open ] [i am a wolf in your eyes and i'm filled with regret

[eluding]

[ooc: SO THEY ARE fighting for real. if your character wants to try to break it up, watch out, they're vampire and werewolf (though the cliffhanger moment i think someone could talk sense into Ethan rlkj;ea). also all the furniture/the bar/the alcohol on the deck and stuff is gonna be a bit destroyed for awhile. SORRY ABOUT THAT. someone should try to make them clean it up lol]

This has been building for awhile. Honestly, it's been building since Chicago, but being on this ship with Damon's constant jabs and comments (calling him wolfboy over and over again when there's nothing Ethan hates more than the werewolf inside of himself) and the knowing that Ethan not only fell out of a Rift after Elena when it was Damon that chose to go with her (and he hasn't seen her in decades, DECADES before now) and the knowing that they're in a relationship-- And part of always be in love with Elena even if she is his best friend first (and that dynamic can take over), Damon has always been in love with her too.

They end up on the deck alone together, and it doesn't take long to build into violence because it has been building for a long, long time. Ethan, for his part, tries to walk on by, ignoring Damon, but Damon starts in with the jabs and Ethan has a temper that he is no longer avoiding. He's done the worst as a werewolf. What more is there to avoid about it?

"I think I'm just going to have to remind you that I'm the one that was in that car with her that day." Damon is trying for the sarcasm but it's coming out sharp, angry. "Not you. You were perfectly good with walking away."

It's been building, and there's a certain level of too sharp, too real hurt when it comes to that particular accusation, and it's why the words come out in a shout, with bite. "I WAS COMING BACK."

"But you still thought you'd be good with WALKING away in the first place, didn't you? You left, and I stayed and I am always going to stay with her. I am always going to choose her like I always have, and that's not something you can say, wolfboy."

"Yes, because your obsessive fucking STALKER levels is something to wave around like a fucking flag." Ethan's hands become fists hard. The whole of him is shaking with rage and the need for violence. "Elena and I are together. She doesn't choose you, and it's her choice that is relevant here. Not yours. I understand that that is something you struggle to handle, but that never gives you the excuse to act like a jackass to me or to her. Do you understand? You need to back off or believe me, I. will. make. you."

And everything that Ethan is saying is striking a really, really hard nerve inside of Damon. The anger is growing and growing and so is the hurt, but he somehow manages to smirk (because if anyone is going to throw the first blow here, it's going to be her precious better man than Damon could ever be). He is used to burying down so much pain, and the smirk slides a bit further, something half sadistic in it. "Did you know Elena and I were together New Year's Eve? On my desk? It was really, really hot. Threw all of the things off of the desk, went wild. Y'know, now that I think about it, funny enough that was during the time you were once again strangely comfortable with walking directly out of her life--"

It is impossible to describe Ethan's reaction, because Elena and Ethan tell each other everything (almost everything, there are some things they were still working to tell each other, and it's true-- it's true that he wasn't-- it's something he regrets and guilt that he lives with every single day because the absence of Elena in his life is something he cannot--). There's a moment that it takes before it processes like he can't really wrap his head around the fact that this dickhead asshole and Elena actually-- And then it hits suddenly with visuals along with the grief and the guilt and the rage for Damon unlike he has ever fucking known it before.

Ethan lets out a noise of rage that hardly sounds human (and he's not really at the end of the day) and everything goes red all at once because he's picturing it and it's true that he wasn't there for fucking-- he wasn't there for her, and he lunges at him with both of his hands up, knocking him back so hard into the bar that they crash it open, breaking down the side of the wall completely as Damon hurdles back into the shelves of alcohol that all come crashing down on top of the both of them. Damon mutters a Finally before he shoves himself forward back at Ethan, fists are flying from both sides, and they're both bloody and furniture near by is getting broken in half or knocked to pieces along the way.

Neither one of them is really getting a leg up on the other. The rage and emotion inside of the both of them is intensely strong, and while Damon is much, much older than Ethan, Ethan's father made him and his brother to be stronger, faster than the average werewolf. It's not long at all until most of the deck has seen the results of this destruction (the furniture overturned or broken, bar broken, alcohol shattered), and Ethan manages to get that last punch in that has Damon sprawling backwards. The rage is still in every portion of his body (werewolves have so much rage, Ethan has had so much rage of his own, one and the same).

He reaches down gripping hold of Damon by the shirt and hauling him up violently against the railing (they're both bloody with bits of glass in them) as he shakes with that rage, intent on throwing him off the ship entirely at this point, because Ethan isn't exactly checking his strength. And that part inside of him that is violence and rage has clicked on.

If someone doesn't stop him, Damon is going straight into the water. Oops.

Comments

♥♥

[aneurism]

"Because I own my mistakes," she tells him brazenly, strolling up to him and coming to a stop so close to him she has to tilt her head back to see his face. "Unlike some people."

Harsh? Maybe, but at least she was honest. She did what she did, and she'd do it again. Doing those things meant accepting the consequences that came with them. She's lived for this long with them, she can live (or not live) a bit longer knowing that Elena Gilbert held her in contempt for the stunts she pulled to get her mother out of that damned tomb.

[consumes]

"Because that makes you so much better than me, is that it?" He lifts up his hands one either side of himself as if speaking to a crowd. "Anna owns trying to kill Elena, everyone! She is a paragon of virtue here."

Damon doesn't back away as she strolls up to him. It is no less harsh than he is with himself, but he is already upset from what just happened, already tangled up in his emotions from that particular fight.

"Newsflash, I am perfectly aware of what I have done. I am a terrible vampire. We're vampires in case you've forgotten. We do terrible, horrible things." It's the reason. "And when you've done as much as I have, you can't afford to feel it." He cannot afford to feel the guilt of hundreds of years of doing and being the terrible person that he is (guilt is a human emotion, and he is not human, he is not). He has to be terrible.

He has to be worthless and terrible. It is the reason behind everything. It's the reason Katherine didn't want and love him after all. It's the reason that he became a vampire, that his brother made him one even when Damon didn't want to be one anymore (he had betrayed Stefan for so long and been so jealous of him that it was the least that he could do to not leave him alone).

[aneurism]

"Wow, you're quick to assume. Which is, by the way, part of your actual problem. You assume too much, Damon, whether it be of the people around you, what they're saying to you, or even what you are trying to tell yourself. Maybe if you stopped assuming, you wouldn't be such a terrible vampire. I survived for five hundred years working my way around not being a completely terrible vampire. Just because we're predators doesn't mean we have to be terrible. That's a choice you make for yourself."

Anna frowns at him, taking a healthy step back from him as she crosses her arms over her chest. She can tell he's hurting, but it's not really her problem. Or her business. She senses there's more to this recent bought of hurt than she's aware of.

"If you can't afford to feel it and are so set on being terrible, then why haven't you just turned it off?"

[consumes]

Damon feels his jaw lock as she continues. No, there has to be a reason. There has to be a reason behind everything terrible that has ever happened to him and every terrible thing he has done to the people around him. It is because he is terrible. Nothing else makes sense to him. Nothing else is something he can process. It doesn't matter how right she may be. Damon cannot see it or feel it as being right.

He takes a step toward her as she takes that step back from him. He is dangerous and reckless. It's his choice that he made because he is a terrible thing. Otherwise, there are hundreds of years of guilt that he doesn't want to-- can't afford to feel. He isn't human. Feeling like he is remotely human, that is what hurts because it isn't true.

"I have before for a long time. Life sucks either way. That's what I told Jeremy when I came to tell him you died. Life sucks either way."

A lot of things have changed... but that-- that hasn't. He isn't going to admit he no longer has the ability to turn it off. It was his rift change. He wouldn't turn it off here anywhere, but how he craved to just let go of every emotion in that other world for over eighty years.

[aneurism]

Anna may look like nothing more than a fifteen-year-old girl, but she's wise beyond her years. She's over five hundred years old, has lived far longer than most vampires should, stayed in the long-term company of the infamous Katerina Petrova and even had a clever means of keeping the Originals at bay. Not only did she know Damon when he was human, innocent, and untouched by any of the horrors of the world they live in now, but she's seen people like him before. The ones that just, for some reason, get terrible after they're changed.

It's an unfortunate story each and every time.

"What do you want me to do, thank you for telling a boy who liked me that I died?" A boy she liked in return and still likes, but Anna's lived too long to get hung up on one boy whose life she was ultimately inferring in. She's not Katherine. "A boy whose neck you later snapped in the heat of a drunken hissy fit? Yeah, I saw that. I saw a lot of things while I was stuck on the Other Side, Damon."

[consumes]

Anna is still older than him by a lot even after he had that eighty or so years in the universe of hell, which he will return to. Damon feels he was terrible before he was a vampire too. He was human, and he was weak and pathetic. He knew exactly what was going on with Katherine and kept it from his brother, because he was jealous of how everyone felt about Stefan and liked the idea that the woman he was in love with might love Damon more. He was petty, and he got what he deserved and what he chose even if he spent decades blaming Stefan for it.

Damon manages to flinch when she mentions that. It's true, of course. He did it. One of those things he immediately regretted, but it doesn't change what he did.

"No. I'm saying life sucks either way." There's a low release of breath. He is not the Damon in Mystic Falls. He is the Damon that went to Chicago, that spent decades in hell with no chance for an escape from it, from his guilt, from what he has done. It's one that grew to care about Jeremy in his own way. The admittance comes so quiet and low. "I would take it back."

Killing Jeremy, he would take that back if he could, but he can't. "Jeremy ended up in Chicago too. I don't know how things turned out back home, but he had an actual life there. He hunted things, graduated from high school, all those big milestones."

[aneurism]

"Graduated?"

Momentarily distracted from her frustration with Damon being Damon, Anna's face lights up with hope. Jeremy went to this Chicago everyone's constantly speaking of. He grew up. He graduated. He lived a life. She's happy to hear that, because from where she was standing, it seemed like Jeremy was constantly being held back by the people around him. He'd been through so much, and without the fear of winding up alone on the Other Side influencing her thoughts, she can see that she was part of what he went through.

And she's sorry about that, even if she's not sorry she met him.

"But you can't, Damon. You can't go back and undo it. Don't you think trying to undo things has caused Mystic Falls enough trouble?" Katherine, Klaus, the Other Side— "Instead of trying to undo things, why don't you try doing things right and better in the here and now? In the future? The past can't be changed."

If it could, Anna would've found a way to stop the town from finding out about the vampires or fled from it before they did.

[consumes]

There is so much that he could respond to. Part of Damon wants to lash out again, it's what he does. The older, more grown part is hit with the heaviness of things he cannot change and how little he feels it matters if he changes now. How there is some part of him that refuses to make this choice, because if he makes it now, what does it say about all the time leading up to it?

Instead he just swallows thickly. He heard about how trying to undo one of his screw ups lead to Jenna being killed instead, lead to his being bitten by Tyler which lead to Stefan signing himself away.

Damon is very aware that she is right even if admitting that is something else entirely.

So instead, he just lifts a drink from the nearest bar that has not been destroyed. He lifts the entirety of the bottle, and Damon swallows down the emotions rising up through his chest. He doesn't comment on any of those things that hit too terrifyingly close to home. For once, he is not an ass either.

"You really loved him, didn't you?"

It's said quietly. "I guess it's still love maybe. You are still around."

Even if she is dead, even if she is a ghost.

[aneurism]

Anna is genuinely surprised by his reaction. She'd been expecting him to lash out at her, to tell her how wrong she was or how he already knew the things she was telling him, not accept it in humble silence.

What has he been through? Something changed him. Chicago?

She nods, shrugs. "I did — do. Past tense works. I was supposed to be moving on, finally. No more Other Side. Just peace. But, I guess being here and tangible again means I'm not moving on anymore."

[consumes]

"So is that how it works over there? There's an Other Side. What's it like?"

Damon always figured there was nothing after death. Obviously, if one becomes a vampire, there is very much something after death, but he means the permanent kind of death.

There was a time when he was human that he believed in God, but he doesn't anymore.

[aneurism]

"Lonely," she answers, her response immediate. "It's like you're still there, but you're not. Nobody can see you or touch you or even hear you. You're completely alone. There is no bright light and happiness to follow. Just..." Anna shrugs. "You're just stuck. No going forward, no going back."

[consumes]

"...sounds like it sucks," Damon says bluntly with a shrug as he takes a drink. "Not that I'm really surprised. If there was an afterlife, it'd obviously be a shitty one."

That makes some relative sense... as much as anything can make any sense.