Damaged (1/1)
Damaged
Disclaimer: The characters and other things from The Vampire Diaries don't belong to me. Credit goes to the rightful owners.
I am a monster. Everyone believes I am so and I work to keep the illusion so their world does not fall to pieces. I take blood and life as if it meant nothing. I manipulate, torture and make them wish they had never even heard of my name. I become the villain they need me to balance out their reality, keep them from going insane. They need to see my evil so they can continue to believe in the good. Those are the rules of light and darkness that keep this world from spinning out of control. They have kept me able to guess my opponent's next move and win each hand because I always knew what drove them to do what they did before they even thought of it. So I kill, and I kill until I see nothing but blood.
But that is all it is, an illusion, because even the darkest souls can be broken and mine is already beyond repair. It is because of this vulnerability that part of me ignored the attack, the same part of me that was frustrated it had failed. For a split second, I wanted to die. I wanted release. I wanted it all to be over more than I wanted my father dead. It was a weakness I could only afford once and my enemies weren't ready to take advantage of it. I will not make the same mistake as they did. I will not be weak again. Mikael is dead. There is nothing to keep me from being great. I am no longer a boy.
My order to have Damon Salvatore killed if I were to be harmed was the product of envy and bitterness. Too many people love him. Unfathomable. He has Stefan, a brother who gave up his own freedom for a cure. He has Katerina, whose selfishness rivals my own, who gave up a chance to kill the greatest threat to her existence, the one who murdered her entire family. It would not do to allow him the luxury of existing when I could not even taste a fraction of what he had.
We were made of the same thread, born of fathers who never understood us and saw us as mistakes. We destroyed everything in our path, good and bad, if only to feel anything. We deserve nothing but hatred. We demand fear not loyalty from those weak enough to stay in our lives. We both corrupted those we most loved, never recognizing what value they brought to us. They were never meant to love us back.
But Elena did not respect those truths. She put back together a man who should have been left wanting and desperate for affection. She made whole a man without a soul. She placed her life in the hands creature whose first instinct was to kill and believed that through his imperfections he was worthy of her trust. She forgave what was unforgivable. She loved him and through that, saved him.
Oh, she wasn't giving up on Stefan. I would not have expected any less. But her persistence had become a habit more than desire, not that any of them would care to admit it or maybe they had not realized it yet. Possibly it is born of some guilt or remnants of a love that still echoed and was never properly ended. Whatever it is, it can be explained and rationalized to bits and pieces.
Unlike with her and Damon, absolutely nothing made sense. They crossed so many lines, blurring everything in between that whatever they have is simply indefinable. The only thing that that remains certain is that the second he entered her life he would forever be in it and not merely of his own insistence but also because she unconsciously refuses to let him go.
Jealousy. Bitterness. Resentment. All of them apply. I should have killed him a long time ago. My promise to his brother is something I could have worked my way around easily had I really put my mind to it. But I chose to torture myself, weighing the pain against seeing how far he could get before he wished I would just kill him.
I waited for to be driven mad by having to watch the woman he loved pine for his brother, a second time in his sad life. I needed someone else to understand how it was to never be loved by the one person who could have changed things. If the mold from which all doppelgangers were made of did not choose to love me. Her bloodline was always supposed to pick the good brother. These are the rules. History and its repetitions were supposed to be absolute. Elena is not supposed to love Damon.
And yet in the hospital, as her blood was draining from her body, it was his name that she whispered. I almost missed it but it was unmistakable. The desperation in her voice as she asked for him was a confession I knew they were still unprepared for. It meant I had time to crush that possibility. It meant I had time to kill Damon.
So with every hybrid I created, their first order was always the same. If anything happened to me, rip Damon's heart out and deliver it to Elena. And she will have to live knowing that his blood is on her hands and time will never wash away the guilt that she created the abomination that killed the man she loves.
And with this final cruelty, I will have left their lives as tattered as my own, my curse to the doppelganger and the vampire who dared defy the odds. I tied my fate to theirs and if my end comes, there will be only pain, a loss that can never be avenged and a love that will never see forever.