Dark Side. | D. SALVATORE.

Chapter One: Nodus Tollens. Part I.

Disclaimer: I do not own the Vampire Diaries, its characters or plot. Only characters, situations, places, and plots that you do not recognize are mine.

Nodus Tollens: n. the realization that the plot of your life doesn't make sense to you anymore-that although you thought you were following the arc of the story, you keep finding yourself immersed in passages you don't understand, that don't even seem to belong in the same genre.

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Dark Side: A Damon Salvatore/OC Love Story.

Chapter 1: Nodus Tollens. Part I. 

'In the end, I let the windows get dirty.
I couldn't stand to see your absence through the glass.
And in the end, I learned to sleep with the light off,
So tired from giving space to shadows of the past.'

-To Build A House. Cosima.

Eternity can be tiring. Having lived for five hundred and thirty years, eternity is something Cassandra Woodhouse knows very well. She has lived in and visited all one-hundred-and-ninety-five countries in the world several times. She's made friends and lost them; she's made enemies and gotten rid of them. She has seen every member of her family be born, live, and die. She has fallen in love, hard, more than once. She's kept secrets. She's spread rumors. She has gone to higher education in five different countries. Most importantly, Cassandra Woodhouse has learned how to keep herself busy, entertained.

Still, some years, like this one, she finds herself bored out of her mind. She didn't think she would be returning to the United States of America until at least five years, but pressing responsibilities have forced her to. Stupid witch's code, she thinks, rolling her eyes as she switches lanes towards the exit leading out of the highway. She barely even practices magic anymore, knowing very well that being a vampire-witch hybrid is a very dangerous thing to be in this world, surely that should exempt her of having to take on a student, right? Emily Bennett, may she rot in Hell, doesn't seem to agree.

Cassandra sighs, flipping off the asshole currently beeping at her for not driving off the second the red light turns to green. Of all the places, of all the tiny, silly towns in this goddamned state of Virginia, why did she have to come to Mystic Falls? She avoided the town for the last one hundred and forty-five years like it was the plague.

WELCOME TO MYSTIC FALLS, VIRGINIA. POPULATION 6, 923. The big, green sign reads. God, that's small, she laments. Small towns are boring, there's absolutely nothing to do in them. It was the same reason Katherine and Cassandra had moved here oh-so-long-ago. Mystic Falls was tiny, isolated, and basically lost in the map. Perfect for their plans.

State of Virginia, America, eighteen-sixty-four.

Cassandra Woodhouse sat in the moving carriage across Emily Bennett, the dark-skinned handmaid who accompanied her and her friend towards their new temporary home. They were moving once more. It was becoming incredibly tiring. She glanced out the window. Nothing surrounded them except for miles and miles of thick forest. So different from New York, so boring.

"Katherine," Cassandra started without turning from the window. Her voice was as calm as the surface of a lake in a windless afternoon. "What is the exact reason we are moving here?" she asked politely, although what she really wanted was to rip Katherine's throat out. It wasn't fair. They had been having fun in New York.