MONSTER, stefan salvatore [2]

I Know What You Did Last Summer

CHAPTER 10: I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER

The Quarry

All Stefan Salvatore had wanted was a fresh start. To be able to live his eternal life with the beautiful love of his life and live happily ever after. But fresh starts aren't always successful. Sometimes your past haunts you, or sometimes it just doesn't work out, especially when you want them to.

Unfortunately, solitude and failure weren't his biggest problems. Because for what felt like the thousandth time (and it might have been), Stefan felt water run down his throat, banging on the hard door of the safe he had been trapped in ever since the night he graduated. He had drowned countless of times, but always came back because he was a vampire. Simple water in his lungs couldn't kill him for good. But sometimes he wished it could.

But he found some sort of safety in the thought of his loved ones. Especially two very important people to him, arguably the most important people to him. His brother, Damon, and the one who was his girlfriend before he was thrown in the safe, Natalie. 

He expected that she had moved on pretty easily when he didn't give her any indication of where he was. She was smart, beautiful and awkwardly funny. How could she not find someone who'd want to be there for her when he couldn't? He wasn't sure whether he wanted her to, because if he ever got out, he wanted to be with her. But if he didn't, he didn't want her to be hung up on him forever.

But, still, there was a war in his mind of what he should do, and he imagined it as two sides. Him against his brother, fighting for what to do. How to get through the awful experience over and over again.

He imagined feeling the sunlight on his skin, standing by a window as he looked out on the green grass and blue skies. How he missed it. But the war in his head raged on and his currently-imaginary brother walked up behind him. "Wish I could say it gets better."

But Stefan saw himself as being the side where he could do the right thing, unlike the side he made Damon play where he would do what made him be in the least pain. "The answer's no, Damon."

Damon seemed to come back with another way to try to convince him. "Why? So you can keep dying and coming back to life? You've felt nothing but sheer agony for three months. You hallucinate conversations with me to have something to do. Just turn off that pesky humanity switch."

The younger Salvatore brother shook his head, knowing that it wouldn't automatically take away all the pain he had felt in those awful three months. "Won't take the pain away."

"Yeah, but it'll turn off your misery. Your fear, your hopelessness." Damon tried to convince him, and Stefan tried to forget that his brother was simply a figment of his own imagination that was telling him to do it, because part of him wanted to.

"And then what, huh? Let's just say that you actually notice that I'm gone, let's say I get out of this. What good is it if I'm a monster again? How is that better than any of this?"

The fight in his mind ended as he once again had enough water in his lungs, feeling himself dying once again.

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The Salvatore Boarding House

The Gilberts were notorious for being a pretty messed up family. But that was part of the package of being a family with only supernaturals. All the siblings' parents had died (and there were more than two) and there were only two nineteen-year-old twins and their one-year-younger brother who had to repeat junior year.

Elena Gilbert was the oldest, a doppelganger and a vampire. She was then shortly followed by her younger twin, Natalie Saltzman who was a reincarnation and a vampire (as one would understand, she'd died a few times). The youngest was their biological cousin and adoptive brother, Jeremy Gilbert, a supernaturally strong hunter who had been brought back to life three months before so they had to come up with some sort of explanation as to why he had been dead.