Disclaimer: L.J. Smith and Kevin Williamson own The Vampire Diaries. "Kingston Vampire" belongs to Pendulum and DJ Fresh.

A/N: This just kind of popped into my head and begged to be written. Set at the end of "Fool Me Once."


Jeremy had tried acid once. It hadn't gone very well. In fact, it had gone horribly. The hallucinations had been so vivid, so awful. It might have had something to do with his parents' deaths the month before, but what did he know? While everyone else had laughed about the loser kid who couldn't handle his drugs, Vicki had been the only one to sit with him for all eight hours and remind him that what he was experiencing was fake, synthetic.

Tonight, Jeremy Gilbert had come to those uncomfortable realizations that sometimes there are horrors in reality that don't even compare to what the mind can conjure up.

They thought that he'd been unconscious. They thought he hadn't heard the discussions, the spells, the arguments. They'd been wrong. Granted, he wasn't conscious for the entire time, but he'd heard enough.

Anna was a vampire. A real, honest-to-god vampire. The first girl he'd had feelings for since Vicki turned out to be a bloodsucker. Some guys had all the luck. What was it Damon had said? "Hot trumps weird?" Maybe that worked for Elena, who was dating a vampire (and that wasn't ever not going to be weird to say), but not for him.

A voice in his mind tried to convince him that he was wrong. That he did have too much to drink and he passed out. That it had all been a terrible dream.

It was futile. He'd been lucid and clearheaded and he knew. He knew the truth of Mystic Falls, the one that Elena had been hiding since she started dating her own bloodsucking fiend.

Scratch that, he knew the horror of Mystic Falls.

So he lied to Elena. He told her that he didn't remember having that much to drink, but that he must have gone overboard without realizing it because what other explanation could there be?

As soon as she left, he got on the Internet to research vampires. He wouldn't be in the dark anymore, so to speak. He would be prepared for the next time. Because he knew.