"Crashed"

Mystic25

Summary: It took a second car crash for Stefan to remember. Stefan/Damon centric. T for imagery, violence, and language.

A/N: I wrote this after 5x04, and with the constant airing of new episodes, it will be AU now, but I'm a fanfic author, I do AU like it's my job.

A/N #2: This does contain Delena, but minor, because the focus lies somewhere else.

xxxxxXxxxx

"Then I crashed into you, and I went up in flames.

Could've been the death of me; but then you breathed your breath in me."

~Daugthry "Crashed."

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The world blurred by at a dizzying pace, bleeding like an oil painting across a canvas, turning colors into a solitary darkness.

Stefan had the windows rolled down of the car he had stolen, a Dodge Charger, nowhere near the power and speed of the car the Damon had taken earlier in the week, but it did its job. He had compelled the kid pumping gas to give him the keys, and had even managed to restrain from leaving him headless in a puddle of his own arterial blood before he gunned the engine and sped away.

He had swiped a handful of blood bags from the basement freezer, and so far he'd gone through three of them, discarding them on the passenger side floor of the far like candy wrappers. The vampire hunger in his stomach was quenched for now, but hardly sated. He only had memories that spanned weeks, but one of the strongest was the taste of blood from the waitress in that tavern, and that kid from the bond fire. It was almost – euphoric to drink their blood, it gave him a sense of power.

He reached into the cooler he placed the blood bags in and picked up a full one, plump with blood like rising bread dough. He bit through the shaft of the bag where it would be spiked with an IV with his fangs (an odd feeling, he bit through his own tongue at least five times before he got the hang of it.). He swallowed the viscous liquid, trying to ignore the gnawing pit in his stomach for something stronger.

He had nearly killed two people back in that town of Mystic Falls, and maybe it was a part of his old 'sad loner self' coming through, or a part of a newly formed conscious half buried under the thick veneer of retrograde amnesia – but the act of taking human life for his own sustenance didn't sit well with him regardless of either circumstance.

It was almost three in the morning and the roads were deserted except for one lone semi-truck that had barreled down him a while back ago with its halogen headlights before trying to pass him, and had nearly been run off the road as Stefan shifted the car into high gear and spun fast in a move worthy of the Indy 500. He had turned in the wrong direction down the two lane highway jutting into the other lane seconds before an impact. The truck's blaring horn had shaken the windows of the Charger like an earthquake.

Stefan had been driving for over 9 hours, passing sleepy towns and highly reflective truck stops. And he had since discovered that his dead vampire body craved adrenaline. The people he had managed to attack back in Mystic Falls all radiated the scent of fear, even the girl he compelled. The adrenaline coursing through their blood stream, he could taste it. He had no memories of his past so he couldn't accurately say that he had never been high before, but he could easily imagine that tasting fresh human blood from the people's pumping jugular's had the same kind of feeling. The feeling that all your senses are so super heightened that you can count each individual heartbeat in a crowd of people down to the exact second; the place where light sings and colors have a smell.

Stefan felt that with each person he drank from, as well as the hunger that Damon had insisted turned him into the Ripper of Monterey. From the way Damon described it and what Stefan read in the journals before he burned them down to ash, he had been a serial killer for over 30 years.

The strangeness of his long immortal life was what had shocked him the most. He didn't look a day over 18, and yet he had a brother who recalled with startling accuracy things that happened during 1800's Civil War period Virginia; over 165 years ago. Damon even had old Daguerreotypes depicting both of them looking just the same as they did now, only with Stefan wearing a cravat and tails and Damon in a Confederate war uniform. The writing on the back of the thick yellowed paper read: February 1865, Salvatore Plantation, Virginia.

They both had their arms around each other and actually looked happy. Damon had told them all he could about their old life, how they were raised as the only two sons to a wealthy plantation owner. How their mother had been a Virginia socialite, who had caught the eye of their father Giuseppe, and like she was a sack of corn, a deal was struck with her father to marry her off to him, and Stefan and Damon were a result of that union. Damon told him how their mother died of consumption when he was 8 and Stefan was 4, he talked how he left to fight in the Civil War at 22. He even talked about how Katherine Pierce had seduced them both and turned them into Vampires in the same night.

But Damon never commented on pictures like that one he showed Stefan tucked in some dusty first addition volume of The Leather Stocking Tales , or mentioned the relationship they had growing up, or even after they turned. It was like how he hadn't mentioned Elena to Stefan, or talked about how they had dated for several years, before she had chosen Damon over him. Since he had woken up, Stefan had only known his brother for three weeks, but having no past memory of Damon allowed him an outsider's perspective on him – Damon lied. He avoided the truth at all costs for self-preservation. He didn't want Stefan to know that he had once dated, been in love with Elena Gilbert, because doing so might dredge up past feeling she had for him and slash through their relationship like a serrated knife through a sheet of canvas. Damon didn't talk about their own relationship outside of naming dates, and factual tidbits, like it was a Venn Diagram of Stefan's life, not the life history of two people who had been brothers for almost two centuries.

The life that the old (very old) Stefan Salvatore had was self-detrimental. Stefan didn't know if his old self used to believe in Karma, but after spending weeks viewing his past life as an observer, losing his memory might have been part of the cosmic alignment of his fate.

He took another long pull from the blood bag like it was a soda in a paper cup. A large green sign just past mile marker 76 proclaimed Stefan to now be in West Virginia. The landscape did little to change with this news, the gas stations and the stretches of empty highway remained the same. At least until he reached the boundaries of the Appalachian mountains and the flatness gave way to huge brown elevation dotted with a few lights of those who had either just woken up or not gone to sleep. Trucks began again to emerge on the highway that crept up into the mountains like a snake.

They were semis like the one he had cut off 8 hours and one state back ago, and huge tankers hauling gasoline and crude oil. The grade up the mountain began to grow steep, almost an 80 degree angle and the car Stefan had stolen began to groan and creak. The engine was a supped up V6, (Stefan had no idea how he managed to know modern things such as that, and couldn't remember being alive for 165 years prior). But a Dodge Charger was not an off road vehicle. It didn't have the torque to handle the route that Stefan realized halfway up was reserved for a trucking route into the mountains.

Not that he was about to let anything as trivial as that stop him.

He floored the accelerator, taking the car way past 150 miles, the air blew by him like a cyclone, trees almost seeming to fly at his speed. Honking horns blared at him as he zigzagged in and out of the lumbering vehicles, zipping past a guard rail gone black and rust filled with neglect. He was pretty far up now, most likely over 1,000 feet. From this high up the full moon was visible like a giant lamp in the sky sprinkled with a freckling of starts.

It was actually a picturesque sight to see, even for an amnesiac 165-year-old vampire trying to escape a past that he couldn't even remember.

The cup holder flashed brightly as the smart phone he had thrown there the moment he'd stolen the car rang.

Stefan glanced down and read the caller ID, the screen flashing a bright, single name:

'Damon.'

Stefan sighed in irritation half gone to just being pissed as hell, tempted at first to let the damn thing ring. Or better yet, to hurl it out the window at a terminal velocity that would reduce it to powder by the time it reached the bottom of the mountainside.

But on the third annoyed vibrated buzz he threw the blood bag down on the empty passenger seat and snatched the phone up.

"What do you want?"

"Now that's not a nice way to greet your older brother after you ran away from home without leaving a forwarding address."

"If you called to try and convince me to come back, you might as well throw your phone onto the fire with my journals Damon because I'm not coming back."

"Ouch, Stef, that almost hurt my feelings." Damon voice chirped in his ear in such a sarcastic timbre that Stefan wondered how the hell his old self managed to put up with him for over 16 decades.

"Tell me something-" Stefan questioned into the phone "Did this cynical personality of yours get anywhere with me when I had my memories?"

"No, but you were always a fount of brooding and self-righteousness, Stefan. The only thing that got to you was manually ripping that stick out of your ass."

"I'm going to ask you one more time before I turn this phone into confetti," Stefan growled, leaning one elbow against the driver's side door as he wound the car a particularly curved portion of the mountain side. "What is it you want? You already apparently made my life a living hell for 160 years, and stole my girlfriend, twice. Don't you think that's enough damage for a century?"

"What I want is for you to turn around from whatever little field trip of self-loathing you've driven yourself too-"

Stefan managed a laugh, it was dry sounding, like he wasn't used to doing it. "And why is that?"

"Don't question," Damon's voice was curt and biting. "Just drive-"

Stefan currently didn't know his own brother from a hole in the ground, but he sounded pissed. It was actually kind of amusing. "If you can name me one good reason why I should listen to you, then I'll turn the car around."

"I can think of a million good reasons why you should listen to me! One of my top ones is about the amnesiac vampire who doesn't remember shit about the rules and is going to get the rest of us exposed!"

"If that's your best version of a motivational speech buddy, then I recommend you stick with your night job," Stefan drove past an elevation marker saying that he had reached over 1,500 feet. One of the perks of being a Vampire, Stefan had discovered, was that he had night vision, true night vision, like predatory cats in Africa. So he was able to see the landscape at the base of the mountain bumpy with the scraggly trees he had driven past hours ago. The road ahead of him continued to curve and Stefan accelerated as he followed it.

"Don't do the whole sarcastic comment thing Stefan, you're innately bad at it."

"You know, the whole bonding thing might actually be touching if I had any memories of you whatsoever, and hadn't found out you were such a dick-"

"Harsh Brother," Damon retaliated snappishly.

"What'd you expect?" Stefan returned. "Your most recent actions towards me were repeatedly breaking my neck so you and Silas could continue with your diabolical plans."

"It wasn't diabolical Stefan!" Damon's insisted, his voice going up in a pitch that Stefan had heard enough to know that Damon was about to explain away something. "I needed Silas at full mind reading power, if you were still alive that couldn't happen. I merely provided temporary rectification for the problem; it's not like I was going to keep you dead."

"If that's the kind of thing that passed as brotherly bonding between us then I wonder how we even lasted this long."

"Blame it on the alcohol Brother."

Stefan laughed again, that dry sound that he still wasn't used to. He wondered when was the last time his former self every truly laughed. "We're done here, brother-" The bulkiness of his daylight ring tapped against the phone. "Whatever kind of relationship we had, Damon, it was obviously a very detrimental one because you've yet to prove that it wasn't." Stefan shifted the phone to his other ear. "So here's what's going to happen. I'm going to hang up this phone, and follow this road until it runs out, then I'm going to follow another road until it runs out, and another, and another until I've put enough distance between me and you as possible."

Damon left no moment for pause. "Bad idea Stef-"

But Stefan did. "Goodbye Damon." He ended the call and threw the phone out the window, and with his enhanced senses he heard the exact moment the phone broke apart on the road 1,600 feet below.

Stefan had driven with the radio off for the better part of three hours, choosing instead to listen to the wind blow up his ears the faster he pushed the car. But listening to the funneling wind was starting to become annoying. He reached over and pressed the dial for the satellite radio. An electric guitar's heavy riff filled the interior. It wasn't a bad beat and not having any memory of what his taste in music had been like previously kept him from switching the station. He reached for the blood bag he discarded and took a long, guzzling sip like it was whiskey.

The back end of a tanker truck pulled into view; dropping his speed down to a veritable crawl. A sign on the back of the tank proclaimed the contents the truck hauled to be 'flammable' The truck was barely doing 35 miles an hour, and Stefan's irritation with it didn't take long to creep on. He placed the car in four gear and accelerated.

The Charger was clear up to the front wheels of the truck's cab, when the truck's very front wheel blew. The truck spun on its hub cap, the cabin and trailer lurching in a 45 degree jack knife. Stefan flattened the gas, but the back of the Charger smacked into the truck's remaining right inflated wheel. This action torqued the car backwards, and into the trailer.

The impact broke through the aluminum tank and the contents of the tanker erupted into a massive fireball that lit up the night like the sun.

Stefan was flung out of the car, landing on the road, beside the truck's cab which had busted through the guardrail and hung halfway out over a thousand feet in the open air.

The back of the tanker was a wall of fire, and the line of gas down the road from the Charger's broken gas tank quickly ignited in a trail that zigzagged its way up the road up both Stefan's pant legs.

The pain was instantaneous. It hurt more that Stefan believed that being lit on fire was supposed to feel like, it was like something was melting him from the inside out. He screamed horrendously into the ball of fire that blocked out the star filled night, back arching up off the ground in sheer agony, as the flames crept further up his body.

A wall of clouded ice cold vapor shot at him like fast moving fog, ramping up the burning feeling to a blinding coldness that shock waved through his system.

His eyes felt melted together, even when he managed to open them, they were horribly wrong. Vision half blurred, and red around the edges. Something black moved around him, a face gone half blurry like raindrops against the window stared at him, cursing louder.