Vampire Diaries 1. Chapter 1

**Inverse Redemption**

_Disclaimer: Don't own, just playing crazy, crazy games_

_A/N: This story is set at the end of season two TVD. It contains spoilers up to episode 2:21 but is an AU story that will deviate wildly from canon after the prologue. It is also a story that will be set in 1864 and will focus on Damon, Katherine and Stefan. Characters from present day Mystic Falls (such as Elena) will be mentioned but I don't know yet if they will feature in this story beyond the prologue._

_I would also like to dedicate this story to Waltzmatildah whose appreciation of all things D/K helped inspire the idea for this story._

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><p><em>Prologue: Time travel is not one of the five stages of grief<em>

Five days, seven hours and twenty-three minutes. That's how much time had passed since Klaus' ritual sacrifice had been averted and Elena had been spared. Victory had been far from bloodless and marred, as most victories were, in tragedy. Every action had a consequence and every life a price to pay.

The first to pay had been Jenna Sommers; a truly innocent victim in a game far too big for her. Then John Gilbert died to buy back Elena's lost choices and from there the ripple effect of loss took its toll on the others too, one way or the other. Elena, Jeremy, and Alaric felt Jenna's loss the most keenly, but no one was immune. They were all walking wounded when Sheriff Forbes ripped apart what little illusion of safety they had tried to wrap around themselves in the aftermath. In the wake of her actions Caroline, Matt, and Tyler paid their dues in blood and sorrow and sacrifice.

Then it was Damon's turn, although in retrospect, his death was assured before any other. It was just delayed in the execution. Wolf-bitten on the night of the full moon trying to save Caroline Damon kept up the front for the fight against Klaus and the immediate aftermath, but it was only a matter of time before he succumbed. Five days, seven hours and twenty-three minutes to be exact.

He wasn't quite not dead yet but even by the unique standards of most vampires he could hardly be described as _living_. Ironically compared to Rose, Damon actually had it easy for the first couple of days. Fever, sickness, and a creeping sense of displacement and paranoia that was as much about tying up loose ends and seeking absolution as it was encroaching insanity, were nothing compared to the convulsions, blood vomiting, and gangrenous rotting Rose went through in the space of the first twenty-four hours of the infection.

It was almost enough to encourage the stupidly optimistic among them all – mostly Stefan – to hope that maybe, just maybe, wolf-bites weren't always fatal to vampires. Maybe because Tyler wasn't fully transformed the bite was less potent? Or perhaps Rose had just been damned unlucky and it was worse for her? Stefan even toyed with the idea that Klaus breaking the curse had something to do with the atypical course Damon's infection was taking.

On the fourth day however all hope was lost; because on the fourth day the pain came and swept Damon away.

Stefan had seen and endured any number of ugly, hideous, and even piteous things in his long existence – many of them having some connection to his brother – but the moment he blurred down the basement stair to find Damon in the secure cell (where he'd put him to stop anymore suicide attempts) tearing into the rotted flesh of his left arm was a moment that was going to haunt him for the rest of his eternity.

Lucidity gone Damon had been like a sick animal, wild with pain, tearing at the festering, bloated, cracked and sloughing skin of his arm with nails and fingers and even teeth. He attacked himself as if he wanted to rip his own arm off, smacking his head repeatedly against the solid stone walls of his cell hard enough to shatter his skull all the while making terrible, bestial snarling noises deep in his throat.

Stefan had restrained Damon, tying him to the fold away cot. He'd tried to treat and dress the necrotic mess of splitting, stinking, decaying flesh and tissue that used to be a perfectly serviceable left arm but when he touched Damon's skin, even with a fingertip, he felt it slide and slip and fall apart in wet, oozing pustules. Damon screamed then. He screamed and would not stop. Stefan drugged him with vervain, doped him with whiskey, bourbon, vodka and blood. He tried to talk to Damon, made promises that he would fix this. Fix _him_. Repeated over and over like a mantra that he could not lose him and that Damon had to hold on.

It was all pointless because in the rare moments his brother was quiet and still, neither screaming in mindless pain nor passed out in fitful oblivion, he would turn blank eyes on Stefan devoid of wit, awareness, or any recognition. He stank of sickness and death and animal fear.

"Stefan."

Elena came to him, pale and gaunt, a woman old and worn in spirit wearing the suddenly ill-fitting body of a very young girl. She came to him where he sat against the clammy wall of the basement corridor right outside Damon's cell. She touched him with chilled fingers and her eyes were bruised with so much loss already.

"Stefan he's in pain." She said; the non-sequitur making altogether too much sense.

Inside the cell Damon lay on his cot, flat on his back, eyes open but staring unseeing at the ceiling. His chest rose in great heaving breaths, rasping and torn, his lips parted and faintly blue from oxygen depletion. His bitten arm was wrapped in stained bandages from fingertip to shoulder and his pallor was chalky, the tell-tale signs of vampire desiccation setting in as, no longer responsive to anything or anyone, he refused all blood.

"He's not getting worse." Stefan told her, numbly reaching up to clasp his own hand over hers as it rested on his shoulder. "He's stabilised. I just need to keep getting some blood into him." He shook his head sharply hearing a buzzing panic in his ears. "There's still time. He's not getting worse."

"Stefan." Elena jerked away from him eyes shooting from Damon in the cell to Stefan and back again. "How can you say that? Look at him. He's _suffering_." Her voice cracked on the last and she stared hollowly into the open doorway of the cell. Stefan didn't know what she thought or felt; the quick fire dance of emotion over her face seemed alien to him. He wondered if she loved Damon in her own way; he wondered if it even mattered.

"He wouldn't want this." Elena told him with bitter finality as if the scant few months she'd known Damon could compare with Stefan's lifetime of fraternity. "He'd hate this. You know that."

"He's my brother." Stefan said and he thought he'd said those three words so many times in the last five days that they'd lost all meaning – if they ever had any to begin with. Yet he clings to them still. Clings to the knee-jerk, irrational, gut-churning certainty that he cannot, will not, _must not_ let go.

"I know." Elena took a shuddering breath and dropped down beside him, notching her chin on his shoulder. Her breath tickled his neck as she breathed out a half-sob. "I know." She repeated. "But this is cruel Stefan. It's cruel and he…he deserves better." She kissed his shoulder and it stung.

"What are you asking me?" Stefan flinched away from his own question. Elena did not.

"We have to let him go Stefan."

"No." Stefan was up and standing before he realised it. He stared down at Elena unable to recognise her. She was speaking a language he didn't understand. Panic sang a rising chorus in his mind. He was afraid to listen too closely to what that chattering choir was telling him. So he ignored it until all he could hear was the roaring of blood in his ears.

"No." He repeated raking fingers through his hair and turning away from Elena. "I am going to find a way to fix this."

Turning away from Elena meant he had no choice but to look down at his brother's still warm carcass, rotting alive in a cold, dank basement. Damon's blank roaming eyes had closed and Stefan wondered if he dreamed.

"This isn't how it ends," He whispered unable to turn away from what was left of Damon no matter how much he wished he could. "I can't lose him, not now."

"Stefan please," Elena moved up behind him, wrapping her arms around him from behind and pressing her face against the dip of his shoulder blades. "Don't make him suffer anymore." She whispered, her tears burning through the fabric of his shirt like acid mixed vervain. "Let him have peace finally."

"There's still time Elena." He insisted clasping his hands over hers as they stretched around his chest. "There's still time. I'll bring him back. I'll fix all this."

In his cell, lying on sweat and putrid stiffened sheets, Damon moaned, a somnambulant, unintelligible sound and silently, swiftly, treacherously, time ran its course around both brothers, dragging the one away from the other as it had for the best part of two centuries.

"This should never have happened." Stefan told the thick enervating air of the basement. "This isn't how we were supposed to end up." Stefan spoke with a leaden tongue, trying to explain something as nebulous as broken souls and lost destiny, of lives both shattered and unending and bonds savagely torn asunder. Mostly however Stefan wanted Elena at the very least to know about the wailing ghost of reconciliation singing painful threnodies in his mind and of a hope so cruel the loss of it threatened to devour Stefan as surely as the wolf bite ate away at Damon.

All he could say however was as prosaically childish as it was achingly honest.

"I wish there was a way to go back, back to the beginning and change everything. I wish there was a way we could do everything again. Erase the mistakes, the pain, the loss, and start all over again."


	2. Chapter 2

_A/N: warning for potty-mouth language in places._

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><p><em>Chapter one: Déjà vu all over again<em>

Damon snapped his eyes open brutally awake in an instant. He had a moment to catalogue the deluge of different sensations assaulting his brain, hard ground underneath him, the tickle of grass stems against the back of his neck, cool fresh air and the taste of morning dew on his lips and then there was a wet, whiskered muzzle in his face, a blast of hot breath across skin and an equine snort.

"What the fuck?"

Damon launched himself into a sitting position, almost distractedly shoving the horse out of his face as he blinked bleary eyes and took in his surroundings. He was in a field, or a pasture, or some kind of big open grassy space. There was a copse of trees in the distance and the blackened remnants of a small campfire, all grey ash and scorched stone, a few feet from his position. The sky was heavy and overcast, dully glowing with pearlescent cloud. The big chestnut bay that had woken Damon stood beside him, black tail twitching as it bent its huge head and started chewing on his hair. Jerking his head away from the horses thick, rubbery lips Damon turned around and stared.

"Milo?"

The horse tossed his head, whickered in contempt and wandered off towards a patch of wild flowers but Damon had seen enough. This horse was a dead ringer for his old horse Milo. The horse he'd broken in himself as a foal and taken with him when he went to war. It was then that Damon noticed what he was wearing. The grey, threadbare, messily darned uniform of a confederate soldier, his fabric cap crumpled on the grass behind him obviously pressed into service as a makeshift pillow. Just the feel of the rough, abrasive wool of his old uniform was enough to send a shiver down his spine. He plucked at the sleeves, fumbled to undo the brass buttons and poked at his string vest covered flesh underneath.

What the hell was going on?

The last thing he remembered was waiting to die in the basement of the boarding house, his body aching with a raging fever and his thoughts skidding together in a thunderous cacophony of pain and a distant sort of regret. Was this a delusion then? Had the were-bite dementia dissolved his mind to a nostalgic sludge, forcing him to relive abstract moments of his long inglorious life before he finally rotted away to nothing? If it was then he was seriously disappointed. There were way more interesting parts of his life he could be reliving than memories of a god damned horse.

Rising unsteadily to his feet, and kicking out the kinks in his muscles, Damon figured he might as well make the most of this fairly benign hallucination while it lasted. He bent down and picked up the slightly blood stained knapsack lying in the grass next to his discarded blanket and peered inside. A wave of nostalgia poured out as he discovered a twine bound stack of battered letters from Stefan that he almost remembered receiving with desperate joy during his time on the frontlines in Georgia. There was also some hardtack and basic rations, and a canteen, sadly only containing water, beside a mealy apple at the bottle of the knapsack under a spare shirt and undergarments.

It was an exercise in delving the far reaches of his memory trying to saddle up Milo after, what was it now, maybe seventy years without riding a horse? But he managed in the end and Milo, contentedly munching on the apple, seemed inclined to be patient. Once he was mounted on the horse however he actually found himself smiling. He used to love to ride back in the day and, hallucination or not, there was something incredibly peaceful in the sensation as Milo started off at a lazy pace in a basically westward direction. Damon had no idea where he was going after all, and as this was all just a figment of his dying mind's imagination anyhow he figured any point of the compass was as good as any other.

A few miles down the wide dirt road he came across just beyond the grassy meadow Damon began to suspect he knew where he was after all. He was on the long road back to old Fell's Church. Which was just peachy-keen. Obviously his tendency for masochism extended to his subconscious as well, because dying demented clearly wasn't enough. Oh no. Now he had to start having vivid flashbacks to god damned 1864 as well. And this was the year 1864, of that Damon had no doubt. There was no other year it could possibly be; his prior human existence had long since distilled into a sliding blur in his mind after all. 1864 was where it all ended and began. There was no other time and place his mind would regress to right now, when he was likely dying for good, than 1864's Fell's Church.

All the same riding into the centre of the old town was surreal. The town's central square was at least familiar, as was the clock tower, but as he looked left and right at wooden awnings swinging in the light breeze above the apothecary and the Fell's General Store (which in his reality happened to be a swanky Apple boutique) and caught the dung-heap reek of horse crap lying in the road instead of the much more familiar sting of car exhaust fumes hanging on the air, Damon felt a bubble of hysterical laughter rise and lodge in his throat. This was worse than Mystic Fall's Founder's Day pageantry. The dress and trappings of his youth were completely alien to him now.

He pressed his heels into Milo's flank, nudging him into a faster trot just so he could get through town that much faster and kept his eyes dead ahead, studiously ignoring the few petticoated and parasol bearing ladies walking the boardwalks from one store front to another who looked up at his passing. He had no idea how involved this hallucination was going to get –it seemed pretty damned vivid already – but he didn't think he could handle talking to anyone just now. Hell he wasn't sure he even remembered how to talk to people in 1864. He'd absorbed way too many pop-culture references from the twentieth century in the interim.

Milo led him along the (not so old) Fell's Road, past the still standing church, along a sun-dappled wooded path to a place he had tried his level best to banish completely from his memory.

Home.

"Whoa boy," He pulled Milo to a halt as they broke from the trees at the edge of the Salvatore estate and Damon slipped off the horse's back.

His father's house stood, tall and proud and glowing in sunshine beyond the pastures, a distant memory no longer all that distant, and Damon felt his stomach cramp painfully with what he assumed was something akin to long buried grief. He wondered how he could be assaulted by a wave of buried memory within what was basically one long, delirium fuelled trip down memory lane in the first place. His feet rooted themselves to the ground and he jerked Milo back by the reins when the horse, recognising home, tried to move forward.

"I don't want to be here Toto," he murmured when the horse shook his head irritably clearly wondering what the freaking hold up was. The horse pulled forward again and this time Damon let himself be towed along. He kept a light hold on Milo's reins as he walked simply to help ground him as he approached the stables, every detail perfect beyond anything he consciously remembered. He could almost believe this was real except obviously that would be completely insane.

"Master Damon?"

A man in rough homespun looked up from mucking out the stables when Damon entered with Milo in tow. His weathered face was creased like old, stretched leather and his mutton-chops were a pure, prickly white. He pulled the flat cap from his head and used it to swipe sweat from his brow as he set aside the pitchfork and moved forward to greet Damon.

"You have got to be kidding me," Damon blinked and took a small step back without thinking. Like Dorothy in her red slippers Damon found himself chanting his own desperate mantra, except 'there's no place like home' became 'I want out of this fucked up nightmare _now_.'

"Master Salvatore didn't say you were coming home, sir." The old man told him smiling warmly with missing teeth. "This is a surprise." He swept rheumy eyes over Damon and Milo, assessing them both. The reek of manure and sweat rising from the man like heat haze off asphalt was almost overpowering. "You look well sir. I'm glad to see it. After what happened in Atlanta –well –our prayers have been with you and the rest of our boys fighting those damn Yankees."

The man – whose name Damon could not remember – looked at him oddly, the smile fading from his worn parchment face when Damon failed to reply to the cheery greeting. "Are you feeling well sir? You look a mite…out of sorts."

"God no," Damon barked out a laugh before he could help himself. Then he shook his head harshly and abruptly let go of the reins of his horse. The urge to run and hide was so powerful the muscles in his thighs had started quivering. He felt like prey, exposed and undone. His eyes darted nervously around the confines of the stable, hoping for some tell-tale inconsistency in the delusion he could use to break free. There wasn't any. This was the perfect prison of the mind. He kept backing away out of the stables and away from the man and the horse and all of this shit. He couldn't remember being this…scared in a very long time. Dying didn't disturb him – he had earned a long painful death after all – but this, reliving the humiliation, frustration and helplessness of his last months of true life?…no, this was beyond torture.

"Master Damon…?" The old man, whoever the hell he was supposed to be, queried again moving tentatively closer.

"Fuck it. I need to get out of here."

Turning jerkily on his heel Damon did something he hadn't done in well over a century. He turned tail and ran. Sprinting across the pastures he didn't notice in his panic that he ran only at human speed, his feet taking him not away from the estate but instead towards the house, as if his own body was conspiring against him.

He came to a halt at the edge of the manicured gardens of the house, near the hedge maze and the white faux-marble statuary where father had enjoyed playing crochet with undercover hell-spawn harlots. Leaning against a live oak with wide spreading branches Damon swallowed hoarsely, his throat raw and dry and his sides aching. He felt light headed and dizzy from what was really a very short run. He also realised he was hungry but it felt different from the usual thirst for blood. Instead of his veins burning under his skin and his jaws aching dully it was his stomach twisting in his innards that he was most aware of and a sensation of being empty that he no longer recognised as a normal symptom of hunger. Cautiously he glanced at his ring-less left hand and then up to the overcast but still bright enough to immolate sky.

Huh, so he was remembering human hunger and human frailty was he? Even for his twisted subconscious it all seemed a little too cruel. He was dying insane and pathetic and only now could he remember what it felt like to be human again. That was some vicious irony right there. He'd almost be impressed except for the fact that, oh yeah, this was so not his idea of a good time.

"Ah but you must catch me first."

Damon's head jerked up at the sound of an all-too-familiar coquettish giggle. Oh fuck him, no. Not _her._ Damon had a moment to consider hiding behind the tree trunk or running the hell away again but it was already too late. A dark haired beauty in hitched up hoop-skirts, dark ringlets bouncing and smile as false as the rest of this travesty darted out of the maze and stopped short as soon as she saw him.

"Oh," Katherine simpered as she made a show of smoothing her skirts and brushing back her disordered curls. "Good-day to you sir," She offered up a dipping half-curtsey but Damon could see the sharp, keen, cruel intellect burning behind her eyes.

Damon stared. The last time he'd seen Katherine she'd been a prisoner in Ric's apartment compelled by Klaus to stay put until he commanded otherwise. He'd walked away from her fully expecting to never see Katherine again until the day someone finally staked her nasty, self-serving black heart and she ended up in hell right along with him. He should have known he'd never be that lucky. He should have realised that despite everything that had happened he couldn't hope to be free of her spectre even now. It was amazing how much he loathed just looking at her, even knowing she wasn't real.

"My name is Miss Katherine Pierce." Katherine was talking again and he thought that she had read something in his silence because she watched him with the sharp steadiness of a predator sizing up a potential threat. "May I enquire as to whom you might be?"

Somewhere in his hindbrain maniacal laughter threatened to drive Damon deaf. This was too much. He felt his lips pull back from very human teeth, but a snarl was still a snarl. "No one of interest to _you_, Miss Katherine," He spat, feeling more rage toward the visage of his first (stupid, misguided, wasted) love than he had for the real Katherine.

He pushed away from the tree and walked past the frowning vampire feeling fury quake his spine. How much longer did he have to suffer before someone ended him? He was dead and finished. He knew that. He deserved to suffer yes, but god damn this! He suffered all the time anyway. He suffered knowing his own stupidity had caused Elena so much pain. He suffered knowing that once again he'd failed when it mattered most. He suffered knowing he was dying a pathetic, broken wretch whose entire existence had been nothing but an exercise in futility. Why couldn't that be enough?

"Brother?" All suspenders and loose collared white shirt Stefan-not-Stefan appeared out of that damnable maze just to add insult to injury.

Damon barely acknowledged him. He didn't dare. All this was Stefan's damn fault. He'd prevented Damon from achieving a nice, dignified death by slow baking in front of the parlour window and locked him up in the basement just to draw out the ignominy. Figment of his imagination or not Damon knew if he was forced to look at Stefan right now he would kill him.

"Damon?" Stefan chased him down as he stalked over the wide expanse of lawn towards the big white house with its Corinthian columns and wonderfully nineteenth century vulgarity.

Damon spun around as he felt Stefan's hand clutch at his sleeve and shoved the stupid boy away. Stefan staggered, almost falling and his face, weirdly young looking despite the fact that real Stefan and memory Stefan looked exactly the same, was a mask of shock. Damon felt a savage surge of pleasure to see that. He reached out roughly to grab the boy (and he really was such a boy, funny how Damon had long since stopped seeing that in the real Stefan) and ended up yanking Stefan forward off balance, balling the loose fabric of his brother's shirt in his fists as he snarled in his face.

"Try that again and I will gut you brother."

"What?" The wide eyed look of horror that morphed Stefan's face was so different from the closed off, angry, passive-aggressive mask of indifference with which Stefan usually responded to his casual threats of bodily harm that Damon blinked and let go feeling a weird chill slide down his spine.

"Brother what is the matter with you?" Stefan gabbled smoothing down his shirt and staring at Damon as if he'd grown a second head. Damon licked his dry lips. Were hallucinations supposed to look so betrayed? Were they supposed to be this real? Behind Stefan's back, standing a few feet away, Damon spied Katherine watching him with the avid interest of a vulture eyeing its next meal.

"Leave me alone." He mumbled not sure if he was talking to Stefan or to Katherine, or even to the world in general. "Just leave me alone."

He turned then and stumbled up the steps and into the cool, darkened gloom of his father's house... or as he was beginning to suspect was more likely the case, the illusionary facade of hell itself.


	3. Chapter 3

_Chapter Two: The eyes have it_

Almost as soon as Damon stepped across the threshold into his father's house he discovered a flaw in his plan to barricade himself inside the illusion of his bedroom until, one, he woke up from this delusion, or two, he died in reality and thus ceased to be completely. The main problem was the fact that he could not for the life (or unlife) of him remember where his old bedroom was situated. In fact the entire floor plan of the Salvatore mansion seemed to have slipped his mind. He had vague memories of the ugly oil painting of his paternal grandmother that used to sit over the fireplace in the drawing room, as well as the sensory memory that his father's study used to smell of sun warmed leather, decanted brandy and tobacco snuff, but in practical terms he may as well have been a total stranger visiting this mansion for the first time.

Standing in the wide foyer of his father's house, eyeing the Gone with the Wind staircase and the gilt framed portraiture with suspicion Damon was just about to turn on his heel and leave once again, even if that meant running slap bang into his brother and Katherine when yet another unwelcome blast from the past appeared at the end of the hall and strode towards him.

Giuseppe Salvatore looked every inch as glad to see Damon as he was to be here in the first place. Damon eyed his father and murderer sceptically as the man came forward. In the last hundred and forty odd years he'd rarely thought about the man who had raised and killed him. Now he categorised all the little things about his father's appearance he had wilfully forgotten. Giuseppe's hair was snowy white, cropped close to his head and his face was cut in firm, disapproving lines. He was dressed well in dark clothes that didn't quite manage to hide a strong barrel-chested frame built of hard toil and so-called honest work.

"So you are back." His father looked him up and down, critically noting the mud caking his boots and the threadbare condition of his uniform. To say the welcome was underwhelming was stretching the notion of understatement to breaking point.

"I'm not convinced of that," Damon flashed his teeth, fingers twitching with murderous urges his human body couldn't give full vent to.

"I wasn't aware you were due leave from the front." His father said ignoring anything Damon himself had said, which was the habit he'd employed throughout much of Damon's formative years anyway. Once again Giuseppe looked him up and down, clearly not impressed to find his eldest son alive and in good health when he would have preferred to bury him a war hero, or, possibly just bury him regardless.

"Have one of the housemaids draw you a bath. You look a disgrace. I will see you in the study in an hour." Giuseppe ordered in perfunctory fashion before turning to go.

"I'm not staying." Damon was only mildly surprised by the words out of his mouth. After all none of this was real so none of it mattered. All the same the slight surprise on his father's face as he turned back to Damon was gratifying.

"I peg your pardon?" Giuseppe's tone, in contrast to his words, made it clear that begging was the last thing he was doing.

Damon felt his habitual smirk slide into place. "I said I'm not staying. I came back to collect my things that's all." He lied on the spot. Considering this hallucination seemed to be peculiarly lifelike Damon figured that if he wanted out of his damn Confederate uniform he'd have to change in the boring way and thus would need to find clothes from somewhere. He also knew there was no way in hell he was staying in this house with Katherine, Stefan and his father.

"You would speak to me in such a manner?" Giuseppe seemed to be having trouble processing his words. "Enough of this foolishness; I will see you in my study in an hour and that is final."

"Why?" Damon cocked his head to the side curiously. It had always been palpably obvious that Damon had never been anything but a disappointment and an embarrassment to his father, although quite frankly he'd never figured out what exactly he'd done wrong to deserve all the crap his father heaped on him, way before he even deserted the confederacy. Well, other than not being Stefan, of course, and now he thought about it that was probably enough. God only knew it was the stick everyone else he'd ever cared about had used to be beat him with.

"You hate me, I hate you. Why the hell would you want me to stay?" He asked his father genuinely wanting to know the answer.

"How dare you." Purple in the face Giuseppe grabbed a fistful of Damon's uniform in very much the same way he'd grabbed Stefan not so long ago. "I had hoped the army would teach you discipline and manners, boy." His father's breath was soured by the whiskey he drank. "I will not tolerate this insolence."

"Please," Meteorically unimpressed Damon grabbed his father's hand and prised it free of his uniform. He lightly pushed his father out of his personal space before stepping up into Giuseppe's face, deftly turning the tables on the man who taught him all about the wonders of space invasion. "I may not be able to rip your heart out and show it to you– and believe me I want to – but let's get one thing straight. You do not want to get into a pissing contest with me…_Dad._"

Smiling beatifically into his father's outraged face Damon figured there might be a few good parts to this extended and seemingly inescapable meander down memory lane. He'd waited almost two centuries to stick it to Giuseppe after all. He might as well take full advantage of the opportunity.

"You are nothing to me. _Nothing_." He crowded his father against the wall by the foot of the stairs and clasped his hands loosely around his father's neck, flexing his fingers over the butterfly tripping of his pulse under the skin. "I could snap your neck so easily..." he murmured thinking that he probably could, even without vampire strength. The trick was in the technique rather than brute strength after all and he had decades upon decades of practice.

He looked into his father's eyes, saw speechless rage and also a whisper of fear in their bloodshot depths and smiled. "Mmhmm, that's right. I'm not playing by your rules anymore." Almost purring he smoothed his hands down his father's jacket lapels and stepped back, losing the smile as he held his father's eyes. "Screw with me and I will end you."

"_Damon_!"

Standing in the open doorway Stefan was doing his best impression of a horrified goldfish, mouth hanging open like a damned yokel and then snapping shut again.

"Yes brother?" Damon drawled before stepping fully out of his father's range. This was probably just as well as Giuseppe finally roused himself to action. Face mottled in impotent fury he pointed an overly dramatic finger straight at Damon.

"You've run mad." He roared, the echoes of his bellow attracting the attention of sundry servants.

"Well _obviously_." Damon rolled his eyes. "Why else would I be stuck here?"

Giuseppe ignored him and, unsurprisingly, turned to his brother. "Stefan, take Miss Pierce and summon Doctor Abbrams. Your brother has clearly taken leave of his senses." His father looked past Damon down the hallway where two black men stood watching. "Michael, Isaac – restrain him."

Damon looked from his father to the two men, evidently part of his father's retinue of slaves, and back again. "Dick move, Giuseppe."

Elbowing one of the two men in the throat Damon kneed the other in the balls before deftly stepping out of the middle of the huddle. He then grabbed an ugly-ass but solid bronze statue from a convenient side-table, and made for the door while brandishing his offensive statuary like a shot-gun. As dramatic exits went, it could do with some work but, eh, beggars can't be choosers. This was just a delusion anyway. In reality he was slowly dissolving into a gangrenous puddle in the boarding house basement.

The door and his only means of escape happened to be neatly blocked by one Katherine Pierce, standing fiercely unafraid of Damon and his dangerous(ly) crappy sculpture just beyond the threshold while his brother tried ineffectively to pull her to safety. She looked up at him with dark, dancing eyes as he stepped through the door and almost on top of her.

"Well aren't you a wild thing," she murmured too low for anyone but him to hear.

"Don't worry," Damon scoffed as he sidestepped her wide skirts and Katherine finally allowed Stefan to pull her aside. "I won't be making your heart sing."

Then he jumped down the steps of the columned portico entrance and beat a hasty retreat off his father's property before Giuseppe could whistle up a lynching mob.

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><p>"My today has been most eventful," Katherine smiled as she shucked her white gloves onto the bed for Emily to pick up and put into the laundry hamper.<p>

"So I heard," Emily murmured in that annoyingly enigmatic manner of hers that grated terribly upon Katherine's nerves. "It's the war." The witch said authoritatively as she moved to help Katherine out of her day dress so that she might bathe and dress for supper. "It sickens the soul and breaks the mind of some men. I imagine Master Salvatore's eldest boy is one such casualty."

"Hmm," Katherine released a breath as her corset grew loose, "Perhaps. I, however, can see the advantage. It has been terribly dull around here. Stefan's brother has already proven quite capable of breaking the tedium."

Stepping out of her hoop skirts and undergarments Katherine daintily stepped into the metal bath tub a slave had earlier brought up to her room in the Salvatore coach house. She set about the arduous task of luxuriating in the warm water as Emily knelt by the tub and added just enough of her favourite scented oil to the water.

"Have you lost interest in the younger Salvatore boy already?" Emily asked her voice so studiously neutral Katherine gave her a sharp sideways look as she snatched the scrubbing brush from the witch's hand.

"Hardly," she scoffed before tilting her chin and adopting a falsely coy smile. "Stefan and I are getting along quite swimmingly. He is darling. I was simply observing that his brother has quite a way about him."

"Madness is often eye-catching; much in the same way fools can be made to love their own destruction." Emily pointed out a little tartly and Katherine moved, slapping her handmaiden across the face with a dripping hand faster than most could blink.

"Mind your tongue." Katherine advised sweetly. "That is no way to address your mistress."

Emily said nothing, her gaze steady and unabashed; the mark of Katherine's hand ablaze across her cheek more a badge of honour than shame. Katherine narrowed her eyes. Emily was a powerful witch and a useful servant, but all the same Katherine couldn't help but wonder if she should not make plans to be rid of the witch altogether.

"And in any regards, you are mistaken." She said picking up the conversation as if the slap had never happened and handing back the scrubbing brush with an imperious flip of the wrist. "Damon is no lunatic."

"That is not what his father and your Stefan think," Emily had returned to her usual neutrality and focused on using a small pewter jug to pour water down Katherine's back and rub scented oil into the ends of her hair. "The house slaves say he threatened his father and spoke very wildly and in such a manner no gentleman's son would employ."

"Quite true," Katherine concurred smiling once again as she brushed a soft wash cloth over her breasts. "But that is not lunacy. The man may be mad in some fashion but he is far from witless. He was quite cognizant of what he said and did when he threatened to snap his own father's neck."

Emily looked up at this showing a little genuine prurient interest, "How do you know?"

"I saw it in his eyes." Oh and she had. Such pretty, pretty blue eyes they were too. Quite a startling contrast to that mass of tangled dark waves falling across his forehead as he stepped so close to her upon leaving his father's house that she could taste the emptiness of his stomach on his breath. And what cruelty and petty spite she had spied inside him too. Spite and disdain he had directed upon her especially. Katherine was not used to having a man, any man, look at her with quite so much unadulterated loathing upon first acquaintance and while she most certainly did not like it she could not help but be intrigued by such.

"Master Salvatore will want his son contained as soon as he is found." Emily said thoughtfully. "He may even send him away to a sanatorium or hospital for the sick of mind."

Snapped from her meditation upon the elder Salvatore son Katherine pouted. "That will not do. This Damon could be interesting. I simply will not have it that the first genuine entertainment to come my way since arriving in this town – aside from my dear Stefan – should be snatched away so soon."

"What will you do?" Emily asked once again allowing a little true curiosity to break free.

"Well that is the question, isn't it?" Smiling Katherine shifted down in the tub so she could totally submerge her head under the waters, soaking her hair to the crown.

Giuseppe Salvatore was a man in love with his own self-image that much was evident even upon scant acquaintance and Katherine, who had been his guest for the last several weeks, had built up a picture of the man as a reactionary conservative afraid of change and superstitious to a fault. He would not appreciate the scandal of having a son in an asylum one jot. Stefan her charming would-be consort, adored his elder brother. This had become very evident to Katherine by the sheer number of times the topic of 'Damon' had come up in conversation between them long before the man himself made his impromptu return. Stefan was already quite beside himself with worry for his brother - and had been so terribly eager to lead the hunt for him this afternoon that he had put Katherine in mind of a hunting hound on the scent. He would not want his brother sent far from home, and of course, Giuseppe doted on his youngest and was far more likely to show leniency to Damon for Stefan's sake than Damon's own.

"It is simple," Katherine said rising from the water once more and running her hands over her hair and scalp to squeeze out the excess. "I will plant the notion in Stefan's mind that it is better that his brother be cared for quietly and discreetly at home, in familiar confines wherein he is more likely to regain his faculties, than to endure the public ignominy of carting him off to some distant asylum." She rose from the tub, water falling from her body much as Aphrodite in the painting. Very like the goddess Katherine held out her arms as Emily draped her in soft towels.

"You will compel him over this?" She laid more towelling on the floor so Katherine could step out of the tub. "You know the father drinks vervain. He adds it to his nightcap and morning tea."

"But not to his son's beverage," Katherine smiled smugly. A town full of foolish men afraid of vampires very much suited her purpose so long as said self-important poseurs remained ignorant in all the ways that count. So far Giuseppe Salvatore had yet to disappoint her.

"Regardless, I do not believe compulsion shall be necessary. I will simply be the mouthpiece of their true desires, as is so often the case." Katherine allowed Emily to help her into a diaphanous shift and moved over to sit by the vanity so that Emily could attend her hair.

She examined her own reflection critically as the witch began to comb through her long locks. Discovering Stefan Salvatore had been an unexpected boon. He was so young and innocent, yet surprisingly sharp of mind. He was also quite obviously enamoured of her yet, either because he wrongly ascribed to her a virtue she had never cared for even when she had it, or due to his own reticence, Stefan did not act upon his desires. This both vexed and delighted Katherine. Eternity could be very dull without the occasional challenge after all. Stefan was also a handsome young man, strong and healthy. Mostly however it was his closeted self-restraint that attracted her coupled with the veneer of innocence that had less to do with purity of the soul and more to do with never having known the joy of sin. He was so very impressionable and yet, underneath that, Katherine suspected his mind was as strong and unbending as her own. She liked to imagine breaking him to her whim, becoming the master of that mind and its hidden passions. Seducing Stefan Salvatore would be a slow and calculated game, all the more rewarding in victory for the effort it took to attain his heart, mind, and soul.

All the same it was not Stefan's clear and sweet eyes that haunted her thoughts as she sat before her vanity idly playing with the row of perfume bottles lining her dresser. Instead it was a pair of ice-blazing blue eyes, narrowed with hatred she had surely yet to earn from any native of Fell's Church, fixed upon her with such intensity she felt that the bite of loathing should cut to the bone. That look, now engraved upon her memory, was all the more unsettling when cut adrift from the moment.

Katherine had spent countless decades running from those she had scorned, cheated, and otherwise betrayed, as well as those first two brothers whose names she dared not utter even in the confines of her mind. The look Damon Salvatore had given her was a look that should be reserved for those who knew her and had lost to her in the great game of survival, not a stranger who should only be able to see the disguise she manufactured to dazzle and entice. That Damon seemed able to pierce her veneer disturbed Katherine. If nothing else she must ensure to keep the elder Salvatore boy close, at least until she had a better understanding of the threat he might pose to her plans.

And if it turned out that Damon with his wild eyes and maniac's smile should prove to be more danger than diversion, well, who would truly mourn the death of a mad man anyway?


	4. Chapter 4

_Chapter Three: Mad dreams and bad awakenings_

Damon thrashed drowsily, body twisting until the cotton sheets wound as tight as a death shroud around his lower body. His fingers dug into an uncomfortably hard mattress, raking over wrinkled bed linens as he struggled to find his way out of a dream that never seemed to end.

…_Damon, brother…can you hear me? _

He heard Stefan calling him as if from a long, long way away. His brother's voice was muffled, indistinct, caught in a wind tunnel gale. Damon buried his head in the pillow under his face and tried to drive out the echo.

"…Mmmg…go 'way…"

_I can't let you die…not like this, not now. I've found a way to undo everything that went wrong. This will fix everything, your bite, Jenna's death, Elena's pain, all of it. _

Stefan's voice wouldn't let Damon rest; incessant, persistent and clogged with raw emotion Stefan usually didn't allow himself, the words grated nonsensically upon his nerves, making him grind his teeth reflexively. He twitched and flinched like a horse attacked by horseflies as a tentative hand clasped his shoulder. He kept seeing throbbing purple spirals twisting around and around like the proverbial screw behind his eyes. He felt like he was falling in slow motion.

_You have to go back to the beginning. Everything else is just a symptom… but if you fix what was broken back then everything can be better. I'm sending you back home brother. You can live again. We can _both_ live again…The way things were supposed to be. _

_I'm trusting you Damon…don't screw this up…_

With a sickening jolt Damon's eyes snapped open, sightless and blind, the coiled afterimages of angry indigo serpent tails still spinning at the back of his skull. He grabbed for the hand he sensed rather than saw reaching toward him and twisted the wrist with negligent menace.

"Damon!"

Stefan grimaced as his wrist was held immobile. Damon took in his brother's suspenders and billowy shirt, the floppy hair and the innocent eyes and groaned disgustedly, almost throwing his brother's arm away from him as he flopped over on his back on the narrow bed that he refused to acknowledge used to be his back in his human days.

"Noooo," he moaned, pressing the heels of his hands into his scrunched closed eye sockets. His head hurt, his throat was furry and dry and the inside of his mouth tasted like something had curled up and died on the tip of his tongue.

"Damon, brother…are you…that is to say…" Stefan stammered to a halt and Damon peered at him through his fingers. Stefan looked like an antsy teenager, all earnestness and awkwardness and Damon could not figure out for the life of him what Stefan was doing perched by his bedside, looking for all the world like he'd been sat in the hard wooden chair all night. Then again Damon couldn't figure out why he was still stuck in the same hallucination either, so yeah, it was probably pointless looking for sense in any of this.

"What?" He croaked, trying to sit up and then thinking better of it when his head reeled and his stomach threatened to erupt in a geyser of vomit and bile. He slumped back into his thin pillows. He looked blankly at Stefan when his brother pushed a glass of some weird smelling concoction under his nose.

"Here drink this. Miss Katherine's maid, Emily, said that it would help your head when you woke." Stefan frowned a little, a puppy-dog version of his familiar disapproval. "Really, Damon; you were in your cups last night when I finally found you. Father is furious you sold the bust of Athena to pay for your liquor."

Damon tried to make sense of his brother's words and then he smirked. He remembered beating a hasty retreat from the estate still armed with that ugly statue, presumably Athena's bust or whatever Stefan had called it. He'd ended up selling the thing to a man he vaguely remembered from the real 1864, Jimmy Haggatty, an inveterate gambler and horse dealer who had taught Damon to play poker when he was a boy. He'd used the money to pay for whiskey at the old Francher's tavern, the Grill's dilapidated forebear. Damon had figured at the time that if he drank himself into oblivion in his hallucination he'd surely wake up back in reality. Evidently the universe still hated him, because his grand plan had failed leaving him stuck in (fake) 1864 and suffering the mother of all hangovers.

"Brother, are you listening to me?" Stefan's voice broke into his muddled thoughts.

"No." Damon replied bluntly, looking around him at the not so familiar confines of his old bedroom. There was a porcelain washbasin set in a cherry wood frame against the far wall, a large and imposing wardrobe, a hat stand and shoe rack and a bookcase. There was, obviously, no en-suite, and Damon shuddered at the thought of using a chamber pot again.

"Why am I here?" He asked tiredly, scraping his palms over stubbled cheeks and feeling ten colours of nasty. He wondered if this was some sort of karmic joke. He'd only just recently admitted that he missed being human, only just come to terms with what he'd so stupidly thrown away and now, suddenly, here he was. Forced to live through this twisted charade of all that he'd lost in a period of time no sane person would ever want to be just human. Damn it, there were no power showers in 1864, no indoor plumbing, no downloadable porn, no cars, no phones…just shitting in a pot and rampant disease. No wonder he'd wanted to turn back in the day. He might have been a love struck fool, besotted with a cold hearted bitch, but his human self had definitely been on to something. Being alive in the nineteenth century sucked.

"Damon this is home. You belong here." Stefan confusedly answered the question Damon had mostly meant to be rhetorical.

He curled his lip. "Like hell."

Peeling back the bed sheet tangled around his lower half Damon peeked down at himself. Yep, he was naked. Wasn't that just perfect? Now, he really wasn't shy about sharing the virtues of his fantastic demi-god physique with the wider world but all the same he really didn't want to think about who was responsible for removing his clothes last night, because he knew it hadn't been him. Damon froze then as a truly disturbing thought came to him. He looked up swiftly to Stefan sitting solicitously at his bedside and winced.

"Just how long have you been sitting there?" He demanded, deeply, deeply creeped out.

A mottled rose blush crept up Stefan's cheeks. "I was worried about you," his brother mumbled. "You…aren't yourself brother and when we brought you home last night…I…I wanted to be here when you woke. I thought you might find my presence reassuring."

Oh sweet holy hell…_no. _

"Reassured? Are you kidding me?" Damon stared at Stefan waiting for the punch line he soon realised wasn't coming. Now, he freely admitted he'd pulled the whole lurking around in the bedroom waiting for his brother to wake up trick on Stefan in the past (or future, reality, whatever!) – but, and this was the important part – he'd damn well known what he was doing was plain creepy. That had been the whole _point_.

"I…" Stefan looked different flavours worried, hurt and uneasy as he rose jerkily from the uncomfortable chair. "I should summon Doctor Abbrams. He wanted to see you as soon as you woke."

Damon blinked and tried to roll back the outmoded rolodex of his memory to place the doctor. Then he remembered, that recognition falling on him like an entire red wood tree. Doctor Abbrams had been the Fell's Church resident physician, the same man who had failed to save his mother's life from the fluke infection that had taken her from her sons in 1853. If Damon recalled correctly the man had been on the morphine so long he'd been incapable of telling his own ass from his elbow, let alone giving an accurate diagnosis to someone else, which was probably why mother had died in the first place.

"That _quack_- what the hell does he want?" Unconsciously his hand fisted in the folds of bedsheet pooling around his hips as his lips skinned back from his teeth in a fierce grimace.

Stefan winced, eyes darting guiltily away from him. "He's here to examine you, brother. You are…unwell, as I said. Father believes the doctor will have some treatment for your…malady." Stefan told him as he opened the bedroom door and all but darted out into the hall.

Damon stared after him at the solid door of his bedroom and decided he would dismember the first person to suggest the use of leeches.

* * *

><p>"I'm sure the good doctor will know what to do for your brother Stefan," Katherine twirled the stem of her parasol with one hand and tucked a loose curl of hair behind her ear with the other, before once more coiling that free hand back into the crook of Stefan's elbow. They were supposed to be enjoying a scenic walk around the Salvatore grounds, but so far Stefan had been preoccupied to an annoying degree by his brother.<p>

"Yes," Stefan agreed, startling a little and looking from Katherine's white lace gloved hand tucked into the crook of his arm to her face and away again nervously. "I'm sure you are right Miss Katherine." He said even as a distracted frown bunched his brow. Katherine affected a sigh, which just so happened to do interesting things to her décolletage.

"I do not believe you." She told him tartly, tilting her head in a way she knew was very flattering and bouncing her parasol on her shoulder. "Here I am trying to reassure you and you are barely even listening. Would you prefer if I left you alone?"

"No," Stefan almost yelped and immediately stopped short in his aimless wandering. "Forgive me." He insisted with pleasing earnestness. "I did not intend to cause offense. My mind is wandering. I apologise."

Katherine allowed herself just a little smile. "I am teasing you, Stefan." She gave his arm a gentle squeeze. "Your concern for your brother does you much credit. Now come, let us walk on. The day is lovely and I'm sure by the time we return the doctor will have a reason for your brother's recent strangeness."

Stefan smiled faintly, relaxing as he fell into pace beside her. "You are very kind, Miss Katherine, to listen to me talk so. I know it is bad manners, but I am…grateful…for your understanding all the same."

Internally Katherine scratched out another point in her favour. Stefan was not swift to trust, which was an odd and intriguing trait in a boy who should be as guileless as a summer's sky and she considered it a personal victory that Stefan felt comfortable to confide in her to the degree he did. It was just a pity she found his whining about his brother so perpetually dull. All the same there was merit in learning what she could of the other Salvatore boy.

"Tell me about your brother." She spoke up impulsively, once again startling Stefan. "Tell me of your happier times together. I know how it is with brothers. You must have been quite the pair." She slanted a look his way through her lashes. "I can well imagine the mischief you must have caused in your youth."

Stefan immediately shook his head, "No…no, Damon and I were raised in the proper way I assure you. Father does not tolerate much in the way of mischief."

"Ah but that is the fun isn't it?" Katherine sidled close to Stefan, brushing against him and pinning his arm to her side in a way that an unmarried maid should never do if she wanted to preserve her prospects for a good match. "To bend the rules and to break them; how else do we know we are alive?" The specks of blood spotting Stefan's cheeks and the way his pulse leapt in his throat as she moved closer gratified her immensely. Oh yes, Stefan was well on the way to being quite infatuated with her already.

"You sound like Damon," Stefan admitted as his nervous gaze skittered away from her. "In truth, I fear I am rather the dull egg in comparison. Damon is much more daring than I." Stefan glanced at her a curious look in his regard. "He used to joke that he was the brawn and I was the brains of the Salvatore family and together we could achieve far more than we could separately. If only because his recklessness was likely to earn him an early grave."

"Oh?" Katherine affected a look of interest upon her face and stroked her hand over his arm, until her fingers curled for just a second around his wrist, the pad of her thumb brushing against his pulse point.

"Yes," Stefan continued warming to his reminiscence. "Before the war, sometimes Damon and I would talk about our futures. I…probably should not say more actually." Stefan pursed his lips. "Such things were only idle fancy, but Father would be angry if he knew."

"Knew what?" Almost interested Katherine urged him to continue, "I can keep a secret Stefan. I'm very good at it."

Stefan glanced at her, meeting her eyes and Katherine considered compelling him, but in the end she had no need – clearly Stefan wanted to confide his little secret to someone. "We talked about selling this estate, after Father's passing," Stefan told her in a rush, "And travelling out West…to California or the new territories along the railroads. Damon has wanted to go west since we were children. He has never wanted to stay in Virginia."

Katherine immediately stored that piece of information away in her mind, as it could be useful in the future, but for now Stefan had offered her an unexpected insight she had not considered. "And you? Do you not want to stay and inherit? After all Damon could simply sell to you his share of the estate and do as he wishes once the war is won."

"I know…and in truth Father acts as though he expects me, and not Damon, to run this estate once he is gone. Certainly Damon has never been shy in expressing his desire to make his own way in the world, so I do not believe he would begrudge me the title to the estate. It is merely that…"

"You do not wish to be the one stuck here while your brother is out in the world free as a bird." Katherine finished for him, truly intrigued now, as she had not expected to find such proof that a spirit for adventure lurked underneath Stefan's buttoned down exterior.

"No," Stefan shook his head swiftly. "That is not so. It is just that these last two years and more that Damon has been away in the war…I have come to realise how much I have missed him. Damon has a presence about him, a way of making even the most tedious task somewhat interesting, if only because Damon cannot abide boredom and is like as not to find some trouble simply to avoid becoming bored."

"Ah," Katherine smiled knowingly. "I see, so you would rather make a future for yourself – with Damon – than stay to inherit what your father has already crafted. You are lured by adventure and not lulled by the security of this estate and your inheritance." Fluttering her eyelashes coquettishly Katherine gave him a secret smile. "I had never imagined you as a risk taker, Mister Salvatore."

"I…it is not that, truly," Stefan stammered, ears reddening with an alluring mixture of innocent pleasure at being cast in such a daring light and a good son's determination to impress upon all his virtuous side. He sighed, shoulders slumping slightly. "I suppose, if I am honest, whether I stay here for life or travel the world matters less to me than the notion that I might be parted from my brother." Stefan looked at Katherine then and the honestly in his eyes struck even her. "All my life Damon has been my very greatest friend. I think if he were to leave…well, I do not think I would do so well without him as I would with him."

Katherine blinked, mind whirring as she internalised what Stefan had revealed to her. She hadn't guessed at the sheer force of the bond Stefan felt for his brother. It reminded her eerily of those other two brothers, those who haunted her dreams and dogged her nightmares even now. Despite herself she shivered, suddenly wondering what she had stepped into and whether it would be safer to cease her dalliance with Stefan immediately in case history chose to repeat itself against her favour. Those two brothers from centuries ago had all but been the death of her…she would sooner walk over the corpses of both Salvatore boys than allow such a thing to come to pass again.

Stefan, attentive to a fault noticed her shiver but misread its cause. "Are you cold Miss Katherine?"

"…No." She said, thoughts still twisting sharply in her mind. "But I think I would like to return to the house all the same."

As Stefan solicitously escorted back to his Father's house, Katherine found she had a lot to think on. She may very well have to change all her plans.

* * *

><p>Doctor Abbrams was even more useless than Damon remembered. He fussed around, poking and prodding until Damon flashed his teeth at the man. Then Abbrams had waffled something about shell shock and crises-du-nerfs and prescribed rest, solitude and the avoidance of 'unnecessary excitement' for a period of a fortnight, with a prescription for Laudanum passed to his father with the understanding that the drug be given only if Damon himself became 'rambunctious or excessively high in spirits'. Damon resisted the desire to laugh at the doctor's words.<p>

Left to his own devices Damon shaved using the porcelain washbasin and the dainty ivory handled razor before dressing in rough breeches and a thin cotton shirt. His disordered hair he left alone; although he took a moment to stare into his reflection. He'd been staring at the same face for the last hundred and forty-six years. Superficially there were no differences between his outward humanity and his vampire self, but when he looked closer he could see it; his human frailty. It was there in the blotchiness of his skin after shaving and the tiny spot of blood where he'd nicked himself with the razor. The cut was minute, but it wasn't disappearing. Touching his fingers to his cheek he couldn't decide if his skin felt different to him or not. The dull throb at the back of his eyes – his hangover - left him feeling slow and foggy-headed, but that didn't necessarily mean any of this was real. He'd been werewolf bitten and in pain long before he entered into this delusion. This simulated hangover could just be the pain of the bite infection seeping into his hallucination.

But...but the longer he remained stuck here in this continuous delirium the more he began to question what was real and what was not.

He left his bedroom feeling uncharacteristically cautious. The upper floor landing sparked dull memories. He knew his brother's room was down the corridor from his and that the master bedroom, once shared by his parents but now his father's sanctum alone, stood on the opposite end of the hallway. His mother's old sewing room was situated opposite his room, on the other side of the staircase and Damon knew without opening the door that everything in there was exactly the way his mother had left it eleven years prior, before she was taken ill.

Descending the wide, sweeping staircase, Damon gripped the banister rail, feeling the smooth glide of the resin veneer under his palm. The scent of orange oil clung to the wood furnishings, just barely covering the earthier scents of a world without sanitized modern conveniences like air-conditioning units and vacuum cleaners. A nameless servant holding a feather duster stared at him warily as he reached the lower floor parlour and Damon wondered what her name was -if he'd ever even bothered to learn it back when all this was real. She averted her gaze when he looked over and hurriedly left the room. Damon watched her go for a moment before moving further into the parlour.

Above the mantle hung the only portrait of his mother Giuseppe allowed to remain on view after her death. Damon moved over to that portrait as if drawn by gravity. His mother had sat for the portrait as part of her engagement to his father, around about 1838 while still living in Florence, three years before his own birth in the spring of 1841. Just thinking about it made his brain hurt. Damon had salvaged the picture from the estate in the early 1870's when some of his father's Florentine relatives had come over to America to pick over the wreckage of his father's wealth. He'd kept it for years, the only memento of his human life he'd allowed himself. He'd taken great pains to ensure the painting was preserved and restored throughout the decades, but in the end, just like with most things, he'd lost the painting somehow. He didn't even remember how now, but it probably happened after he flipped the switch and just stopped caring about all that trivial pointless shit.

Reaching out tentative fingers he tapped the rough canvas delicately, a faint smile touching his lips. "Hello mother."

Turning away from the mantel Damon started before he could help himself. A woman stood near the doorway at the back of the room watching him. Not just any woman either. Damon swallowed back the instinctive desire to sneer as he found himself subject to the cold scrutiny of one Emily Bennett, witch-bitch extraordinaire.

"You are Master Salvatore's elder son?" Emily asked him and Damon did smirk then because Emily was absolutely fearless. Nothing more than a black female slave (at least in the eyes of most people in 1864) she met his eyes without flinching and Damon wondered if she had any idea how much she stood out compared to other women of her situation. Really it wasn't a surprise she'd been caught out by the Founder's council and burned. Instead it was only surprising that men like his father had needed Katherine to betray Emily before they'd realised what they had in their midst. Emily's strength and self-assurance radiated from her drab garbed frame like a palpable force. Damon hated Emily for screwing him over but he would never be so stupid as to disrespect the woman.

"I'm Damon Salvatore," He answered carefully and almost called her Emily, but something stopped him. Maybe he was getting sucked into this all-encompassing delusion but for some reason admitting he already knew more about Emily then he technically should seemed...dangerous right now. Caution wasn't his forte but he'd try it out for the time being.

Emily approached him, clasping her hands before in a guise that might have seemed meek to anyone who didn't know what Emily could do with just a look. Damon watched her move closer and tensed imperceptibly. Witch aneurisms hurt like a sonofabitch even when he knew he could repair the damage to his brain in minutes, but now he was human (or thought he was) and all the more vulnerable.

"My mistress, Miss Katherine Pierce, is a ward of your father sir. I am Emily, her maidservant."

"I know." Damon said before he could stop himself and then, when something sparked in Emily's dark eyes he lied on his feet. "My brother told me earlier."

"I heard that you were taken ill sir. I am glad to see you are recovered." Emily told him boldly, still eyeing him keenly. She came to stand very close and Damon didn't like it. He was feeling weird, no longer completely convinced that all this was just a symptom of his raging fever, and he didn't like the sensation of not being in control.

"Don't be so sure," Damon managed to grind out, teeth flashing in a strained sort of half-snarl, half-grimace.

"I have some knowledge of healing sir," Emily continued, her sharp eyes digging into him, weighing him up and casting judgement far more effectively than her young descendent Bonnie could ever manage, "If you have need of my services."

Having delivered her odd offer, which Damon figured was just a front for what she did next, Emily reached out and very swiftly, light as a hummingbird, touched her hand to his arm. Damon knew what she was trying to do instantly but he didn't have time (thanks to his dull human reflexes) to ward her off before her fingers caught on the sleeve of his white shirt.

"Don't," he snapped not even sure why he was worried and then, just to make things worse, he made the amateur mistake of grabbing for her hand with his own to pull her off him. He knew the moment Emily had her vision. Her eyes snapped shut, her face twisted briefly in pain, and her fingers locked spasmodically around his sleeve.

"You...you should not be here." Emily stared up into his face with wide shaken eyes. Then her knees buckled in a dead swoon and Damon reached out instinctively to catch her before she crumpled at his feet on the parlour floor.

"Damn it," He swore, hefting Emily up and dumping her onto the brocade couch by the window. The witch was twitching like an electrocution victim, eyelashes fluttering as her head lolled loosely on the stalk of her neck. "What? What did you see?" Crouching by the couch, Damon cupped her face and tried to shake sense back into the woman. "Don't screw with me Emily – not today."

"Emily, where are you?" Katherine's voice, melodic but carrying the bite of annoyance floated through the air, far too close for comfort.

Damon jerked his head up still holding one of Emily's limp hands and crouched on his knees by the couch the witch handmaiden was sprawled across when Katherine breezed into the parlour, his brother at her heels.

"Oh my," Katherine exclaimed prettily perfectly plucked eyebrow quirking as she took in the sight of her servant and her benefactor's son caught in a potentially compromising position and Damon thought he saw the twist of dark amusement hidden behind the veneer of respectable shock.

"Brother! What are you..." Stefan in contrast looked simply horrified.

Damon opened his mouth not sure what the hell he was going to say, but before he could stammer even the first syllable of an excuse Emily surged upright and jerked her hand from his.

"Vampire," she whispered, staring not at Katherine but instead straight at him. "I saw everything. I've seen the future." Then Emily's eyes rolled back into her head and she fell back into a half-swoon across the couch.

Damon stared at her appalled for a handful of seconds, thinking something that pretty much condensed down to the constant mantra of 'ohshitohshitohshit.' Then he felt the burning points of two dark eyes boring into him and almost against his will turned his head to meet Katherine's eyes.

"Mister Salvatore, I do believe my maid just called you a vampire." Katherine's voice was flat and devoid of its usual musical lilt and her dark eyes blazed menace even as her lips curved into a stiletto sharp smile. "Whatever could she have meant by that?"

Damon swallowed drily, pulse thundering in his head, chest tight with burgeoning panic and for perhaps the first time in his long unnatural existence he was well and truly lost for words.

He was so completely and utterly screwed.


	5. Chapter 5

_Chapter four: The yellow brick road straight to hell_

Damon stared at Katherine and she stared right back. In that moment everything else in the world ceased to exist, fading into a red tinged blur at the edges of his vision. His heart tripped like a jackhammer and he could hear the thunder of blood in his head, loud and hard and almost painful.

This was real. It was all fucking real.

Slowly Damon rose to his feet, stepping away from the couch where Emily lay sprawled in a dead faint. His skin tingled with shock, with the knowledge that the world had turned upside down and back to front and everything he thought about…well _everything…_was now apparently wrong. Was he JR Ewing; had his unlife all been a bad dream and ratings gimmick? Was everything he remembered from 2011 merely a very, very weird drunken delusion? No, he didn't believe that. He could feel the weight and truth of his hundred and sixty odd years of existence like Sisyphus' god damn rock in the back of his mind. He had no idea how it was even possible that he could be, what, back in the past? A time traveller caught out in an accidental quantum leap? But right now he didn't have time to deal with any of it.

Because right this instant he had a dangerously suspicious vampire bitch to appease.

"Your guess is as good as mine, Miss Katherine." Damon smiled into the hard, wary gleam of Katherine's eyes and made a point to take another step back so he stood bathed in the unadulterated sunlight flooding the parlour. He ostentatiously brushed his hands down his shirt front so Katherine could clearly see the lack of any lapis ring or tacky magic jewellery.

"Your maidservant approached me here in the parlour," Damon wrapped his tongue a little awkwardly around the manners and deference of speech he had done away with decades ago. "We spoke briefly and then she appeared overcome with some strange weakness and fainted dead away. I was trying to revive her when you entered." He hoped the earnest look he affixed to his face didn't look anywhere near as forced as it felt. "I have no idea what she meant. Vampires are the stuff of bawdy fiction."

Katherine did not look convinced, but then considering she happened to be a vampire that wasn't surprising. However she did seem to recognise that, no matter what he _ought_ to be, he was clearly not a vampire at the present time. She continued to make far too much eye contact with him and if it wasn't for the fact that Stefan was in the room, and presumably not yet compelled out of his poor little mind, Damon was sure she'd have flung him into a few walls by now and attempted to get her claws into his brain to scrape out the truth. The fact that she couldn't because she was still playing the part of lovely southern belle stirred a perverse sort of pleasure in him. He made sure to give her his very best, most annoying 'I-know-something-you-don't' smirk, because, hot damn, he really did know a whole helluva lot more than darling Katerina.

"Poor Emily," Caught in a stalemate Katherine had no choice but to abandon their epic staring contest and attend to her servant. She rustled over in her petticoats and bustles and dropped down in a cloud of fabric on the floor next to the couch. "This is most unlike her." She simpered not remotely convincing in her show of concern and studied her witch with the remote eyes of a jungle cat.

"Should we perhaps take her back to her room?" Stefan, mostly ignored by everyone else in the room, looked a little lost. He was probably the only person present who genuinely cared a whit for Emily's well-being. He really was a lamb in a den of wolves.

Damon felt all his former glee at the sudden advantage he had over everyone seep away as fast as blood from a ruptured carotid artery as he forced himself to really _look _at Stefan. He stood by Katherine's side, almost wringing his hands in solicitous concern for the entire world, and he was just so freaking innocent it was actually painful to behold. This wasn't Saint Stefan the Vampire; he of the Tortured Soul, with his self-aggrandising determination to justify his continued existence through interminable penance and self-denial. This was a seventeen year old boy who had wanted to be a doctor but couldn't handle the sight of blood.

Screw the world but Stefan was just a _kid_. A wet-eared boy Katherine was going to turn into her own little sex toy. Convulsively Damon's hands clenched into bloodless fists and something hot and searing rocked him on his feet. His vision dimmed blurring into grey and black spots as his jaw ached and his teeth ground together. The only thing that stopped him lunging at Katherine right now was the fact that as a human he was just ever so slightly less consumed by the force of his emotions than he had been as a vampire.

"Damon?" Coming back to himself with a jolt Damon almost flinched. Stefan had left Katherine's side and was now facing him. He was frowning but instead of reproach, suspicion and the accumulated pain of decades of disappointment all Damon saw in Stefan's face now was uncomplicated concern.

"Brother you do not look so well yourself." Stefan placed one hand on Damon's arm and something like shame quivered wetly at the edges of Damon's eyelids. "Perhaps you should sit down. I will go and fetch Henry to take Miss Emily back to her room."

"No," Damon reached out impulsively and grabbed hold of Stefan and for a moment he just held on, trying to convince himself that this Stefan was real. "I'll go." Words exited his mouth without making much sense to him. "I…need some air."

Flustered, sick to his stomach for reasons that had nothing to do with his (apparently completely real) hangover, Damon glanced rapidly from Emily to his brother, his gaze cutting Katherine completely out of the equation, then he left the room at as fast a trot as he felt he could get away with just shy of breaking out into a full blown sprint.

He found a house servant doing something servile in the entranceway. He had no idea if this was the eponymous Henry or any random Tom, Dick, or Harry, and it didn't matter. He blurted out something vaguely authoritative about Stefan needing assistance in the parlour and then darted out of the front door.

He didn't stop moving until he found himself, quite by accident, at the edges of the drowned quarry on the very edge of the Salvatore estate. The waters glittered with shredded sunlight and across the gun metal expanse Damon could see the old rotted wooden façade of the shack where he had finished his turn from mostly dead human idiot to completely undead vampire idiot.

Dropping down to squat by lake edge he reached out to dangle his fingers into the cool water and remembered the moment he'd awoken from the gunshot, his white shirt plastered to his chest with drying, sticking cold blood and his head full of the reek of gunpowder, torchlight and the animal baying of bigots for blood. From his vantage point on the other side of the lake Damon could see the spire of Fell's Church just rising over the trees to his right. The whole thing seemed like some weird allegorical triptych; him looking at the spot where his heart died and then to the place where he had been turned. There was also the fact that he was viewing all this from the position of someone remembering things that had never happened… or at least hadn't happened yet.

"What the hell is going on?"

Uncoiling like a spring Damon leapt up again, his arm whipping back so he could hurl a large stone through the air and into the lake where it smashed the golden rippling surface and sunk, casting cracked reflections of burning sunlight across his retina.

"Why am I here?" His voice splintered on a shout that ended up a whisper as he paced the waters edge, fingers clawing at the loose thin weave of his shirt because he had nothing to rend apart except himself. "I should be dead. I was _ready_ to die."

Briefly scraping his hands over his face Damon tilted his head up and back so he could stare up at the bright and guileless blue sky. After everything was said and done, after Jenna and John Gilbert had been buried and the war was won and lost, Damon had started to view his were-bite demise as a sort of just dessert. It seemed like the natural conclusion to his wacky existential odyssey. The monster realises what a complete dick he's been for the last century and change, fucks up his last chance to make amends as per usual, and then dies. It was poetic, neat, simple. Mostly though it was an end and Damon hadn't realised just how badly he'd wanted to get off the vampire joy ride until he was given an excuse to do just that.

Sadly Stefan hadn't been onboard with team let-Damon-die-already, and had gate-crashed the carefully orchestrated suicide by immolation Damon had planned in favour of locking him in the basement with his own bloody vomit and raging delirium for company. In one of his last moments of lucidity Damon had wondered if this was Stefan's ultimate revenge for all the shit he'd put his brother through over the years. He'd come to the conclusion that he really didn't blame Stefan if it was. He'd worked hard to earn the right to a long, protracted, agonising and undignified death after all.

"Brother..."

Swallowing around the hot, dry knot of panic lodged in his throat Damon slunk down to sit in the shade at the base of a weeping willow, whose long trailing branches eddied and swirled in the gentle lapping of the wavelets against the pebbled bank of the lake. His hands were shaking in his lap and his breathing was erratic. This was real. He was human again. He was home. The reasons why and how almost didn't matter. They were trivial when faced with the reality that everything he'd messed up in his life (unlife – whatever) had been erased, washed clean, never happened.

_I'm sending you back home brother. You can live again. We can _both_ live again…The way things were supposed to be. _

The memory echo of 2011 Stefan's voice from his dream (that might not have been a dream) tickled his hindbrain, gnawing at the mouldering corpse of his stunted conscience.

"Stefan what did you do?"

The idea that Stefan had somehow catapulted him back in time seemed a little too Star Trek to be real, but then again, Damon had once firmly believed that werewolves didn't exist so what the hell did he know? It was getting harder and harder to write all this off as just a really, really vivid delusion that was for damn sure.

_I'm trusting you, Damon…don't screw this up…_

He choked out a gasping laugh. "Oh sure, brother, no problem; it's not like I've made a century long vocation out of _screwing everything up_."

Digging his restless fingers into the scraggy stems of grass poking up through the mud at his feet Damon tore loose the shoots and flung them away, angrily wiping crumbs of dirt from his hands on his pants legs. What the hell was he supposed to do? What was he supposed to _not_ screw up? He didn't know what Stefan expected of him (had never really understood what Stefan expected of him). And…He was scared. The realisation plopped into his head like the proverbial ice down the spine. He wasn't…good at much. He wasn't a thinker like Stefan. Truth was he tended to be just stupid enough to ensure failure and just bright enough to miss out on the comfortable cushion of happy ignorance complete idiocy afforded. Hindsight being the bitch she was gave him a clear view of all his faults in retrospect. Everything he was boiled down to a case of 'not enough' and 'too much' in all the wrong increments. He'd always been that way. Human or vampire didn't change the fact that as a man he kind of failed.

If any one person in the known universe deserved a cosmic do-over, it would be Stefan. His brother would know what to do if he was here. He'd know what was right and just and the correct way to make sure that he didn't turn his new lease on life into an epic disaster.

Damon…didn't. He didn't know what to do. He had his life back and it felt more like a curse than salvation.

* * *

><p>Emily Bennett came out of her meditative trance carefully, well aware that Katherine watched her hawk-like from her perch on Emily's narrow pallet bed. She blinked open her eyes, finally allowing the fantastical and nightmarish visions she had received from Damon Salvatore slide into the safe depths of her subconscious.<p>

"You are finally awake," Katherine tossed her curls off her shoulder as Emily sat up carefully. Sharp dark eyes raked over her. "What did you see Emily?" Katherine caught Emily's chin in her hand, sharp nails pricking skin with lazy menace.

"Vampires," Emily replied promptly. Her decision to go into a deep trance and fain unconsciousness after receiving the vision had been a prudent one. It had given her time to consider the new information she had about Damon Salvatore and his strange and dangerous future. It had also given her a chance to come up with serviceable lies to assuage Katherine until such time as Emily could decide what was to be done with Damon.

"Damon is not a vampire," Katherine sneered, quick to discredit Emily's initial confused allegation. "He is as human as his brother."

"That is as may be," Emily allowed herself a tiny ironic smile, for she had seen Stefan's vampiric fate as clear as Damon's own in her vision. "But he knows of your kind. He knows far more than his father."

"Does he know what I am?" Katherine's nails scraped her face as she drew her hand back.

Here was where Emily's meditation would be invaluable. She had been given unparalleled insight into the soul of the man Damon Salvatore when she had seen the world he had come from, a place in time so removed from anything she knew it seemed quite alien to her. Much of what she saw made her doubtful that such a man should be suffered to live. His soul was a blood soaked and damaged thing, had been warped in life and further maligned in undeath, yet there was good in his passion as well as ill. He loved deeply if not wisely and had sought absolution and a good death before some force outside his own control had sent him back to this time and place that was her present and his past. To Emily's mind it would be unwise to trust Damon as any kind of ally, but, far greater folly would be found in making of him an enemy. So she lied if only to protect herself from the danger too much knowledge could bring.

"He knows of vampires, has seen them feed on the fallen on the field of battle. War draws your kind in; the promise of easy meat a dangerous temptation. To an observant eye it would not be hard to recognise what he was seeing even in the chaos of a battlefield. Unlike his father he has seen the reality, not clouded his judgement with the myth of your kind."

"Damnable carrion feeders," Katherine sneered, "Do not liken me to those wretches." Katherine rose from the pallet and crossed the tiny patch of rough wooden floor in the small attic room of the carriage house Emily had claimed as her own. "So he has seen vampires but only the lowliest. He does not suspect me," Katherine spun around eyes intent. "Of this you are sure? He does not suspect me?"

"I have said," Emily kept her reply cautious and evasive. It was never wise for a witch to be too free in perfidy. Oathbreakers and deceivers might find themselves with consequences they were most unwilling to deal with. All the same it was true that Damon did not _suspect_ Katherine. He already _knew _precisely what she was. Such fine distinction of omission helped maintain the balance that a witch must always preserve.

"But what of the rest," Katherine pushed surging towards Emily once more, her elaborate skirts sweeping over the dusty floorboards. "What did you see when you touched the boy, Emily. _Tell me_ and omit nothing."

Emily rose from her pallet, brushed down her modest skirts and stood almost nose to nose with the vampire she was indebted to. "I saw fire." She said simply. "Fire and death and the blood of innocents; I saw this town wreathed in flames as father turned on son and brother fought with brother." Staring Katherine straight in the eye Emily felt some little fear creep into her. "I saw ruin. Katherine. Ruin and blood."

"Then I should kill him," Katherine turned away from Emily carelessly once again pacing the small space to stand by the tiny, grimed window, the sun falling through the smeared glass fell upon her like a hazy streamer of honey gold light. "The elder Salvatore boy is clearly too troublesome to live."

"You may regret moving against him Katherine. He is dangerous."

Emily hesitated to say more. It was her belief that Katherine was right. Damon should not exist in this time and place, not as he was, a harbinger of a time yet to come with knowledge he should not possess. He was out of balance with the natural flow of time and as a witch Emily was bound to do whatever she must to ensure balance was always maintained, yet, there was much Emily had seen that she did not understand. She was unsure how to best protect the balance of nature in this new turn of events. All she knew was that if Katherine was the devil she knew, then Damon Salvatore was the devil she did not. The choice therefore was not to oppose evil but instead to pick the lesser evil in whatever battle was brewing. At the moment Emily was unsure who that might be.

Watching Katherine plot the elder Salvatore boy's death with her face tilted up to the sunlight like a self-satisfied cat Emily resolved to let matters take whatever course fate prescribed. Perhaps if she was lucky Katherine and her vampire spawn-yet-to-be might destroy each other without any action needed on her part.


	6. Chapter 6

_Chapter Five: The return of the diabolical master plan_

Stefan ran across the wide expanse of fresh cut lawn fronting the house, the sun at his back and the breeze sweet in his lungs.

"Go long brother," he heard Damon call from several yards behind him as he turned around and saw his brother hurl the ellipse shaped lumpy leather 'ball' towards him. He started running to catch the ball when it became clear that the throw was going to overshoot him. He caught it on the downward arc of the ball's descent only to be tackled to the ground by his brother seconds later. He hit the grass with a soft 'oof' and a laugh as Damon swiped the ball from his arms and rolled off him.

"You are too fast," Stefan admitted just a little enviously as he sat up and tried to rub grass stains out of the elbows of his white shirt. He had been delighted when Damon had come across him in the library earlier this morning, the odd ball tucked under his arm, and invited him to play the new game he had picked up from fellow soldiers on the front. Several bruises later and Stefan was still happy, despite a rip in his pants leg that would be difficult to darn.

"And you spend too much time with your nose in a journal." Damon retorted without menace, indifferent to the state of his shirt sleeves. He continued to recline on his back in the grass, arms folded under his head, squinting smilingly up into the clear blue sky.

"You sound like father," Stefan sighed slumping a little. Father had always believed in the importance of both a sound mind and body and had actively encouraged his sons to be active, both on the estate and in sports and outdoor pursuits. Stefan enjoyed such things well enough, but he also enjoyed quieter pursuits such as writing and reading. Father, who kept a journal himself, respected Stefan's hobby but still, sometimes, in comparison to Damon, who was always active in some newfangled diversion, Stefan could not help but feel slightly lacking.

"Ugh," Damon grimaced sitting up in one smooth movement without using his hands, "don't compare me to him. It makes me feel dirty."

"Damon," Stefan frowned reprovingly. His brother and Father had always been at odds, in many ways because they shared similar traits of personality and stubbornness, but since his return from the front Damon had taken to virtually ignoring Father's existence, and speaking out against him without a moments fear or shame. Thankfully in the last few days Damon had mostly kept to his own room, convalescing as per the doctor's orders, while father had been much away from home of late, often in town visiting with Mister Gilbert, so there had been very few altercations between them that Stefan had needed to diffuse before the two could come to blows.

"Ste-_fan,_" Damon mocked his tone, face contorting into an expression of annoyed contempt. "Don't frown brother; you'll get brood lines – and trust me – that's not a good look on you." He rolled his eyes, lips quivering with some odd, secret amusement that had so often been with Damon since his return from home a week ago.

"You could make more of an effort to get along with Father," Stefan began, "I don't mean to lecture you brother but…" He stopped short when Damon barked out a quick laugh and gave him a look at once incredulous and mocking.

"You don't mean to lecture?" Damon's lips quivered, thinning as he rolled them tight trying hard not to laugh out loud once more. "Stefan…that's precious; really." Damon shook his head, his unkempt and windblown hair falling in his face and sticking up wildly from his head.

Stefan frowned, slightly stung. "I don't see what is so funny."

"I know," Damon grinned up at the sky elbows resting on drawn up knees, "That's the point. But trust me, if you did know, you'd think this whole situation was a real _hoot_." Damon tossed his head, smile turning strangely caustic before falling completely from his face as fast as the sun slipping behind a roll of summer cloud. As often happened lately Damon's gaze became abstracted as if he was looking at something Stefan could not see, or so lost in his thoughts he forget where he was.

Tentatively Stefan reached out to place a hand on his shoulder, "Damon?"

His brother flinched and immediately shrugged Stefan off turning to look at him sharply, his eyes flaring wide with something surprisingly tense and feral before he caught himself and relaxed once more.

"What?" Damon asked him flatly. The comfortable, familiar camaraderie of just a moment ago gone from his tone and Stefan wondered if Damon was having another one of his 'funny turns'.

"You seemed troubled," Stefan admitted with a sheepish shrug, "Your thoughts were a million miles away."

"More like a hundred or so years away," He murmured around a pained smirk almost too low for Stefan to hear, and then before Stefan could ask what he meant, Damon spoke again, louder this time and in his more usual cheerfully bluff tones.

"Where's Miss Katherine today? Shouldn't she be dangling attentively from your arm as usual?"

"Damon," Stefan snapped and ducked his head knowing the heat creeping up his neck showed pink in his cheeks, and knowing just as well without seeing his smirk that Damon saw him blushing. "Miss Katherine has gone to town. She has made fast friends with Miss Pearl who owns the apothecary." He paused and then added, a little defensively. "And really Damon, do you have to make everything sound so unseemly? Miss Katherine does not _dangle _from my arm. I simply enjoy her company as she does mine. There is nothing wrong with that."

Damon snorted, most inelegantly. "Oh she enjoys something alright."

"That's enough brother." Stefan was up on his feet before he realised it, the heat in his face turning from schoolboy embarrassment to the beginnings of anger. "I do not know why you have taken such an evident dislike to Miss Katherine, who has shown you only good manners and courtesy, but I will not listen to you disparage or demean her good name and reputation."

"Oh please," In an instant Damon was up on his feet as well, the strength of his hands bearing down on Stefan as he clasped him by the shoulders. "Reputation; seriously?" He sneered, expression shifting into that intense and disturbing visage Stefan remembered from Damon's homecoming, a look akin to madness. "Think with your head and not your dick Stefan, and tell me - what do you actually know about your dear Miss Katherine? Haven't you noticed that the little Orphan Annie routine doesn't wash? Don't you think it's a little odd that our father never mentioned a business associate called Pierce until _after_ Katherine turned up on our doorstep?"

"Get off me," Stefan shoved his brother in the chest hard and managed to force Damon to let go of him long enough that he could put some distance between them.

"Enough Damon, I mean it. I won't listen to this." He slashed a hand through the air as if to ward off his brother's words. "You are unwell and we are all making allowances until these odd turns of yours pass, but there is a limit, brother, and Katherine is beyond that limit. Do I make myself understood?"

"Stefan," Damon looked at him almost pityingly and shook his head slowly. His voice grated with badly suppressed annoyance. "Open your god-damn eyes, would you?"

"To what?" Stefan snapped taking a bold step towards his brother, fist curling despite himself as he all but shook with rage. He and Damon had rarely ever brawled in their youth, they had been too much the good friends for such things, but now he dearly wished to punch his brother square in the nose. "The lies you are telling about Katherine? No brother. I will not allow your sickness of the mind to sway me. I…"

"Shut up Stefan," Damon snapped, grabbing him by the back of the neck the way one might scruff a puppy. "For once you are going to shut your damn mouth and listen to me." Damon's intensity blazed into him and Stefan, despite himself, bit his tongue and listened. "This isn't about Katherine," his brother paused, expression twisting into a complex grimace as his eyes rolled, "…or not _just _about Katherine. This is about father and John fucking Gilbert and all the _mysterious _animal attacks on slaves in the last month. This is about you pulling your head out of your ass long enough to pay attention to what is _really happening_ for once in your life."

"Father and Mister Gilbert; brother what are you talking about? And those slave deaths are due to mountain lions forced down into the lowlands by the war aren't they…?" Stefan sputtered so surprised by the odd turn in the conversation that he forgot his anger, despite the insult Damon had just delivered on him.

"And people say you're the smart one." Damon released him with a vaguely disgusted shove on the shoulder. He started to walk away without a backward glance and Stefan, after a moment of confusion, hurried to catch up him with, grabbing for his arm.

"Damon what is going on?" He demanded feeling more than a little irate and unsettled by his brother's mercurial changes in mood and seemingly deliberately enigmatic statements.

"That's for you to find out, brother." Damon clapped him almost soothingly on the arm, still giving him a somewhat pitying but also irritated look. "I'm temporarily insane, remember? I can't be trusted. I have anti-Katherine bias…and you won't believe me if I _do_ tell you. I barely believe it myself and I'm stuck living this fucked up nightmare."

Roughly Damon pulled something out of his pocket and thrust it into Stefan's hand. "Take this; I picked it from mother's grave. Wear it under your shirt where it can't be seen – or swallow it. I don't care which, just don't throw it away."

"What is this?" Stefan looked down at the purple headed sprig of some nearly odourless herb Damon had just almost crushed into his palm so that the pollen stained his skin.

"Vervain," Damon said darkly with utter seriousness. "Trust me brother, you are going to need it."

* * *

><p>"…Katherine this is unwise. This town is already suspicious of the recent deaths. You can't kill your benefactor's son right under his nose." Pearl rapped her nails on the lacquered counter near the cash register, this one movement the only overt sign of her agitation she allowed herself.<p>

"Really Pearl," Katherine scoffed, tossing her head as she idly examined the jars and bottles lining the shelves of the apothecary. "Do you think me a fool? _I_ won't kill anyone. We'll send Frederic to do it."

Annabel, carefully hidden away, neither seen nor heard despite the fact that both her mother and Katherine knew she was there, eavesdropped on their conversation from the door of the storeroom. Mama had known Katherine for almost fifty years and it had been mama who had encouraged Katherine to come to Fell's Church after she and Annabel had found a good home here. Of course mama hadn't known that Katherine travelled with an entourage, and now the town was full of vampires, most of them not very civilised. Mama, Annabel knew, was worried about the death these new vampires had already caused, but she trusted Katherine.

"Frederic? He's a brute and he's barely a hundred years old." Pearl pointed out sharply.

"He's old enough to kill one human man." Katherine pulled down a small vial of pure rose oil extract from the shelf, unstoppered the top, and sniffed delicately. "And he doesn't need brains to snap a neck, Pearl." She poured a drop or two of the oil onto her thumb and forefinger and dabbed the perfume behind her ears and between her breasts. "He just needs the element of surprise. Emily tells me Damon knows something of our kind, but he isn't in a position to know every vampire in this town on sight. An ambush would be a simple thing to arrange."

Annabel slunk back into the storeroom as silently as a church mouse. She didn't know who this Damon was but if he was connected to the Salvatores than she guessed he must be Stefan Salvatore's older brother, the one who had spent the last few years away fighting with General Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia. She and Mama had only moved to town a little over a year ago but they had worked to assimilate swiftly, despite being strangers and somewhat more exotic than most. Annabel couldn't imagine why Katherine would want to kill this human, but it didn't really matter. What Katherine wanted Katherine got. It was as simple as that, although Annabel couldn't help feeling distantly sorry for this 'Damon.' Her mama had raised her to view humans as more than food, after all, and she could feel sympathy for Stefan and Mister Salvatore on the loss they were soon to experience.

Annabel tiptoed quietly to the door at the back of the storeroom, past rows of dried herbs, flowers, seeds and more exotic concoctions while her mama and Katherine continued to debate further the merits of killing Mister Salvatore's eldest. She slipped out of the backdoor almost soundlessly, jumping the step down into the alley behind the store in a soft rustle of crinoline as she closed the door and adjusted her bonnet.

She hurried around the side of the building with her head down, watching her feet, and stepped out onto the boardwalk of the main street. She thought she might go visit Miss Emily who was always nice to her, or perhaps venture out in the woods where the slave children played when their masters had no use for them. Annabel was not truly a child but that was the way the world saw her and so she played the part of young girl on the cusp of womanhood to the best of her ability. In truth, the role chaffed, and she preferred her freedom when she could take it. She darted down another alleyway behind the blacksmith and the stagecoach house meaning to dash into the woods at the first opportunity.

"Hello Anna."

Jolting to a stop, her mouth in her throat, Annabel looked up. A handsome young man with unkempt dark hair and laughing blue eyes stood right in front of her, blocking her path. He had just appeared from the back of the stagecoach house as if he had been waiting for her. What was startling was that she hadn't heard him approach, not until he was almost on top of her. She noticed, almost as an afterthought, that he held a white handkerchief loosely wadded in one hand.

"What no hello? Not even a snarky eyebrow quirk?" The man peered at Annabel bemusedly, studying her intently and despite the fact that she had never seen this man before (Annabel was sure to remember a face like his) he behaved as if he knew her and expected some form of recognition.

"Wait – we haven't met yet have we?" The man blinked his extraordinary blue eyes and then shook his head, releasing a deep sigh and shaking out the handkerchief. "I hate time travel."

Annabel ducked her head and used girlish shyness as distraction while she took a careful step back, ready to run far faster than this odd man could chase her if she needed. She did not know who this stranger was but something told her to be very wary. There was a faint odour rising from the handkerchief as well as the almost medicine tang of spirits rising from the man. The alcohol smell made it impossible for her to identify the scent coming from the handkerchief.

"Please sir," she all but whispered still hiding her face under the shade of her bonnet but letting her fangs extend. "I'll scream."

"Yeah, not likely," the man drawled almost laughingly and dropped down on his haunches into a crouch so he was much closer to her eye level. He moved as if to grab her chin and lift her head. Annabel chose that moment to lunge forward, teeth bared, ready to rip her would-be attacker's throat open.

She ended up with a vervain and whiskey soaked handkerchief shoved into her mouth. She choked instantly as her tongue and gums burned and then became achingly numb. Staggering backwards her hands shot up to yank the soaked cloth out of her mouth and it was then that the man grabbed her, spinning her around so her back was against his chest and locking one strong forearm around her middle as he jerked her head back with his free hand and pressed a fresh handkerchief, stuffed full of fresh cut vervain, against her mouth and nose, all but suffocating her with the noxious fumes.

"Quit struggling, I'm not going to hurt you." The man hissed roughly in her ear as Annabel kicked and writhed and clawed at him. She was stronger than a human man, but the vervain was potent and this stranger seemed to know how to move with her struggles so that rather than dislodging him she seemed instead to merely fight further into his hold. In short order, her pulse pounding in the back of her head and angry red splotches dancing before her eyes Annabel succumbed to the vervain, her feet drumming helplessly on the floor as the man dragged her out of the alley towards a horse, standing ready behind the blacksmiths.

* * *

><p>Damon waited another half a minute after Anna's eyes had rolled back in her head and her body had gone completely limp in his arms before he took the handkerchief from her face and slung her across Milo's back before leaping up into the saddle himself. He then gathered Anna's unconscious body up in his arms so it looked like she was merely riding ahead of him on the saddle before turning Milo around and heading for the woods at a fast canter.<p>

Vervaining Anna hadn't been fun, and the fact that his plan to snatch her had come off without a hitch despite the fact that the tiny girl in his arms had to be a couple of centuries his senior and strong enough to snap him like a toothpick, didn't make him feel any better about kidnapping her either. The thing was, between her and Pearl, he had more chance incapacitating Anna than he had of getting the better of her mother.

Weaving his way through the trees and deeper into the woods Damon's thoughts were racing with a mixture of adrenaline and just a little post fight buzz. So far he was two for two on his daily goals. Earlier today he'd managed to kick start Stefan's woefully underdeveloped sense of paranoia, enough (he hoped) to ensure his brother wouldn't be so damned easy for Katherine to compel, but without telling Stefan anything that could get him killed should he open his damn fool mouth like the gullible, noble moron he was, and always had been. Now he had Anna just where he wanted her. As far as diabolical master plans went, this one was pretty damn awesome.

"Whoa boy," reining Milo in at the spot near the dry creek bed he'd scouted out earlier, Damon slipped off the saddle and lifted Anna down after him. Carefully he propped Anna up against the trunk of a birch tree, smoothing her skirts down over her stockings and arranging her loose limbs neatly.

Back in what he had decided to think of as the 'old' 1864, Damon had barely noticed Anna – she'd been a professional wallflower daughter back then, the sort that was rarely seen and never heard – but when they'd met again in the twenty-first century he'd kind of liked her. Yes she'd screwed him over about knowing Katherine wasn't in the tomb, but as that whole thing was a cluster-fuck disaster Damon was prepared to give her a pass on that one. She'd been almost useful a couple of times after that and he'd been legitimately sorry when Uncle John Gilbert had staked her on Founder's Day. So in a strange way he'd been almost glad to see her alive and well (or at least undead and well) in the 'new' 1864.

That being said, if the conversation they were about to have as soon as she woke up didn't go to plan, well…Damon pulled out the eight inch long stake he'd whittled himself from Milo's saddle bag and tested the sharpness of the point by running it across the pads of his fingertips. He drew blood and tucked the stake into his waistband, before squeezing the cuts until blood dribbled down his fingers in slow, dark crimson globules.

Settling down in a light crouch beside Anna, Damon looked from his bleeding fingers to the insensate vampire. Anna's lips were swollen from the vervain and her chin and nose were still dotted with angry red welts where the skin of her face had become inflamed. Cocking his head to the side Damon pulled the stake loose again and shifted his position for a better angle. Once he had the stake positioned just under her breastbone with one hand he pushed his bloody fingers into Anna's mouth – and waited.

The vervain must have been wearing off already because he didn't have to wait long before the blood had the desired effect. Anna's eyes flew open, veins throbbing to life under the delicate skin of her lower eyelids even as her teeth bit down on the joints of his fingers and her hands came up to grab at his wrist.

"Ah, ah, ah," Ignoring the mild pain as Anna gnawed on his fingers Damon gently pressed the sharp edge of the stake into her diaphragm. "Don't get greedy."

Anna's eyes shot to him as awareness came back and she all but spat his chewed fingers out of her mouth. "You," she tried to wriggle away from the stake but he had her pinned a little too well against the tree. Rather than trying to rush him, using her superior strength and speed against him, Anna stared up at him with big dark eyes, clearly attempting the puppy-dog look. "Who are you?" She asked and just managed to stop herself from wobbling her bottom lip like the proverbial little girl lost.

"I'm Damon Salvatore," He grinned intrigued when Anna's eyes widened just a little as if the name meant something to her. "Now tell me Anna, how would you like to become my undead girl Friday?"


	7. Chapter 7

_A/N: Umm Hello? So it seems that I haven't posted in weeks, so probably no one is reading anymore, but if you are – sorry for the delay and hope you enjoy._

* * *

><p><em>Chapter six: Aperitifs and after dinner stakes<em>

"So we have a deal?" Flexing his slightly chewed fingers Damon rose up from his crouch and eyed vampire Anna curiously. The sun was beginning to sink in the sky casting long arrow slanting shadows through the canopy of the woods. He and Anna had been in negotiation for over an hour and Damon still hadn't managed to get much more out of the girl than near silent incredulity.

"You expect me to believe that you would side with vampires over your own flesh and blood?" Anna frowned at him and on someone less cute the expression might have been forbidding but on Anna's girlishly exotic face, framed by her oh-so-Bo-Peet bonnet she just looked like a china doll in a snit; though even that was losing its chuckle-appeal after an hour of this stuff.

"Mmmhm," Damon smirked crookedly, tiredly, and shrugged, shoving the stake back into Milo's saddle bag. "I did the first time and, what the hell, repeating the mistakes of yesterday is all the rage right now."

"The first time?" Anna rose to her full height (such as it was) and brushed down her skirts. "You're mad." She told him flatly and Damon grinned completely without humour.

"I'm also about the only person in this town playing for team Anna and Pearl." He told her equally deadpan. Anna just looked at him uncomprehendingly and that was the point that Damon lost his, very limited, last reserve of patience.

"You _know_ the town is gunning for vampires, your Pearl's boy-toy Gilbert is leading the search and destroy party." He snapped throwing his arms out and just managing to resist the urge to growl or kick at the clump of forget-me-nots growing beside a patch of toadstools at the foot of a tree. There was a reason he didn't do this teamwork shit. It didn't freaking work. Having all this future knowledge crap was more trouble than it was worth when he had no way of convincing anyone to believe him. Turning away before he did something stupid, like try and stake Anna, Damon ran his hands in agitated fashion over Milo's flank. "Pearl stole a magic gizmo that hurts vampire brains. She doesn't know that's what she's got, but I do. You get that for me and I'll make sure you and mommy dearest get out of dodge before the stakes come out. This is a win-win deal, and trust me, you are _not_ going to hear better for the next hundred and forty-five years."

Anna stared at him hard. She didn't ask him how he knew that her mother had stolen a device from Johnathan Gilbert because even in the short period of time since he had abducted her (and demonstrated more knowledge of vampire weakness in doing so than any human she'd ever met before) Damon Salvatore had said all sorts of mad and incredible things. He knew things he shouldn't know. He spoke in a way that was quite odd indeed and he seemed to be completely unafraid of her even knowing what she and her mother were. He could have killed her after vervaining her but he hadn't and he'd fed her his blood to revive her without a flicker of revulsion for her appetites.

"You said we couldn't trust Katherine." Anna said slowly. "Why?"

Damon scoffed, "Because she's a self-serving little bitch who's only interested in looking out for number one." He paused in the midst of fussing with his horse's saddle and tack and threw an impatient look over his shoulder to her, expressive face contorting with annoyance and frustration. "You don't trust her either."

Stepping forward Damon peered down at her. "What was it you said…you don't say much but you see everything. So tell me little miss-see's-all, what possible reason does Katherine have to screw with this town unless she _wants_ the pitch fork and angry mob ending? This - you and your little nest of vampires in town – it's a disaster waiting to happen, but Katherine's got you sitting back and waiting for the vampire barbeque anyway."

"Why would she betray her own kind?" Anna meant to sound accusing and disbelieving but Damon's allusions and veiled allegations rang true to the chime of her own suspicions. Anna knew her mother was worried too, but mama trusted Katherine and…and Damon was right, Anna didn't trust Katherine. All the same she didn't trust this mad human either.

"Katherine's priority is Katherine." Damon said with a curl of his lip. "Loyalty really isn't her thing." He cocked his head and added. "For the record, getting rid of the useless vampire retinue, not something I'm against. You and your little gang are almost too stupid to live. The only reason I'm doing this is because I like you, but if you screw me over? I will personally make sure you and your mom are the first on the bonfire."

"You are threatening me?" Anna bristled, veins pulsing to life under her eyelids.

Damon rolled his own eyes in response. "Amateurs make threats, sweetheart. That was a promise."

Anna believed him. It was shocking and unpleasant but she completely and totally believed him. It was rare that a threat from a human could faze her. Yet Damon was different. He might be mad. He might be working for his father and the other humans of this town to trap her and the others of her kind. Yet regardless of his motives she believed that he was capable of what he threatened. In that instant Anna was afraid.

"If I agree to help you, will you let me go now?" She asked quietly, falling back on the camouflage of meek helplessness that had served her so well over the centuries even as she thought furiously about what to do to protect herself and her mother.

"Please the little girl lost act doesn't work on me." Damon sneered before mounting his horse and looked down at her as he gently kicked the horse forward his expression serious and thoughtful. "I better not regret this."

Anna watched him go and found herself thinking the exact same thing. Katherine had already placed the order to have Damon killed. A fact she had neglected to mention to him. In all likelihood Damon would die tonight and she wouldn't have to worry about him and his threats. He was no doubt lying about the device, or if not, then he was using some ploy of his father and the rest of the human town leaders to entrap her and the rest of her kind. Katherine was no doubt right to have him murdered.

And yet…

…As she watched Damon Salvatore ride off along the woodland path she couldn't help the odd suspicion from creeping up on her that if he died tonight it would end up being a very bad thing indeed for her and mama.

* * *

><p>The clash and scrape of sterling silver cutlery over fine bone china made Katherine's teeth ache. The food was passable, the company tolerable, especially considering what she remembered of table manners and dining etiquette from the fifteenth century but the overall result still left much to be desired.<p>

"…And I still maintain that Lee will rally. The Yankees have more men, but we have God on our side. The Commonwealth will persevere."

James Fell, a simpering young man of Stefan's age with no discernable backbone or capacity for original thought spoke up from across the Salvatore dining table. His mother, Honoria, an aging woman with a mottled complexion and a turkey neck wearing a violently starched white lace high collared blouse and cameo brooch immediately cooed over her son's ability to repeat the idle gossip of ill-informed older men. Katherine swallowed down the desire to pluck out the stupid boy's eyes with her fingers and shove them down his mother's stringy throat along with another mouthful of the rather overcooked game fowl on her plate.

"I'm not so sure," Seated to Katherine's right Stefan spoke up in opposition to James' easy patriotism. "After all can we really win this war when the North possesses superior numbers, arms, and steadily gains control of our main supply routes? We've lost Atlanta and the port of New Orleans. I'm just not sure…"

"Well really." Honoria scoffed in a reedy, nasal grinding tone. "I'm sure we shall struggle mightily when our young men are all such pessimists." She frowned upon Stefan over the soft golden light of the candelabra forming the centrepiece of the tableware. "I swear I do not know what the matter is with you young men these days; anyone would think you did not want to fight for your father's lands and your own inheritance."

"I assure you Honoria, my son Stefan is no coward." Giuseppe rumbled from the head of the table finishing off yet another glass of wine. "He knows his duty and will act on it." The Salvatore Patriarch fixed Stefan with a quelling glance. Stefan blushed, mumbled an apology and ducked his head. Katherine idly fantasised about ripping out Giuseppe's heart and serving it up slice by slice alongside the after dinner aperitifs.

"That reminds me Mr Salvatore sir," the boy-Fell piped up into the stilted quiet of scraping utensils and awkward generational divides, "Where is Damon? I had heard he was back from the front. I would much like to hear his opinion on the war. Should he not be here at dinner also?"

Beaming inanely the poor sap remained completely oblivious to the dark look on Giuseppe's countenance or the way Stefan tensed and fumbled with his own wineglass. Katherine, ignored as young women generally were during such discussions as these, ducked her head and hid a slight smile.

* * *

><p>"Go, go, go – Johnny – go, go." Hopping over a dried pile of horse crap lying on the road Damon turned the move into an impromptu dance shuffle, coming close to breaking into a moonwalk despite the fact that he was getting his musical genres all screwed up. "Go Johnny, go, go. Go Johnny…"<p>

The moon was a harmless sliver of dulled silver peeking out from around ink blot clouds in an equally pitch black sky as Damon made his way, unsteady as a newborn colt, back to the Salvatore estate a bottle of rye swinging from his loose grip. Periodically he'd belt out a snatched refrain from Chuck Berry's 'Johnny B Goode' because…well humming the melody to the Viennese Waltz just didn't have enough oomph to really live up to his mood…which was in need of a serious pick-me-up.

"Way down Louisiana close to New Orleans…way back in the woods among the evergreens…"

Damon hadn't initially intended to court cirrhosis of the liver tonight but after riding back to his father's estate earlier he'd begun to doubt just how awesome his new plan actually was. Getting the anti-vampire dog whistle device from Pearl one hundred and forty odd years earlier than the last time, with a mind to using it on the Machiavellian harpy who actually deserved to have her synapses burst and her brains leak out of her ears, had seemed like a brilliant plan – in theory. Sadly he forgot to factor in the _liiiittle_ fact that back in 1864 nobody, not even Pearl, had realised just how monumentally selfish Katherine truly was. In 2010 Pearl and Anna had coughed up the Gilbert device voluntarily, but in 2010 they'd both been burned by Katherine's true nature; a quasi alliance of convenience against the founder's council and the latest John Gilbert asshole had been logical in that context. To Damon's mind, packed full of hindsight (or foresight or whatever) it was still the best plan. Anna and her mom were perfectly placed to help him screw over Katherine without her knowledge. The kicker was that an alliance would only work if the two elder vampires realised the advantage, which they weren't likely to do without having lived through entombment and estrangement because of Katherine and her schemes.

Now Damon had the sinking feeling that his awesome plan was going the same way as all his other awesome plans – sunk without a trace due to bad implementation. And really, the only response to realising he'd screwed up his second chance at life because he still couldn't formulate a workable plan after one hundred years of trying was to get drunk and sing classic rhythm and blues tunes at the top of his lungs.

"His mother told him someday he would be a man and he would be the leader of a big old band…"

The silhouette of a man suddenly loomed large about twenty feet ahead of him standing beside a stile leading to the Salvatore back paddock. Damon rocked to a halt and squinted. He was pretty sure that the man was a vampire; mostly because in Fell's Church in 1864 the only people running about after dark were vampires, which Damon knew for a fact as he'd spent a lot of nights running after one vampire in particular the first time around.

"Fuck." Damon said with feeling and laughed at the sheer freaking irony of getting killed by a random vampire out for a late night snack. This was probably karma.

"Are you Damon Salvatore?" The vampire asked just as he stepped near enough in the almost complete darkness for Damon to see his face; a distinctly familiar face possessed of an equally familiar (and stupid looking) goatee.

"Oh you have got to be _kidding_ me." Damon stared thunderstruck as recognition hit. "_Frederic_?"

Looking as much like a two-bit renta-thug in 1864 as he had in 2010 vampire Fred, the same asshole that had snatched Stefan for a torture play-date, the man stopped a few feet from him in the road. "Are you Damon Salvatore?" He repeated in Cro-Magnon growl.

Damon ignored the question brain pushing past the alcoholic buzz. Frederic was part of Pearl and Katherine's gang, he was also a grade-A moron who neither woman would be sorry to see acquainted with the wrong end of a stake, but he was still part of that group. Well Shit. Had Anna told her mother about him already? Had Pearl sent Frederic to kill him? This was the absolute last time he tried to play for a team. Damn it. He'd been trying to help Anna and Pearl and this was the thanks he got.

Without warning Frederic was suddenly in front of him grabbing him and slamming him into a tree just outside the Salvatore paddock boundary line. "I asked you a question." The vampire snarled, pupils dilating with the beginning of compulsion. Damon slipped his hand into his pants pocket to grip the sprig of fresh vervain he kept there as insurance.

"Are you Damon Salvatore?" Frederic repeated yet again over-working the compulsion angle as he had every other aspect of the vampire mystique. Damon figured there really was only one answer to give to that question. It was worth a try anyhow.

"No," Damon intoned trying to make his voice dull and monotone, "I'm Stefan."

Frederic sneered, "Liar. Stefan's with Katherine." Immediately Frederic grabbed his arm, the one attached to the hand grasping the sprig of vervain. The vampire yanked his fist open and snarled down at the crushed herb in his palm. "Vervain; Katherine said you might know about that."

"Katherine?" Damon blinked. "Wait _she _sent you?" His thoughts crashed and collided before spinning up to high gear again as a red clanging anger pulsed to life before his eyes. "That bitch…" Frederic cut him off, literally, when he lunged forward and ripped into his neck fangs first.

One hundred and forty-odd years spent ripping into his fair share of throats and Damon had legitimately forgotten how much a vampire's bite could hurt when on receiving end. Sulphur burning fireworks of pain ignited behind his eyeballs. Ice-lightning sheared through his nerve endings as Frederick gnawed flesh and artery alike. The pain stole his breath and caused his throat to close as unconscious oblivion roared upwards intent on sweeping him away.

Damon had only one option to save himself and precious few seconds in which to do it. Guzzling at his neck Frederick's own throat was right there, licking distance away and hell, Damon had been a vampire for a hundred and forty years (in his head at least) and some things are instinct even if he lacked the right hardware for the job. Damon opened his mouth wide and bit down on Frederick's neck as hard as he could, grinding and tearing with his own blunt human teeth until Freddie's flesh tore and a mouthful of vampire blood hit his tongue. Damon gulped for all his life was worth.

Frederic jerked his head up. "What the hell?" He demanded slapping a hand to his own neck, keen vampire eyesight clearly able to see that despite having gone for a full throat rip, thanks to the two quick pulls of Frederic-lite Damon had stolen, the wound on his throat had been down-graded from certain fatality to merely life threatening.

Frederic was not impressed, "You bastard."

Damon grinned savagely and used the element of surprise to compensate for his own dizziness as he snapped up his arms and drove the thumb of each hand into the vampire's eyes. Frederic the dumbass pawn howled in a way no self respecting vampire would ever scream and shoved Damon back against the tree hard before staggering away, fingers clawing at the blood and viscous mass dripping from between his squinted closed eyelids.

"My eyes! You are going to pay for that, boy!"

Damon meant to capitalise on his advantage but as he tried to advance on Frederic a wave of shivering weakness, hot like malaria fever and as sickening as watching Bonnie and Jeremy moon over each other, crashed through his body. He collapsed on his ass half propped up against the trunk of the tree, a hot scalding cascade of his own blood soaking his shirt.

Woozily he stared at the blood. "Well this sucks."

Vampire Fred charged him. The remembered instincts of a hundred and forty-some years spent as a successful predator saved Damon from an incredibly embarrassing death by bearded-moron, but only just. He had time to duck his head and angle his body so Frederic ripped into the meat of his right shoulder and not his throat. All the same there was not a damn thing Damon, as a human, could do to protect himself when the vampire wrenched his shoulder out of the socket, picked him up around the waist and hurled him five feet through the air. He hit the ground hard enough to crack some ribs and rolled, boneless as a raggedy-ann doll, down the shallow ditch on the other side of the road.

Pure survival reflex was all that deflected Frederic's next attack. The vampire jumped on him again in the bottom of the ditch and once more lunged for his throat. Damon twisted ignoring the solar flare burst of pain that ignited in his chest as he did so, and thrust an elbow into Freddie's oozing, still healing eye socket. The vampire jerked his head back, his fangs-first lunge thrown off balance. Damon followed through on his moment of opportunity and pushed his fingers into the vampire's mouth. Cramming as many digits inside that wet hole as he could Damon was intent on shoving his fist right down Frederick's throat and manually pulling his lungs out even as Frederick started to choke around a mouthful even he couldn't swallow.

As Damon and Frederic rolled around on the bottom of the dry ditch in a snarling, cursing mass of blood and frustration neither man saw the small, svelte figure with the stake slip down into the ditch on silent feet after them.

* * *

><p>Katherine turned away from Honoria Fell and an increasingly tedious attempt to make polite and charming conversation with the woman, ears primed to catch the harried exchange between father and son occurring in the hallway outside the parlour.<p>

"...Worried about Damon father; the house servants say he has been away from home all day. You know he is under doctor's orders to keep from town. With your permission father I would like to go and look for him."

"Absolutely not; it is past dark and I'll not have you traipsing about at night on a fool's errand. Do not compound your brother's folly by chasing after him."

"But father..."

'Enough. I have spoken. Do not argue with me Stefan. Now come, we are being poor hosts."

As Giuseppe all but shoved his younger son through the parlour doorway ahead of him Katherine sashayed over to his side, a coy head nod to her so very gracious benefactor and host. Stefan looked up as she approached and his relief was highly gratifying.

"Stefan you seem troubled?" She murmured letting the fingers of her hand flutter over his sleeve for just a second.

"It's Damon," Stefan said in a rush on a gusty exhale, as if his anxiety was so great that it whooshed out of his lungs with the force of a bellows.

Katherine only just managed to resist rolling her eyes. "It always is." She murmured too low to be heard even by Stefan.

"Pardon?" Wearing a distracted frown Stefan allowed her to pull him further into the room towards the awkward – and annoyingly fawning – James Fell. Katherine smiled prettily at him.

"Come, dear James was just telling me of your school days together. What scamps you were."

Thrusting Stefan in front of the irritating milk sop boy while Giuseppe entertained the withered old prune in the corner of the parlour Katherine allowed herself to drift into her thoughts as James launched into a dull tale of boyish hi-jinks that would have bored her just as much four hundred years ago as it did now.

Glancing out of the parlour window, the thick draperies parted just enough to allow a slither of pure darkness to creep in from the outside, Katherine planned out just how exactly she would use Stefan's grief when some slave or other discovered his brother's broken body in a ditch to her benefit. She had ordered Frederic to make Damon's death look like an accident and not another animal attack, but really even if the fool man failed to cover his tracks she could still use the resulting hysteria to her advantage. Ultimately along as the elder Salvatore son died Katherine could not lose. She smiled brightly in secret triumph but thankfully both James and Stefan assumed she was simply reacting to their trivial reminiscences.

A sound from outside beyond the warm gas-lit house caught Katherine's attention; a flurry of running feet and strident voices, filled with urgency. Ah, had Frederic finished with Damon already? Katherine composed herself for the moment, ready to shed tears befitting the tragedy of a young life brutally and senselessly cut short.

"Master Salvatore!" One of the omnipresent slaves hurried into the parlour, decorum forgotten in the high drama of the moment.

"What is it?" Giuseppe, a man mired in appearance and standing, snapped hand itching to get a switch to beat the insolence out of the slave.

The woman, hands twisting in her white apron, bobbed like a turkey, "Forgive me master, but it is your son Damon."

"What about him?" Giuseppe demanded, mood darkening further.

Beside Katherine Stefan tensed like a hare scenting a fox, and Katherine, the fox in disguise, couldn't resist inching closer and laying her hand on his arm. She quivered with anticipation, already savouring her victory. Oh how she would laud this over Emily. To think the fool woman had actually thought Damon was a threat.

"It's the demon beast sir," the stupid slave woman yammered on, "He's had him a bite out of the young master sir. He's sore wounded...and his neck master...merciful god be kind to him."

"...A demon...?" Honoria Fell clutched a gnarled hand to the high lace collar of her blouse watery eyes flashing sharp as blades to Giuseppe whose ruddy complexion paled with what might, just possibly, have been the faint ghost of genuine concern for his least loved boy.

"Dead?" Giuseppe asked grimly. "Tell me now woman, is he dead?"

Beside Katherine Stefan lurched into motion, the mention of his brother as always acting as a catalyst for Stefan's sudden action. Yet before he could do more than lunge forward a step or two there was a crash and thunder of feet through the front door of the house, and Katherine caught the unmistakably delicious tang of blood on the air an instant before two of the plantation slaves staggered in through the parlour doorway bearing between them the limp and bloody body of Damon Salvatore.

Katherine was not the only person to draw a sharp intake of breath, a gasp by any other name, however it was almost certain Katherine was the only one present who then licked her lips with a mixture of hunger and satisfaction.

"God have mercy." Honoria exclaimed loudly before swooning back against the couch.

"Good grief - is he...?" James Fell, the eager war monger cringed back against the mantle-piece over the fire as Damon was dragged forward, head lolling against his chest, one side of his white shirt crimson with his own sticking blood, his legs dragging behind as the two slaves hauled him into the warmly lit parlour proper.

"Brother!" Stefan grabbed for Damon as he was lowered to the glossy polished wood floor of the parlour. Instantly Stefan jerked his hand away and stared at the palm, imprinted red as fresh sin with Damon's blood. Katherine watched as his young face twisted into a hideous grimace of naked fear and shock and for just a moment she remembered a time long ago, and a girl who had escaped one hell only to walk in on another in the form of her family massacred in cold blood all because she had dared to live. In that brief instance she almost knew shame.

"Damon?" Giuseppe Salvatore crouched down and roughly turned Damon's head to the side, revealing the crusted wound in his throat. The man hissed like a startled cat and made as if to rear back, one arm scything out to push Stefan away to safety as he did so.

It was at that moment that Damon's eyes snapped open and he grabbed hold of his father's arm with vice-like fingers. Then Damon coughed weakly, body moving jerkily as he tried to lever himself upright, Stefan proving more hindrance than help as he rushed to aid his brother.

Katherine, frozen in shock, began cursing Frederic and his incompetence vociferously in her head even as her mind raced for a way to salvage this situation and her own skin. Her treacherous little heart thundered in the cage of her chest as Damon blinked blearily, face pale but breathing steady and even, and his heart - that she had arrogantly failed to recognise before - continued to beat a strong tattoo she could hardly fail to hear from across the room.

"What attacked you? You must tell us. Did you see the face of the one who did this to you?" Giuseppe demanded of his son as Damon's eyes slowly tracked across each face clustered around him and then, as unerring as the final judgement, came to rest upon Katherine.

Unable to pull her gaze away from those vicious and impossibly blue eyes Katherine could do nothing but stand transfixed by the parlour window, fascinated and enthralled as a bird is mesmerised by a snake as slowly, with painful triumph, Damon smiled.

"Katherine," he said into the charged and dangerous silence of the parlour, eyes fluttering closed even as once again he damned her on his last conscious breath, "...Katherine..."


	8. Chapter 8

_Chapter Seven: Bite me _

_(Flashback – Fred is dead)_

Anna stood in the ditch, the crescent moon at her back. Frederic was dead. The stake she had stolen from the saddle bag of Damon's horse while he drank at the tavern still protruding from his back. Damon Salvatore was lying at her feet, breathing wetly around cracked ribs and torn throat watching her with too sober eyes.

"You swear that you mean mama and I no harm?" She asked in a tiny voice and her hand clasped tight to her chest. Her palm was still hot with the memory of the wood against her skin. She had never killed another of her kind before and now a fine trembling took over her limbs. The pungency of Damon's blood and adrenaline spiking the air was not helping either. She felt both giddy and sick.

"You swear that you will help protect mama?" Anna demanded poised between helping this human and finishing him off.

"…Yes…I swear…" Damon growled still managing to infuse menace into his inflection despite the fact that he was bleeding and broken on the ground.

Anna nodded making her decision even if she didn't fully understand it. Swift as a striking snake she brought her wrist up to her mouth. She yanked aside her tightly buttoned cuff and bit into her flesh. She hurried over to Damon and pressed her wrist to his mouth. He needed no further encouragement, grasping her arm tightly as he gulped at her blood, tongue lapping at the puncture wounds to keep them open longer. Anna, who had never done this before, was enthralled. The sensation of Damon's tongue caressing and teasing her flesh was disturbing to her, an uninvited and peculiarly erotic intimacy she had not expected.

"Uhg…" throwing his head back, his neck whole again, Damon's eyes fluttered shut on a shuddered moan as he licked the last trace of Anna's blood from his lips. "I miss doing that."

Embarrassed Anna jerked her arm back from his grip and tugged down her cuff over her still wet skin. Beside her Damon dragged himself upright, still woozy from blood loss and reached out to touch the side of his neck before rolling his shoulder and tracing a hand down his ribs. Anna realised she had been watching Damon a little too closely, and turned away swiftly. She ended up staring at Frederic's grey veined corpse.

"He'll be missed," She said quietly.

Beside her Damon had stopped examining himself for injuries and snorted, "Like hell he will."

"I meant his absence will be noticed," Anna frowned and turned back to Damon. "Katherine ordered him to kill you, but mama knew about it. When they discover you are alive and Frederic is gone…"

"They'll think I killed him," Damon finished for her indifferently as he brushed leaf mulch out of his hair.

"The town founders can't be allowed to discover his body," Anna insisted. "They would recognise him and then…"

"They'd be able to put a face to the demon menace plaguing the town and maybe track it back to you and Pearl and the rest." Damon once more finished her thought for her. He stopped fussing with his clothes and hair and rolled his eyes. "Okay. Here's the plan. We dump Frederic at the bottom of the drowned quarry. No body, no trouble with the founders." Damon jabbed a finger under her nose. "You get Pearl off my back and I'll deal with Katherine."

"How?" Anna demanded, "How will you deal with Katherine? She tried to have you killed."

"Like this is the first time she's tried that," Damon muttered darkly and shook his head. Then he went still, an odd expression flickering over his face as he scratched at the dried blood still coating his now healed throat. He blinked slowly, head canted thoughtfully to the side.

"Huh."

Slowly Damon's eyes slid sideways towards her and a slow smirk slipped silkily over his lips. Anna did not like the look at all. She almost wanted to inch away from him.

"What is it?"

"Bite me," Damon said still smiling whimsically as he jerked his tattered collar away from his throat and formerly bitten shoulder.

"What?" Anna's eyes jerked from Damon's blood and mud spattered but unmarred skin to his face and back again in a skittering dance. Moving with more coordination and speed than she would credit a human Damon seized the back of her head and jerked her forward off balance. He moved then so he could whisper in her ear, and the smell of him, sweat, blood and whiskey filled Anna's world.

"Bite me, honey, and make it look real."

* * *

><p>(<em>Present – Salvatore parlour)<em>

"…Katherine…" Damon breathed out, eyes slipping shut as he succumbed to his injuries, falling into Giuseppe's arms. Giuseppe caught his eldest boy on reflex before he could topple to the floor but his eyes, along with everyone else in the room, were locked to Katherine's.

Katherine for her part could not look away from Damon's insensate body. He knew. He _knew_. How could he know? Yet he did. He knew that she was responsible for Frederic's attack. She'd seen that message clearly in his eyes. Not fear, not horror, but instead a perverse triumph as he threw the light of suspicion upon her.

"Quickly," Giuseppe's voice cut through the buzz of her spinning thoughts as he snapped commands to the attendant slaves. "Summon the doctor, and you two, carry Damon to his room."

As Damon was borne out of the parlour Giuseppe's eyes appraised Katherine once more. Rather than charmed mildness she saw the first hard glint of suspicion. Her lips parted, but not to speak, for she could think of not one word to say. It was taking all her control not to lunge for Damon right now and tear out his heart. Would it be best to kill all the humans in the room and then claim they had been attacked by the same fiend terrorising the slaves? She had become adept at playing the part of tragic sole survivor after all. Perhaps she could even burn down the Salvatore estate as she had the house in Atlanta?

"Father what was that mark on Damon's neck? It looked like something had bitten him."

Stefan's confusion added to the tension helping to fill the room with almost too much feeling, and too much violent energy. His presence also served as a reminder to Katherine that there was at least one person in this room she did not want dead. Still she was in trouble, four hundred and more years of running behind her, and she was in danger once more. If she did not act fast to dispel the first spark of suspicion it would be too late. She needed to regain control, or at least divert attention until she could come up with a way to extricate herself from blame and suspicion.

"Not now Stefan..." Giuseppe snapped, brusquely looking from his son's blood on his hands to Katherine. Giuseppe was a superstitious man, one who believed what he chose to believe with complete conviction and did not allow anything, including fact or the benefit of the doubt, to interfere with his own sense of righteousness. Should Giuseppe believe even for a moment that Katherine was not as she seemed to be...well, then all her plans would be for nought.

She must act now, or be forced to run yet again.

"Oh…" she half-gasped, half-sighed her hand fluttering up towards her face, the incredible aroma of Damon's blood remaining in the room even after he had been hauled away, assaulting her nostrils as she did so. She felt hot and flushed, the muscles in her calves cramping with the suppressed urge to run and her gums throbbing with the contained desire to bite and tear and rend apart vulnerable flesh. She wavered on her feet.

"Oh my!"

Katherine let her knees buckle and rolled her eyes back in her head as her body thumped onto the floor by the fireplace in a dead swoon (that stupid Fell boy too slack-jawed to catch her in time). Katherine let her limbs fall as they may and sacrificed dignity for authenticity. At this moment feminine weakness would be her greatest weapon.

* * *

><p>The hooting of a lone hunting owl and the metronomic ticking of the mantle clock over the fire were the only sounds other than the hush of breathing as Emily assembled her newest gift for Johnathan Gilbert.<p>

"With this compass you will find your demons," placing the pocket watch compass inside the enamelled box Emily Bennett passed the device to Johnathan. "The compass will point you in the right direction. You only need to follow it."

"I see," voice low with a hushed excitement the failed inventor reached across the parlour table to take the box. He removed the compass immediately turning it upside down and holding it to the light as he peered at the innocuous seeming object. "Remarkable." He tapped his finger against the compass needle, presently resting dormant in a northward direction.

Emily stood quietly in the parlour while he played with her spelled device. Her eyes drifted over the piles of books and papers littering the mahogany desk in the far corner of the room and the shelves of dusty, leather bound tomes lining the walls. The gas light wall sconces flickered in liquid whispers, throwing burnished gold light across the room and the shadows encroached upon the faded edges of a worn Persian rug and the scuffed leg of a once beautiful Queen Anne chair. Everywhere in the Gilbert abode Emily could see the signs of near forgotten splendour, the detritus of a once great family reduced to one reclusive and nervous man living alone amid the memories of wealth.

"I must go," Emily spoke up causing Johnathan Gilbert to startle badly, dropping the magnifying glass monocle he had wedged over one eye as he poked and peered into the useless mechanism of the pocket watch and compass. Despite knowing that the devices Emily spelled for him were powered by magic the man still tried to seek answers in the physical realm. There was something tragic in the man's delusions.

"Oh yes…of course," Gilbert rose to his feet, his chair catching on the worn rug and almost toppling over backwards. He fumbled to catch and right the chair before it could fall and then kicked out the wrinkles in the rug. "I'll have my driver take you in the buggy back to the Salvatore estate."

"That will not be necessary," Emily smiled faintly despite herself, "It would raise questions in more than just my mistress's mind should I be seen returning late at night in the Gilbert buggy."

"Ah," Gilbert froze awkwardly, mind clearly ticking over the implications of what the town might think. "Yes…you are right; of course." He nodded his head jerkily then gestured stiffly with one arm for Emily to precede him out of the parlour to the back door of the house. He opened the door onto the night and peered out with all the overt fear of a very young child afraid of the dark.

"You will be safe returning alone to the estate?" He asked showing more concern in that stuttered question than most white men would show for a black slave, regardless of gender.

Emily gave him a genuine smile and bobbed slightly into a half-courtesy. "I will be safe." Her smile turned wry as she stepped out the doorway into the night. "It is not the demons I must fear."

Johnathan Gilbert closed the door on her and Emily drew her thin shawl up around her shoulders as she set off for the woods. There was an impatience about the night, a sense of foreboding in the canvas of almost pure darkness. Something potent was afoot, some working of fate or human folly that would have far reaching consequence. Emily could feel it in her bones. She shivered under the thin protection of her shawl.

A mile from the estate Emily stopped sensing that she wasn't alone. She drew her power to her silently, listening to the night silence of the woods and waited for her noiseless stalker to approach.

* * *

><p>"Katherine! Good god." Stefan exclaimed much to Katherine's gratification as she fell and shuffled a step in her direction, momentarily forgetting his precious brother who lacked the good manners to die as Katherine willed him to.<p>

"Gracious me," Honoria Fell quavered and Katherine heard the sound of springs as the woman rose from the couch, "The poor girl must be quite overcome by all this. James what is wrong with you? Help Miss Pierce."

The room broke into a flurry of activity after that. The Fell boy swept her up in his arms and deposited her on the couch. Meanwhile Katherine strained her hearing for the sounds of Giuseppe and Stefan hurrying up the stairs after the two slaves bearing Damon's unconscious body to his room. Katherine was thus left alone with the Fells', which was, at the moment at least, the very outcome she had hoped for.

"Are there any smelling salts?" James wondered uselessly as he hovered close enough to Katherine's prone form she could smell the wine on his breath.

"James, get away from her. You are too close. It's unseemly." There was a smack of hand against cotton covered arm as Honoria batted her useless offspring away. Seconds later Katherine was forced to endure the indignity of the old hag's gnarled fingers and dry palm across her forehead. "Poor girl, such a sweet soul; it does a delicate constitution no good whatsoever to see such violence. Oh and poor Giuseppe! To think his son has come to this."

Upstairs, beyond the annoyance of the Fell woman's useless prattle Katherine could hear the slap-thud of flesh against flesh as Giuseppe raised a hand against his youngest son and bodily forced him from Damon's room.

"…Away Stefan…I'll not let the demon's taint take you too…"

"But Father what…?"

"There is evil in this town my son, and it has made a claim on your brother. _Listen_ to me and stay away. I must be sure that the devil has not found foothold within Damon's soul."

"…Father!"

The sound of a door slamming shut was probably audible even to human hearing but Katherine suspected only she could hear the muted thud as Stefan drove a fist into the doorframe, his breathing fast and rough, as he stood helpless upon the upstairs landing.

"Mother," James Fell's whiny lilt jarred Katherine back to immediate awareness of her surroundings. She was forced to fall back on her iron control to swallow down the desire to surge upright and snap the stupid oaf's neck.

"What do you think happened to Damon? All that blood…Do you suppose the Yankees…?"

Settled close to the couch Katherine could almost feel the sudden tension that drew taut the woman's thin frame and could quite clearly detect the increase in tempo of the woman's heartbeat. Ah, so the Fell woman knew about the 'demon scourge' too did she? Not surprising, as the widow Fell was the senior Fell in the town and one of the so-called Founders (Emily tended to differ on this interpretation, but it made no whit of difference to Katherine either way). Katherine found herself curious as to how Honoria would respond. Giuseppe clearly had no qualms about speaking of devils and superstition in front of Stefan and yet made so little effort to protect his children from the threat he knew to be very real. Katherine had certainly capitalised on this shortcoming and, if she was to survive this mishap she fully intended to make full advantage of Stefan's vulnerability this night.

"Do not be ridiculous James," Honoria tutted as her posture fell into a false relaxation that would have seemed natural to anyone who could not read the thunder of her heartbeat and the quickening of her breathing. "It was no doubt a bar brawl or some such. Poor Giuseppe, he had hoped that the army would do Damon some good, but alas," Honoria sighed and Katherine was impressed with the woman's ability to lie and deflect so well, "That boy has never been right since dear, sweet Francesca died. And he has grown up to be so very wild."

"Ah mother Damon is really not that bad. I've always found him to be…" James stopped himself as he and Honoria became aware of their silent audience. "Stefan! What news on your brother?"

Katherine listened to the sound of Stefan's soft footfalls approaching, her nerves tingling at the deliciously vulnerable sensation that came upon her as she lay, for all intents and purposes unconscious and shockingly helpless, while Stefan stood above her, his heartbeat tripping violently in the hollow of his ribcage and his breath caught in his chest. She imagined the tightness of his expression, the flaring of his nostrils and involuntary twitching of his little finger of his right hand that all denoted an imminent, oh-so-delightful loss of composure.

"Nothing," Stefan's voice was flat as dust, so tightly contained it was dead and blunt against the ears. "Father is with him - what of Katherine?"

"She fainted dead away and has yet to so much as stir…"

Katherine stirred. Artful and graceful she first puckered her brow delicately, then sighed and arched her back in a move designed to draw the eye to her cleavage without seeming in anyway wanton or unnatural and then she let her head roll to the side as if struggling to wake from a persistent nightmare. Stefan grabbed her hand, his own trembling with the force of his emotion. Deeming the time right Katherine fluttered open her eyes, making sure that the first thing she saw was his face.

"Oh…Stefan…" Katherine fluttered her eyelashes, gasped his name, her fingers squeezing his lightly, fleetingly as she played the part of swooning maid to the hilt. It was essential that she drive out any hint of suspicion from the minds of those present and if she must do so by pandering to weakness and frailty she did not possess then so be it.

"Katherine," Stefan breathed her name like a benediction and she smiled. She would deal with Giuseppe and Damon later. Now she must seize control of Stefan.

* * *

><p>"It is me, Emily," Stepping out from the shadow of an old oak Annabel played with the ribbon of her bonnet, hanging from her hands. Her dark hair had begun to tumble loose from its tight bun.<p>

"You are out late." Emily nodded to the girl and relaxed somewhat. No vampire was safe but Annabel had a good soul, despite her vampiric nature. If it was possible to do so Emily would try to save Annabel from what was to come. She was a servant of the natural balance and while vampires stood outside of nature, as only the undead could, Emily also knew that Annabel was not a threat to this town or its human inhabitants.

"I need your help." The vampire cast a furtive glance behind her, hunching her shoulders and stepping close, resembling less a predator and more the young girl she had once been.

"Help?" Emily frowned. The town was not yet aware of Annabel and her mother's true nature, or even the true magnitude of the threat living in their midst. Katherine had no reason to strike out at Annabel and there was little else that could threaten a vampire of Annabel's age. "Help with what?"

Annabel looked up at her, pale face luminescent in the uncertain light of the crescent moon through the trees. "I need you to make another sunlight ring." She whispered close enough now that Emily could smell the old copper tang of blood on her clothes.

"For whom?" Emily asked warily. Pearl, Annabel, Katherine, and one or two other of the vampires in the town possessed sunlight rings but most did not. Emily had risked the balance she was sworn to uphold making a ring for Harper when Pearl turned him to save him from a death he did not deserve and she was not eager to make more.

Annabel hesitated for a handful of heartbeats and then looked up to meet Emily's eyes without flinching. "Damon Salvatore." She said with quiet conviction. "Katherine might kill him tonight and if she does, he will go into transition."

* * *

><p>"Katherine – this is not proper…" Stefan twisted around to look back at the house as Katherine clung to his arm and propelled him forward through the dark gardens with more strength than he might have imagined she could possess. "It is not even safe." He insisted. The vision of his brother so pale and covered in blood was still fresh in his mind's eye. "Let me escort you to the coach-house. You should rest and I must return to the house for news of Damon…"<p>

His words were abruptly cut off as Katherine turned around in one too fast move and pressed her finger boldly to his lips. Stefan was stricken. The night was chill and Katherine's flesh seemed to burn like a brand against his lips. He could scarce breathe let alone move a muscle to step away as Katherine smiled an odd, mysterious smile and reached out to stroke his cheek.

"Shh," Playfully Katherine tapped him on the nose with one finger and then turned away in a swirl of hoop skirt and lace. She tossed her curls over her shoulder. "Chase me, Stefan." She took off running, hitching her skirts up around her ankles.

"Katherine," Genuine alarm jolted him a half step after her as Katherine darted into the dark hedge maze, a black and hulking grid-work of shadow almost indistinguishable from the darkness of the night. "Wait!"

Hesitating for a fraction of a second, Stefan was caught between following Katherine to ensure no harm came to her and his almost burning need to return to the house and his brother. He didn't know what had happened to Damon, but clearly something had attacked him and anything that could hurt Damon so badly would surely do great harm to Katherine.

"Stefan…Come find me Stefan…" Katherine's lilting voice, full of music and laughter, sounded like a siren's call in the night and Stefan shivered. He had no choice. A young woman should not be left unattended, especially at night, and certainly not when a foul beast lurked in the shadows.

"I'm coming." Throwing one last anxious look over his shoulder to the house Stefan ran towards the entrance of the hedge maze.

The darkness was so complete inside the maze that Stefan's vision broke apart in a flurry of white and grey spots, his hands out before him as he tried to feel his way through empty air suddenly grown treacherous in the alien landscape of the night. He gave up running and instead shuffled between the narrow, privet hedged paths of the maze. It really was extraordinary. He had run through this maze a hundred times before and in the light of day knew every turn and corner, yet now he was trapped. The darkness, thick as a wall, closed in around him, at once gossamer light yet at the same time stifling. It pulsed behind his eyes in time with his thundering heart.

"Katherine where are you?" He called, flinching at the harshness of his own voice as his shout hung in the air for a moment and then was lost. He received no reply, nor could he hear the rustle of Katherine's skirts or the tinkle of her laughter ahead of him.

"Katherine," he called again a little more stridently this time. "This is no time for games. I must get back to the house."

There was no response, not even a sound save the distant rustle of the breeze in the far woods and the teeming stillness of night. He felt a fool, a scared boy caught alone in the dark. Damon would not be scared of the darkness. He would merely laugh at his own blindness; an inability to see where he was going had never once slowed Damon down. He thrived upon such unknown dangers.

Damon…

Unbidden Stefan's mind flashed again on the sight of his brother, pale as a ghost, covered in blood and filth, the perfect, ugly rind of teeth marks purpling his neck in the centre of a corona of his own black-tar blood. Stefan shuddered. He had always been repelled by the sight, scent, and taste of blood. It was the reason he had given up his ambition to become a physician. Damon may not have been afraid of the dark, but something within this very same prison of blackness had hurt him, badly.

Stefan clenched his fists, childish or not, fear of the dark was not irrational; had Damon himself not warned him of the creature killing slaves? And now Damon himself had fallen prey to something with an appetite for human flesh. Stefan squared his shoulders and started forward once again; intent on finding Katherine and dragging her back to the safety of the coach house if he must. This nonsense could not go on. Stefan had other concerns tonight than Katherine's beguiling daring.

"Kat…" He started to call out again as he caught the faint whisper of her perfume on the air. He turned a blind corner, hands running along the spiky, small privet leaves of the hedge on either side of him, helping him navigate. When his hands found only empty air, the hedgerows opening up into the centre of the maze, Stefan was sure he should find Katherine seated demurely on the stone bench smiling her secret smile.

It was then that something whipped through the air, slicing through the stilted darkness like a stiletto blade. Stefan whirled, night blind, and raised his arms instinctively. He was hit hard as a body tackled him. The air whooshed from his lungs as Stefan bounced off the hedge and fell to the ground.

Again the air was disturbed by a fast moving object, something he could not see or hear but could sense moving at great speed. Reflexively Stefan threw a punch only for his fist to sail through empty air. A moment later someone grabbed him around the upper body and fisted a hand through his hair, wrenching his head back and exposing his throat. Cool air hit his neck carrying the sweet hint of rose oil and Stefan froze in confusion, unable to marry up the familiarity of the touch and scent with the impossible strength of his attacker. Then, while his mind still floundered, white hot needles of pain pierced his throat and the world exploded in agony.


	9. Chapter 9

_A/N: Hello everyone – and thank you to the people who reviewed last chapter, I'm sorry I didn't get around to replying personally to everyone. Hopefully another chapter will suffice instead? ;)_

* * *

><p><em>Chapter Eight: Battle lines are drawn<em>

"Mmmm, no vervain," Katherine moaned in delight as she let Stefan drop to the ground, his blood hot and syrupy as it rolled down her throat. Tilting her head back to smile up at the panorama of the stars just visible peeking through the night cloud, Katherine used her fingers to wipe the blood from her chin, licking the digits languidly as she dropped down beside dearest Stefan.

"K...Katherine?" Stefan clamped his hand to his neck and struggled feebly, too disoriented to manage to stand or scrabble away from her.

"Yes Stefan?" Smiling sweetly and feeling very pleased with herself Katherine pulled Stefan's hand from his neck, turned the palm up and raised it to her lips, lapping the blood from his hand as a kitten might lap at a saucer of cream. Stefan was not drinking vervain, or apparently keeping any on him. He was so dreadfully helpless right now that the sheer notion of the power she had over him made her head reel. Damon might have thwarted her and Giuseppe would no doubt insist his beloved son bathe in vervain come tomorrow, but tonight Stefan was hers.

"What are you?" Stefan choked out, jerking his sticky fingers from her grip, eyes wide and face twisted in abject horror. "What manner of fiend are you?"

Katherine lost her smile. "That is hardly the way to speak to your sweetheart, Stefan."

"S –sweetheart?" A surge of adrenaline shot through Stefan and he scrambled back from her, scuttling like a crab, but only ended up backing himself into the spiky wall of the maze hedge. "You," Stefan almost hissed. "You attacked Damon." His eyes widened. "My God! This morning; he was trying to warn me about _you_...he..."

Katherine lunged forward grabbing Stefan's face between her slender palms and holding his head (and thus the rest of him) entirely immobile. Swiftly she straddled Stefan's legs so she was almost in his lap and forced his head up so he had no choice but to look her straight in the eyes. "Yes Stefan...Tell me what Damon told you. What does your brother _know_?"

Stefan's facial muscles relaxed from rigid anger and fear into a slack mask of numbness as her compulsion took effect. His body relaxed underneath her, eyes becoming fixed and deadened. "He told me I was a fool. He said I shouldn't trust you...that you were not as you seemed. He said that I should pay attention to what was happening, with the attacks on slaves in the town. He gave me an herb..."

Katherine tensed as her fingers absently started kneading into Stefan's cheeks, "An herb? Vervain?"

"Yes," Stefan murmured drowsily. "He said that I would need it...but it was just a weed and Damon has been behaving so strangely lately that I...I threw it away."

"Good boy," Katherine's smile returned.

So Damon knew about vervain just as Giuseppe did, and like a good brother he had tried to protect Stefan, but just like Giuseppe, he had not trusted Stefan with the truth. Wasn't that interesting? Was it possible that Damon had kept Stefan in ignorance because he suspected Katherine would kill his brother should Stefan find out the truth and turn on her? Clearly Damon knew she was a vampire, which was more than Giuseppe did. How long had he known; since they met? Was that even possible? If he had known all along why hadn't he moved against her? Surely he had to know that even the scantest evidence would be enough to damn her in his father's eyes. Yet, Damon had not made a move against her directly. Why? Could she have been premature in trying to have the elder Salvatore boy killed; had she seen an enemy when none existed? Simply knowing about vampires did not always equate to hatred, after all. Damn Emily, the witch might have been right along.

"Stefan dear one," Katherine cooed still holding him enthralled. "You must not fear me. You love me. What you feel for me will not change just because you know my secret. Do you understand?"

"I..," Stefan stammered woozily, "I...yes, Katherine. I understand. I...am less afraid now."

"Good," Katherine relaxed her grip on his head and stroked his cheek with her knuckles. "Now listen carefully. You must keep my secret. Please love, this is very important. You must tell no one what I am. Not your father and not Damon. They would not understand. They would only see the worst."

"But Katherine...if you explained..." Stefan frowned a little. "Damon...Damon knows...something already...and he..."

"No Stefan," Katherine spoke firmly, pushing the compulsion. "You must not tell Damon about this. Do not tell him I bit you. Do not tell him I...asked you not to tell people about me."

"...Very well," Stefan nodded dully. "I will not tell Damon."

"My dear Stefan...you are so good to me." Katherine smiled and caressed his cheek again before moving forward to kiss his forehead. "Now, if your father should give you vervain, or talk to you about the demons in this town; you are to take what he gives you and listen carefully to everything he says. But remember, dear heart, you and I love each other, you want to protect me. You wouldn't want harm to come to me..."

"No," Stefan interrupted earnestly, "Never."

"Yes good," Behind her unblinking eyes Katherine could feel a dull ache throb to life. This was more complicated than the usual compulsion to erase a memory or lull a stupid human into docile acquiescence as she fed. The effort it took to drill her commands into Stefan's mind was making her hungry, the mouthful of Stefan's blood she had already ingested nothing more than a tease to whet the appetite.

"So you must be my special protector, my darling Stefan, and you must tell me everything you hear. Everything your father and any other in this town tell you about the demons. Do you understand? But above all, you must remember, you are mine and I am yours. I love you Stefan. I need you. You will not let me down, will you?"

"I will not fail you Katherine." Stefan's face was as open as a blank page and he looked so young, so perfect in that moment, that Katherine's fangs unsheathed from her gums involuntarily. She smiled and inhaled, her nostrils flaring at the scent of the blood caking Stefan's throat wound. She jerked his chin to the side to expose the wound and ducked her head. Just before she bit down Stefan, relaxed and trusting as a new born baby, spoke again.

"I love you Katherine."

"Good," she purred as her teeth broke open the thin scabs half formed over the puncture wounds and fresh blood welled up thick and rich. "That is exactly what I wanted to hear." Shoving Stefan down onto the ground, Katherine pounced and this time Stefan did not struggle at all.

Stefan was hers now and there was nothing his father or his brother could do about it.

* * *

><p>Giuseppe paced the floorboards of Damon's room, his hands clasped behind his back and impatience simmering in every taut muscle of his body. Damon lay in his bed, the physician having examined him and found that the bite marks on his neck and shoulder and some trivial abrasions around his ribs were the sum total of Damon's injuries. The physician had left a half hour ago and now Honoria sat by Damon's bedside carefully swabbing the bite marks with distilled vervain essence.<p>

"Well?" Giuseppe asked, unable to keep the sharpness from his voice, as he completed a final circuit of the room.

Honoria, quiet and steady in her motions, began to dress the wound on Damon's neck with vervain treated gauze. "All is well Giuseppe." She smiled thinly and swept a hand over his son's disordered dark hair, falling across his pallid brow. "He does not react to the vervain. The demon taint has not spread to his blood."

"You are sure?" Giuseppe stepped close to the bedside so he could cast a critical eye over his son. Damon was weak from blood loss but his breathing and pulse were strong. Pursing his lips Giuseppe noted the scraped skin of Damon's knuckles and the already bandaged bite on his shoulder, shallower than the one on his neck but more ragged, as if Damon had managed to deflect the first rush of the demon's attack.

Giuseppe rolled his lips together in thought. "Damon fought off one of the fiends." Rubbing a hand over his blunt jaw Giuseppe found himself dealing with a highly unaccustomed feeling of pride towards his eldest son. "My boy beat off a demon."

"He is a credit to you Giuseppe," Honoria rose from her perch at Damon's bedside. "The good Lord has seen fit to return your eldest from the war so that he might help this town in its hour of greatest need."

"Perhaps," Giuseppe admitted gruffly eyes still locked on Damon as he slept, the low light of the bedside candle casting his pale face mostly in shadow. Giuseppe barely noticed as Honoria bid him goodnight and slipped from the room. The senior Salvatore had much to think about.

Giuseppe did not love Damon, had not in fact loved his first born for many years. Perhaps not since Stefan was old enough to prove to be Damon's superior in every way. Certainly he had not felt any warm regard for Damon since Francesca's death. That Damon had always seemed to blame him for her death only served to justify Giuseppe in his disregard of his eldest. A son should respect and obey his father, not look on him with sullen reproach and an incipient judgement that bespoke nascent hatred. Therefore if Giuseppe held his boy in contempt then it was merely an act of reciprocity. All the same Giuseppe had maintained the faint hope that Damon might make something of himself, that he might yet bring pride to his family and his name. Giuseppe had hoped that the war might be the means of doing that, but it had been over two years since Damon had enlisted and his son was still a private, and had yet to distinguish himself in battle or in any other way. When Damon had stumbled back home, weeks ago, crazed and dishevelled, Giuseppe had lost what little hope had remained that he would ever respect Damon as a man or as his son. Yet if Damon could fight one of the demons plaguing this town and live...perhaps then there was some worth to the feckless boy after all?

Giuseppe's internal musings were cut off abruptly when Damon blinked open his eyes, muscles tensing as he woke suddenly.

"Damon?" Giuseppe moved forward dragging the hardback chair by the writing desk over to his son's bedside before perching on the edge, elbows on knees and fingers pressed together in a steeple under his nose.

"Ugh...not you," The look his eldest son gave him, a complex tincture of resentment, disdain and animosity did much to erase the tiny speck of good will for Damon Giuseppe had felt return to him; ungrateful, feckless boy. "What do you want..._Father_?"

Giuseppe suppressed the answering urge to strike the disrespect right off his son's face. "What attacked you?" He demanded. It was essential to discover how much his son knew.

Damon blinked at him, face blossoming into a look of pitying surprise, "Seriously?" He croaked throat hoarse. "What do you think attacked me? A rabid squirrel? Or wait...a misplaced mountain lion! That's the story you and the rest of the Secret Friends are peddling, right?

"Damon I am warning you..." Giuseppe growled large hand clenching into a fist as his lowered his arms. He smoothed his palms over his pants legs in an attempt to maintain his composure. Damon watched him with a cold smirk.

"Yep," His son's teeth flashed in a sharp edged grimace, "That's the old man I remember. Great role model Papi; gotta love the tough love approach to parenting."

Giuseppe grabbed him by the hair, dragging his head up off the pillows, heedless of the fact that the rough treatment would simply rip open the wound on his neck. "You will tell me now boy, or so help me, I will show you my wrath."

"Seen it, felt it, got the deep rooted psychological scars to prove it," Damon clamped one hand around Giuseppe's wrist, while propping himself up on his other elbow. The effort of holding himself up in bed causing his arm to shake, even as he managed to pry his hair free of Giuseppe's grip. "It was a fucking vampire. Happy now?" He demanded as he flopped back down onto the mattress, glaring.

"Vampire?" Giuseppe posed the question cautiously. Johnathan Gilbert had posited a name for the demons infesting their town but it was not commonly used. What difference did a name make, these creatures were all spawn of ultimate sin and the devil, come up from hell to test the resolve of the righteous. They were demons who walked as men. That was all Giuseppe cared to know of the specifics. Yet the question remained: how did Damon know that word?

Misinterpreting the intent behind his question Damon rolled his eyes and flapped his hands in irritation, "Yes vampires, or demons, or hellspawn, bloodsucking fiends, nosferatu...the bogie man. The undead. _Vampires._" Damon shot Giuseppe a dark look, "Damn it. Now I sound like a reject from a Hammer Horror movie. Great."

"You know about the fiends plaguing this town?" Giuseppe pressed ignoring the rest of his son's statement, which made no earthly sense to him, but then again, very little Damon said or did made sense to Giuseppe.

"Obviously, one of them just tried to give me a back woods tracheotomy."

"How did you get away? Did you see its face? Answer me Damon. Did you see the creature's face?" Once more Giuseppe made to grab him and this time Damon swept up his own arm to knock his hand away.

"No," He ground out mulishly and Giuseppe knew he was lying. "It was dark. He came at me from behind. I was drunk. I didn't see anything."

"Liar," Without a moment's hesitation Giuseppe raised his hand and slapped his son around the face, swift enough this time to manage the blow before Damon could react to stop him. He then rose from the chair and grabbed Damon by the shoulders, pushing him hard into the mattress. "You said 'he'. You knew he was a man. Did he speak; what did you _see_? This is no time for your impertinence, Damon. Lives are at stake." Giuseppe shook his stubborn stupid boy hard, even as Damon tried to push his arms away, fingers shaking as he clawed at Giuseppe's forearms. "Tarnation boy, this creature is a servant of the devil himself. I am trying to protect you from an eternity of damnation."

Damon stared at him breathing fast and shallow, anger and bull headed defiance ablaze in his too wide eyes. "Screw you."

He bucked suddenly, spine bowing up from the bed so he could twist and throw Giuseppe off him. He stumbled almost falling back into the chair he'd dragged towards the bed. Damon fumbled for a moment, hand yanking open the drawer of his night table and drawing forth a snub, sharp edged knife. His son sucked in a harsh breath, wild with anger and shaking with exertion. The blade of the knife caught the madly flickering light of the candle and reflected it back into the room.

"Get out," Damon growled, "Before I send _you_ straight to hell."

Giuseppe struggled to regain his composure, swiping a hand through his iron grey hair and down his vest. He was almost trembling with the desire to shake Damon until he could force sense into his unruly child. How could Damon not see he was trying to protect him? What would make his boy to withhold this information? Was the boy possessed; was Honoria wrong? Had the demon wrought his foul magic on Damon after all?

"Tomorrow," Giuseppe sucked in a harsh breath of air of his own. "You _will_ tell me Damon. You may be happy to damn your own worthless soul, but I will not allow such a thing to befall Stefan or the rest of my house." Staring down into Damon's eyes, as blue as Francesca's, Giuseppe made a promise. "If you will not see sense willingly, if you will not obey your father, then I will make an example of you boy. Mark my words. I would sooner you dead than a demon's plaything."

Then he turned and stormed out of his eldest son's room, ignoring the way his hands shook, or the palpitations of his belaboured heart.

* * *

><p>The night was growing old, midnight had come and gone and the main house was quiet as Katherine snuck in from the carriage house. She had left Stefan asleep in her bed after having her way with him, but now she had business to attend to with his brother.<p>

She smiled, licking her tongue over her teeth. Stefan's blood warmed her; she felt full as a tick, although the metaphor did not hold overmuch appeal to her vanity. Daintily ascending the stairs Katherine slipped up to the elder Salvatore boy's door. She could hear the rhythmic sound of his breathing from within, the rustle of cotton and the creak of old springs as he tossed and turned in his bed. She turned the door handle, jerking it a little to pop the lock and slipped inside.

Evidently the noise of the door being forced open had woken Damon, Katherine had a moment to take in the view of the elder Salvatore boy struggling into an upright position, the sheets twisted deliciously around his legs and trailing low on his hips, and then she was in motion. She was across the room, on the bed, and slamming Damon back down into his mattress with one hand slapped across his mouth before the man could do more than blink.

"Hello Damon," leaning down she nipped at his earlobe just above the white bandages covering his vampire bite. She sat back, lazily straddling his waist, and withdrew her hand from his mouth. "I think we should talk."

"You tried to kill me," Damon glared up at her, his initial heart hammering reaction to being ambushed in his own room abating swiftly. "You sent _Frederic_ to kill me. _Frederic!_ The guy was a moron." He looked up at her fearlessly that oddly familiar look of contempt still evident in his lovely blue eyes. Strangely enough Katherine found his lack of fear oddly arousing.

"Is he dead?" Katherine asked mildly as she wrestled Damon's arms up and above his head, holding him pinned by the wrist with each hand. She shifted her body wriggling her hips and arching her back so she was stretched out above him. Her dark nightdress showed off a rather indecent amount of décolletage, of which Damon's eyes took in their fill.

"Yep," Damon chirped into her cleavage not bothering to make eye contact, "Looks like you're short a boy toy." He chuckled mirthlessly and murmured almost too low for Katherine to hear, "At least this one wasn't a surfer."

Katherine ignored him in favour of shifting her body again, almost nonchalantly clenching her thighs around Damon's hips. He noticed, but then again how could he not? Katherine had never had a man resist her for long. She smiled when Damon flicked his eyes up to her face, expression a pained mix of annoyance and burgeoning arousal.

"Give it a rest, Katherine." He growled trying to pull his arms free of her grip. "I'm over my evil slut lust stage. So let's just skip to the part where you kill me or get the hell out of my room because, seriously, you are not getting dick from me."

Katherine reared back, clawed her fingers and tore off the bandage covering his neck in one impossibly fast move. The vervain stung her fingers as she did so but only for a brief second before the dressing was lying on the floor and Damon's neck wound was exposed to the air. He tried to stop her as her hand arced down toward his throat but he wasn't fast enough. With no small amount of savage glee Katherine raked her nails over the puckered puncture marks and ripped open the scabbed wounds.

Damon cursed vicious and low and tried to fling her off him but she was stronger, faster, and far more agile than he was. In short order she had been pressed face first into his pillows, as she rode his back, one hand at the back of his neck and the other twisting his right arm harshly behind his back.

"Now Damon," she breathed into his ear once again, enjoying the hissing of his angered breathing, "Do you really want me to kill you? There are so many far more enjoyable things we could do together."

Thrusting her fingers deep into his dark tangled hair Katherine scraped her nails lightly over his scalp even as her other hand twisted his arm a little harder, just inches short of breaking his wrist. Damon refused to make a sound, but she felt the lithe muscles of his back tense and bunch in pain. Impishly she lowered her face to the taut triangle of sweat dappled skin between his shoulder blades. She licked the salt from his skin, enjoying the taste of him. Damon tried to suppress a shiver and failed.

"You want this," she told him, triumphant. "You know what I am and you're not afraid. You haven't told that fool of a father of yours. You didn't tell Stefan..."

"Stay away from my brother," Damon reacted then, trying to throw Katherine once more, heedless of the vice-grip she had on his arm or the scoring marks her nails left down his scalp. His eyes blazed with protective fury. "I will end you if you hurt him."

Katherine sneered, lips pulling back from her fangs as she whipped Damon around so he was on his back again, handling his body like so much warm meat. She curled her nails around his throat, digging the nail of her pinky finger into one of the still oozing fang marks on his throat. "Don't be a fool." She snapped not even sure why his stubbornness had irked her so much, except for the fact that she found the idea of stringing both Salvatore boys along very appealing. "You can't stop me. Not now." She squeezed down on his throat a little more. "You had your chance tonight in the parlour, Damon. You didn't take it. Now let me tell you how this is going to work."

"...How what is...going to work...?" Damon choked out around her fingers clenching down on his throat. He stared up at her angry and confused.

"Our new partnership of course," Katherine beamed down on him. "You and I Damon, are going to take over this town." Releasing his throat Katherine tapped his cheek affectionately, staining his skin with his own blood coating her hand. "If you do everything I say, I promise I'll leave Stefan alone. Betray me and I'll kill him." Katherine paused to wait on whatever reaction Damon intended to give to her ultimatum.

"Rot in hell," He spat and once again tried to fling her off him. Katherine simply moved with his body, as one might try to stay seated on a bucking horse.

"I'll take you with me when I do." Katherine promised coolly. She really was becoming more and more fond of this new plan. It was clearly going to be so much more entertaining breaking Damon to her will than she had imagined. He fought so hard and so rough, when he inevitably succumbed it would be all the sweeter. A broad and purely predatory smile bloomed upon her face.

"Now, kiss me like you mean it." Grabbing his face between her hands in much the same way she had to Stefan early Katherine darted down to seal her lips over his.


End file.
