Hi!!

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. 

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.

“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.