In A Rough Embrace by idolatrie Sometime, Damon thinks, it would be easier to love Stefan than to hate him. But Damon's never liked doing easy things. Love is soft and warm and rubbery; untrustworthy in its lack of certainty. It changes between people, expanding and contracting -- lapping against sand or crashing savagely on cliff faces. Damon doesn't like love, because he doesn't understand it. He has hazy memories of a soft voice and warm milk that he names 'mother' in his mind, and thinks that if she really meant it when she said I Love You, she would still be here with her soothing hands and skirt-folds he could bury himself in. Damon has learnt that love is just a warm gust of wind -- you can feel it for a while, but you can't see it or hold it in your hand. And when the wind picks up again and moves past, it feels colder than it did before. That's why Damon prefers hate. It is simple and sharp and hard to keep hold of. Damon is a connoisseur of all things that pierce and lance and prick; he is most comfortable with a sword in his hand, a predeliction he traces to his father. Damon eats lemons by themselves, biting down to the pith, sometimes scraping the zest with his teeth. Damon likes to keep tastes seperate, weapons sharp and clean; the relentless pulse of eternity taught him appreciation of routines and awareness of patterns slicing through the diversions of each age. Hate is slick and potent, and strong enough to consume him entirely so that all the soft edges and lying memories are sharpened and scoured away. Damon's had two people tell him they loved him, ever. Oh, he's heard it may more times, careless words dribbled by the pretty, silly girls passing through his days, or the intense young men who earnestly argue love through compass points. But they didn't really say it, not with the weight of one who understands what it means. I Love You, his mother said. Later, he was told that his birth made her bleed and cry out. Later, when he bled and screamed with pain from a sword through his heart, he could only think of her and how she pressed her lips against his brow and said I Love You even though she had the memory of the hurt he caused her. At that moment, he felt he was closer to understanding love than ever before, but then it was all darkness and empty and the laden chill of wet stone that no warm wind could penetrate. So, it was hardly unexpected that the other person to say I Love You was the one who caused him the pain. After all, there's a pattern in everything, you just have to look for it. It was raining when Stefan said I Love You. He said it in his painfully sincere way, with his eyes focused on the curve of Damon's cheekbone and lashes twitching in that way that betrays his anxiety. He said it as a brother, an equal, as the one who cut the life from Damon's body and rose with him after. It was different to the maternal I Love You, there the balance of power was never quite even in a fundamentally unchangable way. Stefan's I Love You was spoken at the same height, with the same accent, as a result of the same learning. Yet, it was obvious that Stefan understood before Damon did, and he didn't like that at all. Stefan said I Love You into the silence of midwinter, rain hitting the roof with sharp taps and a fire throwing shadows across the faces of two boys sitting so still that they didn't even share a breath. Stefan said I Love You and Damon said nothing and Stefan understood and Damon didn't and now that Stefan had gotten to love first, there was only one thing left for Damon. Damon thinks his father taught him hate. He drank it in the wine poured at the dinner table, when it was just the two of them and the servants -- mother was always 'too ill' to come down and Stefan was not-born then too-young to join the real men, only graduating to the long cold table after Damon had left for schooling in the city. Damon remembers his father's smile, all thin lip and knowing amusement, the smile of a powerful man whose superiority lies within rather than in his possessions. Damon sometimes catches that smile in the mirror, and it stings somewhere in the vicinity of his unbeating heart, though he knows the pain is in his head. His father taught him to fence, a priceless favour bestowed out of pride. Damon excelled, because it meant his father would cover his hand on the hilt with his own larger ones, brace his arms with his own stronger ones, and ruffle Damon's hair with his breath. Damon learnt how men smelt from those lessons, the protective leather chafing against skin mingled scents of power and strength that drugged him and made his head feel heavy. His father never hurt him, and that's why Damon knows that he learnt hate and not love at his feet. Love needs pain to triumph over, but hate is created by itself. Hate is there earlier, a right and a privilege of the first only. The first born. His father put the blade in his hand, adjusted his stance, and smiled his twisted, knowing smile when Damon's opponents fell before him. Damon alone shared this with his father, something that young, soft Stefan never did. Damon doesn't and hasn't ever hated his father. He does not love him either, because that would lessen him and negate the lessons he taught. He hardened Damon, carved his character with his measured words and intense gaze, with Damon's terrified fear of ever disappointing him. Damon knows he turned out almost precisely how his father wished, and for that he respects the man, a steady emotion untainted by love but equally unreinforced by hate. It is in the same way that Damon is like his father that Stefan resembles their mother. Stefan is warmth and blurred edges, indistinct motives and uncertain loyalties. Damon was with his father when they opened the door to his mother's chambers and saw her panting and moaning under the naked gamekeeper. Somehow, Damon was looking at his father at the moment he first found out, and he saw the way his father stumbled, heard the intake of breath before he learnt the cause. To Damon, the betrayal that is part of love has always been characterised by the loss of power and poise that trip and gasp represented. His mother betrayed her love for him as much as for his father with the peasant lover in her bed, for the only knowledge of love he had was entwined with lies and uncertainty. Of course, Damon was also there when his father ordered the gamekeeper to run, the cuts Damon had inflicted upon him under his father's approving gaze dripping a visible path for the hunting dogs to follow. Damon knew why his mother's leg was broken such that she never left her bed again. Those were acts of hate, lessons of his father, to go with the pain love flowed from and over, lessons taught by his mother. Stefan, with his steady voice and anxious eyes, whispering I Love You in the empty house with the understanding of a sixteen year old who has lived and lived and lived. Stefan, who hurt him the most, who reiterated every scrapped-together fragment of awareness Damon possesses about love. Stefan, who loves him and hurts him. Damon knows he has hurt Stefan too, but he thinks his hurt was born of hate, or at least the vacancy of love. Damon cannot love Stefan, because that would be too easy, too much a repetition of something that is now entirely Stefan's domain. Stefan takes after their mother, beautiful, soft, warm, traitor. Damon is their father's son, powerful, strong, cold, betrayed. Stefan says I Love You, making the fire lick at Damon, surrounding him with flames. Stefan says I Love You, but the next day he's still walking away. Stefan says I Love You and robs Damon of any love within. Damon forges lances of hate for his brother, storing them in the dead-space of his heart. He protects them there, keeps them sharp and strong and prepares himself for Stefan's next betrayal. For the next girl with flaxen hair and sky-stained eyes. For the next back walking away without a glance. Damon knows it would be easier to let those daggers he holds to blunt and tarnish, holding them aches ever so much. But he is too late for love, and somewhere inside, he does not think he would be able to break Stefan in the way love allows. Damon does not think Stefan is strong enough to bear it. So Damon hates and Stefan loves and their roles are the stable constants of the endless years melting one into the other. (end)