A/N: Lexi is my favorite character from TVD, and I love the flashbacks of her through the series. I'll be updating regularly with journal entries of her to explore certain moments in her life, mainly interactions with the Salvatores and others she knows in the series. I'm hoping each one can be inspired in part by a Bon Jovi song, but that's just a pipe dream. I know this one is super short, but the rest will be longer. I needed to set the scene and all that jazz. Enjoy!

Please review if you read!

Disclaimer: I don't own The Vampire Diaries (too bad, right?). The characters and settings are simply borrowed from the brilliant Julie Plec & Co.

I don't know where I'm going, but I know where I've been.

"Lost Highway" - Bon Jovi

August 17, 1864

Dear Diary,

The war is still raging on at a grisly cost. I do what I can to help, assisting whomever I stumble upon first. My profession as a nurse in my human life is sufficient help when I happen upon an injured soldier, Union or Confederate. Though, the proximity of the blood and my craving limit greatly what I can do. Some of the things I see are the most ghastly I have seen in my two hundred and fifty years.

Today, a voice rang out as clear to me as a whip-poor-will's song, no gifted hearing needed. It was a plea for help. I combed through the bodies littering the blood stained field of strife until I found the source, and what greeted me was a scene I see too often. Here laid a man on the ground, a helpless look written across his face. The overwhelming stench of blood and gunpowder signify something that wasn't hard to miss; his legs were mangled and partially missing, presumably blown away from a cannon blast. Somehow I found the courage to meet his eyes without showcasing the severity of his injuries. But his words, the last words of a dying man, will haunt me for the rest of eternity as I walk this Earth.

Ma'am, I know I'm dying. I can feel my soul going home. But, please Miss, go tell my mother that I went home. I'm safe.

With labored breaths between nearly every word, he told me his last wish. After pulling out a piece of parchment from his breast pocket and placing it in my hand, his head lolled back. And with that, he had gone home.

It's strange when you see the last breath of life leave a person. That one last tether to life is severed, and they cease to exist. Being what I am, it should mean nothing to clip that last string and feast on the elixir of the living; blood. But it does. If there's an ounce of humanity left in your soul, death is a sacred passage. Just because we've escaped and alluded it doesn't mean that we shouldn't respect it. For even the eternal can meet final damnation.

Later that night, I made my way southeast through a dense forest. By the moonlight shining through the limbs and my keen eyesight, I kept reading and rereading the address on the parchment the man had given me. The parchment was actually an envelope with a letter inside. I dared not to open it, and it didn't take much convincing for me to realize I had to deliver it.

That dying man had held on long enough to ensure this letter would reach his mother. I had no other choice. Mystic Falls, Virginia, it read. I had never been before, but rumors run across the lands of the place like wildfire. The opportunity to uphold a dying man's last wish and a chance to view such a heralded town with my own eyes seemed like a good idea.

At first, the sense of good idea remained. Under the soft glow of moonlight, my first duty was to deliver the letter to the man's mother. She wept openly in my arms, and the tear stains are still visible on the fabric of my dress. Without question, she was mourning, but there was something more. He wasn't alone, she had said. It brought her relief. He wasn't alone, and I'll be with him again one day, she kept repeating in lament. And I truly hope she will.

But now, the strangeness of this town is setting in. Something isn't right here. The people of the town are suspicious, too suspicious. For the night, I have managed to get a room secured at a boarding house on the outskirts. I'm unsure of how long I'll be in this town, though. Rumors get twisted, and I don't trust whatever lurks beneath the surface. From the outside looking in, it's the typical Southern town in the shadow of the mountains. But from the inside out, it's anything but ordinary.

Alexia Branson

Mystic Falls, Virginia