Disclaimer: I do not own Vampire Diaries or any of the characters but God I wish I would!

A.N.: Hello everyone! How are you all handling the hiatus so far? Me not good. Hence the fanfiction. I hope you're gonna like it. This is going to be a multi-chaptered story, and I will update it more quickly if you give me some feedback! So please review! Love,Wil

22 days. 17 unanswered phone calls. 65 text messages. 1 brother, who became a medium, and tons of complicated feelings.

That was my life in numbers, ever since Stefan left all of us, but most importantly me. I told Jeremy that the best way to survive is to live our lives day by day until it gets bearable, but it didn't seem to get any better. In fact every new day brought another bad news. First, my brother started to see ghosts, who seemed to appear in all the most inconvenient times just to haunt him. He didn't know how to handle the situation and neither did I. Bonnie was no help at all. She felt very guilty about it, convinced that it was her fault. I haven't blamed her, she didn't have another choice, Jeremy's life was at stake. Anyway, her powers were weakening as she was afraid to use them. The witches didn't help either, they refused to do anything else. And to top it all that we had a little bit of a financial crisis, what Jenna concealed from us. It was strange, how the secrets in this family, which we kept to protect each other, tend to turn into disasters. Alaric tried to smooth the drama, by applying as our legal guardian, since he was the closest to the family as the ex-husband of my biological mother. What made him even more suitable for the post was his commitment to us. Too bad the authorities haven't considered that as top priority. So now he was now running from lawyer to lawyer trying very hard to be our daddy.

If that wasn't enough problems, I still had a missing boyfriend and his older brother, who I didn't know how to treat.

I thought that life would be easier by now. We took care of the big bad evil, I survived. Stefan and I should be happy together. Well it seemed like life in Mystic Falls was not a fairy tale, there were no happy endings to any story.

I was checking my phone again for the hundredth time today. I sighed when it displayed no new messages. I was still hoping Stefan would contact me somehow. For the first few days I had been writing him pleading texts to come back. After that, I just asked for any kind of proof that he was okay. By now, I just sent him updates about our lives here. I knew he received them all, but I had no idea why he hadn't answered me anything. One moment I was convinced that he couldn't for some reason. The next second I was thinking he just didn't care anymore. Anyway, I persistently wrote him about the news here. My phone became my diary I was writing to Stefan.

Of course I couldn't write him everything. Me being scared was one of these things. I didn't want him to worry about me. For the same reason I haven't told him I felt completely lost. And I certainly wasn't going to let him know that I kissed Damon, because I felt extremely guilty about it, mainly because I wasn't really regretting it.

It seemed just okay, to give him what he craved for on his death bed. It was very innocent. Despite the fact that I had told him there's hope, I hadn't really thought that he would make it. What damage a little kiss could do? Nobody would know about it and he would die happy. But he survived. Which is good news of course, but last confessions are quite embarrassing when you outlive them.

So here we stood now with Damon. The embarrassing part. We handled it the best way we could. With big silences, by avoiding each other and by a lot of scotch on his part. No wonder we couldn't come up with one reasonable plan about how to start searching for Stefan. We were all falling apart.

I put my phone back into my bag and was headed to school when Alaric stepped inside the house. He seemed really tired and he had his bringer-of-bad-news face on. That one I learned to recognize.

"Everything's okay?"

He just shook his head. Of course not, stupid question.

"Is Jeremy home?" he asked looking around for my brother.

"No, he already left. What happened?" I questioned him with a raising anxiety in my voice.

"We need to talk."

He took my bag away from me and walked me back to the living room. I supposed it was urgent, so I collapsed onto to sofa getting ready for the regularly scheduled drama.

"Elena, I spent the last two days with lawyers and the people from the authorities to find a solution to the legal guardian problem."

I knew that, and I figured if he sat down to talk to me they made some kind of progress. His face was telling me I would not gonna like it.

"It seems like they only let me take care of you if I can guarantee your financial security," he continued. "You know my place is a rent. And there's no way we could maintain this house with my salary."

"What does that mean?" I asked suspiciously.

He answered after a little pause.

"I think we have to sell the house."

My heart sank. This was my parents' house. The one I grew up in and I loved it. This was supposed to be my house.

"If we could make a deposit from it for your college education I think it will be good enough for the custodian office. Otherwise I'm not sure this is gonna work."

This all sounded very reasonable. To be honest I had my doubt about whether we could keep this house or not. But saying that out loud and forcing us to decide about it was very difficult. And it also raised another question.

"But where would be living then?" I inquired, but I knew the answer to that question before he answered.

"You have another house."

Oh, no. Hell, no.

Stay tuned, in the next chapter Elena is going to move in!