1,076Like I said before, this chapter and the last one were originally supposed to be a single chapter, and even though I split them in two, this half *still* ended up being almost twice as long as a regular chapter all by itself. Every time I thought I was almost done with all the scenes, it would occur to me that I needed another scene to really make it work. That happened with at least five scenes. It drove me nuts. I promise they're not padding. This is a super important chapter. So enjoy!
May 2023 update: If you're here because you got an alert that this fic had been updated, a) wow, my update alerts work! They haven't worked in several months! and b) I haven't actually updated it, I've just extensively edited it (including thousands of words of additions), which I didn't think would trigger alerts even if those worked again. I hope you enjoy the improvements, because I've enjoyed incorporating them. The goal of all these revisions has been to fix anything about the fic that didn't come up to my current writing standards and to get myself familiar enough with this story again that I would be able to continue it, and I think it's working. Unlike all the previous times I've tried to think about what to write next for this thing, my brain is giving me more than a string of question marks that I was too tired with the TVD'verse to push past. That's largely thanks to the help of a series rewatch and the support of CosmicAdventurer, my new fandom buddy who has been a wonderful sounding board and far more patient than I deserved. If I do get a new chapter written for Part II, I will be cross-posting everything on Ao3, where the alerts definitely DO work. More on that when there's more to tell.
Grayson had just finished an afternoon checkup and wouldn't have another one for at least fifteen minutes. He was thinking about sending Laura home early when Elena showed up at his office. "What are you doing here, sweetie? Did your mom send you?"
"Oh, no," said Elena. "I was just bored. I read to the kids at the hospital earlier and I wrote a couple scenes in my book. Caroline has committee meetings and Bonnie has a shift at the pool, so I thought I'd drop by and offer to help out with Damon's treatment again."
"He and Stefan already left," said Grayson, frowning. "Damon's symptoms started again last night, so he came in early this morning before any of my patients showed up."
"How did you manage to see regular patients while they were here?" said Elena, sitting down across the desk.
"Stefan understands enough about the procedure to do most of it on his own," said Grayson. "I just had to go downstairs every hour or so to check that everything was running smoothly."
"Then it is? Running smoothly, I mean?" said Elena.
"It is," said Grayson. He looked closely at his daughter. "I don't think I've ever seen you this anxious about one of my patients before," he said lightly. She blushed and wouldn't meet his eyes. His heart sank. He'd been ignoring the signs for weeks, hoping he wouldn't have to have this conversation with her, but it seemed he wasn't going to be that lucky. "You care very deeply for Damon, don't you?"
Her eyes snapped back to his and her blush intensified. It was as good as an affirmative. He nodded. "I see," he said.
"It doesn't matter," said Elena. "He's going to leave with Katherine once she's free."
"And if Katherine weren't a factor?" he asked gently.
"I'd want to be with him," she said. Grayson watched as tears streaked her cheeks. The sight made his chest constrict. This was the last thing he had ever wanted for her. He would have been happy to watch her marry a good kid like Matt in a few years and have a perfectly normal little family, but he couldn't force her into that life if it wasn't what she wanted and it might never have been possible anyway. She would always be the doppelgänger; he ought to be grateful for any outcome that didn't include her being ritually sacrificed by an original vampire simply for existing.
"Are you disappointed in me, Dad?"
"No," he said at once. He walked around his desk and pulled her into a tight hug. "I love you. Maybe I wish I hadn't let you watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer with your aunt, but—"
Elena let out a reluctant, half-choked giggle. "Dad."
"You can't help what you feel," he said, giving her an extra squeeze before letting go. "And that's okay. I don't necessarily approve, but it's like you said. He's leaving."
"Yeah," said Elena glumly. Is he leaving, or is he dying on Comet Day? Like the previous day, the thought came to Grayson in the voice of his old friend. Elena would be devastated either way, but would she ever forgive Grayson if he went through with his plan? Particularly now, after the lengths he was going to in order to treat Damon's werewolf bite.
"I'm sorry that's going to hurt so much for you," he said. "Heck, I think I might just miss him a little bit myself. But no matter what, you'll always be my daughter. I just want you to remember one thing."
"What?" said Elena, her puffy eyes wide.
He broke into a grin. "Your mom and I want grandkids at some point, so no more vampires, okay?"
Elena glared up at him. "We were having a really nice moment and then you had to ruin it by being all embarrassing."
"It's my job," he said. "And speaking of jobs, would you mind dropping these off at a few businesses and stores around town for me? Your mom just finished the designs and sent them to me so I could print them off here." He pulled two short stacks of paper towards them from across the desk. One was a flyer, the other a sign-up sheet. He and Miranda had talked about it on the phone, and they hadn't been able to come up with a better, safer idea than Damon's "blood embezzlement scam" for discreetly obtaining the amount of blood they'd need to get both Salvatores all the way through Damon's recovery process, so Miranda had spent her free time that day planning everything out.
"You're doing a blood drive here?" said Elena, skimming through the info on the flyer.
"Yeah," he said. "We need the supplies to continue Damon's treatment, and it seemed like a good way to put the clinic to use on a Saturday. Meredith Fell's going to help." Elena raised an eyebrow, and he grimaced. "Don't mention it to Damon. He'll find out anyway, but the longer it takes, the less I'll have to put up with him gloating about it."
X
Jeremy sat down across from Anna at one of the tables in the young adult section, his face so hot he was sure he could've cooked something on it. "I hate you."
"But now we know the vervain's gone," said Anna, plainly fighting not to burst out laughing.
"Why did you have to make me do that?"
"Would you have of your own free will?"
"Hell no!" Almost-fifteen-year-old boys did not jump onto public library circulation desks and sing the training montage song from Mulan at the top of their lungs. And yet that was exactly what Jeremy had done.
"Was it necessary to compel everyone in the library to join in for the chorus?"
"No, but it was either that or let them throw you out for being too noisy."
"Yeah, those were definitely your only two options," said Jeremy. He looked at her sulkily. "Why Mulan?"
Anna shrugged. "The Ballad of Mulan was my favorite story when I was little. Plus, that song is awesome. It was the obvious choice."
Jeremy didn't reply. Mostly, all he remembered about his musical debut was his entire mind screaming pointlessly at his body to stop, but he also thought he'd seen Anna holding something while she watched the performance. "You recorded that, didn't you?" he said, glowering.
"No," said Anna innocently.
"If I find it on YouTube later, I'm staking you."
Anna couldn't hold back her giggles any longer. Jeremy waited grumpily for them to subside. "It's okay," she said in a slightly choked voice. "I swear I won't post it anywhere. I just wanted to be able to relive that moment." She bit her lips, her eyes still watering with mirth. "Have you...have you considered taking a drama or choir class?" And then she was gone in another fit of laughter.
"Did we come here to spy on Mayor Lockwood, or did you really just want to make me die of embarrassment?" said Jeremy loudly.
"Okay, okay, I'm sorry," said Anna.
"So what kind of animals are you using to keep tabs on him?" said Jeremy, trying to sound completely businesslike and focused.
"An owl, a hawk, and a fox, but the owl's sleeping now, so we'll just be using the hawk for visual and the fox for audio, unless we feel like this needs to roll into a night shift."
"Do they have cool names?" said Jeremy.
Anna blinked.
"Come on, they're basically animal secret agents. Do you realize how awesome this is? They could be...I dunno, Agents Hawkeye, Foxtrot, and Nightwing."
"Wait, I thought Nightwing was Robin, except not lame," said Anna, frowning. "Why would we call the owl that?"
"Fine, you pick that one," said Jeremy, though he was impressed that she understood the reference.
"He can be Agent Archi, short for Archimedes."
Jeremy gave her a look. "Like the owl from that Disney movie?"
"After what I just made you do, you're surprised?" said Anna. "If it makes you feel better, the movie is based on the book The Once and Future King, and Archimedes is in that too."
"Whatever," said Jeremy, shaking his head. "Can we get to the actual surveillance now?"
"You're the one who wanted to take a break to name the 'secret agents'," Anna pointed out.
"They needed names!" said Jeremy. "It would've been confusing otherwise."
"Shut up," said Anna. She closed her eyes. "I'm going to connect to their minds now."
X
A few miles away at the mostly deserted high school, Coach Tanner struggled and yelled as Richard tackled him to the ground, but even though he was bigger and taller than Richard, he was no match for the Mayor's newfound strength. Richard swung the trophy again. On the third blow, there was a sharp crack of bone, and Tanner's body went limp.
Richard's exhilarating fury faded a little now that his prey lay broken beneath him. Clarity of thought began to return. He brought a slightly shaking hand to Tanner's throat. A strange mixture of relief and annoyance filled him when he found a pulse. He'd been restless ever since learning that he'd failed to kill Grayson Gilbert as a wolf; attacking Tanner had been almost cathartic. That he was still alive too somewhat ruined the effect.
For the first time, Richard noticed the blood. The trophy was covered with it and so was Tanner's scalp where the skin had split. There were drops of it spattered on the filing cabinet, the floor, the desk, on Richard's skin and clothes. In addition to the blood, there was also some kind of clear fluid coming out of Tanner's left ear.
Richard stood up and took a couple steps back, considering his options. Tanner was still alive. If he regained consciousness, he would charge Richard with aggravated assault at the very least. Richard's career would be over and he'd likely spend years in prison. And that was only if the Council failed to use this as a way to connect him to Vicki Donovan's death and get him convicted for that too, which seemed unlikely. After that, a single full moon behind bars would expose him as a werewolf. He'd lose everything. He couldn't let that happen.
On the other hand, what if Tanner were simply to go missing? If Richard put up a sign on the locker room door saying that practice was cancelled until the following week, who would even notice Tanner was gone until Monday? He might be alive now but from the looks of the wound, he probably wouldn't last much longer without serious medical attention. As long as Richard put the body somewhere no one could find it, there was no reason this ever had to come back to him. He hadn't told anyone he was coming to see Tanner and there was nobody else in the school.
He looked down at Tanner's face, and the man's accusations echoed in his ears. His lip curled. Tanner had no right telling him how to raise his son. Tyler had to be taught respect but he wasn't a fast learner, so he had to be taught again and again. Could any reasonable person blame Richard for losing his temper with him every once in a while? Maybe if Tyler wasn't so weak, Richard wouldn't have had to come here in the first place to try negotiating with Tanner.
An idea struck him. An idea that terrified him a little, but which was simply too perfect to ignore. If Tanner really cared so much about his son, then he'd appreciate getting one more opportunity to help him.
X
Elena was almost out of sign-up sheets and flyers to give out by the time she reached the pool. She found Matt sitting behind the admissions counter in the office, looking glum, but he perked up a little when he saw her coming. "Hey, Elena."
"Hey, Matt." She held up the flyer and sign-up sheet. "I'm just here to drop these off for my dad."
"Oh," he said. "Okay." He accepted the two papers and turned to pin them to a bulletin board next to the counter.
Elena wanted to say something to him but she wasn't sure what. "I was—" she began, just as he said, "Do you—" They both broke off, grinning awkwardly. "Sorry. You go first," said Elena.
"Do you want to get something to eat sometime?" he said. "Not like a date," he hastened to add after catching sight of her face. "Just as friends."
"Really?" said Elena, pleasantly surprised.
"Yeah," said Matt. "I've been spending a lot of time by myself lately, ever since..." His expression crumpled a little as he trailed off. "Anyway, I could use a friend."
"What about Tyler?" said Elena, frowning.
"I don't know what's going on with him," said Matt, shaking his head. "And I'm not sure I want to. I showed up late to practice yesterday and Coach Tanner told me to leave until I could be there on time. Tyler hadn't spoken one word to me for a week and a half, but then suddenly he was getting in Tanner's face and breaking his nose."
Elena bit her lip. She thought she knew why Tyler would be acting that way but it probably wasn't her place to tell Matt about Tyler and Vicki. If she told him and he went and confronted Tyler about it, he could end up on Mayor Lockwood's bad side too. "Maybe he's been dealing with family trouble or something," she said, shrugging.
"I guess," he said. It struck Elena as slightly odd that he would accept that suggestion so easily. Was it a common occurrence for Tyler to have family trouble? "Hey, could you do me a favor?"
"What?"
"Bonnie and I carpool here a lot, so I was going to be her ride home today, but I took the closing shift too so I can start making up for the ones I missed. She's on guard duty at the deep end and I haven't had a chance to tell her since I signed the shift exchange."
"Yeah, I can take her home, no problem," said Elena. "When does she get off?"
"Seven."
"Okay. Might see you then. Do you need dinner if you're double-shifting? I could grab a pizza for you on the way here."
"That'd be great, thanks," he said, giving her the first smile she'd seen from him in months.
X
Jeremy could never have imagined what it would be like to look through a hawk's eyes. Not that he hadn't tried many times back when he was reading Animorphs in elementary school. He would probably spend the next few days feeling like he needed glasses because Agent Hawkeye could see sharp details at about four times the distance he could, maybe even farther. There was a squirrel crawling up a tree at least a hundred feet away from where Agent Hawkeye was flying through the forest and he could see its right ear twitch. The image was also a much wider panorama than what Jeremy's own eyes could see, but the weirdest part of it was that almost everything in that image was in focus, rather than just one little spot right where he was looking.
"This is the coolest thing I've ever done," said Jeremy.
"Thanks," said Anna. "Don't distract me."
Jeremy began to recognize where Hawkeye was flying. It was the road that led to the high school. He landed on a telephone pole in the parking lot. There were only two cars in it.
"That's the Mayor's car," said Anna. "The silver one."
"How'd you know he'd be at the school?" said Jeremy.
"A hunch," said Anna. "He seemed pretty pissed yesterday about his kid getting kicked off the football team. If he wasn't at work, I thought he might've gone to chat with the coach again."
"What now?"
"Now we wait for him to come out."
Jeremy groaned.
"Haven't you never watched any cop shows?" said Anna. "Ninety percent of a stakeout is waiting."
"Great."
Luckily for them, it seemed like they might get to skip that part, because the door nearest the two cars opened after a minute or two and Richard Lockwood emerged. Jeremy probably wouldn't have paid any attention to his clothing in other circumstances but it was hard not to notice when someone who usually wore suits came walking out of a high school in an ensemble of very baggy sweats and dress shoes. He was also carrying a pinstriped cloth bundle under one arm, though (Hawkeye could actually see stitches of the pinstripes!), which explained what happened to his regular suit.
"What is he doing?" said Jeremy.
"Why are you whispering?" said Anna. "I compelled everyone in the library to ignore us and nobody else has come in yet. And it's not like Hawkeye is a Skype call; he's just our one-way visual feed."
"Shut up. This is just really intense, okay?"
They watched the Mayor walk to his car and dump the cloth bundle inside. After checking the parking lot very carefully, he pulled a second set of keys out of his pocket and unlocked the other car.
"Whoa, what's going on?" said Jeremy. "Is that Coach Tanner's car?"
"I think so," said Anna. They watched the Mayor reverse the car to within a few feet of the school doors before going back inside. Hawkeye flew to the next telephone pole so they'd get a better angle on the gap between the car and the door. He'd just settled down on his new perch when the Mayor reemerged. The sight of what he was dragging behind him shocked Jeremy so much that he leapt up from his chair in the library, instantly cutting off his connection to Hawkeye. The Mayor had been hauling the pale and unmoving form of Coach Tanner, the black baseball cap on his head failing to entirely conceal a bloody head wound.
"Sit down, dumbass," said Anna.
Jeremy sat back down and let Anna put her hands over the sides of his head again. It was like changing the channel. One second, he was looking at Anna's face, scrunched up a little from how hard she was concentrating, and the next, he was looking at the Mayor loading Coach Tanner into the trunk of his own car at the school. After shutting the trunk, the Mayor got in driver's seat and drove away.
"Holy crap," said Jeremy. He felt lightheaded and queasy, sensations somewhat magnified by the way his vision was currently outsourced. "Holy crap. Did we just witness a murder?"
"I don't know," said Anna.
Jeremy tugged Anna's hands away from his head, switching the channel back to the library again. "We can't let him get away with it this time."
"We won't," said Anna. "The Lockwoods used me and the other Mystic Falls vampires as scapegoats for the murders their son George committed as a werewolf in 1865. Almost all of the Lockwood fortune is what they got for what they did to us. I won't let it happen again."
X
Richard was a little surprised by how easy he found it to cross off items on his mental to-do list. The first one after cleaning every speck of blood he could find off the surfaces of Tanner's office and loading him into his own trunk was to drive out to the old Lockwood estate. He parked as close as he could get to the flat clearing that had once housed the mansion where his ancestors lived. He used the shovel from his excavation of the cellar that morning to dig a shallow trench on a particularly bare spot of ground, into which he deposited Tanner. He put a strip of duct tape over his mouth in case he woke up.
There were a couple of dead trees near the clearing, and Richard spent the next hour ripping branches off them and piling them on top of Tanner's trench until he was completely hidden from view. Once he was satisfied, he got back in Tanner's car and drove it to the quarry. Even if Tanner regained consciousness while he was gone, the duct tape would prevent him from calling for help and he'd be too weak to get free of the hundreds of pounds of wood trapping him on his own. With the car at the very edge of the quarry, Richard rolled down the windows, got halfway out, shifted the gear to drive, then hopped clear, letting it roll right off the stone cliff. He watched the spot where it hit the water until the waves subsided and the surface was still and calm again.
After that, he jogged the six miles back to the high school like it was nothing. When he reached his car, he paused to check his pulse, and found that it was barely above its resting rate. Yes, there was no doubt in his mind: becoming a werewolf was the best thing that had ever happened to him.
He drove home. Carol's car was gone, but Tyler's was in the garage. Perfect. He went inside, changed into some of his own clothes (not a suit this time), then burned the bloodstained ones and the sweats he'd stolen out of Tanner's office in his fireplace.
Only one thing left now. He walked to the door of his office. "Tyler?" he called loudly.
X
At seven o'clock, Elena returned to the pool, where she found Bonnie already waiting outside for her, still wearing her lifeguard stuff.
"Thanks for the ride," she said as she climbed in.
"No problem," said Elena, driving out of the parking lot. "Save any lives today?"
"No," said Bonnie. "The only interesting thing that happened was when they had to evacuate the shallow end for half an hour because some kid threw up in it."
"Ew."
"Trust me, it can get much worse than that. How've you been?"
"Fine, I guess," said Elena. "I'm trying to stay busy so I don't end up obsessing over Damon's recovery."
"That makes sense," said Bonnie. "It must be pretty stressful to have someone you care about get infected with something that's never been cured before."
"What are you talking about?" said Elena. She suddenly felt cold all over. "It wasn't that bad, was it?"
"Grams told me what her friend in Florida said. No vampire has ever survived a werewolf bite, and she's pretty sure there isn't any spell that could cure it. Damon's really lucky to be allies or frenemies or whatever with your dad."
Elena said nothing, trying to focus on the road.
"Are you okay?" said Bonnie.
"Nobody told me it had never been cured before. Dad's been so confident about it." Tears blurred Elena's vision. "Damon really could have died?"
X
Tyler loved the outdoors. Camping, fishing, backpacking, whitewater rafting, hunting—all of it. It was a bug he'd caught from his uncle Mason, who used to take him on camping trips all the time when he was little. Ever since Uncle Mason had moved to Florida, Tyler had kept up the tradition with his friends.
One person who had definitely never been part of that tradition was his dad, whose idea of camping was staying in a spacious, air-conditioned cabin. So Tyler was a little baffled by his dad's sudden eagerness to go camping out on the grounds of the old Lockwood estate, especially one day after he came home looking like he'd spent the most miserable night of his life lost in the woods. Still, Tyler had learned a long time ago not to question his father's whims, so he decided to consider himself lucky that this one happened to line up with his own interests. Even better, his dad seemed to have forgotten about punishing him for getting kicked off the team. As they drove along the winding dirt road through the forest, Tyler kept sneaking glances at his dad. He definitely looked like he was in a good mood. Would this actually be fun?
They pulled up to a spot near a small lake, parked the car, and got out. "I thought you said you'd prepared a campsite," said Tyler, looking around in confusion. "Where are the tents?"
"We don't need tents," said Richard. "The cellar of the mansion that used to stand here is still intact. We'll be down there."
"Cool," said Tyler. He grabbed his gear off the backseat. "So what about dinner? Are there fish in that lake? Should I gather wood for a fire?"
"Oh, I already got everything set up for the fire," said Richard, retrieving a couple of fishing poles and a can of lighter fluid. "We can fish while it gets hot enough to cook on." Richard led Tyler over to a stack of dead branches, but when Tyler reached for one of the larger ones, he said, "What are you doing?"
"...Setting these up like an actual campfire?" said Tyler. "I thought this was just your wood pile. It's not shaped like any campfire I've ever seen."
"What does it matter how it's shaped? It's dry wood. It'll still burn like this," said Richard, and he began dumping the lighter fluid all over the wood pile in a completely random way.
"Okay...," said Tyler, resigning himself to doing what his dad said, even if it made no sense. Why had he allowed himself to hope he might enjoy this? He should have realized that just because his dad knew jack about camping, that didn't mean he was going to admit it and actually rely on Tyler's expertise.
"Want to do the honors?" said Richard, pulling one of those cheap Bic lighters out of his pocket and holding it out to Tyler. Tyler accepted it, noticing as he did that his dad seemed weirdly excited. It reminded him of that moment yesterday at the Grill when he could've sworn he saw his eyes turn gold. But that was impossible. He shrugged off the odd sense of foreboding he felt and looked through the pile for anything resembling kindling, but it was all medium to large branches.
"What are you waiting for? I used the whole can of lighter fluid already. Shouldn't that be enough?"
Yeah, for melting our faces off with a huge burst of flames. If this was set up like an actual campfire, we wouldn't need lighter fluid at all, Tyler thought. What he said out loud was, "It'll probably be fine, but we need kindling. I can get that. Do you want to go put the fishing poles together?"
"Fine," said Richard, dropping the empty can and walking off towards the lake.
Tyler stared sourly at the pile, wondering how long the fire would need to burn before they could cook on it without it tasting like butane. He went back to his bag of camping gear and pulled out an old notebook. At least half the pages had been ripped out for kindling on previous campfires. He tore out another dozen and walked back to the stupid wood pile while crumpling them up. He stuffed all but one of the wads of paper into a gap in between a few of the smaller branches. Then, he carefully lit the one in his hand and stuck it in with the rest of the paper. The other papers caught on fire within seconds, and it spread to the surrounding wood. For a second, Tyler thought he heard something like a groan, but he had no idea where that could be coming from. He watched the fire until he was sure it would definitely stay lit, then headed over to find out how badly his dad had screwed up his fishing poles.
X
"You don't think...Coach Tanner is still alive, do you?" said Jeremy nervously. He and Anna were still spying on the Mayor with Hawkeye, and now Foxtrot was close enough to the campsite to hear everything he and Tyler were saying.
"I don't know," said Anna honestly. She'd come up with the idea of letting Jeremy help her spy on Mayor Lockwood so that she could get a window for compelling him; she hadn't thought the Mayor would actually do anything worth spying on today. "That head wound looked pretty bad, and I'm pretty sure that was cerebrospinal fluid leaking out of his ear. Even if he wasn't already dead when the Mayor put him in the trunk, he wouldn't have lasted long."
"Then what's the deal with the father/son camping trip and the fire? If the Mayor's trying to get rid of the body, there have got to be less risky ways to do it. He could've just left Tanner in the trunk of his car when he drove it into the quarry."
"Maybe that's not what he's doing," said Anna, a horrible thought occurring to her.
"What do you mean?"
Anna cut off the sensory input from Hawkeye and Foxtrot. Jeremy blinked and rubbed his ears. Anna looked at him very seriously. "The Mayor seemed pretty insistent on making sure Tyler was the one who lit the fire."
"So, what, do you think he's trying to frame his own kid for Tanner's death?"
"No, you don't get it. If Tanner's not dead yet, but Tyler's the one who starts the fire that finishes him off, that would make Tyler the one who technically killed him, even though he doesn't know Tanner is even under there and the Mayor's the one who set everything up."
Jeremy's eyes went wide and he looked slightly ill. "Mayor Lockwood's trying to activate Tyler's werewolf gene." He grabbed Anna's hands. "We have to stop him."
"What can we do? The fire's already lit, and they're miles away in the middle of the woods."
"So? Can't you run like a hundred miles per hour?" said Jeremy. "You could knock the Mayor out, compel Tyler to go home and forget all about tonight, and pull Tanner out of there and heal him with your blood. Tyler and Tanner might both be douchebags, but they doesn't deserve this."
"Jeremy, I can't get directly involved," said Anna, a sense of panic growing in her chest. "Using animal spies is one thing, but the whole reason I'm back in Mystic Falls is to free my mom; if I went charging into a situation like this, it would jeopardize everything! Vampires can't compel werewolves, and even if the Mayor didn't see me, he'd know someone supernatural ruined his plans, and the Council would start hunting for vampires again."
"So we'll figure out a way to deal with it," said Jeremy. "I'm sure my parents would want to help you if they knew you'd saved someone from Mayor Lockwood."
Anna shook her head. "I can't," she said. She was surprised to hear the pleading note in her voice. Why was it so important to her that he understood?
He stood up abruptly. "Fine. Sit here and do nothing. I'll just get Stefan to help me instead."
He turned to leave, but Anna leapt up and sped in front of him, staring directly into his eyes. "I'm sorry, Jeremy, but I can't let you do that. You're going to go home, and you're going to forget that we witnessed the Mayor doing anything more interesting than going to work and going back to his house."
Looking dazed, he picked up his stuff and headed out. Anna had to blink back tears. So much for her plans. In the end, she'd only compelled him to keep him out of trouble, and even that much had felt like she was betraying him.
X
Damon watched Stefan with narrowed eyes from the sofa in the drawing room. Stefan was playing "Valse" by Poulenc. He was a better pianist than Damon, who rarely had the patience for it. (Although even occasional dabbling eventually got you pretty good at it when you had forever.) Stefan glanced over at him for the third time this song, and Damon whipped the newspaper he was holding (but not reading) up over his face again. Stefan paused for a very pointed five seconds between songs, then moved on to "La Plus Quelente" by Debussy. Damon smirked. Stefan's song choices were getting steadily more irritable. He lowered the newspaper again and resumed his suspicious glaring.
Barely halfway through the song, Stefan banged on the keys and jumped up off the piano bench.
"Finally!" said Damon, tossing the newspaper aside and sitting up. (He hadn't actually read any of it. He was pretty sure it was from the eighties.) "Are you about to have a ripper freakout? Because I've been bored out of my mind babysitting you all day."
"I am not having a ripper freakout!" Stefan yelled.
"Really?" said Damon, raising an eyebrow. "What do you call this?"
"Go visit Elena and leave me the hell alone!"
Damon actually did want to go see Elena. He was starting to have trouble remembering how he had managed to pass his time before he met her. Granted, his humanity had been off then, so boredom hadn't been as tedious. "Are you sure that's a good idea?" he asked.
"I will throw this piano at your head."
"That piano is a Steinway, so no you will not." Damon walked past Stefan with the casual air of someone who wasn't currently in danger of acting out a Wile E. Coyote cartoon. "I'll go. If you're sure you can last a few hours without supervision."
"I'll be fine."
"Do I need to have you send me hourly photographic evidence that you're still in the house?"
"You know what? It was less annoying when you wanted me to kill people."
X
Tyler was almost positive he'd heard a groan coming from the direction of the fire that time. He set down his fishing pole and started walking over to it, but before he could get there, his dad came back from whatever clump of bushes he'd gone to take a leak behind. "Come on," he said. "I want to show you the cellar."
"Okay," said Tyler, reluctantly following him, though he kept throwing glances over his shoulder at the fire.
Richard led the way down a set of leaf-strewn stone steps, passing Tyler a flashlight when they reached the bottom. Tyler walked past him. "Whoa," he said. "This place is pretty sweet."
"I found it when I used to party here with my friends in high school," said Richard, idly kicking aside an old, crumpled beer can.
Tyler ran his hands over the heavy iron bars halfway across the underground room. "It's like a prison cell," he said, looking around. "Why would there be one of those in the cellar? What, were people just really protective of their booze back then?"
"When our ancestors lived here, it was before Abolition," said Richard. Tyler jerked his hand away from the bars, suddenly feeling like he'd much rather spend the night in a tent than down here. He kept shining the flashlight around, but paused when it glinted off a series of evenly-spaced grooves in the wall on the other side of the bars. He walked inside the cell area and touched the ends of those grooves with his fingers. They looked like...claw marks. He turned to look at his dad. The light flashed off his eyes eerily, reminding him of predators in those nature documentaries substitute biology teachers always played.
"I've been reading through the stuff written by our Civil War era ancestors," said Richard. "Barnette Lockwood, the first mayor of Mystic Falls, wrote that his son George buried his journal in there. I dug it up this morning. You should read it, tell me what you think."
"Yeah, okay," said Tyler. "Sounds cool." He walked back out of the cell, perhaps a little faster than he needed to, but this place was starting to give him the creeps, and his dad wasn't helping. "We should go fish if we want to catch anything while it's still light."
"Good idea," said Richard. He turned to head back out of the cellar, and Tyler made to follow him, but then he gasped and fell to his knees. His skin felt hot and tight and it was like his bones and organs were all about to explode. The next second, his eyes and ears were flooded with light and sound. Even without the flashlight, he could see the previously dark cellar with perfect clarity, and he could hear everything from leaves rustling in the forest above to his dad's heartbeat to the footfalls of some small animal—a fox, he thought, based on one of a hundred different smells he was suddenly aware of. He gave a violent, full-body shudder, wondering if he was about to throw up. And then it was all gone again, like someone had flicked a light switch on and off in his head, except that he still didn't feel normal.
He realized that his dad was standing right in front of him, holding his hand out.
"I'm okay," he said, getting back up on his own. "But I don't think I really feel like camping tonight. Mind if I call Mom to come pick me up?"
"Go ahead," said Richard. "I'll take care of the fire."
"Yeah," said Tyler. He had to make a conscious effort not to sprint up the stairs in his eagerness to get the hell out of this place. When he finally reached the surface, a breeze was blowing from the direction of the fire. It didn't smell like a campfire; it smelled like cooking meat. He called his mom, and she was happy to come pick him up, but he decided not to wait for her to drive all the way out here. He grabbed his stuff and started walking up the road. He was a half a mile from the old Lockwood estate by the time he saw her car.
X
After dropping Bonnie off, Elena had gone home and spent the rest of the evening holed up in her room. The Mayor's bite could have killed Damon. Damon could be dying or already dead right now if it wasn't for her dad being willing to help him, despite being raised to hate vampires and being a member of the town's anti-vampire council.
Somehow, Elena had had this subconscious idea of Damon being indestructible, even though she'd seen him wounded, starving, and delirious. She knew he was going to leave in two months, and until now, she'd thought that nothing could hurt her more than the prospect of his departure. But remembering the way he'd looked lying there on that operating table yesterday, stark-white and motionless, she realized how wrong she'd been. As much as the thought of him leaving hurt, that would just be physical distance. He'd still be out there somewhere, with his beautiful, impish eyes, his smirk, and his witty remarks. Even if they would all be for Katherine, they would still be. But that bite could have taken him away for good, all because he had protected her family. Thinking about it made it hard for her to breathe.
A light breeze disturbed the air in the room. Elena looked up from the journal on her lap to see Damon standing in front of her window, looking just as strong and invulnerable as ever despite everything he'd been through. "Hey," he said.
"Hey," said Elena. She set the journal on her nightstand and slid off the bed. "Treatments still going well?" she asked.
"Yeah," said Damon. "Stefan kicked me out, so I thought I'd pay you a visit." He frowned. "Have you been crying?"
"It's nothing," she said.
"Are you sure?" he said, closing the distance between them.
Elena didn't plan it. She was pretty sure the idea of doing it never consciously crossed her mind. But with him actually standing here, the first vampire ever to survive a werewolf bite, concerned about her, she couldn't help herself. She did what she'd desperately wanted to do ever since the credits rolled at the end of The Princess Bride: she flung herself at him and kissed him right on the lips.
If he was surprised, maybe his vampire reflexes helped him recover from it quickly, because it only took a fraction of a second before his arms went around her and he was clutching her against him and kissing her back with matching enthusiasm. Her heart felt like it would burst with joy. This was what she'd needed: to feel the evidence of how alive he was with her hands, her mouth, her body against his. He was warm and strong and a very good kisser, and she loved him so much that she didn't know how there was room inside her for the entirety of the feeling.
Kissing wasn't enough. She wanted to get even closer to him, to get as close as it was possible for two people to be, and maybe then she wouldn't have to be afraid of losing him. She broke the kiss as a sob wracked through her. The next moment, she was crying her heart out into his chest.
"Hey," he said. His voice sounded hoarse, and his arms were still around her. "If you keep this up, you're gonna owe me another shirt."
She hiccupped, but didn't speak. Her vocal cords probably couldn't handle it right now anyway.
"Why did you do that?" he asked. When she didn't answer, he pulled back and cupped her face in one hand, gently turning it up so that their eyes met.
She swallowed back another sob. "You could have died," she whispered, tears still flooding down her cheeks. She tugged on the collar of his shirt as she spoke. "Nobody told me how dangerous werewolf bites are. I only found out because Bonnie mentioned it by accident."
"Hey, it's okay," he said, "I have a really good doctor."
She let out a choked laugh and smacked him on the chest. "You're not allowed to die, okay? That's the whole point of you being immortal. Not dying. Ever." Her hands moved to his face. "Damon. Do you have any idea how much you mean to me?"
For a second, he looked surprised. Then, he looked like he was in as much pain as at any point before the blood replacement procedure. He kissed her, pulling her close again. It was not the kind of kiss that leads feverishly to anything more intense; it was tender and slow. When he pulled away, there was a soft smile on his face, but that pain was still in his eyes. "Pretty sure it goes both ways," he said.
"Will you stay?" she asked. She'd only been talking about that night, but part of her hoped that after what had just happened, maybe his long-term plans would have changed too. But it seemed he hadn't noticed the potential weightier meaning of her words. Rather than giving her a verbal reply, he used his vampire speed to kick off his shoes, sweep her legs out from under her, carry her to her bed, and nimbly position them both under the covers with her still tucked up against him.
"I don't think I'm going to be able to do much dreamsharing until I'm fully cured," he said.
"I don't care," she said, snuggling closer. "I'm sure I'll have good dreams anyway as long as you're here."
X
"I'm home!" Jeremy yelled as he shut the front door behind him. Today had been a bust, although getting to see a literal bird's eye view and eavesdrop with the auditory acuteness of a fox had definitely been worth it even without catching Mayor Lockwood doing anything shady.
"Where've you been all day?" said his mom, stepping into view from the direction of the kitchen, a half-eaten pizza slice in her hand.
"Library," he said, immediately veering into the kitchen for some of that pizza. "Looking up stuff in the folklore aisle about vampires and werewolves."
"There's stuff about werewolves there?" said Jenna, who was also eating pizza in the kitchen.
"Not really," said Jeremy. "But there are lots of different accounts of what happened in 1865."
"Has Dad shown you the Gilbert journals yet?" said Miranda.
"No, but those sound cool."
"They are. You should ask him about them."
"Okay." He loaded four slices onto a plate and then started to leave, planning to eat them in his room.
"What, you can't eat with us?" said Jenna indignantly.
"Nope," he said, not rising to the bait. He made it up to his room without encountering anyone else. When he sat down at his chair, his dad's voice recorder shifted in his pocket. He didn't particularly want to listen to seven hours of nothing happening, and the fact that he could still remember his anti-compulsion precautions seemed to indicate that he hadn't been compelled, but he wasn't going to leave anything up to chance. As he worked his way steadily through all the pizza slices, he plugged the recorder into his computer and uploaded everything from today. Once he was sure he now had audio files that totaled the same amount of time he'd spent at the library, he deleted them off the recorder so his dad wouldn't find out about Anna by mistake.
He took the empty plate back downstairs as a cover for returning the recorder to his dad's desk drawer, then returned to his room, flopped on his bed, and pulled out his sketchbook to work on while he listened to the recording at 1.5x speed.
X
Damon held Elena close as she slept, one hand idly playing with strands of her hair. He'd been completely blindsided by that kiss. And boy, had it been one hell of a kiss. It was actually kind of shocking, because it had nothing to do with sensuality or technique and everything to do with emotion. He found himself wondering if he'd ever been kissed by a woman who genuinely cared for him before tonight. Most—hell, maybe all—of the other women he'd kissed in his life had been focused on the pleasure he could give them. No one had ever kissed him out of sheer joy and relief that he was still alive. Not even Katherine, even though they had already been together when his home leave ended and he had to return to fight in the war. All she'd done when he came back was flirt and tease and then go with Stefan to the Founder's Ball instead of him.
The stubborn lie Damon had been telling himself for the last several weeks had crumbled away as soon as Elena's lips were on his. She'd put her whole soul into that moment. Had he been operating under an entirely false understanding of what love was supposed to be?
And yet...even if he had, it didn't change anything. Icy numbness seemed to spread through him.
His birthday presents were sitting on her bookshelf. As a boy, he'd read read all six of Jane Austen's novels with his mother, including that same copy of Pride and Prejudice. They'd also read Jane Eyre, then a new release only a few years old. In a century and a half, Pride and Prejudice was the only Austen book he'd reread, but his old copy of Jane Eyre was nearly falling apart now, from use more than age. He hadn't picked it up since his time at Whitmore but he still remembered it well.
The night they met, Elena had joked about the two of them being like Austen's characters, but she'd been wrong. They were much more like those of the darker novel. No matter how much Edward Rochester had loved Jane Eyre, he was bound by his marriage to the madwoman Bertha Mason. But Rochester was luckier than Damon, because even though he was blinded and scarred by fire, he still got to be with Jane in the end. All those times he'd read that book after becoming a vampire, Damon had thought Katherine was his Jane. Now, he was starting to wonder if she was really Bertha and he'd fallen for the trap just like Rochester. His chest ached. If she was Bertha, then there would be no escape. Jane could never be his.
He felt furious and powerless. How could this have happened, and not even two full months before he and Katherine would be reunited? He wanted to break something, to kill something. All he could do was pull the sleeping Elena closer still. Maybe he was strong enough to dreamshare with her after all. They'd done it so many times now that it had almost become automatic, so maybe he didn't need to be at full strength for it anymore. He carefully undid the clasp of her charm bracelet and set it down on her nightstand without disturbing her. Then he pressed a slow kiss to her temple and let his mind drift into hers.
X
Bonnie, Tiki, Dana, and the rest of the squad were making a pyramid.
"Come on, Elena! Why aren't you in your uniform yet?" Caroline was standing in front of her, in her cheer uniform like all the other girls. She had her hands on her hips, and she looked annoyed.
Elena glanced down. She was holding her cheer uniform. "But I quit the squad," she said, frowning. This wasn't right.
"Yeah, but that was because of Damon, and he's leaving."
"What if he doesn't?" said Elena.
"Come on, don't be stupid," said Caroline, rolling her eyes. "Anyway, once he's gone, you can rejoin the squad."
"And we can get back together," said Matt, who appeared at Elena's side, his expression happy and hopeful.
"Guys, no!" said Elena, frustrated. "I didn't quit the squad and break up with Matt because of Damon. I did it because I don't like cheerleading anymore and Matt and I aren't right for each other." Their expressions didn't change. They just didn't get it. She scowled and threw her cheer outfit down on the grass in front of her, then turned and ran. She was trying to sprint, but it was like moving through molasses. She heard Caroline and Matt calling her back, possibly chasing after her. She ignored them and kept going. Eventually, she reached the forest on the edge of the school grounds. Caroline's and Matt's voices grew quieter and quieter until all she could hear were twittering birds and shifting leaves. She slowed back to a walk, enjoying the peaceful scenery.
After a minute or so of walking aimlessly in the woods, the trees parted to show a white mansion with tall pillars in the front. Elena's heart leapt. She knew this place. She glanced around her excitedly, and sure enough, teenage Damon came running towards her a few seconds later, his cheeks rosy and his curly hair disheveled.
"Good!" he said when he was only a few feet from her. "You're here. I wasn't sure you'd be able to make it." To her surprise and delight, he greeted her with a kiss. It wasn't as good as the ones when she was awake—a little too fuzzy around the edges for that, but it was still wonderful. When they broke apart, he caught one of her hands in his and started tugging her along with him. Together, they headed for the stables.
She looked down at herself and frowned. "Why am I still wearing my regular clothes?" she asked him.
At her words, Damon's steps faltered. He steadied himself by bracing his free hand against his knee, and suddenly he was adult Damon, wearing a leather jacket and dark jeans, his face even paler than usual. "Just go along with it," he said, breathing hard. "This isn't very easy right now." Then he was upright, once again a seventeen-year-old in breeches, an unbuttoned waistcoat, and a baggy white linen shirt with the sleeves bunched to the elbows. They kept racing to the stables like nothing had happened, and Elena decided to do as he'd suggested. For one thing, it would be much easier to ride a horse in jeans than a hoop skirt.
Once they had the horses saddled, they rode out across the property. Elena caught a glimpse of little Stefan following his and Damon's mother as she pruned her rose garden. Farther out, she saw a couple of carriages traveling along the road that led to town. Damon didn't stop to comment or point out any of this to her; he must have a specific destination in mind. Eventually, they rode all the way out to the quarry, where he jumped off his horse and turned to help her down. Thanks to the jeans, she didn't need help dismounting, but she wouldn't pass up a chance to leap into his arms for anything. He caught her and spun her around, laughing. They tied the horses' reins to the hitch outside a small shed and walked, hand in hand, to sit where their feet could dangle in the cool water.
"I wish we were really back in 1857 together," he said.
"How come?"
"Because that way, I would've met you first."
Elena turned to look at him. His young face was twisted, like he was being forced to eat one of his least favorite foods. She found that she didn't feel very sympathetic. Nothing she'd heard about Katherine made her sound like soulmate material for anyone, let alone Damon. And if he wasn't looking forward to being with her anymore, why was he still planning on it? "Don't you still have a choice?" she asked.
"Yeah, but there's a hundred and forty-four years' worth of momentum behind this choice."
Now Elena was the one with the bitter taste in her mouth. "So after everything that's happened, you're going to leave anyway? Why did you kiss me back?"
"Because I wanted to take a break from reality and pretend I lived in a world where it was okay to kiss you."
"I don't want to pretend, Damon. You built the cage you're in, and you can tear it down if you want to. Don't act like it has to be there." She got to her feet and walked away, leaving him sitting there at the water's edge. She never thought it was possible to feel pain in a dream, but there was an ache in her chest that was too sharp to be imaginary. Apparently he did return her feelings, just not enough to do anything about it.
"Elena, wait!" he called after her. She started running again. She could show him a brave face in the waking world, but everything was exposed here, and it was too hard right now. She untied her horse and jumped back on, then rode all the way back to the Salvatore mansion and ran inside. He'd probably find her soon; he'd created this dreamscape after all. So she went to the one place she hoped he wouldn't look for her: the room on the ground floor that he'd skipped when giving her the tour.
The door loomed before her, bigger than it should have been, and the light from the windows seemed to avoid it, leaving it dark and forbidding. It gave her the creeps, but she heard Damon calling after her again, and despite her misgivings, she pulled the door open and slipped inside.
The room was dimly lit, but she could make out a desk, a couple of chairs, and a number of bookshelves. An office, maybe? Behind the desk stood a tall man whose face was in shadow.
"Is it true?" said the man.
"Is what true, Father?" said a small, trembling voice. Elena jumped and looked around for its source. A boy with curly black hair, no older than nine, was cowering near the door through which she'd just entered. Damon. And the man... Damon had never introduced her to his father in any of these dreams before, and her stomach clenched as an ominous feeling washed over her.
"Don't play the fool, boy!" barked Mr. Salvatore. Elena and little Damon both flinched. "You may have many faults, but a weak mind is not one of them. Have you or have you not been skipping lessons with the tutor I paid good money for to run around with a pack of Negro brats?"
"I was only teaching them how to read," said little Damon. "They're my friends."
"They are slaves," Mr. Salvatore spat. "They are not your friends, and they'll be no good to their masters if their heads are full of books when they should be focused on their work. If you're so friendly with them, I'll talk to Mayor Lockwood and see if he can put you to work in his fields alongside them!"
"But Mother said I could play with them!" little Damon protested. As horrified as Elena was at Mr. Salvatore's behavior, she couldn't help being impressed with Damon's defiance. "She says anyone who wants to read should be able to!"
"Your mother is not the head of this household!" Mr. Salvatore shouted. "I am! I'll see to it that she remembers that." He made to come out from behind the desk. Elena didn't want to see what he would do when he reached little Damon. She pulled the door open and practically dove back through it.
She was relieved to find the teenage Damon sitting on the stairs just outside the office door. "I'm so sorry, Damon. I wouldn't have gone in there if I'd known—what was that room?"
Damon didn't even seem to notice she was there, let alone reply to her question. She frowned and moved closer to him. He was staring at the opposite wall with an expression like despair, tear tracks all down his cheeks. He and Elena both jumped when the front door crashed open. "There you are, you insolent boy!" snarled the same voice from the scene in the office. In the sunlight spilling into the foyer, she could see his face this time. Damon had been right when he'd said Stefan looked more like their father. The man's face was contorted with anger. "Did you care so little for your mother that you wouldn't even attend her funeral?"
"Why attend the funeral, Father?" said Damon, looking equally angry as he stood up. "To say goodbye? You already robbed me of the chance to do that by sending her away to die surrounded by strangers."
"Did you spare no thought for how it would look to our neighbors and friends if Lily's own son wasn't there to pay his respects?" Mr. Salvatore demanded, pointing forcefully in the direction of the rest of town.
"I don't give a damn what any of them thinks of me!" Damon shouted. "I'll grieve how I choose to!"
"You'd better start giving a damn what they think of you. I will not allow you to make a mockery of this family!" Mr. Salvatore punctuated the sentence by striking Damon across the face.
Elena gasped and stumbled back, but Damon righted himself, wiping blood away from his lip and glaring at his father. "In other words, you want me to pretend to be your dutiful, loving son. I'm sorry I'm not so skilled an actor as you are." This time, Mr. Salvatore grabbed him by the neck and threw him to the floor at the base of the stairs. Elena screamed and ran down the corridor, throwing herself through the first door she could reach.
To her dismay, this door somehow led to the inside of a completely different pre-Civil War house. There was a knock on the door, and a woman in period clothing walked right past Elena to answer it. On the other side stood the adult Damon, accompanied by a shorter, fair-haired man. Both were dressed in gray Confederate soldier uniforms. The woman was reluctant to let them come in for a meal, but Damon insisted. Elena watched, confused. What was this memory? The woman led Damon and his fellow soldier into the kitchen, where an old woman was preparing food with the help of a teenage girl. Everyone in the room seemed tense, and Elena was getting very nervous.
Her instincts proved to be good, because the next second, two men emerged from a hidden room on the far side of the kitchen, one also wearing a gray uniform, both brandishing pistols. Damon drew his own. Elena realized what must be happening. These men were deserters, and Damon and his fellow soldier had been sent to capture them. "Kindly lay your gun down," said one of the deserters.
"I do not want any trouble," said Damon, laying his pistol on the floor and slowly standing with his hands in the air.
"If you go right now, you will find none," said the blond man who wasn't dressed like a soldier. "All we want is to go home."
"See, that is the problem," said Damon. "I want to go home too."
Just then, Damon ducked and his companion emerged from the hallway, firing his gun. He shot one of the two men. Elena screamed and clapped her hands over her ears as pandemonium broke out. A mere ten seconds later, all three women and the other man were all dead, leaving Damon and his companion standing there in horror. "I spilled my first innocent blood before I became a vampire..." God, was this what he'd meant by that? Elena thought she might be sick, if it was possible to get sick while one was trapped in someone else's memories. She scrambled out of the room.
Before she could wonder how she would find her way out of somewhere completely unfamiliar to her, she emerged into the crush of a crowded ballroom. She looked all around her in confusion and received quite a different shock than the ones she'd found so far. Stefan, looking the same age as in 2009, was mere yards away, and he was dancing with...her. She wore a Civil War era ball gown and had her hair piled up onto her head in an elegant, complicated style. She was looking into Stefan's eyes with a playful expression as they danced with their hands a couple of inches apart between them. Elena watched in confusion. She wouldn't dance like that with Stefan. A few yards beyond the happily dancing couple, she spotted the curly-haired Damon, who was doing a very poor job of hiding his disappointment and jealousy as he watched them revolve around each other.
Her eyes snapped back to Stefan's dance partner as realization dawned. That wasn't a dream version of herself, it was Katherine! She stared in horrified fascination for a few seconds, dodging between other dancing couples so she could keep the other woman's face in view. She'd known all along that they looked alike, but actually seeing it made that real in a way it hadn't been until now. As far as she could tell, they were completely identical. Elena had drawn close enough to hear when Katherine made a reply to some comment from Stefan, and she flinched at the sound. Even their voices were the same.
Just then, Katherine shot a smirk past Stefan's shoulder at Damon. With that one look, she pretty much confirmed the worst of Elena's suspicions about her. Elena's hands clenched into fists. She'd had enough of this. She pushed through the crowd—quite rudely, especially considering the setting, but like in the previous memories, nobody noticed her. She reached Damon and seized him by the shoulders. "Damon, look at me!" she shouted, trying to make herself heard over the music and the chatter of the crowd. "You've waited for her long enough! I'm right here! I don't want to be selfish, but you deserve better than someone who won't even decide between you and your brother!"
It was no good. This wasn't the part of Damon's mind that he had conscious control over; she'd gone too deep and now she was lost in true memories that she had no power to influence. She gave her arm a hard pinch, but the action failed to wake her up. It was his mind she was trapped in, not hers; she wouldn't be able to get out that way. She'd just have to try to find her way out. She left this sad, jilted Damon alone on the edge of the dance floor, having spotted another door. When she went through it, she was back at the quarry. She spun around and found that Damon had moved to sit inside the little shed.
"Oh, thank God," she said, no longer caring that she'd been trying to get away from him before, as long as she'd gotten out of that crazy rabbit hole. However, Damon didn't turn at the sound of her voice. What was more, Elena realized that it was now nighttime, though it had been midday there just minutes ago when she'd been there with him before, the shed was now so run-down that it was barely standing, and this was not the teenage Damon she'd left behind.
The sound of approaching footsteps made her turn. Stefan was leading a blank-faced young woman towards them. "What are you doing?" said Damon. "Who is that?"
"I brought her for you," said Stefan. "She's a gift." He looked at the girl and gestured at the front of the little shed where the door was missing. (Wait, hadn't Elena just run through that? The geography of dreams and memories was so strange.) "Have a seat, please."
Elena took a couple of steps back. This was not the Stefan she knew. Evidently, Damon felt the same way, for he looked at his little brother in horror. "What have you done, Stefan?"
Elena wanted very much to get out of here before she could find out what made this memory so terrible, but her legs wouldn't move. She was too afraid for the blank-faced girl, and some morbid part of her needed to know what became of her before she left. So she watched as Stefan explained to his appalled older brother that he'd completed his transition into a vampire thanks to their father's blood, and that he wasn't going to let Damon fade away when he could live forever, powerful and deadly. Damon tried to refuse. He heaved himself to his feet. "Katherine's dead, Stefan," he said, stumbling past Stefan towards the water. His next words drove a lance of pain through Elena's heart. "There's no world without her." But whether he lacked the physical strength to escape Stefan or the mental strength to resist, he eventually gave in. Stefan bit into the girl's neck and practically forced the bleeding wound under Damon's reluctant lips.
Elena ran. Doors seemed to be a reliable way to get from one memory to another, so she dove for the empty door frame of the tiny shed. She thought she might end up back inside the ballroom, but instead there was an entirely new memory in an unfamiliar location. If the last one had been bad because it showed Stefan pushing Damon to become something he didn't want to be, this one showed the reverse. She watched Damon persuade Stefan, who had evidently only been drinking animal blood in recent years, to feed on a young woman. She realized too late how badly wrong it was going. She screamed and flung her hands in front of her face, but it wasn't enough to cover the sound of the woman's head thudding to the ground, no longer connected to her body.
This wasn't supposed to happen. Dreamsharing with Damon was supposed to be an adventure, a holodeck fantasy they could explore together—something that was just theirs and completely safe. Somehow she'd tripped into the nightmare parallel, and no matter where she turned, she couldn't find the way out. Whether she found a new door or backtracked through the one she'd used to enter the memory, she ended up somewhere else every time. She'd noticed that they seemed to be in chronological order, which might mean that she'd find the way out once she got to the present, but how many more terrible memories would that take?
The next door took her into the boarding house. A tinny voice made her look around, and she saw an old black-and-white television set in a wooden casing sitting in the parlor, getting dusted off by a maid. A second later, Damon swaggered in, looking particularly handsome in the fifties version of his standard wardrobe, asking after someone called Joseph Salvatore. A middle-aged man with brown hair walked into the room, the maid left, and Damon shared lighthearted banter with him until Joseph suddenly stuck him with a vervain syringe.
"Sorry, Damon," said Joseph. "The money was too good to pass up."
Damon's response was to jam the glass tumbler of bourbon straight into Joseph's neck, and he crumpled to the floor, clawing at the foreign object, but removing it only made him bleed out faster. Another man appeared and injected Damon with even more vervain. Elena's surroundings stretched and blurred, then reformed into a basement laboratory that bore an eerie resemblance to her dad's, where Damon came to strapped to an operating table and the second man from the boarding house was now approaching him, wielding a scalpel.
Elena bolted before she could find out what he was going to do with it, but the only thing on the other side of the next door was the inside of a steel cage in the middle of a room that would've looked quite elegant if it hadn't been on fire. She couldn't feel the heat of the remembered flames, but the sight was alarming enough on its own. Standing next to her was a ragged, emaciated man with dark hair and haunted brown eyes. She followed his gaze and saw that Damon was there too—of course; it was his memory—, tearing his way around the room and through the throats of everyone in it, while the flames licked steadily higher.
"Damon!" shouted the man in the cage. "We've got to get out of here! Damon, now!"
Damon blurred over to the cage, and they both wrenched at the bars but instantly recoiled.
"Vervain!" said Damon. They tried again, fighting through the pain, until Damon let go and backed away, shaking his head. His expression was tormented and hopeless. The man in the cage watched him with pleading eyes. Elena didn't understand why.
"Damon."
"I'm sorry, Enzo," said Damon.
"Damon, please."
Damon only backed farther away, hanging his head. All of a sudden, the vibrant colors of the flames consuming the room around them faded to much duller shades, and when Damon looked up at Enzo again, his eyes were just…empty. He turned and walked away as if he was deaf to Enzo's pleading screams.
Before Elena could even attempt to look for a way out of this memory, a furious roar drowned out all sound and everything went black. A cold, iron force seized her in the darkness and hurled her through the air with tremendous strength. The next second, her eyes flew open and she sat bolt upright on her bed. Damon jerked awake too and flung himself away from her so violently that he sent her crashing to the floor in a heap. She scrambled up, trying to shake off the disorienting aftereffects of sleep. "Damon, what—?" she began, but he didn't let her finish.
"What the hell did you just do?" he demanded.
She looked up at him, a hand pressed against her throbbing head. "I don't know!" she said. "I couldn't find my way out, and—"
"You broke into my memories! You had no right!"
"Damon, please, it was an accident!" said Elena, but his eyes were wild and it was like he couldn't hear her.
"I trusted you!" he snarled. "Do you think I trust people easily? Do you think I've ever let anyone into my head before?" The look on his face…betrayal, hatred. It was like a physical blow to the stomach, and it hurt worse than anything she'd just seen. How could this night have gone from the best in her life to the worst so quickly? Their kisses and falling asleep in his arms seemed years away, and she felt so much older than she was.
"I'm sorry!" she said, taking a step towards him with her hands in front of her. "I promise I'll never say anything about what I saw—not even to you, if that's what you want."
He laughed mirthlessly. "You're damn right that's what I want." He walked towards her. "And I'm going to make sure of it." He seized her by her upper arms, his eyes boring into hers.
"What are you doing?" she said, more terrified than she'd ever been.
"What I should've done the night we met," said Damon.
Elena's eyes widened. "No, please, you can't!" She tried to break eye contact with him, but it was like there were steel beams running from his pupils to hers, and she couldn't turn or blink or even unfocus her gaze. She wanted to plead with him some more. He couldn't possibly be about to do what she thought. If she could only talk to him, maybe she could get through to him. Please! she screamed inside her head. Don't do this! I'm sorry! I never meant to see any of it. I'm in love with you, Damon! I love you more than I ever thought possible!
None of it reached her lips.
Damon's pupils expanded until she thought she might fall into them. "You and I have never met, and we never will. You don't remember me or anything you've seen inside my head."
The connection broke, and then Elena was standing alone in her bedroom. She looked around, confused. She could've sworn someone else had just been there, but that was absurd. It was the middle of the night.
There was a knock on her bedroom door, and she heard her mom's voice. "You okay, Elena? I thought I heard voices."
"No," said Elena, "I mean, yeah, I'm fine. I guess I just had a bad dream. Go back to sleep."
"You sure?"
Elena frowned. Her window was open. She walked over and shut it. "Yeah," she said again. "I'm fine."
Originally, I was going to have Richard just openly try to force Tyler to finish Tanner off, but then it occurred to me that he would have a much higher chance of success if he tricked Tyler into it. So, R.I.P. Coach Tanner. You were mostly a jerk, but you did care about your students. Maybe if you weren't standing in the way of Alaric showing up, I wouldn't have had to kill you off. Also, originally, I planned to not have Damon and Elena kiss until after Comet Day. (Yeah, seriously.) They didn't listen to me. You're welcome. Elena getting lost in Damon's worst memories was something I've had planned ever since I made the door to Giuseppe's office so ominous in that first 1850s dream, but Damon feeling so betrayed and violated by it that he wipes her memories of him was a more recent idea. I love Jeremy and Anna's stuff. I totally did not expect that to end with Anna actually compelling Jeremy. Seriously, you'd be surprised by how much of this fic I come up with as I go. It's great! That means I get to enjoy the twists as much as you guys. I love that Elena and Jeremy are in similar positions with their vampires. It feels like it came together super organically, and I really liked bringing Part I to a close by coming full circle from the original premise, where Damon doesn't compel Elena to forget him.
If you would please now leave your final comments before proceeding to Part II in an orderly fashion...