I was going to wait till tomorrow to post because I won't have any time today to devote to it....

[badboy_fangirl]

...but I'm obviously posting it now!

fluffyfrolicker said, IF YOU BUILD IT, THEY WILL COME! [and we shall just ignore the part where she stole that from a Kevin Costner movie] and shipperjunkie made banners. So here we are.

A Damon Salvatore ficathon!

Comments

"I've Learned," Damon, PG-13/R (lang), post-S3 (1/4)

[pyrrhical]

UM. I hope this is what you intended. :D It got a lot longer than I expected. And I got to use my Mad History Skillz.

(By the way, this is running on the notion that Damon was 24 in 1864, and thus 18 in 1858. Which is, I think, presumably confirmed. And someone might argue with what I’ve picked as actually making him 18, but, you know, news traveled by word of mouth and messenger in 1858.)

1858

“Have you read this nonsense?”

Damon looked up from when his father entered, startled. Giuseppe held a missive in his hand, waving it as though the paper itself were speaking the words which so bothered him.

“A house divided cannot stand.” Giuseppe snorted. “High-handed words! But to what house does the idiot refer, hm?” Giuseppe shook the paper again. Damon sat patiently, waiting for his father to run himself out. “He expects slavery to become unlawful, or the house shall fall down! Tell me son, are men half-free and half-slave today?”

Responding automatically, Damon said, “We are both free men.”

“Exactly! There are no men who are not free. Slaves are not men. At least, we cannot allow the notion that they are men to become the prevailing one.” Giuseppe shook the paper again in disgust. “What would become of this country if we did?”

Having never considered that question, Damon didn’t answer. His father didn’t expect him to.

“You read through this carefully, son. Make sure your brother understands it when he returns from lessons. I’ve a mind to go see Lockwood about this.” Giuseppe dropped the paper atop the book Damon had been reading, exiting as promptly as he had entered.

Damon looked over the words on the paper, weighing their meaning heavily. Abraham Lincoln, a man running for Senator in Illinois, a place Damon had never visited, and did not expect ever to visit, had put words to paper that Damon did not know could express such sentiment.

He glanced throughout his father’s library of academic texts, worn and -- one-sided.

Perhaps he could do as his father wished while still understanding what this man had said. That seemed, to Damon, the most intelligent way to proceed.

1901

It surprised him, sometimes, how much the world looked the same -- and how much it didn’t. Damon had been a vampire now for longer than he had been human. He wasn’t sure how to feel about that.

At first, he could only feel two things: grief and rage. They were all-encompassing. They were his everything.

Then he walked into the Library of Congress. And they told him about other national libraries, specific libraries, places he could do research -- and he thought, at least there would be something to do while he waited.

And he thought, maybe he could find the answer. Maybe he could find some way to get Katherine back. It was insane, and he knew it, but it was something, and it was more than he had.

What had been a pipe dream fueling his rage and grief became a real objective, and Damon added something new to his list of emotions: purpose. It was a subtle emotion, unnoticeable as a human, but it was there.

A part of him -- a still-human part -- questioned how far he would go, for that purpose.

At present, it would take him to the exhumation of a long-dead president to meet a guy who knew a guy, who might, maybe, just maybe, know where to look for a book that actually applied to undead problems.

As Damon watched Lincoln being exhumed, he considered the man carefully. Lincoln was a man who had felt purpose, even as a human. Felt it, been driven by it, and then been ended because of it. Damon knew, as he waited for God-or-whatever only knew who, that he would give just as much.

Maybe his cause wasn’t a country, but he’d already fought for one of those, and the last he’d checked, his side had lost.

And Damon was all right with that.