New York || Damon Salvatore [1]

Prologue

As Damon Salvatore drank his daily glass of bourbon and blood concoction, his mind divulged in the past. He leaned back on the leather chair and watched the fire burn the wood, the crackling noise making him furrow his brows, His past was filled with darkness, but there was a small patch of light for a few months where he felt like he could breathe, and then it became dark once again. The light returned when he met Elena Gilbert, his girlfriend and love of his life, but he couldn't help but think of the other light in his life.

"When were you planning on telling me about her?" Elena Gilbert's voice rang through the room. "Tell me, Damon!"

"About who?" he asked, tilting his head back to look at her with a hint of annoyance. Elena had a picture in her hand, a picture that made him frown and his chest ache. He stood from the chair and sped over to her, and grabbed the picture from her hand. He stared down at it, his heart quenching. There was nothing he could say.

"Who was she, Damon?" Elena asked, laying a hand on his shoulder.

"No one," he answered, still staring at the picture. "She was no one."

"She doesn't look like no one!" Elena defended, grabbing the picture from his hand. She stared down at it, looking from Damon to the girl that stood next to him. "She looked like someone important to you."

"Drop it, okay, Elena?" Damon suddenly snapped, turning away. "Just drop it. It's in the past, let it go!"

"I can't let it go!" she groaned, walking to him. "I want to know who she is; I want to know about you, about your past, the good and the bad, and that includes her." She sighed and ran a hand through her hair, continuing her stare at the picture. "Who was she?"

"Are you sure you want to know?" he teased, pushing away his emotions and letting his usual uncaring self out. "I mean, you might get jealous, Elena."

She looked at him with a face, both annoyed and amused. "We've already established that you used to love Katherine, and I'm no longer jealous. Eventually, I'll get over this one as well." She took a seat next to him on the couch and took his hand, staring into his eyes. "Damon, please tell me."

"Why do you want to know about her so much?" he asked, frowning. It had been decades since he last spoke about the girl in the picture, since he last let his mouth say her name. He had spoken about her briefly to Stefan in the nineties, but that was when he was in the shed and weak, when he confessed that he returned because he wanted to feel a connection to his humanity once again. It was so briefly, that he surprised himself that he even spoke about her.

"Because it was part of your life," Elena gave him a smile. "I've told you countless of times that I want to know everything about you. She was part of your life, I deserve to know, don't I?"

Damon stared at his girlfriend for a few moments before looking back at the picture she held. He took it and stared down at it, mostly at the woman that was posing besides him. She looked so happy, with her bright smile and her eyes staring at him with such love-she looked alive. Suddenly, he felt as if the world would cave in his chest. It hurt, it was painful, and he could no longer look at the picture. He handed the picture to Elena and instead looked down at the glass filled with bourbon and blood.

"Remember when I spoke about how I used to live in New York?" he asked her, tapping his fingers against the glass.

"Yeah," she nodded. "In the seventies. You told me about how Lexi came and tried to help you regain your humanity back."

"Yeah," he chuckled. "Well, it was before that. It was 1976, to be exact, a year before Lexi. There were two bars that I used to go to, Billy's and The Ground-original names-in the Bowery on the lower east side of Manhattan. Then, The Bowery was a street filled with the rebellious: vampires that prowled for blood and fake ID's, witches that did both good and bad, punk rock kids that ran away from home, and werewolves with a love for The Sex Pistols, Blondie, and Patti Smith. Now, it's a Whole Foods, designer clothing stores, and soulless hipster restaurants, but back then it was the centre everything." He turned to look at his girlfriend with a small smile. "New York in the seventies was a beautiful, ravished slag-improvised and neglected after suffering decades of abuse. She stunk of sewage, sex, rotting fish, and blood. But even as dirty and grubby as it was, it was still the most exciting place to be on the planet..." He trailed off as he recalled the great times in that horrendous yet marvellous city.

"Is that where you met her?" Elena quietly asked.

Damon turned to her, smiled softly, and nodded. "It's where I met her," he confirmed. "She was... Wow, she was this bright light in the darkness of The Ground. It was the first time I had felt so weightless since the fifties, and it was because of that bartender that served me drink after drink and made me smile with no humanity."

"What was her name?"

"Her name was Freya," he softly said. "Freya Beauchene from Provincetown, Massachusetts."