Damon Salvatore

Appearance
Damon was twenty years old when he was made into a vampire. That was back in 1492, in Florence, Italy. He is an average height, perhaps leaning slightly to the shorter side, with short black hair that reflects rainbow colored lights in it, like a crow’s feather. His eyes are black and fathomless. When he walks, it’s with a sensual grace that he possessed long before becoming a vampire. His facial features are like something out of a Botticelli work of art; pale, smooth, and utterly flawless.

Personality
Following his disastrous relationship with Katherine, Damon has dedicated his life to never appearing weak or vulnerable. The loss was simply too much to deal with and too far out of his control. Now he must always be in control, always be in the know. This has led him to develop something of a mercurial demeanor. He puts on a front of loving everything about being a vampire and often acts under this front to taunt those he considers capable of getting underneath the surface to his more vulnerable side. His favorite victim, of course, is his brother Stefan. Since becoming a vampire, Damon has struggled with everything inside of him to be what Stefan is not. And Stefan has likewise agreed to this unspoken contract, dedicating his life to being the opposite of Damon.

Damon is outwardly vain and egotistical and slightly egocentric as well, while inside he remains quite insecure. Generally, his relationships are temporary, a fact which he will never admit bothers him somewhat. The truth is that Damon is an unbearably lonely individual, but he will not allow himself to get close to many people, for fear of exposing all of the hurt inside. The fact that Stefan is the only permanent thing in his life has only recently occurred to him. For this reason, he’s decided that blood indeed runs deep. While he may not like Stefan much, he does, deep down, love him.

To avoid experiencing pain, Damon's relationships with mortals are intentionally kept short. Although he claims to enjoy killing, Damon generally prefers to feed and wipe his victim’s memories afterward. In fact, Damon almost never takes a life, unless it is out of self defense. He has a great fondness for blond girls, owing to both Katherine and Elena, and has spent much of the last five hundred years or so chasing after them, playing with them, feeding off of them, and sometimes sleeping with them. When interacting with other immortals, Damon likes to be the superior, but fully understands that with age, comes power. He is never respectful, but he will back down from a fight he knows he can’t win.

History
Damon was born in 1472 in Florence, Italy. He was the oldest son of Giuseppe di Salvatore, a Count. Some years later, his brother Stefan was born. Damon and Stefan's mother fell ill and died a few years after that. Damon was very close to his mother and for quite some time, blamed his brother for her death. He was sent to Oxford as a young adult, but wasted all of his time there gambling, hawking, and womanizing, while sending his tutors to do his work for him instead. He ignored his father's demands that he straighten up, and the animosity between him and Giuseppe grew. Damon began to resent his father, feeling that Giuseppe let his friends mooch off and make a laughingstock out of him.

On one of his returns from university, Damon met Katherine, the daughter of Baron von Schwartzschild, who was staying with the di Salvatore family for her health while her father traveled on business. Although Stefan was already romancing her, at some point while he wasn't looking, Damon also befriended and seduced Katherine. Damon and Stefan both found out about Katherine's vampire nature, and Katherine came to both brothers separately in the night and shared blood with them, each not knowing that the other was getting the same treatment.

After the two brothers demanded that Katherine choose one of them for her husband, or neither, Katherine chose both of them and provided each of them with a lapis lazuli ring. Damon and Stefan, infuriated, almost fought one another on the spot, but Katherine ran away crying when they wouldn't stop fighting, even for her sake. The next day, Damon and Stefan found Katherine's new white dress smoldering with ashes and remains of burning flesh, and a suicide letter telling them that she wanted her death to bring them together.

Enraged, Stefan and Damon grabbed their swords and began dueling. Damon pierced Stefan's heart, possibly by accident, because he then leaned down to check on Stefan. As he did so, Stefan's last dying act was to stab Damon through the heart as well. Damon later woke up, just like Stefan, in their family crypt, now a vampire. A few days later, Damon chased Stefan out of Florence altogether and warned him never to return. Damon, however, was too restless to remain Florence for long, so he eventually left for Rome. He spent a few years romancing the Pope's mistress, Giulia di Farnese before he again got bored and decided to leave Italy all together.

For years, Damon was a vagabond, wandering from place to place across Europe. He began seeking other vampires. Through them, he learned about his own abilities. He was also able to keep track of Stefan from a distance. In the early 1520s, Damon settled in England, where he was a regular in the Tudor court. He became particularly good friends with Charles Brandon, a favorite of the king. Damon was able to enjoy a life of leisure, leeching off of Brandon the same way that many of his father's friends once leeched off of him. When Brandon died, however, Damon lost access to his money.

He moved on to Scotland, hiring himself out as a mercenary for a few decades. Although Damon had utterly convinced himself he no longer had scruples, when he was hired out to wipe out the entire Lennox clan in 1583, including Lord Lennox's six children, he suffered from an ontological crisis. For a year, he dealt extreme memory loss, which was only reversed by the presence of Stefan. This fact enraged Damon, in the end widening the rift between the brothers.

After awhile Damon grew tired of the old world and crossed the ocean for the new world. In the Americas, Damon established himself as one of the oldest vampires on the continent and enjoyed this status, as the older a vampire was, the more powerful he could be. Damon learned how to do things that Katherine had never mentioned, such as turning into a crow. All the while, he romanced young, blond girls and carved out a living, based largely on lying and deceiving. He doesn't talk much about his American adventures, other than a decade or so he spent in Youngston, Ohio, which was apparently memorable.

In 1991, Damon ended up in the town of Fell's Church, Virginia. He claimed to have followed Stefan there to torment him, but that was really a cover. The reality was that that Katherine, who faked her own death and had really been alive all the whole time, lured both brothers there so that they'd meet Elena Gilbert, a near dead ringer, and feel guilty over her. Damon competed with Stefan for Elena's affection. Both of them fed her ample amounts of blood, Stefan feeding her willingly, Damon using deceit to gain access to her room, which infuriated Stefan. His presence in the city caused Stefan to falsely accuse him of several crimes committed by Katherine. Among these crimes was Elena's violent death, although she was revived as a vampire. Eventually, it was discovered that Damon was not the source of evil in Fell's Church. In a final showdown with Katherine, Damon (like Stefan and Elena) was tied up in her secret hideout and is offered a second chance to rejoin her. He turned her down. Along with Stefan, he watched Elena die, and both brothers promised her that they'd look out for one another.

The two of them left Fell's Church shortly thereafter, returning to Florence. There, Damon fell into a deep depression, realizing that he truly loved Elena. Stefan did his best to keep Damon out of trouble, but Damon developed some suicidal habits, including a neurotic need to feed off of American tourists with Elena's coloring. All of that changed, however, when Damon encountered an usual tree that swept him away from Florence.

Game History
Damon spent several months living in a tiny universe known as Rowan. He was very detached from the warring nations vying for the aid of people like himself, from other worlds. This was due largely to the fact that he was still in mourning for Elena. Making matters worse was the fact that one of his companions in this world was an alternate version of Bonnie McCullough, Elena’s best friend, who was apparently sired by the Damon of her world. For a very long time, Damon had difficulties interacting with this Bonnie, but eventually, he accepted his place in her heart as her sire and took on some responsibility for her (whether she wanted it or not). Together, the two of them were swept up into another world, Willaknapp, where they were forced on a caravan, heading to visit some kind of witch who supposedly had the power to send them home. Damon and Bonnie’s relationship slowly developed into something close to friendship, although Damon’s efforts to feed off of the young girls of the caravan were occasionally thwarted by a jealous Bonnie.

Arriving in Bete Noire, Damon and Bonnie quickly adjusted. Damon ingratiated himself to the local law enforcement, becoming a police interrogator. He did this primarily to keep his ear to the ground and remain one step ahead of anyone who might be giving vampires in the city grief. He wanted to protect Bonnie. Unfortunately, she was eventually outed. Damon, however, managed to keep his undead status more or less under wraps, although select friends figured it out.

Keeping a low profile, Damon managed to work his way through the ranks, eventually becoming head of the day shift on the BNPD. He also wormed some secrets out of his boss, Raylan Givens, namely that Raylan was a werewolf. At the same time, his relationship with Bonnie changed as Damon gradually realized that he was in love with her. They began a bit of an affair, agreeing to keep things open. Still, they couldn't avoid their feelings. Privately, witnessed by Jack Harkness (s2) and Buffy Summers, the two of them married.