"I can waken things inside you that have been sleeping all your life."

1. Having met Selene.
2. Stefan disappeared long enough for Elena to get lonely.
3. Bonnie asked to remember that night. I suppose I came off looking well enough.
4. Darling Giselle.
5. The pretty little wizard didn't have his wand with him.
6. Hotel lockdowns.
7. Stefan loosening the stick up his ass a bit.
8. Discovering an interest in genetics.
9. Carnivals.
10. The prospect of a very interesting new year...

This chaos, this calamity, this garden once was perfect
Give your immortality to me; I'll set you up against the stars

Who shot that arrow in your throat?
Who missed the crimson apple?
And there is discord in the garden tonight

The sea is wine red
This is the death of beauty
The doves have died
The lovers have lied

There should be blood, he thinks, spilling itself across the snow, under the stretch of trees sillhouetted against the sky. Black and white and a glistening red to break up the pristine beauty of the crystalline stretch. Glancing down he sees there are drops in the dawn's light, glinting red as the sunrise hits them, but no widening stretch indicating the draining feeling of life ekeing out of him without an ability to staunch it.

He sways slightly, and the arm around him tightens, holding him up. It's trembling, not really any stronger than he, but perhaps more determined to hold on. Funny, really, considering just moments--was it moments--before he'd been ready to throw it all away, to literally walk unprotected into the light. But Stefan always took his responsibilities so very seriously, and apparently for the moment that means him. Damon feels the laugh bubble up inside of him at the thought, tasting the copper of his own blood on his lips at the sardonic sound. Green eyes flash to him, furious and wounded that he could laugh at a time like this, then softening as he stares into his brother's black eyes and for the first time in five hundred years seem to find a mirror.

There's an irony there, Damon thinks, that is too painful to rest his mind upon for long. Death and love and love and death, separating and destroying and binding and healing and two girls with hair like sunshine and eyes like the sky in their darkened world who could not have been more different...He swallows as he holds Stefan's eyes for a moment, trying to search the cast of his thoughts but finding too much pain there to carry along with his own. Tearing his gaze away, he squints at the damnable sun, and tightens his arm around Stefan's waist.

We're neither of us strong enough to bring the clouds, and they'll be waiting...and it's damnably cold out here. Shall we go?

Eager to be on your way? Stefan's voice is bitter in his mind.

Damon shrugs, eyes brushing over the pure white snow again, and feels the cold seeping under his skin that even the feel of his brother's arm around him cannot drive away. There's nothing left for me here.