what had brought this talk about of mind powers on. "So, even if you can't go completely against my will when speaking of memory-alteration... what if it comes to manipulating people to specifically do something... 'to persuade' – as you had put it?"

"If I manage to make people do something, it's only because they've been secretly wanting to do it all along and just needed a little nudge. Or at least, they weren't averse to it. I can't force people to act completely against their nature. Besides," Damon pointedly shifted his gaze to my cleavage, "I'd have a hard time putting you under compulsion as long you're wearing that magical trinket."

Instinctively, my hands flew to the necklace Stefan had given me, blocking his gaze. "You mean it's really working? Not some sort of talisman to make me feel safe?"

"Stefan didn't tell you?" Damon gave me a quizzical look. "He put you under his protection. No other vampire can control you – as long as you're willingly accepting his patronage."

"His patronage? He just gave me a necklace..."

"No, it's a magical item – and it has to have his blood in it somewhere. Don't ask me exactly how it works, but it's some kind of rite or spell: In giving it to you, he offered his protection and made a claim on you, in accepting it from him, you made the magic work. No other vampire can compel you now."

"Not a very effective form of protection," I frowned. "You could always rip the necklace off. A few blisters would heal."

"You don't have to have it on you constantly for the magic to work. The necklace is just a token that carries the spell. Blood being offered, blood being accepted. Thus, it's reversible: If he takes it back or if you willingly return it, the patronage ends. But there's more to it than just protection from mind-manipulations..."

"Like what?"

"A human in a patronage usually freely shares her blood with her patron. Other vampires recognize someone else's claim on you and usually respect that by not feeding from you."

I stared at him in shock. "You mean I was branded as his personal blood bag?" I asked, wondering if he was just trying to rile me up again. Damon shrugged. "Sort of."

I shook my head. No way. Stefan wouldn't do that. He said he wasn't feeding from humans, and I believed him. "I don't believe in that esoteric stuff, anyway," I firmly told Damon. He was not going to drive a wedge between Stefan an me.

"You used to not believe in vampires," he pointed out, stealing the cookie from my saucer. "Believe me, witchcraft is for real, as you well know, having a Bennett witch as a friend. There are far more mystical things in this world than you care to know."

A thought hit me out of nowhere. Or maybe it was his talking about mysteries that had triggered it. "Can you turn yourself into a bird?" I asked him, not really sure myself what answer I was expecting.

"Come again?" His surprise was genuine, although it was immediately replaced by irony. "Well no, but I can change into a bat on a full moon..." I ignored it, holding on to the foggy thought that was becoming more clear. "I keep seeing raven-like birds all the time. Crows, except they're huge. And somehow, the sight of one always connects to a thought of you."

A lascivious smile spread across his lips. "So you're telling me that you're thinking about me a lot... now that's interesting!"

I blushed at my blunder. "No, that's not what I was saying – I didn't mean ʻall the time' in a literal sense – it was more along the line of ʻit happened a couple of times' – you know..." I broke off, realizing that I was babbling. Geez, what was wrong with me?

Damon looked amused. "So what you actually meant to say is that you saw a raven once or twice and it made you think of me?" He raised his eyebrow. "Come on, you're not really thinking I'm some kind of shape-shifter!"

"I used to not believe in vampires!" I repeated his argument.

"You have a point there. So – when exactly did you see one?"

"At the cemetery, once. Another time, when I was looking for Caroline, on the night of the spring break party. Even at my window, once, when I woke up in the middle of the night. Which reminds me: First time was when I was down in Carolina, though that was way before I met you..."

The amusement completely faded from his face. "That's... scary," Damon said, and it sounded like he really meant it. Somehow, I was surprised he could even grasp the concept of fear.

"Why do you think I'm seeing it?" I asked, not even sure if I wanted to know. If the fact that I was seeing ravens unsettled him, it was probably something I shouldn't really delve into. Yet I couldn't help myself.

"I don't know. Maybe you should ask your psychic girlfriend."

"I did. She said, in mythology, the raven is a paladin who acts as a strong and protective guardian to those who are in his favor. Nice, but not exactly helpful. And seeing it didn't feel good. It felt creepy."

"Well, she didn't tell you the entire truth, then. In Celtic mythology, the raven is also associated with the god of the underworld. He's a harbinger of death and disaster."

I looked at him with mouth agape. He had to be kidding. Only it was a very bad sort of joke. You didn't tell people straight to their face about bad omens, least of all to people who already believed that they had a shadow above their heads. As I did. Ever since the tragic deaths of my brother and my parents, I had been thinking of death itself as my steady companion – walking along with me for a little while longer before it would strike one last time and take me, too. And there had been times when I thought it highly unfair that it hadn't happened yet. Still, having it told to my face that death was now haunting me in the very real form of a bird was not only mildly unsettling. It was outright terrifying.

"You think the fact that I'm seeing this bird tells me that I'm about to die?" I asked, requesting him – challenging him – to take it back. Which he promply did. "No, I didn't say that. Symbols are more subtle than that. That's why they're symbols."

"Then what?"

"Honestly? I think of it as a manifestation of your subconscious mind. You have a secret death wish."

"What?" I gasped, wondering if he had just been reading my thoughts. If so, he had been seriously misinterpreting them. Just because there had been times when I thought I couldn't make it through the day, times when I had been so overwhelmed with loss and grief that I had welcomed almost anything that would make the pain go away, didn't mean that I was suicidal. Not once had I considered that ending my life would be a good way to end it all. I was stronger than that. I knew my parents would have wanted me to be. Having experienced death first hand, I had just come to accept the possibility that my life could be over any moment. That didn't mean that I was hoping for it!

"I don't have a death wish! How can you say something like that?" I felt myself shake with anger. Or was it trepidation?

Damon's expression remained calm and unfazed. "Because it's true," he said simply. "How you went all by yourself after a potential rapist to save your friend. How you wandered off into one of the least respectful areas of the city all by yourself. The way you acted last night. The fact you're sitting here with me... It's plain obvious: You're courting danger. That's why you crave my company."

"I most definitively do not!" I forcefully objected, not sure, though, whether I primarily was negating to court danger or craving his company.

"Yes, you do!" Damon insisted, his eyes sparkling again. "It's unconscious. Probably because of the death of your parents. I think you blame yourself for being alive while they aren't, and you think you deserve to be taken by death, too. And a likely cause of death is what I am. That's why you find yourself drawn to me."

I could only stare at him speechlessly for a moment. This was absurd. Utterly ridiculous to the point of insulting. My eyes narrowed. "How can you be so incredibly glib and arrogant?"

"And how can you be so daring as to call a vampire glib and arrogant, if you're not looking for trouble?" he countered.

"You're not scaring me!" I claimed boldly. "If you wanted my blood, you could've taken it by now."

"Yes, I could have!" He raised his brow and gave me a meaningful look.

"But you haven't."

"Yet!"

"Then what are you waiting for? My consent?"

His gaze was thoughtful when he looked at me. "The right moment?" he offered.

"Well, good for you to be what you are," I replied snappishly, getting up. "Because you really can afford the time to wait forever."

Damon just smiled, and signaled to the waitress. "I guess we'll see about that..."

A/N: As you see, I've taken some liberties with those nifty vampire gifts. The important ones to keep in mind: Compulsion only works so far - compelling someone to kill a loved one wouldn't work. Garlic does have a similar effect as vervain. Contact with silver is worse than vervain and will cause severe injuries. And though vampires are sensitive to direct sunlight (it would hurt and injure them severely if they were exposed to it for a longer time), they don't need bespelled rings to walk in daylight. And I found the necklace protection highly questionable as the TVD writer's handled it, because it would be easy to rip it off. Besides, I liked the idea of having a potential bond between a human and a vampire - protection against blood. Stefan (being as righteous as he is) is probably not going to take Elena up on her end of the bargain, anyway.