Children Of The Damned

Eliana

Somewhere in another room perhaps, music played, a song I knew well and loved.

“I want the world to stop, bring me the morning…”

Then I awoke, realizing it was my phone and Damon was calling.

“Hello?”

“Get downstairs and let us in. I don’t feel like breaking in.”

“What?!”

“You heard me,” Damon said impatiently.

“Okay, okay, I’m up,” I said, kicking my legs over the side of the bed and onto the floor. “Crazy person,” I muttered under my breath.

“I heard that.” His tone was dark with mock seriousness.

“So what?”

I took the stairs two at a time, and threw open the front door after struggling with the locks in my usual morning stupor.

“What is this all about?” I asked as Stefan and Damon came in, Damon carrying a small duffel bag.

“Can we have this discussion in a more private location than your foyer?” he asked, giving me that mocking smirk. I hadn’t seen him pull that one since I met him.

“Sure,” I said, leading them up to my room and locking the door behind us.

“Stefan and I figured that if you are going to be left alone for any portion of the day or night, you might as well be able to defend yourself.”

“And how am I going to do that?”

Damon dumped the contents of the duffel bag onto my bed. I heard the clanking sound of wood and glass, and saw slim shafts of pointed wood as well as glass vials filled with a liquid mixed in with some sort of herb.

“Ah, I see,” I said, lifting one of the stakes, feeling it in my hands. “Vervain infused something-or-other?” I pointed to one of the vials.

“Alcohol works best,” Stefan explained.

“Bravo,” I said slowly, twirling one of the stakes between my fingers. If I lit a match to that vervain infused alcohol after dousing a vampire with it, it would be a double threat.

“So,” I began, “you guys are trying to turn me into your regular Buffy the Vampire Slayer?”

“Sounds about right,” Damon answered.

So Damon was back to his regular, sarcastic self. How lovely.

“Is that all? Because it’s six in the morning on a Saturday, and I would really like to be able to get some more sleep.”

“Sure. Meet you in the car, Stef?” Damon said, noticing that Stefan seemed to have something he wanted to tell me.

“Yeah. I’ll be there in a minute.”

“Sweet dreams, Ana,” he called over his shoulder as he left the room.

“What happened to him?” I asked when I was pretty sure he was out of earshot.

“He thinks you don’t care about him anymore. And you’re in danger, what with this new vampire taking an interest in you. He’s closing himself off because he doesn’t want to feel the pain of losing you. Not that he would ever let that happen. You have to understand that Damon has always been about self-preservation. Even if it hurts the ones around him. But now, he cares about you, and he wants you to be safe. He doesn’t want to care. But that doesn’t mean he can make himself stop caring, not about you at least.”

“What am I supposed to do, Stefan? Forgive and forget? I don’t think I could do that. I don’t know who to trust anymore. The only people I truly trusted have let me down or lied to me or tried to hurt me. And you want me to take a leap of faith and trust the one person who meant more to me than anyone else, but who lied to me?”

“Look, Ana. It’s obvious that you two care about each other. All I want you to do is think about what that means to you, and whether or not its worth giving him a second chance. I have never seen him like this, not even when he loved Katherine. Just know that, okay?”

“Okay,” I nodded. And then he hugged me, kissing the top of my head like a loving big brother would do, and left the room.

After putting my new weaponry under my pajamas in the bottom drawer of my dresser, I got back into bed and cried myself to sleep.

__________________________________________________________________

When I woke up, it was nearly 1:00 in the afternoon. I still felt tired and my eyes stung and burned from crying.

How pathetic can I get?

I was never a very weepy person, even as a child when my parents failed to appear at my school plays or science fairs. I kept a straight face, kept my composure.

But this was different. This was more than disappointment. I wasn’t sure what I could call this feeling that squeezed my chest and made it hard to breathe. I had never felt this before.

For whatever stupid reason, I watched It’s a Wonderful Life again, and wept every time I heard a remotely sappy line. I drank a lot of Earl Grey black tea in an effort to remove myself from this weird, exhausted, tear filled stupor. It didn’t work.

After the movie, I crawled back into bed and put the song “Transatlanticism” on repeat.

“The distance is quite simply much too far for me to row, it seems farther than ever before. Oh, no. I need you so much closer, I need you so much closer, I need you so much closer, I need you so much closer, I need you so much closer…”