We Are Young

Dressed in a pair of uncomfortable 'skinny jeans' and a long sleeved deep green shirt, Astra felt out of place in her own body. Damon and Katherine were reading away through journals a couple of feet away as she sat before the fireplace and tried to act as though she wasn't losing her mind. She and Katherine continued to look to one another with death glares, before Katherine looked away when Astra sneered mockingly and discretely cracked her fingers. It was easy to taunt the younger vampire, and it was the only form of fun that she could find in the house.

"I am bored," she declared, rising from her chair and striding over to the bookshelves that lined the walls of the room. Damon looked up from the journal in his hands to watch as she began to run one finger along the spines of the books, reading the titles until she could find something that sparked her interest. He couldn't help but to watch her for a moment, inspecting the curls of golden hair that fell along her back or the long nimble fingers that traced over faded, aged leather with a careful, feathery touch.

"Poor baby," Katherine mocked, never once looking up from the old pages in her hands. Astra sneered in distaste, but kept her eyes on the books, briefly stopping every now and again as she considered for a moment whether or not to read the book before continuing on. He noticed that many of the titles were Latin, and her eyes held a sense of nostalgia that broke his heart.

"I am older than you, Katarina," Astra began, glancing over her shoulder at last. "I cannot be your baby." Katherine slammed the journal down that was in her hand and moved to rush toward the other vampire, but Damon stood in her path before she could reach her and gave her a warning look. It wasn't as though he expected her to be afraid of him, she was stronger after all, but Astra could snap Katherine like a twig and she seemed to continuously forget about that. Damon was sure that if Astra remembered the time that they had been together, Katherine would already be dead.

Katherine hissed in distaste before storming from the room like a temperamental child, causing Astra to laugh breathily in amusement. Damon glanced back at her, not having heard her laugh in such a way ever before. The side of her that he had been seeing since she had awoke without a memory of him was very different and he found himself wondering just who it was he had fallen in love with in the past. Was the Astra he knew the real Astra, had she changed so much, or was that just a fake in order to get close to him? She was a predator, after all, and she knew how to adapt to her surroundings and do all she had to in order to get what she wanted.

"You really like annoying her, huh?"

"When I first met Katarina Elijah ordered me to be nice to her so that she did not go running off. It was only a brief meeting, I doubt she even remembers. Whenever she saw me while she was with Elijah, though, she would sneer at me like she had won some kind of a game. I was his lover, and she was a sacrifice. I wish I could have been there to see her face when she truly found out how wrong she was." Damon didn't know whether he liked this Astra or not, but he did know that she was much better for his lifestyle than the human her—or, at least he had believed her to be human—had been.

"Lovers?"

"Our relationship is strange; at least what I know of it. I am sure something must have happened between us in the past five centuries, but I cannot tell you of any of that, as you know. Elijah and I were lovers while I was human, then we were friends, then we were acquaintances, then we were friends again, and once more we were lovers. It's all very complicated," she explained, waving her hand as though it didn't matter. Damon's blood was boiling, however, at the thought of her hiding such things from him while they had been engaged. Then again, she couldn't exactly have kept up the mirage of being human and telling him she had a couple centuries old relationship with another man. He wasn't quite the saint, either, as well.

"How old were you when you died?" he asked curiously.

Astra paused and frowned for a moment, actually having to think back because of how long it had been since she had been asked such a question. It wasn't often in the medieval era that a woman was asked her age. "I was twenty four summers when I died," she finally answered, "Just barely, too. Less than a season."

The strange phrasing was forcing Damon not to crack a smirk, leaving him to purse his lips and nod his head in understanding. She seemed to notice and glared at him briefly, turning her back to continue with reading through the book titles, hoping to alleviate her boredom. Elijah had bought her hundreds of books to keep her sane when she was alone, as he often had to leave with Nicklaus and Rebekah was travelling, leaving her alone. That was often dangerous.

"How old are you, Damon?"

"I'm one-hundred and seventy-three years old as a vampire, but I was twenty-three when I was human," Damon answered, counting off the years in his head. Astra gasped and her hand flew to her mouth as her amethyst eyes widened. He raised an eyebrow at the reaction before he realized that she was trying not to laugh behind her hand. "What?"

"You are but an infant, Mr. Salvatore!" she gasped out, the smile evident in her voice. At his sour look, she only appeared to laugh harder. "Oh, I am sorry. Did I wound your pride?" Damon wasn't sure whether he should be offended or not, considering how open she was acting even though her words did hit against his ego pretty hard. She was content to be in his presence once more. "I apologize," she said softly as she calmed herself down, reaching forward to place a hand on his arm before turning away and concentrating on the books once more. Damon's arm felt like it was burning where she had touched him and he forced himself to ignore the feeling.

Damon looked to the ground as he leaned back against the bookcase, listening to Astra pull a book free from its place and open it to the first page. "I'll protect you from him," Damon declared in a soft voice, but those simple words halted Astra's skimming eyes as the very blood in her veins.

She didn't turn to look at him and Damon wasn't sure if that was good or bad. "Strong words for someone that I don't even know," she mumbled at last, keeping her eyes on the book, even though she clearly wasn't seeing it anymore. Damon's throat constricted at her tone, knowing that he had slipped up and revealed that there was much he hadn't been telling her. She was probably suspicious about him all along, but he had basically just confirmed any doubts of hers in a simple sentence.

"You do know me," Damon began, moving forward and carefully pulling the book from her hands, keeping his actions slow and precise. "You knew me back when I was human," he continued, trying to gain her full attention. She refused to look at him, however, and kept her eyes firmly looking forward.

"And you did not feel the need to tell me this?" she asked in a dark voice, one that Damon had wished wouldn't be turned on him. "I know nothing of what has happened to me for hundreds of years, and here you are with at least some answers and you still feel the need to keep that to yourself?" she snapped at him, her eyes and intense glare before her.

"I didn't know how you'd react." Damon tried to defend himself; "You're not the same Astra I know, partly because you were Astra and not Astraea. I admit it, I panicked when you didn't recognize me! I had no clue what to do because to you I am now a complete stranger."

"And what were you then?" she asked in a sharp tone, finally turning those haunting eyes to his. He kind of wished that she hadn't, because there was red beginning to seep into her eyes and the veins beneath them were slowly edging their way to the surface of her skin. The face of her demon inside was slowly rising to the surface as her anger mounted.

Damon didn't answer at first and he could see that that only caused her to grow more angered, her lip drawing back into a snarl and her eyes darkening to complete red surrounding violet. "I proposed to you," Damon answered in a quiet, fast sentence. The snarl almost immediately vanished from Astra's face as she straightened herself up in shock, her body rigid with tension as she tried to decipher through his words. She had no idea if he was telling the truth or not and she found herself fearing the answer to her own questions. "So believe me when I say it's hard for me to be close to you without you remembering either."

Air. Astra decided in that moment that she really needed air. Running from the house faster than she could be seen, she was soon standing in the center of the front yard with her hands gripping at her hair as she tried to will her memories to return. Pulling at the golden strands, it was as though she was expecting that to speed up the process or something. Damon appeared behind her a moment later, actually surprised that she was still on the property. When she had run, he was afraid she was run to the town or out into the forest where he couldn't find her. Instead, she had only run out into open space where she could breathe better and didn't feel like everything was constricting until she was being crushed by the walls around her.

"I wanted to tell you, but what would you have thought if I just came right out a said 'I was your fiancé! But you just don't remember!' I didn't hold it back to hurt you, Astra," Damon said dramatically, almost yelling out to an audience that was not there. Astra released her hair and turned around to face him almost furiously, Damon's own serious blue eyes meeting her own. How would she have accepted his proposal? He who is so different from Elijah?

"Did I turn you, then?"

"No," Damon answered immediately. "I don't know if you ever planned to; it kind of just happened without either of us getting a say. Not that I'm about to complain, immortality has been treating me quite well," he drawled out, smirking in such a 'Damon' way.

The Astra that had appeared in place of the one that Damon had come to know didn't seem to appreciate the innuendo, however, and turned sharply to begin walking away because of her irritation to the other vampire. Damon moved quickly, because he now knew that if she was able to run then he would lose her at the speed she had gained through the years. She wasn't surprised when he appeared in front of her, his expression serious once more.

"I don't have time for this, Mr. Salvatore-"

Grasping her face in his hands, Damon stopped her from continuing as he sealed her lips with his, the warmth that came from them something that he had never completely forgotten and had missed greatly over the years. Her breath hitched in her throat as her hands lifted almost as though to push him away, but she froze mid reach and was left unsure of what she was going to do.

When she finally did pull away, Damon looked up to find her several yards away from him with her hands covering her mouth and her eyes wide. Red surrounded the beautiful violet colour of her irises and he knew that she was covering up her fangs beneath her hands. As he stepped forward to try and get closer to her, Astra's eyes narrowed at him and he could hear a faint growling noise begin to rise from her chest.

"I'm not a threat, Astra," Damon tried to sooth, but she only dropped her hands and bared her fangs at him. For him to see someone that he had spent over a century believing to be human glaring at him with red eyes and fangs, it actually stuck both fear and longing inside of him.

"No," she purred, her glare slowly turning into a sneer of what Damon could only describe as triumph. "You're food."

Damon's back connected with the ground before he even saw Astra move, the air rushing from his lungs and preventing his scream of agony as Astra's fangs tore into his throat with excessive force. Her hands held him down, centuries more in strength preventing him from fighting against her. He could feel the heat of his own blood rushing along his skin as it gushed out, passing her lips. She wasn't being gentle, and the pain was immense as she pulled at his skin every time the wound would begin to close, tearing it open again.

"A-Astra," he choked out, one of her hands moving up to clutch at his throat that wasn't occupied by her mouth and silenced him from continuing.

When a searing pain rocketed through Astra's skull, she threw herself off of Damon with a roar of pain, blood flying from her mouth and splattering on Damon's cheek. He blinked tiredly for a moment before his eyes rolled back into his head and he blacked out from the blood loss. Astra fell to her knees beside him, his blood continuing to drip from her bottom lip and chin as her hands grasped her head, trying to alleviate some of the pain.

Kicking at the ground, she took off at a dead run to get away from Damon as fast as she could. It wasn't completely his blood that was causing this that much she knew. It was something else; something that his blood had triggered in her mind. Aside from the attack her mind had made on her head, the blood was exquisite. It was almost like she was finally having something that she had been craving for so long. Her throat tightened and she fought against turning back and biting him again, forcing herself to continue on as his blood steadily slid down the skin of her throat.

Something was terribly wrong.

It felt like the memories inside of her head that had been repressed were violently trying to push their way to the forefront of her mind, screaming 'Remember! Remember!' Falling to lean against a tree, Astra pressed her forehead to the rough bark, repressing the urge to smack her head against it in a desperate attempt to mask the pain pulsing inside her skull. The memories were just out of her reach; Damon's blood had been a serious trigger but she didn't want to risk drinking from him against lest she kill him or herself.

Now she's hungry.

Sorry that this has taken forever, I didn't mean to take this long but it kind of happened. Now, though, she's finally out of the Salvatore house and with that you can imagine some interesting things are ahead…