For What You Are

“You weren’t about to leave were you?”

Jayne actually had been, and let out a deep sigh as she saw Damon sitting across from her.

“You’re going to break this branch,” she commented. “And I will not be happy when you do.”

“Of course you won’t,” Damon said. “But where do you want to talk?”

Jayne jumped down onto the road and looked back up at Damon, who had already landed next to her. “How do you do that?” he asked as they started walking.

“Do what?”

“You have to answer my questions,” he replied. “You can’t back out now.”

“Fine,” Jayne said, turning around to face him whilst she kept walking. “But at least ask an easier question.”

Jayne knew he was thinking hard about what could be an easier question than that. But he finally asked, “What is your name?”

“You already know that.”

“I mean, before you were Jayne Perrin, who were you? You told me that Jayne Perrin existed for exactly four hundred and twenty seven years. In my mind that number doesn’t equal eleven hundred and two.”

“Before that,” she said, feeling regret stir within her. She knew she should have made that deal. “Before that I was known as Juliette, Natalya and most probably a few others I can’t remember.”

“So…who were you born as?”

“I don’t know.”

That statement left Damon curious. “No lying, remember?”

“I’m not,” Jayne replied. “I honestly don’t know. When I was seventeen, I woke up one morning with complete amnesia.”

“Well you’re no help then,” Damon said. “Wait, when you were seventeen?”

“Haven’t aged a day,” she said, but she didn’t grin. She was still too preoccupied with the fact she was telling the person she hated all her secrets. Jayne didn’t even have time to move before Damon stood directly in front of her with his hand tucked underneath her hair against her neck. She spun around faster than the speed of light and caught his hand and pushed him away with little effort. He still flew two metres away.

“Huh,” he started, getting up and shaking his hand. “That rules out the possibility that you were a vampire. You’ve got a pulse.”

“I’d probably kill myself if I became a vampire,” Jayne said, continuing walking down the road. “By the way, when we run out of road, you run out of questions.”

“You can’t have hated us since the moment you were born,” Damon frowned, ignoring her previous comment. “Unless your parents were manic vampire haters?”

“Hey, I don’t know anything about the early years,” she said. “When I woke up, I didn’t have parents. I had super powers and a message written on a rock above my head. ‘Destroy the undead’.”

“Aha,” Damon said. “So you hate us because of a rock?”

“In the hundred or so years after that, we found more than a few reasons to hate vampires.”

“We?”

Jayne sighed, kicking herself internally for the slip up.

“So you and Kara are exactly the same age,” Damon started, and Jayne lost all hope at keeping her out of the picture, “look the same and seem to have some really weird relationship that relies upon you taking away her memories.”

“Yes,” Jayne said, seeing the next sentence where Damon was heading. “We are twins.”

Damon's expression prompted her onwards and reluctantly she continued, "And once upon a time we were both Vampire Hunters."