Summary: When Morgan finds out she's adopted she sets off to Virginia to find her birth-mother, but things get complicated when she finds Elena Gilbert first; a girl who looks exactly like her.

So, I can practically hear the cogs turning in your head, so I'm going to stop right now and tell you all that Morgan does not end up with Damon or Stefan. However, somebody does end up with one of the brothers.

Nina Dobrev as Morgan Taylor

Nikki Reed as Rachel Taylor


MORGAN

DON'T LOOK


"Morgan," I heard a tired voice from the doorway call. I knew instantly that it was my sister, Rachel. "What are you still doing up? You have school in the morning."

"I know." I said as I continued to type. "I'm trying to find my birth-mom, but I can't find anything about her." I picked up my CANADA mug and took a gulp of the coffee inside before putting it down and turning to the doorway. "Are you sure you can't remember anything else about her?"

It had been two weeks since my sat sat me down one morning and told me some heart stopping, mind blowing, Earth shattering information. It had been exactly two weeks since she informed me that I was not our parents biological daughter.

It had been two weeks since I was told that I was adopted.

It took me about two days to get over the initial shock of it. I mean, it wasn't that I was mad about it or anything. Rachel had sat me down and told me because she had promised our mother that she would tell me once I was old enough to understand and I loved them all for that. I loved Rachel for telling me and not making it some dirty little secret, but, naturally, I wanted to know everything I could about my birth-mother, but no one knew much about her.

Rachel sighed and went to sit down at the foot of my bed. I was sitting at my desk in front of my window. "I don't know much." She reminded me once again. "I never met her, neither did mom or dad."

"Just..." I shook my head. "Just tell me everything that happened. Start to finish, leave nothing out."

Rachel sighed again as crossed one of her slender legs over the other before recovering it with her robe. "Well," She started. "It was seventeen years ago when I was four. Mom and dad had been trying to have a baby since I was one, but they just..couldn't, so they started looking at other options, but there weren't many." She said. "If they decided to adopt, it'd probably take years for them just to get on any sort of list and back then surrogacy wasn't a common thing. There were way to many medical and legal unknowns for them.

"I remember when mom got upset." She sighed and tucked her dark brown hair behind her left ear. "One night I heard her crying and I went to see what was wrong. They were in the living room and dad was just hugging her and telling her that everything would be okay. Then she said; 'It'll take a miracle.'."

"Then what happened?" Rachel smiled at me.

"The doorbell rang." She continued. "Mom went to the door and came back with you."

"I was a doorstep baby?" I whined and she chuckled at my complaint.

"You were so tiny." She said quietly. "And it was thundering and there was lightning everywhere, but you didn't cry once. I'm pretty sure you were smiling actually." Mom had never told me the story of my first storm. I kind of figured that I was like most babies and cried the entire time and that I just grew to love them. "After a couple of weeks when the police turned up no one in their search for your mom, you stopped being Morgan Doe and became Morgan Taylor."

I sat up at that. "My name was already Morgan?" I asked and she nodded. "I thought you said mom and dad never met my birth-mom?"

"They didn't." She confirmed. "But in the note she left, she asked that you be named Morgan, after her mother."

"What note?" I asked and she furrowed her eyebrows.

"Why are you getting all worked up now?" She asked. "I already told you about the note...didn't I?" I shook my head, shocked that she could be so forgetful.

"Obviously not, you egghead!" I shouted before leaving my room. I heard her following after me.

"There is no need for name calling." She said as we went down the stairs and I immediately went to our fathers study. He had died years ago, but neither Rachel or I had the heart to move any of his things.

For the first time since dad died, I didn't feel the immediate need to cry when I entered the study and I smelled the familiar scent of peppermint and cigars. I had hated the smell when he was alive, but now that he was gone, I couldn't get enough of it.

"What are you doing?" Rachel asked as I began searching through his desk drawers.

"Looking for the note." I said, shoving a drawer close and opening another. "Mom was a pig when it came to organization," I remembered as I continued searching. "That's why dad kept all the important stuff; birth certificates, social security cards, bank statements. There is no way in hell he'd ever let mom lose something so important."

"You mean something important like this?" I straightened up and turned around to see Rachel holding a yellowing piece of paper. "See," She began as I took the note from her and carefully unfolded it. "This is why you need a big sister; so she can tell you where dad kept all his secret stuff." But I paid her no mind as I read the words on the note.

"Kind strangers," I read. "This is my daughter. I haven't named her yet because I knew that if I did, I'd want to keep her, but I can't. I've gone so far and done so much that there is no possible way that I can stop now. I do, however, have a suggestion for a name; Morgan." But there she had started a new paragraph, meaning I could see the few words she had written and tried to erase.

'That was my mother's name.'

"Did you see this?" I asked pointing to it. Rachel didn't see what I was pointing at, but she had already nodded.

"Mom saw it too." She told me. "She tried looking for a woman named Morgan, but Georgia is a big city and that's a common name."

Sighing in disappointment, I continued. "She's only a few days old, her birthday is June 22, 1992. I have only one request; please do not tell her about me. Don't tell her that she was adopted because I don't want her to look for me...." I trailed off. Why? If she asked my mom and dad not to tell me, why had they?

"Are you okay?" Rachel asked and I nodded before continuing.

"I re-" My voice cracked, but I quickly cleared my throat. "I refuse to be a teenage mother and I don't want her to have any unrealistic expectations about what our reunion would be like. I want nothing more than to meet her, love her and hold her, but I can't to be a mother to her."

Rachel put her hand on my shoulder. "Are you okay?" I nodded.

"Yeah." I said quietly quietly as I looked down at the note so she wouldn't see the tears in my eyes. "Nothing like rejection to make you feel loved." I blinked away my tears, but one of them fell right onto the old, yellowing paper. "Crap!" I quickly turned and put the paper on the desk and tried to dab away the moisture before it damaged the paper.

I know what you're thinking; 'Idiot. The paper is gonna rip if you rub it.' Luckily for me, it didn't, but I also found something else.

With the face only inches away from the paper, I was able to see another word that she had tried to erase. My tear had fallen on it, so it was hard to read, but I saw some of the letters and it didn't take a genius to figure the rest out.

"Isabel." I read quietly.

"What?" Rachel's voice asked from behind me and I quickly turned around with the note.

"Her name is Isabel." I said holding out the paper and she took it. "She wrote her name and then tried to erase it. I almost missed it."

Holding the paper right in front of her face, Rachel's eyes shot up. "I can't believe you caught that."

"Neither can I." I laughed before snatching up the paper and rushing out of my fathers office. Rachel followed me out.

"Where are you going?" She asked as I rushed up the stairs.

"To get my laptop!" I grinned as I stopped on the landing and grinned at my sister who stood in the middle of the foyer. "I am going to look up every single Isabel with a mother named Morgan in a two state radius."

I started back up the stairs, but Rachel's voice called after me. "Do you know how many people that is?" She asked.

"Probably a lot!" I called back.


It was a lot. Fifty eight mother and daughter duos named Morgan and Isabel and I went through all of them.

Unfortunately, I found nothing.

I looked in every single city in a two state radius of Atlanta like I said, but came up with nothing. I wasn't a hacker or anything, so I couldn't look into any of the Isabel's records to see if they had ever been admitted to the maternity ward.

I decided to do logical thing and weed out the Isabel's who couldn't be my mother; Anyone who was Asian, African American or anything else that was too ethnic for my facial features. I spent fifty bucks on one of those genealogy test to find out my ethnicity and two weeks later I found out I was Bulgarian, Hungarian, Nordic and Russian, which didn't help me because I had no idea what ethnicity Isabel was.

For a week I was disappointed and didn't even want to try again, but convinced me to keep looking.

I didn't get anywhere until one Friday when I was at school.

I was in Algebra ll when I was reading a problem in my math book about some kid named Fernando who wanted to get his girlfriend's mom some flowers before he went to meet her, but he didn't know if it was possible to drive at the speed limit to get the flowers and still make it to his girlfriend's mother's house; that was my job. The thing that caught my eyes, however, wasn't Fernando's inability to realize that being late by a few minutes wouldn't kill him. It was his girlfriend's name.

Her name was Isabelle.

It suddenly came to me that there was a chance I was spelling my birth-mom's name wrong. My tear had warped the already faded word so I didn't know what the original spelling was.

Not even waiting for class to be over, I packed up my things and ran out of class and the school (something Rachel hadn't been too happy about when my principal called her) and went home to get to my computer.

I knew that my birth-mom's name had five letters and according to five different baby name sites, there were only three ways to spell her name. The first had been the way I was already spelling it, the second had been Isabelle.

The last had been Isobel.

Apparently, not many people knew about that way of spelling it which was good for me. There wouldn't be too many people going around and naming their daughters Isobel.

In a two state radius, there were eight women named Isobel; three of them were still teenagers, one was fifty-five and in prison, meaning she couldn't have been a teenager when she had me, one was Asian, two were under the age of eleven which left me with one.

Isobel Flemming.

She met every requirement of being my mother; she was Caucasian, she had been sixteen when I was born and she had a mother named Morgan.

"It's her, Rachel!" I said showing my sister my findings. "I have to go find her."

"You read her note." She crossed her arms. "She doesn't want to see you."

"No," I corrected. "She didn't think she could raise me and didn't want to be a disappointment in my eyes. There's a difference." I nodded.

Sighing, because she knew she couldn't talk me out of finding Isobel, Rachel sat down next to me on my bed. "Okay, but how are you going to find her?" She asked. "She probably doesn't even live in the same town anymore."

"I already covered that." I said and opened my laptop which had a few tabs open. "I found Isobel on a website for Duke in North Carolina. She was listed as one of their researchers. Then I found this-" I said clicking on one of the other tabs which showed a newspaper clipping. "It's a wedding announcement for Isobel. She got married to some guy named Alaric Saltzman."

Rachel grimaced. "That's gotta be a complicated name to live with." I nodded in agreement.

"But it's great for us." I said. "I Googled him and found him in a town near the one Isobel was born in." I clicked over to a new tab which showed a website for said town. "It's called Mystic Falls- yeah, I know." I said at her face. "Anyway, they have a ridiculous amount of parties and social events every month. Alaric was sold of to the highest bidder in some bachelor auction thing."

"Yeah, but bachelor means they're not married anymore." Rachel pointed out.

"That doesn't mean she doesn't still live in town." I informed her and she sighed.

"Fine." She conceded. "But what are you gonna do? Go all the way to Mystic Falls and find some guy named Alaric and ask him for his ex-wife's address because you're the daughter she gave up at birth and you want to meet her?"

I snapped and pointed a finger at her. "I was just gonna send him an e-mail, but that is a much better idea."


Although Rachel was my older sister and my legal guardian, she had about as much control over me as I did her, which was why she joined me on my drive to Mystic Falls; because she knew I would go without her.

We both packed a bag and got our neighbors, Mr. and Mrs. Olsen, to watch our house for the next week before we left. Rachel knew it would take a few days, even weeks, to find Isobel, so she pulled me out of school for the next two weeks.

"Are you sure this is what you want?" She asked while we were sitting in the car. We hadn't left the garage before she asked. "Isobel might not be who you hope she is."

"She's a good person." I said. "She wanted to keep me, but she didn't because she knew that she wasn't what was best for me. She's a good person because she tried to give me my best chance."

Rachel stared at me as if she were looking for an doubt in my eyes or as if she were trying to find a way to assure me otherwise. "Okay." She said finally before looking back to the driveway and turning on the car.