Disclaimer: I had nothing to do with the creation of these characters on the television series nor the books. I'm just using them for the moment. So please don't sue, and please don't take this story or ideas that are in here. Those are actually mine. XOXOXO

Written in Damon's POV

Prologue

I know what pain feels like. The kind of pain that eats away from the inside out. The kind that won't allow for you to even turn over in your bed. I know that pain. That physical pain that leaks into your mentality. That makes you believe that you're going crazy. So you shut yourself off, try to make yourself as cold and numb as possible. But that kind of psychological tactic doesn't work on someone that feels their own body attack itself. You can't escape the obviousness of it, and those that really love you either convince themselves that they can not see the change or they blame you for being weak enough as to not fight it. I know those reactions; they are as familiar to me as my own hand. But I never came out and told anyone why this pain exist and therefore I was not faced with the pity that would have came along with a confession of ill health, the knowledge of death.

I had always been close to it. Had always known that it was coming and yet I was never aware of it coming so soon, or by whose hands that I may fall. Was it by fate or the porcelain hand that fled from my quarters to that of my brothers on nightly bases? Some my look upon me and ask why was I so accepting of Katherine. Why was I so enthralled in the fact that she had every intentions of making me like her? They would like to know why I was willing to throw away my soul for such a thing as vampirism. They would ask why I was so willing to be dead. And to them I would answer, it was because I didn't want to die.

In the autumn of 1863, I had found out that I was dying from a disease that had taken many lives before my own. It had taken my mother's and that of my uncle, had weakened my father for months before he had, miraculously, beaten it. I was diagnosis with cancer. The silent killer of my time. The Big C of this era. I had not told my brother, nor had he notice. And in the case of my father, he had figured it out for himself. He was more upset of the shame that it brought him, that his son was unfit to continue to fight in a losing war, then the fact that his first born son was on the brink of death.

He didn't want to look upon me, I had brought shame to him. One time too many, he would say, if he were here to answer. How dare I die without his permission. How dare I bring unto him another occasion of pity amongst his fellow man. It was as if I had planned, it in his eyes. Ever the prodigal son, I was.

I had only a few months left to live. This is what was told to me, before I was allowed leave from the militia. I had came home to Fell's Church, Virginia. Home to my brother and father. Home to my bed, where I was sure to spend the rest of my days fighting pain and weakness. Home to the place that my mother rested. Home to Katherine. Home to death, in more was than one.

***this is my first TVD story and I hope that someone reads it and will review on it. Please if you read it tell me what you think***

THANKS,

ChaneD