entrancelogs | When after all, it was you and me [open]

He nods once, passing through the door and catching it with the back of his hand for Damon to slip through behind him. As they walk up the steps into the bar and the music inside begins to beat over the sounds of their voices, he speaks again.

"I must admit, I was not entirely honest with you when I claimed a lack of long relationships," he says, hooking one thumb lightly over the leather strap crossing his chest.

"I was involved with a vampiress, when I was young. She left me."

Damon glances over at Regis curiously. It's more curious that Regis would admit to not being entirely honest than the fact he wasn't. The honesty is hardly required.

"...I've been there before. Sort of." It became complicated with Katherine for multiple reasons. By left, it's more that she faked her own death and didn't actually have those feelings for him so never bothered to contact him. Damon moves to find a table, moving a hand to order them both drinks. This way Regis will have a drink if he chooses to elaborate.

"What happened?"

It hardly matters that he wasn't honest - what he had omitted was really of no consequence. And yet.. he felt as if it was important, somehow.

When they enter the bar, he finds them a seat somewhere that the music is not quite so loud, and rests both of his elbows lightly on the table, fingertips pressed together.

"When I was young, I was very stupid, and very cruel. I allowed an addiction to rule me, and it drove her away." His lips twitch in a quick smile, and he moves his elbows to lean back instead. "It was not so long after that, that I was given ample opportunity to consider my life's direction."

Damon sits beside Regis, and he watches with a quiet sort of curiosity while Regis speaks. He understands he felt it important to correct the words, and Damon listens for once. Regis wants to share something with him specifically.

It matters.

"I think I can also say that about my younger self." Very stupid, very cruel. "Not the addiction part. How'd you consider it anyway?"

His life direction... Damon went through many changes throughout those decades, but it took him time to sit back, consider his life's direction, try to change it. Be better. Over a hundred and a half years old, he found Elena, and he started really thinking about those things for the first time.

"How did I..."

This, in a way, was actually the more painful part of the tale. He doesn't mind sharing it with Damon, however, though he does need an uncharacteristic moment to consider his words before he speaks.

"I was.. intoxicated. 'Flying drunk', as it were." An almost juvenile-sounding term for what he was actually doing. "I attacked a peasant girl, and her village reacted. They captured me, embarrassingly easily, and what followed..."

Well.

"Beheaded, doused in holy water, and buried deep with a silver stake through my chest. Regenerating from it took me fifty years."

Damon quiets and listens, and finally, he grimaces at the thought. So Regis has been beheaded before. It's something Damon hasn't experienced, and it would kill him. Granted, he's died from stuff that should have killed him before and still came back, but it sounds like this was just a natural part for Regis to be beheaded and then to come back from it.

Fifty years is a long time though.

"Addiction can do a number or two on you. So... all of those things together worked to put you out of commission?"

There's another long pause. He thinks of Elena at home, stuck in a coma for- for eighty years. Questions he asks himself.

"Did you remember... any of that time passing while you were buried?"

"In a way." Some vampires never got themselves into such a position, but Regis had been quite stupid back then, and in no state to consider the consequences when he had made his first dive for that peasant girl. He thinks back, though he finds it unpleasant to do so, to the time he spent buried and waiting until he had enough motor skills returned to successfully move.

"I was not unaware, but... there is a measure of mental damage control given in such situations. The physical trauma was quite extensive. I was aware that time had passed, but when I emerged, I had to enquire as to the year."

And yet, it was not the worst he had lived through.

"I have been reduced to less, to almost nothing, by a sorcerer's magic. Even then, I was aware, but... not in a way which you might describe as 'intelligent'."

Damon drinks more deeply from his own glass and then grimaces as Regis describes it and explains what it was like.

"Sounds like hell," he says honestly, and there's even a hint of an apology wrapped up in there somewhere within his voice. It's a shitty thing to have to go through, and Damon knows a thing or two about going through shitty things.

He doesn't really like the thought of Regis there.

"The kind that sticks with you way down the road even when you'd rather forget it."

He hadn't even scratched the surface. There was no real way to describe the cold, numbing terror that came with that level of uncomprehending awareness. It was all he could recall, until enough of his senses had pieced together to be able to protect him from it. Had it not been for another vampire, he would still be in a poor state.

"It.. is not an experience that I would wish to repeat," he says after a moment or two of consideration. "And should the sorcerer appear in Wonderland, I would not be so unprepared when meeting him."

There's something softly dark in his tone at that. Something that suggests a more violent persona under the calm and collected exterior. Then, Regis smiles, and it's gone. "But I shall deal with that if it happens, and not dwell on it."

"By deal with it, you mean you'll kill him, right?"

There's absolutely no judgement from Damon. This is the guy that killed every single last one of the members of the Augistine society after they tortured and experimented on him for five years straight. He did not stop to consider if every single individual had had a hand in torturing him, and he took out their families too.

Damon would like to think he wouldn't take out a family member of an Augustine anymore if they were to stumble into Wonderland, but if it was one of the people who did it to him themselves? Well.

He would kill them slowly.

He smiles tightly, looking Damon in the eyes as he gives the slightest shake of his head. "No," Regis replies quietly.

"Vilgefortz of Roggeveen has far more to answer for than my 'death'. A quick end would be a mercy, and ultimately would hold no meaning in a place that brings people back from the dead."

The way he had ended Regis would account for part of it, naturally, but that had not been a stray act. He had caused too many people to suffer to simply be allowed to walk free.

As a distraction, Regis catches the attention of a passing member of staff and requests a drink for himself and Damon, before returning his attention to his companion. "I would not give him the opportunity to cause harm to anyone else."

Damon tilts his head to the side.

The smirk on his own face is almost dangerous, almost violent in nature. He can understand why Regis would want this, and he accepts it. Their drinks are quickly brought over, and it's only after those drinks are delivered that he'll speak again.

"Good. Sounds like the guy deserves the slow, torturous kind of fate," he says as he lifts up the strange colored drink as if in toast to the hopes that's exactly what ends up happening to the man.

When after all, it was you and me [open]

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