Who: Damon Salvatore & Buffy Summers (with an NPC'd Diana Meade at the very end) What: A slayer gets turned Where: The wilderness Warnings: Violence, NPC death, major character death, bite
“Eww.” Buffy complained, crinkling her nose as her whole face curdled in revulsion as she got a face full of zombie breath. It smelled like death. And...garbage. Death-garbage. Or would it be garbage-death? Because she was pretty sure the first made more sense and--
Crap. The vampire slayer was so used to slaying, well, vampires that she hadn’t quite gotten down the exact finesse of doing the same with the undead because whereas she could afford to have her little mid-slay soliloquies in the angry, contorted face of the average vamp, she was finding out the same couldn’t be said of dealing death to the already dead.
The hard way.
A gross, goey greyish-green hand tangled in her hair ungracefully, pulling it at an odd angle which caused her to yelp slightly though mostly it was due to the fact that it was just so...gross.
“Do you eat other people’s mothers with that mouth?!” She chastised him as she managed to get his hand out of her hair, by, well, breaking off his entire arm. Buffy glanced down at it as its fingers still clawed at her from the disembodied limb. She made another face before thinking quickly and using it to slap his own face with.
The zombie stumbled back, buying her just enough time to grab the nearby metal lid of a trash can. Throwing it like a frisbee but with her slayer strength, Buffy watched triumphantly as it sailed through the air and made easy work of beheading said zombie. But she’d barely had time to brush the dust off of her hands let alone savor this little victory before a shrill scream from deeper in the woods caught her ear followed by the telltale tingling of her slay-y sense. Great.
Rolling her eyes at the twice dead body in front of her, Buffy sighed as she ran off toward the sound of screaming.
The zombie apocalypse was the most cliche thing that Damon had ever heard of. He had been alive over a century, had seen things that couldn't be explained but never did he think that zombies were ever going to rule the world. It was whatever, really. The rules didn’t apply to him because Damon was already dead. A zombie bite didn’t turn him into some kind of zombie vampire. He was too fast, anyway. A zombie couldn’t catch him let alone overpower him.
The great thing about it probably had to be the unsuspecting prey that he found himself being involved with. She was a cute little thing and she was so afraid of getting caught by the zombie horde. Damon hadn’t had any blood in a while and because this was the end of the world it was really easy to compel the girl not to scream.
He hadn’t meant to kill her but sometimes the old Damon Salvatore couldn’t help but say hello as he bit a little too deeply and drank a little too much. The girl had tried to fight him off but after a while she went limp and Damon dropped her like a bag of potatoes. He couldn’t hear her heartbeat anymore but didn’t make a big scene about it. He honestly didn’t care.
But someone did care. Damon turned around to spy a blond who had pretty much came right at the end of it. Damon wiped the blood from his mouth but he had a feeling that the woman had seen everything.
“It’s not polite to stare,” Damon said, his blue eyes coming to life after such a fresh feeding.
It was so typical, she needed a new word for typical. Buffy hadn’t really thought much about the potential vamp population what with all the newness of zombies and all but she’d heard some murmuring about them. Supposedly, they were like Angel. With souls and all. But she wasn’t really sure just how much she was buying that.
Especially considering the fact that she’d just caught one in the act.
She knew without even walking all the way over there that the girl was dead. Buffy was more than well acquainted with Death. Not only was the body not moving at all but her wide eyes stared unblinkingly at nothing and were completely devoid of the light that usually animated a person’s eyes.
Guilt sank to the pit of her stomach like a heavy stone. Just a few minutes earlier and…
Buffy’s face hardened as she reached for Mr. Pointy, her eyes narrowed at the vampire as she slowly advanced.
“What is it with you guys?” She asked. “I mean, I hear you can trade for blood at pretty much any of the places in town that are still open to the public which would make it a total no brainer for anyone who actually has a brain.” She mused.
“And yet here you are, a complete slave to your baser instincts, just like an animal.”
Ah, a stake. Damon eyed the thing as if it was just a piece of wood but he didn’t just jump on her like he wanted to. Someone with a wooden stake meant that they were very well prepared to take that plunge - literally, probably. Damon knew one wrong move and he could be a very dead vampire and obviously he couldn’t have that.
He was behind her in moments. He didn’t think that she was going to suspect the speed and he was right because it was like she was confused about what happened, Damon watching as she turned her head, nearly turning around before Damon punched her right in the face, a hard strike to knock her down.
She was only human - maybe a regular hunter? Damon didn’t know but he knew that the punch would catch her off guard to give Damon enough time to grab her by the collar of her shirt just so that he could throw her, tossing her like she was just some toy.
“Oh, sweetheart. I’m way above that.” Damon didn’t make any rushing movements although he really wanted to finish up here so that he could go back to the prison. There was no need to make his brother worry about his whereabouts for too long.
Buffy was definitely caught off guard by his speed. There she was, stake in and and all upper hand-y, and then it was like he became a blur and was in complete control of the exchange in no time.
It hadn’t really occurred to her that vamps could be all that different from the ones in her world. There were Angel and Spike, obviously. But the soul thing was really the only difference. They couldn’t turn themselves into super-speeding blurs, plus their faces did that whole bumpy thing when they started tapping into their monster side.
Dazed but also even more angry than she had been a few minutes ago, the slayer rolled to her feet. Her eyes searched frantically for the stake but it was nowhere in what little field of vision she could spare considering that there was no way she could take her eyes fully off of this particular vampire, not even for a second.
“Above it?” She repeated, as if that were completely ludicrous. “Hardly. That’s just the convenient little lie you tell yourselves to soothe your wounded egos what with having to live for hundreds of years with the fact that someone killed your sorry asses.”
...Not that she had any real room to talk there. She had died twice and all.
Buffy couldn’t move nearly as fast as he could and she wasn’t really getting anywhere with him until she could buy herself time to find her stake, but he was cocky and seemed to believe she wasn’t actually a threat which was just enough of a distraction to get the jump on him by landing a slayer-powered kick right to his solar plexus. The vampire went flying back and though her stake was still out of sight, she was able to grab a branch, breaking it in half so that one end was plenty pointy.
Throwing herself on top of him, she drew back the hand holding the makeshift stake.
“The only thing you’re above is the ground whereas you should be six feet beneath it. No worries, I’ll fix that for you. Free you from a fate worse than death because, let’s face it: being a vampire sucks.”
Oh, it sucked? In secret it did. It really did suck. Damon knew that better than anyone because he never wanted to be a vampire. Damon didn’t want it and it was forced upon him, a choice made because someone didn’t want to be left alone. It was such bullshit. Damon had wanted to die as a human but his little brother didn’t want that for them. They needed to be together forever and of course Damon saw how that changed him over the last one hundred years and made him realize that choice was something that wasn’t always possible. Sometimes people didn’t know the worst of it until it happened to them.
Damon could have just let it all happen, too. All he had to do was lay there and let this blond plunge a branch into his chest. Maybe dying would have released him from all of this but at the same time surviving was just something Damon was prone for. His body reacted on its own, his arm shooting up so that he could grab that wrist and twist it, breaking it quickly before he threw Buffy off.
She was right. Damon should have been six feet under ground somewhere. Dead to the world aside from his ancestors who would have known Damon as the brother who was too much of a coward to even finish the war. God, he was so pathetic when he was alive. Damon had fallen for Katherine’s bullshit. He had let her get inside of his head and messed with not only his emotions but Stefan’s, too.
Damon felt like all of that was being dragged out and the blond wasn’t helping. All he wanted to do now was just drain her and walk away - he got that far, though. Damon had used his speed to grab her, his “true” face being revealed in that instant as his fangs penetrated her neck. The blood that flowed into his mouth was unlike anything he had ever tasted - both pure and somehow dark at the same time as he consumed her, making her too weak to fight him off.
Buffy’s face contorted both in surprise and agony as the vampire broke her wrist in one fluid moment. It was completely out of nowhere and she had been so sure that she’d had the upper hand here. (No pun intended…) Any other person would have screamed but she wasn’t just anyone else. She was the slayer and her bones, though broken, would heal fairly quickly so she was still in this, She could still win this.
At least that’s the mental pep talk she’d been giving herself right up until the point his fangs broke the skin of her neck and suddenly, she felt more like a fly to a spider: paralyzed and all too aware she was being eaten alive.
In no time, she felt herself getting really woozy. Almost as if she’d just drank too much alcohol. Her vision grew hazy and the world got all tilty around her. Buffy knew enough of death to know that this is what it felt like and surprisingly, she was actually kinda grateful for that. She remembered what the afterlife was like before, how there was no pain, no suffering. She was in no way ready to go but if she had to, at least she wasn’t afraid this time.
Whether it was one last burst of slayer strength or simply the fact that the vampire himself was done and had intended on letting her go, she had no idea, but Buffy’s fingers tangled into his dark black hair weakly and his mouth came away from her neck. It took everything she had to focus on those piercing blue eyes but when she could see them clearly, she smiled victoriously.
“I’d rather die here than…” She sucked in a breath, all of her breathing having grown shallow and desperate.
“Than to be like,” It was so cold, all of a sudden. Were her teeth chattering or was that just her imagination?
“You.” Buffy whispered as she began to lose the battle of focused vision and her eyes started fluttering shut.
She had some fight left in her so of course Damon liked that. Sometimes it was fun when they fought back but that was Damon’s old life. He didn’t kill girls anymore. Damon didn’t kill anyone because all he wanted to do was just drink and leave the poor girl be. Was that girl even alive? Did she crawl away somewhere? Damon didn’t know because he had been too distracted by this ditzy blond who thought she knew everything there was to know about vampires.
An eternity of misery, brother. That’s what I’m giving to you.
“Today is your lucky day.” Damon felt the vampire slayer go limp but no, that wasn’t how things were going to end. Damon could tell that Buffy was dying - she was going to die but not like this. Not without a special little gift that he wanted to leave with her.
The words he spoke to Stefan on that day rang in his head and sprung this on. Misery was what he ultimately wanted to give him but this girl, this little bitch who thought she had it so good? Well, she was going to have it better than anyone. She was going to feel that misery. Damon felt that if she thought it was so bad then she would have to live with it. Live her entire life this way or choose death.
Hell, at least she was going to get the choice. Damon couldn’t even get that.
Biting into his wrist and bringing it to the blond’s mouth, he let some of his blood drop down inside before, in one swift motion, snapping her neck. She was dead but with Damon’s blood inside of her the process of her rebirth was already occurring.
Damon left her there and was about to leave until he saw her, the girl he had almost killed crawling away. Damon knew that she too would probably die but she would be the catalyst to Buffy’s turning. Damon killed her quickly, snapping her neck as well before dragging her so that when Buffy did wake up she would feel that hunger boiling inside of her and feast on the girl’s dead body, on rotting blood. She would either choose to feed or she would die not wanting it. All the pieces were lined up just for her and as much as Damon wanted to watch he didn’t care enough to.
An eternity of misery. It was funny how things could repeat themselves in a way.
Who knows how much time had passed before Buffy came to again. She was dizzy and disoriented, and, well, hungry. Her mouth was so dry and her stomach felt like an empty pit. She had lived a privileged enough life that she'd never really experienced true hunger, the kind that actually hurts. 'Till now, anyway. Because this kind of hunger, it actually brought her an immense amount of pain.
There was a body at her feet, laid out perfectly. Like a gift. Her mouth began to water and she reached over, grabbing the dead girl by the front of her shirt so that she could have better access to her neck. But it was her own blood she tasted as fangs sprouted out of nowhere, catching her offguard as they pierced her own tongue.
Her mouth hovered as she tried to will herself to do this. To finish it. Buffy didn't want to be a vampire. She wanted to just die, and go back to the warm place where nothing hurt. But the hunger...
No.
Shoving the body aside, Buffy climbed to her unsteady feet. The undead milled around around her but they no longer moved in her direction, the same way they didn't bother attacking each other. Their silence and their lack of interest seemed to scream at her: you're not human anymore.
At some point, the slayer became aware that she had begun running, ducking between the trees without any real direction. Just...running. As if there was some place out there that could actually be far enough away from what was happening to her right now. In her haste, she completely missed the fact that there was someone right in front of her and ended up colliding with an unfamiliar brunette. The force of their impact had caused the other girl to scrape a small cut on the side of her cheek. Just the tiniest little trace of blood and...
Without warning, Buffy sank her teeth into the side of the brunette's neck. She'd barely just tasted the first few drops when she found herself being roughly thrown to the side by an invisible force. By the time she got back to her feet, the brunette was running off and the slayer was smart enough not to follow.