You Once Loved Me

Hair Like Fire

***Damon's P.O.V.***

I groaned and sat up from the dirt and dust. I was in a uniform... a uniform? What the hell? I looked around and found a battle raging on around me. In my hand was a gun and next to me was a building on fire. I rubbed my face and stood, looking around in confusion.

"Salvatore! If you can stand you can fight, what are you waiting for?" A man to my right calls out. Williams? I fought in the war with a guy named Williams... but that war was in. I closed my eyes slowly and took a deep breath as I remembered.

Liza.

Her time spell must have worked, I was back in 1863, fighting in a war for the wrong cause. If this was that battle, then to find Thal I simply had to look behind the building to my right which was already on fire.

I quickly ran in that direction and circled around to the back of it, fully expecting to see Thal standing there, beautiful and glowing, hair that looked more like fire than the blaze in the building beside it, only extinguished by the ice cold blue hue in her eyes.

She wasn't.

In fact, there was what looked like an employee of the building crawling out, coughing from smoke inhalation. I gritted my teeth and raised my gun at him, hitting and killing him in one shot before going back to the main street of the town. If she wasn't there, then where the hell was she? What had Liza changed about the past?

Once the battle finished I walked back to the nurse's station. Another revelation about this spell was that I got hurt like a human, which was troublesome because that also meant I could die like a human before I ever figured a way out of this. As I walked into the nurse's station I felt their eyes on me. One of the younger ones came up to me with a smile on her face and gauze in her hands. "Where are you hurt Mr. Salvatore?" She asked, using that as an excuse to eye me.

"Just my cheek, a bullet grazed me. Nothing much." I said pointing to a decent sized cut on my cheek.

"Oh, alright." She seemed a bit disappointed that she couldn't be the one to repair a shoulder wound or something that would have gotten me to take my shirt off. "This may sting." She said holding up the alcohol to my cheek. I nodded and closed my eyes, staying still as it stung. After a few moments of placing and taping gauze she nodded and sent me off.

"Not even one wink... to a pretty girl like that? You must be getting soft." One of the other soldiers came up to me and slung and arm around my shoulder. "If you ever tire of all the women, you know I'm here to pick up the pieces of their hearts." I rolled my eyes.

"Hey, I've got a question for you, do mind if I ask it?" I turned to him and he shrugged, nodding. "Did you... did you see a girl today?" I asked and shook my head, that was too broad. "I mean in town. Did you see a girl with red hair?" The soldier stopped and looked at me.

"What, you fall in love with a Union girl?" He asked. He leaned away from me then, cautious to if I would just be yet another deserter.

"No, no that's not what I meant, I was just wondering." I shook my head and sighed.

"I didn't." His words caused my shoulders to droop. Partly because of the relief that she wasn't there, but also partly because that meant that something really had changed about the past. "But even if I did it wouldn't matter because she'd be dead now anyways." He dropped his head and walked faster, ahead of me and into the mess tent. I spent the night after dinner asking around if anyone had seen a girl with Thal's description and concluded at the end that she simply wasn't in the town. Was that Liza's plan? To make it so that we never meet and only I remember our past, well future to be exact.