Forever Is Not Enough

Furlough

1864 - Mystic Falls, Virginia

Even in the comfort of his own bed, there were times when Damon couldn't distinguish between real life and the battlefield. He sat between two fields of consciousness. In one field, he hovered in a semi-alert state. The pain burned in his belly like fire. He would groan, but he never moved. In some ways, he felt he was bargaining with his own body to numb the pain. Whoever watched by his bedside – usually Elena, who looked like some celestial guardian - would reach for the whiskey on the side table and pour it into his mouth generously. Then, he could only wait for the liquor to blind him in drunkenness or put him back to sleep. He couldn't tell if he was simply growing used to the taste or if his body was actually being trained to associate the burn in his throat with the dulling of the pain.

On the other side, he drifted away from the warmth of his sheets and found himself on the battlefield once again. Sometimes he would see the men he had killed. One would think it impossible to forget the face of a man who died at one's hands, but Damon learned otherwise. Of the men he killed - eleven, he thought – though he wasn't sure, he remembered very few of their faces. At the moment, it all happened too fast. So, when he looked upon the faces these ghosts, they often didn't have faces. He'd go against men who were unarmed, and though he could not explain why, would beat the man with whatever was in his hands, sometimes just his fists. The man would beg for mercy, but Damon would not stop. Perhaps it was fated for him to be a murderer, even in his dreams.

In other illusions, he would spot Elena walking across the battlefield. She stood out, gliding across the carnage, her pale blue dress unstained by any of the blood covering the ground around her. It wasn't until he got closer that he realized her chest shook and heaved. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she looked at the bodies around her. She brought her wet eyes to his. "Damon," she sobbed. "Damon, we must help them!" All he could think was how he couldn't stand to see her cry. He rushed forward, trying to comfort her in his arms, but she resisted. "It was you who killed them, wasn't it?" She backed away from him as though he were a monster. "How can you live with yourself?"

Even though he wasn't entirely coherent, the irony of him hardly being alive at that moment didn't slip by him at all.

As Elena looked down on this once beautiful man, she wondered if this was how his corpse would look. The life in his skin had drained away. The only color she could see was the redness in and around his eyes from crying. God, his cries of pain stabbed her heart like knives. When the nurse pulled the bedclothes back to check his wound, the spot revealed a rainbow of blues and yellows where broken veins leaked under his skin. Dried blood was caked under his fingernails from him scratching at himself and occasionally the hole in his abdomen. He was a nightmare, neither living nor dead. Some of the things about him still looked like a dream. Behind the redness of his eyes, was the blue that had washed over Elena so many times. Some days, when he was feeling well enough, they would look at her like they always did, with that shining reverence of a man in love. Mostly though, they shifted around, as though the spirits in the room were calling to him. The hair on his face had grown out a little. The nurse wouldn't permit him to move from his bed and shave, but Elena liked it. The rest of his hair had also grown long, even though most of the time, it was stuck to his face by the sweat from his fever.

Katherine had compelled her, of course, to feel no pain from this. When Elena looked down on him, she could only feel anger. She did not want to feel happy or calm as she waited second after miserable second to see if he would live or die. She did not want to be angry either, yet it seemed that anger was the only emotion she had left. It was the only negative emotion she was allowed to feel, so she sat, her book untouched in her lap, and brooded over the unfairness of it all. All of the noise and false emotion crowded in her head like a piano playing out of tune.