ajklf;djafd i like how this is just how people summon me now apparently
if words are what you seek, i have a few:
The triple date is going well—or it was.
Over the sounds of the karaoke bar, Bonnie and Jeremy had been exchanging deadpan inside jokes, Caroline and Tyler flirt-squabbling over how to use cutlery properly—Tyler knows a lot of seemingly random facts about fine dining, something Elena will attribute to his mom being Carol Lockwood—and Elena had been doing a pretty decent job of silently threatening Damon into behaving. (Damon is less threatened and more indulgent, she knows, but they both like to pretend.)
Right up until someone crashed the party.
“Hello,” the woman says, hands on Elena’s boyfriend. She’s trying her best to tug him up and out of his seat. Damon, blatantly baffled by this odd event, remains firmly seated. “Get up. There's something I want to win.”
That gets him moving. Damon stands, eyes a bit wide as he takes the woman in. She’s kind of gorgeous, yeah, Elena thinks uncharitably, but there’s no reason to look so stunned. Especially not at her chest. “Uh?”
“Not important. Up. Come on.”
“A little important?” Damon is saying as he’s led away.
One hand holding Damon’s, the woman dismissively flicks her free hand. “Not hardly.”
The mystery woman strides off, arms linked tightly with Elena’s boyfriend. Already tall, her boots put her firmly at least a solid inch above Damon in height, which Elena can easily tell, since they’re standing so close.
To his credit, Damon does look back. Eyes still a bit wide, but he doesn’t seem very concerned to be made off with by some random lady with a British accent. Elena fleetingly wonders if he’s planning on biting her, but the thought has a distinct edge of vindication, so she tries to discard it.
“Did Damon just get kidnapped?” Jeremy sounds more amused than worried, though there is worry too. Probably for the kidnapper.
“Think she’ll keep him?” Bonnie says with hope. Tyler makes a sound that marks his agreement with her sentiment.
Elena remains silent as Damon and his potential kidnapper round a corner and she loses sight of them. She realizes she’s frowning when Caroline says, “Do you think he, you know… knows her?”
Somehow, knows her encapsulates slept with without using the actual words.
“No, he seemed really confused….” Bonnie says slowly. “But, he kind of….”
“Yeah,” Tyler’s nod is short and utterly blasé, “Salvatore’s not that whipped for anyone but Elena. It was a little weird.”
“Hey,” she says by rote. He’s right. Damon had reacted like she would expect him to, at first, but then the woman had said, what was it? Get up? And Damon had jolted like he’d been shocked.
“Maybe it took a second to recognize her?” Caroline theorizes. “I mean, he's got a lot of women to remem—” She catches sight of Elena’s expression. “Maybe she’s a witch,” she course corrects.
“Why do you think that?” Bonnie asks her.
Caroline shrugs, carefully not looking Elena’s way. “He did what she said? Like that movie.”
Tyler rolls his eyes. “Of course you’re bringing that up. Wait, that was a fairy thing in that movie, not a witch thing. I know that, because you’ve made me watch it a thousand times.”
“It’s a good movie, Tyler,” Caroline snaps, right as Bonnie asserts: “She wasn’t a witch.”
“How do you know that, though?” Jeremy asks, sounding like he doesn't really think the woman was a witch, but wanting to toss in his two cents.
“She didn’t have the vibe.” Bonnie takes a sip of the drink in front of her. Her mouth is pursed when she sets it down. “But… now that you mention it. There was… something?”
“Okay,” Jeremy nods, entirely supporting. “She’s a witch. Maybe we should go make sure she isn’t killing Damon.” He doesn’t move.
“She’s not a witch,” Bonnie repeats. “There was just… I don’t know. Elena, what do you think?”
“I think,” Elena says, eyes locked on the karaoke stage, where Damon is being led onto the stage by their maybe-witch. “Tonight is going to be full of surprises.”
Tyler frowns at the stage. “Where’d he get a guitar from?”
“Holy shit,” Jeremy says, then promptly pulls out his phone. “Yeah. She’s a witch.”
“Shut up,” Bonnie cranes her neck to see better, already giggling, “she’s not a witch.”
“She got Damon up on a karaoke stage. That’s some kind of magic.”
“How did it end like this?” the woman sings to the crowd, voice mournful, face victorious.
Pre-emptively victorious. Yes, she’s good, and yes, Damon is doing a great job both making the guitar sound like a singer in its own right and playing back up, but—
“There’s a sting in the way you kiss me,” she croons, eyes on Damon, who is looking right back, his attention on her instead of anyone and anything else, not the guitar in his hands or the rapt stares of the crowd, or Elena’s reaction.
Which is—new.
It makes Elena feel like such a bitch to even think it, but she’s finding out she actually really doesn’t like the way, for the very first time in a long time, maybe even since when they met, it’s not her he’s paying attention to, over any one else in any given room.
“Oh my god,” Caroline gasps angrily.
“She’s good,” Bonnie agrees, then falls silent right as the woman hits a note that competes with the way Damon is making that guitar shriek.
The rest of the crowd in the karaoke bar is just as spellbound as their table. The competition has been going on for the last hour, some competitors good, some great, some greatly terrible but still having fun, but this is the first time the room is otherwise nearly dead silent.
“She’s good!” Caroline huffs. Then elbows Tyler, who is watching Jeremy recording the stage over his shoulder.
“What? Yeah, she’s good.” Tyler shrugs and nods all at once. “You’re better. You’ve got this.”
“I know,” Caroline tosses her hair, “but thank you.”
“You’ll beat her, Care. Your practice at the Grill went really well,” Elena murmurs, not quite able to put in the right amount of conviction; Caroline accepts the praise gracefully nonetheless. Elena doesn’t recognize the song the woman who’d recruited her boyfriend to win a karaoke competition is singing, but Jeremy had. What she does recognize is the expression on Damon’s face. “He looks like he’s having fun.”
It’s good he’s having fun. It is.
Even when that fun is because some stranger dragged him away from his girlfriend while they were on a date with their friends and stole him to live out her karaoke star dreams. Why did she even pick Damon? There’s no way she knew he could play guitar like that—not when Elena hadn’t known he could—or sing at all. Maybe she just grabbed the first hot guy she saw in the crowd for additional eye candy; Damon being good was probably just icing on this woman’s boyfriend-stealing cake.
“I guess,” says Jeremy. “I was hoping he’d be worse at this, to be honest.” Damon not making a fool of himself on stage is probably crushing all of Jeremy’s dreams of blackmail. He seems less enthused about recording once it became clear Damon’s not embarrassing himself.
Elena, forcibly smiling through her boyfriend singing about being bewitched in the moonlight with another woman, nearly crushes the edge of the chair
the song is by Ghost. the woman is in fact Enzo, because i was staring at the ceiling one night and wondering how Elena would have taken things if canon Damon had some trauma bond with a woman who's obviously obsessed with him instead of a man--in the sense that it would be socially accepted and expected for her to be jealous, given that it was like the twenty tens and that's what i think the show would have done--because drama. In this particular fic, Enzo just ran into a witch, somehow for somereason got shapechanged and just went along with it. If anyone asks him, he's the same as he ever was identity wise--i just wanted to write Elena's gut reaction to Damon reacting the same to Enzo but in a way where she'd recognize right away as "competition." bc twenty tens Mystic Falls. And drama tropes. The fun part is that Damon is so desensitized to Enzo manhandling him that he's not picking up on the fact that this looks a certain way to people who don't know what's going through their heads.
The newest brain worm is how funny (to me, specifically) it would be if Maggie broke the compulsion Enzo put on her, remembered him, went back to rescue him, and did some poking around, figured out Damon was there and recruited bunny eating Stefan Salvatore to break them both out under the assumption that as a century old vampire Stefan would be ruthless and strong and instead she gets ‘can’t do human blood’ Stefan ‘let me rot in my isolation while staring hungrily for blood and human connection on the outskirts of community’ Salvatore. Or!!! Villain Stefan!!!!!! Still with Klaus and Rebekah Stefan!!!! Peer pressured into continuing to drink human blood Stefan!!! Limited space for empathy when if he thinks about all his murders he spirals Stefan!! So he’s constantly repressing every real and squishy feeling and deliberately mimicking Klaus and Rebekah’s age-worn callousness to death!!! And it’s killing him inside but he can’t see a way out!!! because Klaus and Rebekah convinced him animal blood doesn’t work and between them have him on an even enough keel that he doesn’t go on sprees (unless they think it’s funny to provoke one) but he still kills every single person he feeds off of. (In this one I mostly want Ripper Stefan tossed into a cell and, while Damon’s freaking out about it, Stefan is being such a petty bitch to the scientists and to Damon, while also very smug about how he has two op vamps who Will come looking for him, possibly annoyed and exasperated.)
ajklf;djafd i like how this is just how people summon me now apparently
if words are what you seek, i have a few:
The triple date is going well—or it was.
Over the sounds of the karaoke bar, Bonnie and Jeremy had been exchanging deadpan inside jokes, Caroline and Tyler flirt-squabbling over how to use cutlery properly—Tyler knows a lot of seemingly random facts about fine dining, something Elena will attribute to his mom being Carol Lockwood—and Elena had been doing a pretty decent job of silently threatening Damon into behaving. (Damon is less threatened and more indulgent, she knows, but they both like to pretend.)
Right up until someone crashed the party.
“Hello,” the woman says, hands on Elena’s boyfriend. She’s trying her best to tug him up and out of his seat. Damon, blatantly baffled by this odd event, remains firmly seated. “Get up. There's something I want to win.”
That gets him moving. Damon stands, eyes a bit wide as he takes the woman in. She’s kind of gorgeous, yeah, Elena thinks uncharitably, but there’s no reason to look so stunned. Especially not at her chest. “Uh?”
“Not important. Up. Come on.”
“A little important?” Damon is saying as he’s led away.
One hand holding Damon’s, the woman dismissively flicks her free hand. “Not hardly.”
The mystery woman strides off, arms linked tightly with Elena’s boyfriend. Already tall, her boots put her firmly at least a solid inch above Damon in height, which Elena can easily tell, since they’re standing so close.
To his credit, Damon does look back. Eyes still a bit wide, but he doesn’t seem very concerned to be made off with by some random lady with a British accent. Elena fleetingly wonders if he’s planning on biting her, but the thought has a distinct edge of vindication, so she tries to discard it.
“Did Damon just get kidnapped?” Jeremy sounds more amused than worried, though there is worry too. Probably for the kidnapper.
“Think she’ll keep him?” Bonnie says with hope. Tyler makes a sound that marks his agreement with her sentiment.
Elena remains silent as Damon and his potential kidnapper round a corner and she loses sight of them. She realizes she’s frowning when Caroline says, “Do you think he, you know… knows her?”
Somehow, knows her encapsulates slept with without using the actual words.
“No, he seemed really confused….” Bonnie says slowly. “But, he kind of….”
“Yeah,” Tyler’s nod is short and utterly blasé, “Salvatore’s not that whipped for anyone but Elena. It was a little weird.”
“Hey,” she says by rote. He’s right. Damon had reacted like she would expect him to, at first, but then the woman had said, what was it? Get up? And Damon had jolted like he’d been shocked.
“Maybe it took a second to recognize her?” Caroline theorizes. “I mean, he's got a lot of women to remem—” She catches sight of Elena’s expression. “Maybe she’s a witch,” she course corrects.
“Why do you think that?” Bonnie asks her.
Caroline shrugs, carefully not looking Elena’s way. “He did what she said? Like that movie.”
Tyler rolls his eyes. “Of course you’re bringing that up. Wait, that was a fairy thing in that movie, not a witch thing. I know that, because you’ve made me watch it a thousand times.”
“It’s a good movie, Tyler,” Caroline snaps, right as Bonnie asserts: “She wasn’t a witch.”
“How do you know that, though?” Jeremy asks, sounding like he doesn't really think the woman was a witch, but wanting to toss in his two cents.
“She didn’t have the vibe.” Bonnie takes a sip of the drink in front of her. Her mouth is pursed when she sets it down. “But… now that you mention it. There was… something?”
“Okay,” Jeremy nods, entirely supporting. “She’s a witch. Maybe we should go make sure she isn’t killing Damon.” He doesn’t move.
“She’s not a witch,” Bonnie repeats. “There was just… I don’t know. Elena, what do you think?”
“I think,” Elena says, eyes locked on the karaoke stage, where Damon is being led onto the stage by their maybe-witch. “Tonight is going to be full of surprises.”
Tyler frowns at the stage. “Where’d he get a guitar from?”
“Holy shit,” Jeremy says, then promptly pulls out his phone. “Yeah. She’s a witch.”
“Shut up,” Bonnie cranes her neck to see better, already giggling, “she’s not a witch.”
“She got Damon up on a karaoke stage. That’s some kind of magic.”
“How did it end like this?” the woman sings to the crowd, voice mournful, face victorious.
Pre-emptively victorious. Yes, she’s good, and yes, Damon is doing a great job both making the guitar sound like a singer in its own right and playing back up, but—
“There’s a sting in the way you kiss me,” she croons, eyes on Damon, who is looking right back, his attention on her instead of anyone and anything else, not the guitar in his hands or the rapt stares of the crowd, or Elena’s reaction.
Which is—new.
It makes Elena feel like such a bitch to even think it, but she’s finding out she actually really doesn’t like the way, for the very first time in a long time, maybe even since when they met, it’s not her he’s paying attention to, over any one else in any given room.
“Oh my god,” Caroline gasps angrily.
“She’s good,” Bonnie agrees, then falls silent right as the woman hits a note that competes with the way Damon is making that guitar shriek.
The rest of the crowd in the karaoke bar is just as spellbound as their table. The competition has been going on for the last hour, some competitors good, some great, some greatly terrible but still having fun, but this is the first time the room is otherwise nearly dead silent.
“She’s good!” Caroline huffs. Then elbows Tyler, who is watching Jeremy recording the stage over his shoulder.
“What? Yeah, she’s good.” Tyler shrugs and nods all at once. “You’re better. You’ve got this.”
“I know,” Caroline tosses her hair, “but thank you.”
“You’ll beat her, Care. Your practice at the Grill went really well,” Elena murmurs, not quite able to put in the right amount of conviction; Caroline accepts the praise gracefully nonetheless. Elena doesn’t recognize the song the woman who’d recruited her boyfriend to win a karaoke competition is singing, but Jeremy had. What she does recognize is the expression on Damon’s face. “He looks like he’s having fun.”
It’s good he’s having fun. It is.
Even when that fun is because some stranger dragged him away from his girlfriend while they were on a date with their friends and stole him to live out her karaoke star dreams. Why did she even pick Damon? There’s no way she knew he could play guitar like that—not when Elena hadn’t known he could—or sing at all. Maybe she just grabbed the first hot guy she saw in the crowd for additional eye candy; Damon being good was probably just icing on this woman’s boyfriend-stealing cake.
“I guess,” says Jeremy. “I was hoping he’d be worse at this, to be honest.” Damon not making a fool of himself on stage is probably crushing all of Jeremy’s dreams of blackmail. He seems less enthused about recording once it became clear Damon’s not embarrassing himself.
Elena, forcibly smiling through her boyfriend singing about being bewitched in the moonlight with another woman, nearly crushes the edge of the chair
the song is by Ghost. the woman is in fact Enzo, because i was staring at the ceiling one night and wondering how Elena would have taken things if canon Damon had some trauma bond with a woman who's obviously obsessed with him instead of a man--in the sense that it would be socially accepted and expected for her to be jealous, given that it was like the twenty tens and that's what i think the show would have done--because drama. In this particular fic, Enzo just ran into a witch, somehow for somereason got shapechanged and just went along with it. If anyone asks him, he's the same as he ever was identity wise--i just wanted to write Elena's gut reaction to Damon reacting the same to Enzo but in a way where she'd recognize right away as "competition." bc twenty tens Mystic Falls. And drama tropes. The fun part is that Damon is so desensitized to Enzo manhandling him that he's not picking up on the fact that this looks a certain way to people who don't know what's going through their heads.
not great, not terrible; but in the very general sense, if your work department is understaffed to the point it would collapse without a single person in it, then it is not a good work environment, methinks
may start job hunting. i hate job hunting. it cuts into my writing time.
other than that, i've planted some flowers and they're still alive, so that's pretty nice
bonlena in a universe where the writers didnt hate bonnie and werent obsessed with their romantic plots
bonlena being mutually and sickly codependents and the thought of living without each other is actually unbearable
bonlena always choosing each other doesnt matter how in love theyre to other people
bonlena immediately noticing when something is wrong with one of them. they can feel each others presence, they cant hide secrets, they are so connected its feels like they share the same soul
bonlena that cannot stand not seeing each other every day, or at least not texting one another for more than five hours.
bonnie hiding her own death from elena? fucking impossible, thats her ghost gf now and she will find a way to bring her back. shes using jeremy as messenger all the time and if he's busy she will use a ouija board even if she feels bonnie laughing at her.
elena seaming more sad about damon's fake death than bonnie's? no way. that girl is crashing out about her best friend all the time, and drugging herself to see bonnie justs as much as damon. she gets depressed without damon, but she gets fucking insane without bonnie, and she is not here anymore to calm her down.
damon being the one complaining how bad he misses elena? both in the prison world and when elena is in the coffin? thats funny, cause half of the words bonnie bennet uses during the day is elena elena elena elena my best friend elena elena. that man is having a crash out? hes not alone, bonnie is screaming back at him and trowing in his face how much more she loves elena, for how long they love each other, how she was her girl way before than his, how a better friend she is. it becomes worse each day and for the first time damon needs to force himself to be the sane one of the friendship or else everything is going to hell.
HELLO i have sent several long asks about damon in the past & i am meticulousbird on ao3... you have been missed & so has your writing i hope you are well<3
Hdjsjdjd thank youuu I wouldn’t say well but I AM doing and even managed to write a bit lately which is honestly such a win and thank you for the kind words they are very appreciated
Hey! How are you? How is work? With power tools, was it..??
I love the power tools so much and my job is so cool bc I get to see a lot of neat art but the constant understaffing is making me want to quit tho 😞 like I don’t mind doing stuff but at some points it’s just me in the workshop for weeks which means the workload is uhhhh… piling. Which means ten+ hour shifts for me which is um cutting into my free time which I hate plus the stress. The stress is getting annoying
I'm alive!!! I'm totally alive!! I've just been hibernating for a bit! Got promoted at work--good,bc i get to play with powertools more; bad bc i now have much less free time and much more stress and it was right before the holiday season kicked off. Writing took a lot more energy than i had, but now that things are dying down, i have more time to vividly hallucinate vampires again.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
And:
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
“You?” Enzo repeats for the fifth goddamn time. “You’ve never…?”
“I told you,” Damon flicks him a glance so blank it’s made its way back round to threatening, “it never came up.”
He goes back to methodically shredding the stupid ‘oops, we accidentally turned vampires’ secondary genders back on trying to cure the whole infertility thing, so everyone’s getting locked in magic bubbles so we don’t have a bunch of heat and rut struck bloodsuckers running amok in town’ note that had been slid under his bedroom door, the one he’d read after spending five minutes trying to figure out how to get out of his room. He doesn’t know where the others are, or how they’re doing, but he and Enzo were locked in here to keep two already unstable alphas from rampaging through Mystic Falls via Bonnie being a sneaky little witch who has gotten way too fond of bubble spells. Better they tear each other apart than innocents.
Just one problem with that plan…
“Yes, but—“
“I was born in a small town in the thirties, Enzo, it wasn’t a thing.”
Secondary genders, when and where he grew up, were considered crass to speak of in public. You weren't supposed to talk about heats or ruts or bonding. God for-fucking-bid you got caught scenting someone in public. Even if Mystic Falls was big enough to have a heat house where those in heat or rut could seek assistance—spolier, it wasn’t—primary was what mattered, secondary genders were mostly just gossip fodder; the kind of gossip that the genteel pretended they didn’t speak of behind closed doors. It was beyond crude to openly speculate on such private matters. If one had to refer to such a thing in public, a truly astonishing number to circumspect sayings did the trick. As in: Miss Smallwood has gone to visit country relatives for awhile—like Mystic Falls wasn’t already in the backend of nowhere—or Mr Fell has gone on a hunting trip—then the inevitable question of who has accompanied him sprang forth immediately after.
Damon might’ve been an omega, once upon a human life, but he was his father’s son first, every other part of him unnecessary or a hindrance to the role. Him presenting as omega—a male omega, in Giuseppe Salvatore’s family; presenting late even, after his father had already been assured he was safely beta—was a shame. If he had hid, that first miserable week after he'd presented—if he’d started studying harder, putting more effort into everything he would have been a natural at, as the alpha or beta son his father would have preferred— If he picked half a dozen fights in the following months, bloodied an equal amount of noses to quickly establish a reputation as a young man who would need his own ‘hunting’ or ‘business’ trips every once in a while—then later spent two even more miserable heats alone and scratching at the walls of a small hunting cabin, unable to keep from crying too loudly—
That was just sense.
God knows what his father would have done to him if he’d hadn’t.
No way in hell would Damon have gotten away with spending a heat with anyone without it being gossip fodder within the hour, even if he wanted to. And he hadn’t. Wanted to. Not human. The only exception had been Katherine, who he’d asked to be his next heat partner—even knowing that as a vampire she was basically a beta; he hadn’t wanted an alpha, he wanted her, in every way she’d have him—but he never got the chance to do more than look forward to it. He’d died and she’d ditched to fake her not-death.
After turning it'd been a moot point anyway. Vampires lose the secondary sex characteristics after waking from death, most assume them betas afterward and they blend in with the majority of the population, except the fangs—a vampire’s fangs are a perverse twist on the normal fangs of an alpha or omega, from natural to supernatural and monstrous. Turned betas sprout them, turned alphas and omegas grow more prominent. Damon had liked that his fangs had gotten bigger, more threatening. Less evolutionary leftovers and more true weapons.
Enzo knows Damon had been an omega once, because there had been some shriveled remnants his body had held on to that Augustine had been interested in poking at and there hadn’t been anything resembling privacy in those cells, but apparently Damon had forgotten to mention that he’d never actually spent a heat where he was the one in heat in the company of another person before.
Ever.
Right up until he’s been launched straight into pre-heat and locked in a room with his friend by a group of busy-bodies who have, once again, decided to mess with forces better left alone and went tinkering around with magic. Who didn’t even have the decency to tell him to his face but instead left a goddamn note.
Paper shreds small as they can be, he drops what had once been the very unwelcome newsletter to the floor and doesn’t watch as the little pieces flutter down. He glares at Enzo instead.
Insultingly unthreatened, Enzo only says, “You understand I’m mostly confused because I don’t generally put you and abstinence in the same category, yes?”
“I wasn’t fucking abstinent.” He’d had sex before he turned—and plenty of it after—just outside of heat, when it was much less obvious what he was. “I just didn’t have heat-sex.“
“Heat sex is fun.”
Damon nearly sprains something rolling his eyes. “I know. And it’s more fun when you aren’t the one in heat.”
“Don’t know what you’ve been doing, but every omega I’ve spent a heat with was having plenty of fun, mate.”
Already on edge because his skin is itching and he’s starting to sweat and every scent in the room—including the rut brewing on Enzo’s skin—is starting to grate, Damon snaps, “It’s not for me. Okay? It sucks. I don’t like it.”
It’s different now—even if people can still be jackasses about it, but omegas get to walk around and talk about what they are and how they handle heats and there are books and billboards and commercials. He sees ads for omega-brand heat helpers, gadgets and medications and special nesting materials—even for male omegas. There are classes now, taught in high school in bland medical terminology Damon would have killed for once, to attend, to understand what his body was doing to him other than betraying him, intrinsically flawed as he’d suspected he always was, but knew it for truth after that disastrous presentation. There was a big push a couple decades ago to cement equal rights in the government and, yeah, people are people and will be people forever about those different from them, but Damon remembers being locked in a cold cabin all alone, stripped bare of comfort save the essentials because his father didn’t want to fucking encourage his behavior and he’d jumped at the idea of never having to do that again, when Katherine had told him turning would take it away.
It doesn’t matter that it’s different now, because Damon’s not an omega, he’s a vampire—except now that has failed him too and his body is rebelling against itself.
Kicking the pile of books next to his bed would solve nothing and he tries not to damage his books when he can, so he doesn’t. He scoops them up and reshelves them instead.
“Fair enough,” Enzo says, tone so mild Damon’s fingers briefly clench on a spine and he has to deliberately let go before he throws the book at Enzo’s face.
“It doesn't matter anyway. Once this spell has run its course, my body will be back to normal.”
“Some people would say the spell has put it to rights.”
“Some people can kiss my ass.” Damon finishes reshelving his books. “
“Not an animal,” Enzo says, with a smile that bares all his teeth, including the ones that had once been removed by the workhouse he’d been raised in. They’d grown back in after he’d turned. “I’m more than capable of controlling myself.”
Less of a stigma in the Old Country about second genders—though it still wasn’t polite to be loud spoken about them—by the 1870s, a bunch of rich English ‘men of science’ published a series of papers on the behavior and social psychology of alphas and omegas, using the classic terminology and popularizing it. It was a bullshit series of essays that reinforced every stereotype about gender floating around in society’s cesspool. Alphas were manly. Male alphas were the epitome of manhood, though it took good breeding to keep them from going savage. Omegas were emotional but nurturing, and took careful managing to keep content and fertile. Betas were levelheaded, but weaker in senses and strength, even as they were more numerous than any other secondary gender. Any variation on the ideal—male alpha, female omega—was tolerable, but must be pitied, for their instincts were diluted and confused. They had already failed step one of biology’s role for them.
London in particular embraced the new science, and, as well as in other the larger cities, thought itself well-reasoned to preemptively remove the fangs of low class young alphas in effort to help them become ’respectable, civil members of society.’ Having no fangs would inhibit the impulse to bite—an alpha instinct frowned upon outside of tempestuous dramas and the occasional well-bred sneer to flash fang. Biting was left to the extremely poorly-mannered or the desperate. Which meant many institutions—hospitals, schools, poorhouses, and some shops—would encourage young alphas of low or working class to trade in new fangs for a week's worth of food-money. Wrenching newly-presented alpha fangs out by the root didn’t do shit. Just made the class distinction more obvious. The practice stopped not a decade later, but not before you got a few generations of alphas with obvious, telling holes where there should have been teeth.
Damon eyes him a second longer. He should probably apologize. Enzo doesn’t have a lot of sore spots, but accusing him of being nothing but a knot-brained alpha who can’t control himself—just as society had once named him for the crime of not being born into the right circumstances—is one of them.
He digs his hole deeper instead. He smiles—and dips his eyes, slow and sweet and false demure, all the way down the bulge in Enzo’s pants then back up. “Sure about that?”
Expression flat, Enzo says, “Very. Sorry to be the one to tell you this Damon, but you’re not irresistible.”
Damon scoffs. “Tell that to your boner.”
“I’m locked in a room with an omega in pre-heat,” Enzo rolls his eyes, “it’s an involuntary response.” A mean-edged smile. “Just like how I can smell you getting wet.”
Damon scowls and doesn’t shift where he stands. He’s trying not to think about the slick between his thighs. It’s not a lot, not now, but if this magic bullshit heat is anything like the ones he’d had when he was human, it won’t stay that way.
Blithley ignoring that, Enzo continues, “Still not going to jump you.”
“Rut-struck is still a valid defense in a court of law today,” Damon points out neutrally.
Enzo’s sneer shows just what he thinks of that before he pins Damon with a searching stare. “This something you’re worried about?”
“What? No.” Even if Damon wasn’t a vampire—which he still is, the spell hasn’t done jack to that—Enzo’s not—
There are worse people to be trapped with, is all.
do you think damon's personality actually changed so thoroughly as stefan and himself believe after becoming a vampire? ik a lot of the bedrock of his personality- tendency for obsession and boredom, intensity in love (!!!), abandonment issues, neuroticism, impatience, eldest daughterisms, spite, pragmatism, etc- were definitely heightened, but there are moments where you can catch glimpses of his 1864 earnesty and sweetness, and a lot of his personality seems to be trauma response or maladaptive personality that i always assumed was from underlying mental illness pre-turning + the genuine ease with himself that comes from having power/comfortability & satisfaction with being dangerous + a result of carefully and deliberately suppressing innate personality traits that would have gotten him killed (ie., constant paranoia overcompensating for his naturally earnest personality).
sorry i rambled!! but what do you think?
oh no, you absolutely get me, i don't think Damon changed much at ALL--like you hit the nail on the head. Genuinely, I don't really have much to add, bc you summed it up so well--turning didn't change him so much as shine a light on different facets and then he embraced certain traits as time and life had their impact. It'd be truer to say life and his responses to it changed him far more than turning ever did.
please ramble more, i love everything you're saying
hi! was wondering, do you write damon to have bpd? certain things come across that way + interested in how you portray him having sensory issues in some of these that other vampires don't seem to. do you have any more thoughts or ideas about that???
it's not something i consciously think about doing, though I do believe it fits him and my interpretation of him, particularly as a human, though i am far from an expert on the subject.
as for the sensory issues--I have sensory issues sometimes and mostly that's me being unable to imagine having super senses and that not being So Much Worse. it just makes sense to me that vampires, given the senses and the heightened emotions, would feel similarly--Damon gets the brunt of that bc i write him the most i think
I think my favorite of relationships on your work is the push and pull between Stefan and Enzo. I know the show had a starker version of it.. but what is the baseline for you when writing Stefan POV about Enzo or any interaction between the two.
uhhhhhhh my baseline for those two is a general flavor of 'wow, i hate your face??' like. those people in the world where you meet and they haven't even DONE anything, but you just. don't like them. they talk and you dislike their voice. they make a point and you're just like, you could be right, but you're you, so... Then things go up or downhill from there depending on the story.
There's also a matching sliding scale on both sides of like. How annoyed they are that the other is taking up Damon's time and attention (even if they'd never admit that part out loud.)
that's the baseline--instant dislike. it varies from there. like, in the rumor has it universe, stefan actually does like Enzo more than he usual does in different fics. Because Enzo is human (Stefan's got a bias) AND because rumor has it!Damon is sooo much worse off than any other counterpart. So a lot of Stefan's interactions come from his perceived influence of Enzo on Damon. (which holds for canon as well). Same for Fire in My Step. Enzo there makes Damon happy--and is, as far as Stefan can tell, mostly harmless (not particularly, circumstances just lend that view) so he likes him a lot better there as opposed to, oh say, Missed Me, where he thinks Enzo is a bad influence on his brother and greatly dislikes this new insert in a dynamic he'd thought he had figured out.
like, they don't cut each other any slack. I think they both see each other's flaws pretty clearly but struggle to find any virtues--they're both really, really stubborn so
