Title: Actus Reus
Disclaimers: I don't own any supernatural powers or anything else to do with TVD. It would be a completely different show if I did.
Genre: hurt/comfort, big time.
Summary/Set: 401ish. What the Founders' vampire cages are for and how they will all cope with being captured.
Pairing: Delena, Datherine, Dabekah..sort of..
Stefan was running though the forest at full speed, pushing himself off a trunk of a tree once in a while to propel himself in the right direction. At first, it was the screams of a man and a woman, a family even he had heard and he wasn't sure if babyvamp Elena could stop herself from draining them all, but then she knew it was her who was in trouble when several male voices and fire arms got mixed into the sounds. Stefan could only blame himself for everything, leaving Elena in the sinking car for longer, trusting her when she had claimed she got a hold on her blood cravings, when he concentrated too much on tutoring her on vampire issues and contemplating his role in what has happened to take enough notice of the Founders' Council's renewed methods of vampire clearance. He saw Elena going down and by this time he had past caring what happens to him. The vampire hunters had no trouble emptying their wooden cartridges into him and he put up no resistance when they approached to inject him with vervain. At least he'd be with Elena whereever they were going to take them and whatever they were intending to do with them.
He sat up groggily to find Rebekah frowning at him, kneeling on the floor a couple of feet away. It would've been hard to move further as Stefan found they were in a very cramped little cell with the barred window on the top of the ceiling. He blinked, just to make sure it wasn't the vervain's side-effect that he saw double, having trouble telling Elena apart from Katherine as the younger woman's hair was so tussled from her previous adventures in the woods it was hard to tell which one was naturally curly. One of them however, had Damon's head on her lap. "What happened?" He asked, finally taking stock of his brother's appearance, grey and lifeless, but presumably without the sticking out veins that would've meant he was staked in the heart, although it was hard to tell in the dim light. He scrambled next to them to join the women positioned around his brother's unanimated body.
Rebekah rolled her eyes, "and the general consensus is that it is vampires who are evil and like to torture others in intricate ways. Sure, that'll be right. I'm an amateur!"
"Does either of you know exactly what happened?" Elena asked, herself had wakened up not so long ago.
Katherine sighed, "they are testing us. Apparently Bill Forbes wrote an essay to the Council about how vampires are not necessarily evil as default, so they're trying to find out how much love can motivate us. They put me in a contraption with a stake just brushing my chest, attached to some kinda system of weights to push it into me unless Damon tipped the balance of the weight by drinking an entire container of vervain to halt the mechanism."
"How much vervain?" Stefan rubbed his face in frustration, only the slightest bit surprised to find that Damon would go to such extremes to save Katherine.
"About half a pint," Katherine gulped, squeezing Damon's inert fingers in doting exasperation, "how much resistance did he manage to build up?"
"He could've only been taking a maximum of two ounces a day tops," Stefan judged, going by his own experiences with getting used to vervain.
"So he's just out of it, right?" Elena pressed the other doppelgänger, "we just need to wait till it gets out of his system."
"I don't know..I hope so," Katherine winced, "ask the original model," she looked at Rebekah reproachfully. Elena and Stefan eyed the oldest vampire in the room with incomprehension. The blonde held a hand on Damon's leg in concern, annoying everyone with her expression.
"You're going to pretend now that you care after having tortured him yourself not so long ago?" Stefan growled, riled.
"That was only for fun," Rebekah defended herself, "you don't even recognise fun when you see it anymore?"
"Everyone! The topic at hand!" Elena pressed further to find out more about Damon.
Rebekah sighed dramatically, "those Council members. We should've taken them more seriously. They got hold of the white oak stakes."
"And just how does that concern us?" Elena jeered, "or Damon?"
"Cause dearest Damon Salvatore is the epitome of noble-minded, honourable and foolishly idealistic!" Katherine cried.
"Wrong century perhaps Katherine?" Stefan shook his head at her.
"Wrong person perhaps, Stefan. It seems like you don't know your own brother," Katherine claimed.
Elena rolled her eyes, "what happened to Damon!" She shouted at them in exasperation.
"He did it for me too.." Rebekah whispered, looking with admiration and adoration to Damon.
"Yes, basically," Katherine agreed, "they waited till Damon was coming to and the burning in his belly abated a little and he stopped screaming in agony and then they put him into the contraption with Rebekah."
"And he drank the vervain for you," Elena finished looking at Rebekah with an excessive dose of jealousy and anger, magnified by her new vampire status, "get away from him!" She pushed Rebekah out the way, taking up a similar postion to Katherine's and mirroring her rubbing, soothing actions on his other arm and shoulders. "What if we made him sick and got rid of the vervain that way?"
"We tried that. It only made him lose more blood. And don't touch his stomach. That hurts him too."
"Is there anything we can do?" Elena looked up at the other doppelgänger for advice. She was not angry with her, rather felt a sort of kinship given both their ill-fated connection to the Salvatores.
"He needs blood," Katherine shook her head, but that didn't stop her from fingering the unconscious vampire's matted locks, stroking his face that maybe offered him some sort of comfort, maybe not. Elena wavered, helpless. If she could only hold his head instead of Katherine, maybe she wouldn't be feeling so useless, but for the moment, she didn't feel entitled enough to try to make Katherine shift. Nor as if she could anyway. So Elena resolved to sitting by and hoping it was her those soulful, beautiful orbs would turn to when he opened his eyes.
Tbc