Bad Blood || The Vampire Diaries [1]

25: Break On Through

   Stefan paced around the room,  his arms crossed and a brooding stare in his eyes. He was debating on whether to drink blood from a blood bag or go back to cold turkey, which to him meant absolutely no feeding. If it were up to me, I would have pushed the blood bag down his throat the moment after he got home last night. Damon tempted him with the blood of an innocent girl, and since he hadn't fed in days, he drank from her. Stefan didn't like drinking from people, which I understood and Damon didn't. Damon wasn't a ripper, he didn't know how horrible it was to go on a feeding frenzy because one is simply hungry. He didn't how it felt to drink blood and feel like bathing in it, as if one's insides were eating themselves because our appetite was voracious. There was no control except the hunger, and that meant no control.

  "Drink it," I groaned, pinching the bridge of my nose. "Stefan, please, just drink the blood and stop pacing. You're gonna mark the floor."

   "That's not the only reason why I'm worried," he said, shaking his head. He stopped, turned to me, and ran his hand down his chin. "Clara, I'm pacing because you told me that you're actually thinking of leaving."

   I rolled my eyes. "I said that I was thinking about it, not that I would." I took the blood bag he had thrown at me when he walked into the room and poured it into a glass. "I told you that I wasn't leaving; you should stop freaking out about something that won't happen." I took a drink of the blood, smacking my lips together in enjoyment. After drinking more than half, I laid the glass down and licked my lips, letting out a sigh of enjoyment.

   "That's what you say now," Stefan continued, beginning to pace again. "But what happens after everything, huh? You're going to leave, just like you wanted when you turned seventeen."

   I stopped moving and stared at him, surprised. Never had I thought that he would remember something that happened when I was young and naive, when all I wanted was to escape the clutches of my father and be free like the girls in the books I read. I was too scared to tell Damon, and he didn't care that much about my problems, so I told Stefan, who was fifteen at the time yet he looked and acted as if he were twenty. He told me that he would run away with me, that we would both grab the first train to Chicago, but that my reason of leaving was just a temporary thing that would soon disappear. It was then that I realised that it was him that kept me grounded in Mystic Falls, he was the reason why I didn't leave when I was sixteen, and maybe I should have paid more attention to that.

   I stood and my made my way to him. "Stefan," I softly said, "I'm not going to leave." I took his hand and smiled, tilting my head to the side. "And, if I do decide to leave, you'll be the first person to know." I began to pull him out of the boarding house, looking up at the bright blue sky with a soft smile. I felt like we needed to get out of the house, to take some control of the little things that bothered us.

   "Where are you taking me?" Stefan asked, both annoyed and curious.

   "Home," I answered, turning back to look at him. 

   By the look on his face, it was noticeable that he had no idea what I was talking about. When we arrived, he immediately recognized. When I said home, I meant the ruins of what used to be our homes. They were covered in dirt and trees and wild flowers in the places where we used to leave our footsteps after a rainy day. My formal home, the one I grew up in was just dirt, pieces of rotten wood, and broken pieces of brick. With time, almost everything that I had touched when I was human would disappear with its only place of existence being on paper.

   I stood in the middle of what used to be my home and spread my arms, smiling at Stefan. He stood outside the broken walls, hands deep in his pockets and his brows raised in both curiosity and amusement. "So, this is where you brought me?" he asked, looking around. "Your old house?"