…This is an old story,
with its old beginning,
as I lay me down to sleep.
But when I wake up, sunlight
has taken over the room…
Whatever was bound to happen
in my story did not happen.
But I know there are rules that cannot be broken.
Perhaps a name was changed.
A small mistake. Perhaps
a woman I do not know
is facing the day with the heavy heart
that, by all rights, should have been mine.
—Lisel Mueller, from "In November"
Chapter 1. "The Enemy of All Deals"
Elena's hand landed on her heart as her eyes flew open, as though she knew that heart needed protecting, as though she could protect it from the outside. She said a word that had been on the tip of her tongue for a number of days—years, decades—she didn't yet know.
"Bonnie."
Her eyes flooded and teeth gritted against it. You knew it was goodbye. You've been dreaming of this goodbye for…
She had no idea how long, actually.
As she sat up, she sensed a number of things all at once. Creaks in all of her joints, for one, and she kind of needed to pee; this was no fairytale. A musty smell coming, she supposed, from her clothes, which had suffered some long interval of light and oxygen. A chain around her neck—her vervane pendant, made heavier, she saw, by an old wrought-iron key, which looked as though it would open something like the garden gate at the Lockwood mansion back when it was first built.
And a piece of paper, which had fallen off her lap. Had fallen onto the coffin beneath her, actually.
Damn all vampires. She'd been dreaming. Couldn't they have just left her in a bed, for crying out loud? No, they'd put her not only into a coffin, but into this sleeveless blue dress she'd never even seen before. She cringed to think who had put it on her prone body. And then it had been June, but now it was… well, whenever it was, it was cold. And the stones in this crypt held in the damp.
The note was in Bonnie's handwriting. She blinked back tears again. "I'm about to spell you inside this crypt, girl," said her friend's faded blue ink, "but I'm leaving you a key to a trunk out in the antechamber, where we can still get in without endangering you. We'll leave you some clothes, send in some updated supplies once in a while. And all those notes and photos and pictures that you asked for, we'll leave those for you, too. No matter what happens to world outside, they'll be safe in here. You'll get these years back the best I can manage. I promise. All my love," and it was signed with just a slashing B.
Now she was crying in earnest. "This is not your time to mourn yet, Elena," she muttered to herself, and winced to hear how her voice, long unwetted and unused, croaked. She pushed that aside. "Mourn with your friends. Once you know they're alright."
Bonnie. Bonnie, Bonnie, Bonnie. She already knew one of them, at least, was definitely not all right. The tears fell faster, but she was hoisting herself out of the casket now. It wasn't her first time getting out of one; she'd found the spring to lift the lower half lid from above her legs easily, this time.
You can mourn once you know who's alright, she thought.
Knowing it was ridiculous, she felt her non-existent pockets for a cellphone. And how exactly were they going to keep that charged, Elena? Bonnie's magic is not compatible with Steve Jobs'. And God only knows how long it's been, if cell phones are still a thing, if they still happen through towers and satellites, if there are any functioning satellites left…
Anyone who was watching would have seen her take four deep breaths.
The bottom of her coffin, though empty of cell phones, was not empty entirely. There were two more notes, tucked in on her sides. The one in her right, she saw as she pulled it out eagerly, was from Stefan. "Time is the enemy of all deals, especially this one, Elena—but it's an enemy you'll beat. If you're reading this, you already have. Come home. If I've managed to keep it from Ric and Damon, we'll open a bottle of '29 Dom and toast to Bonnie's life."
Come home. Oh, Stefan—steady, sure Stefan. She believed him—believed he'd be waiting for her and would welcome her, no matter how long it had been, but the dryness of the paper, its weakness at the folds, told her it had been here a long time. It was an archival document—something he'd written a long time ago.
But Stefan never says things he doesn't mean.
And then, on her left, a short note from Damon, and she almost couldn't bear to read it. "Hope I'm there to wake you up with a kiss, Sleeping Beauty. But if not—don't you dare stop for any apples or dwarves."
She could see how much that breeziness must have cost him and felt some painful admixture—longing and regret and fear—surge within her.
Six deep breaths, this time. They'd left her three notes. One key to a trunk. All lying along with her in her lonely dream, keeping faith with her as the world spun on outside. She stepped gingerly out of the red-and-yellow stained glass light, the warm color at odds with that pronounced chill in the air. She shivered, hard. A bed would have at least had a blanket, she thought, but told herself aloud, "Get over it, Elena. You need to see that trunk. Move."
Anyway, she already understood it. It hadn't been for her.
They'd put her in that coffin to help themselves make sense of the extreme degree to which she'd been gone.
Out in the antechamber, there it was as promised, centered on the right-hand wall, burnished black with matted silver adornments, aged with what looked like as many years as Damon and Stefan had been alive. When she saw the padlock, she understood the awkward shape and size of her key.
She stood looking at the trunk for a long moment. Of course she was afraid of what was inside. The answer to her questions—what year was it, and how much time had she lost? How many of her friends? And even if the living hadn't died, had any of the dead come back to life? Had they all moved on without her, to another town, other women, other problems that dwarfed her sleep coma? Was there still a country out there? Still vampires? It was Schroedinger's trunk, and the time between when she'd fallen into her sleep and when she'd awoken was in there, and it could be any time, and the time could contain any number of tragedies, and once she opened it, something would be true. Terribly, irrevocably true.
She looked at the door to the crypt, and back to the lid of the trunk, and realized that the whole world was the same kind of box. At least opening the trunk would mean she didn't yet have to step outside. That was something.
A small blue light flared within the keyhole when the key was applied, and the top opened of its own volition. On its inside lid, crudely carved, three words: "DAMON WAS HERE." He might have been terrible at carving—or it was hard to carve a magical trunk—or else he'd just been drunk. She wondered if he'd "been here" one time or one thousand. Either way, it wouldn't tell her anything about whether he'd waited for her. His ways of leaving a proverbial hall lamp burning for her were bound to be unorthodox. If he'd done it at all.
She set the train of thought aside firmly.
She was getting good at that, since waking.
First things first. On top, necessities: underwear, deodorant, and yes, a water bottle. Thank God. And then three sets of clothing—a formal dress in green silk, shorts and a t-shirt, jeans and a sweater, all cut or patterned in ways she found a bit ugly, though she smiled to see on top that Caroline had jotted out a note that said "Trust me!" with two underlines. There were matching shoes, and they were odd, too—bulky and old-fashioned, not in a way that Elena found hip. It was then the point caught up with her and she swallowed. Time had passed, then; fashions had changed. Noticeably.
And then again: What would I even do with a formal dress coming out of a crypt, Caroline?
At least, whatever year it was, people were still wearing jeans. She opted for them and the red top with its white cardigan, and changed all of her clothes mechanically, a bit of a taste of ash in her mouth even after she swallowed the water with gratitude.
Now her pulse was leaping around in her throat and wrists, and she was glad that there were no Salvatores around to hear it. She could just about hear it herself. She wanted to be brave enough that her knees didn't shake as she lowered herself onto them in front of the trunk. She willed it. She almost won.
Beneath the clothes, the trunk was only about a third full. Looking down into it, she had no idea where to begin, so she pulled out an item at random.
As soon as she saw what it was, she closed it again.
An album of postcards, tucked into plastic sleeves, all from Bonnie. Making herself open it again, Elena saw the first dated about two weeks after she had fallen into the dream, in the summer of 2015, from Bamako, Mali, the next a month later, from Cairo. Skimming pages frantically, she saw notes from Tibet and Mecca and Jerusalem, Helsinki and Melbourne and Machu Picchu. The notes were all upbeat—what she was learning, whom she was meeting, what she'd loved eating and what languages were rolling all around her. They all ended the same way.
"Wish you were here."
Elena was no longer bothering to hold back the tears. The last of these postcards was dated—oh, God. February 9th, 2022, and had a note about how she was leaving the vagabond life and coming home to Mystic Falls. Only seven years after she'd gone to sleep.
Not nearly long enough, Bon.
Now Elena was opening the rest frantically. There was a manila folder with Matt's name on it, with fourteen audiotapes inside. She set those aside but was so grateful to know he'd recorded his thoughts for her. A cigar box had a note from Tyler in it that just said "for the welcome back party" that made Elena laugh. Jeremy, she saw, had left her a book of sketches, a mix of fanciful scenes of exaggerated vampires and comical mortals, and pictures of people she knew. The first one of those hit her hard. Damon and Stefan, sitting by a fire at the Salvatore house, leaning shoulder to shoulder.
She'd wanted so badly to know they'd be there for each other.
The bottom of the trunk was taken up almost entirely by sets of volumes. On the left, photograph albums, with Caroline's neat handwriting labeling the occasions, some of which she didn't understand: "Groundbreakings at the Estate"; "High Stakes"; "Tyler's 30th birthday"; "New Year's Eves"; "Welcome, Lennie!"
Tyler's 30th birthday.
There was real dread, now. These photo albums seemed to contain the danger of what she had learned at Whitmore to call social death; the danger of all the time and memories she'd lost and could never regain, the danger of being alienated from it all permanently.
But then. On the other side. Pure comfort. The thing Elena had most wanted to see without knowing she was hoping for it.
Stacks of Stefan's journals.
She opened the top one to see an entry dated just one day after Alaric and Jo's disastrous wedding.
Elena,
You told us in the dream that you wanted us to "write it all down," to keep track of what happens here, and that seems more my strength and habit than the others'. I'm relieved you asked for something. It feels so much better to think that there's something I can give you at the end of all this…
The entry told her about the selection of this very trunk—apparently a matter of some controversy, as Stefan explained wryly. While Bonnie and Caroline had warred between magic and design considerations, Damon, impatient for the protection spell to seal her in, threatened both of their lives with increasing hostility. He'd then dragged out of the attic a trunk he'd picked up while off on his Grand Tour, just before accepting a commission in the Confederate army. "Damon was here"; was Abraham Lincoln president when you wrote those words? Did they have anything to do with me at all?
Stefan wrote, finally, about the pilgrimage of the Originals to see her before the crypt closed. And then about the sealing of her catacomb in a ceremony using blood from each of the Originals, so that the seal would keep vampires out as long as there were vampires left alive.
Elijah kissed your forehead before he left. I would rather he hadn't. I don't know how many more times I want to put my poor old body between Damon and an Original.
Elena sniffed a bit at that. Poor old body, indeed.
It was unsettling. What was once you has become just a body, a simple dreaming object that an Original could touch as he wanted, something that couldn't object. I'm downplaying the feeling; it frightened me, and I know Damon felt it, too, when he saw how vulnerable you were. I hate that you're alone in there where we can't visit you, but I'm glad we've made you as safe as we can. From everyone.
Elena looked up and shook her head. No one had been within fifteen feet of her in all that time. How lonely she must have seemed, when they'd thought of her. If they'd thought of her.
At the end of the entry, Stefan promised to write at least once a week, and flipping through that first notebook, she saw that, then at least, he'd usually written more frequently than that.
Steady, faithful, wise Stefan, who always listened to her, who spoke at length mostly to himself, in his journal. Or times like now, when there was nothing to hear.
She could bear it now. She dug for the brown leather journal at the bottom of the stack, flipped to its final pages.
The entry had a date, and it was the latest one she'd seen yet: September 30th, 2029.
She closed her eyes again, resisting the urge to pray—what would she pray to? At least now she knew this much about how much time had passed; it was, at the very earliest, late in 2029. She hoped it really was the fall or winter of 2029. If Stefan was alive, he would have kept writing, 2029 or 3029, that she knew.
"Please let him be alive," she whispered.
The last entry was long, and broken into sections. She smiled to see it. Oh, Stefan. Faithful, wise Stefan. He'd understood so well what she would need.
Elena,
Just as in the last volumes, I'm assuming that if you stop at the trunk at all, that you'll skip to the end of whatever the last journal is. So I want you to know, first and foremost, that at the time of this writing, we're all doing fine. We're all alive, Elena. Take a deep breath.
Jeremy's up in Montreal just now, where he spends half the year with his French Canadian wife, and draws graphic novels about mortals and the magical beings who love them. Yes, I know—it's a lot to take in. He's married, Elena; in fact, he married a witch, and though it's safe to say she and Bonnie will never be best friends, they make daunting allies when the situation calls for it, as it often has. Oh, and you're an aunt; Jeremy and Ollie had a daughter two, almost three years ago, and they named her Helen Sommers Gilbert—Helen for you and for Ollie's sister, and Sommers for your mom and Aunt Jenna. They call her Lennie.
That explained "Welcome, Lennie!", at least, although it was so bewildering, so much all at once, that Elena had to look away. She reached for that album in Caroline's collection because she couldn't help herself, now. The first picture was of Jeremy pressing his face against that of a beautiful jet-haired woman in a hospital gown, the two of them staring down at the small red-faced bundle, a sprinkling of dark hair already on her head, in Ollie's arms. She flipped through to see pictures of Lennie with all of her friends. Lennie's first Christmas had lots of strangers in the background, but Matt, Caroline, Stefan, Damon, and Tyler were all there, too. One picture of Damon in a Santa hat, smiling and holding Lennie up against his forehead made Elena smile and think about what he must have felt, what Caroline had felt as she snapped the picture. If it was hard to see other people have children when they couldn't.
Funny that she'd never thought about it before.
In the pictures, Stefan and Caroline looked just the same—like they could pack up and head back to class for senior year. Damon, too, no older. Matt and Tyler and Jeremy looked… like their parents, almost.
The years had settled onto them. Elena shuddered just a little—something just walked over my grave, she thought—and then bent back to Stefan's journal.
Matt, who's the sheriff now, is recovering well from his injuries of last spring. He fell on the wrong side of a group of occultists who came to town and made our lives a living hell. (I don't recommend having groupies, but since I was one once—just ask Katherine—I might be biased. At least I was never wildly waving around magical weaponry in the town square.) He also lost his hearing for a few months last fall after Bonnie had to spell up a thunderstorm to repel a subculture of witches who call themselves the Alchemists and who turned up just before all hell broke loose. They're still around and still giving us problems. Long story there, too, if you look a book or two back. All unintended consequences aside, Matt's hearing is back thanks to a few forced tablespoons of my blood, which he finally accepted once he forgave Caroline for… well, never mind that now, either.
My writing doesn't lend itself to digests, apparently, even though I've been composing one of these for you every few months for fourteen years. I suppose I'm old enough that it takes longer than that to change my habits.
Alaric is… well, we take care of him the best we can. He's fine in body—the body of a vampire again, by the way, long story there again. But his luck in love hasn't changed, and that's a story that could fill several melancholy hours. I think sometimes he's held onto his humanity only through his fierce determination to protect the rest of us, Jeremy and Lennie especially. Family helps; I guess all of us have had our hearts broken more than once.
Ric's also been the architect of a lot of new protocols we have in place now—something much more like civil society. I wish you could have woken up before the war got here—we were really making progress in vampire-human relations. God willing, we'll do it all again, once this is over.
The war. But wait, no, I know who I'm talking to—friends first.
Elena rolled back on her heels and against the cool cobbled stone wall behind her, felt it snagging her sweater but didn't care.
She had missed a war. An entire war.
Caroline is… so very Caroline. She ran for mayor and won about six years ago, served a term as Mystic Falls' youngest-ever mayor (but not its only supernatural one, we learned to our shock once we had access to the town's secret archives). Now she's the co-chair of our joint council, humans and non-humans alike, as well as running her interior design business, among other revolving community projects. Her tremendous enthusiasm for life and her undauntable energy for the work of living well is unabated. It's also the lightning in my veins, the fact of the world that gives me the strength to keep carrying on. And yes. She and I were together, off and on but mostly on, for most of the first eleven years you were gone. I think we really learned together about how to love humanely and passionately. I would have thought we were each incapable of betrayal at the outset, but I've changed my mind about what betrayal is, instead. We are… suffice it to say that we love each other but are struggling to forgive each other.
God, Elena, I have so much to tell you. To ask you.
Bonnie. It's hard to write of her to you, as always, knowing what must be true if you're reading this. But she's been so strong, so relentlessly adventurous, our hero and savior so many times over. She spent the first years, six or seven of them after you were gone, trying to find loopholes in the prohibition of probing your binding with magic—she probed it with everything but magic instead, traveling the world to learn from every kind of witch and to plumb every form of non-magical ancient wisdom she could think of. That's how she brought the Oracle to us—Iris, now among our dearest friends—and Iris is why the war came to Mystic Falls. It started at a meeting of the vampire clans we called out at the Estate.
The Estate, by the way, is where you should come find us; our house is now integrated into a 200-acre compound which we've magically walled and maintain with our friends and allies, with housing and recreation and training grounds scattered around the site.
Aha. That explained the album "Groundbreaking at the Estate," then, and started to clarify Bonnie's exhortation in the dream to go there first.
In the middle of the conclave, Iris had a vision, a vision of you. She let slip at a conclave of a hundred vampires that the cure for vampirism was here in Mystic Falls. Vampires flooded our town from all over the world, desperate to find you. Ollie spelled the whole crypt to the Other Side for a while, and then she invisibilized it in holy places around the world—in Tibet, at Mecca, Jerusalem, Machu Picchu, combining her own powers with the other kinds of magic stored at those sites. I don't mind telling you—because it all worked out just fine—that she nearly died to save the sister-in-law she'd never met, and more than once. But finally, you were discovered one too many times. She brought the catacomb back to town, and the Originals guarded your body from all sides while we, all of us, fought a great battle against those who wanted to use you up and those who wanted to destroy you and the cure with you. That big battle happened last winter. Many vampires died.
Quite a few of them were our own allies, people who'd become our friends. You'll want to read about them someday. I wrote about it all when the killings were still happening daily and the grief was so fresh that I almost want to ask you not to read that volume. Not ever.
Elena, you chose none of this—not to be the source of the cure, not to fight about it nor how to fight about it. There can be no guilt about any of this, not from you. In fact, one of the few things that kept us going through those weeks was the idea that you were peacefully dreaming through it all. There are still occasional attacks and our little clan has found itself swept up in the political currents of something like a vampire civil war. But it has helped so much that we knew that we were winning because you were safe, and were winning, too, because it was you who we saved.
But brace yourself, Elena. The town has been brought low, and though there's been an armistice, no one is quite sure the war won't come back here. If you find yourself passing through town on your way to find us, it won't be as you remember it.
You'll have seen that there's one name I haven't mentioned. Damon's. He and I have been pursuing a project, war-related, for the last two years that involves a great deal of travel. We've set up alliances, established some systems whereby people might appeal to you for a cure—only if you're willing—once you wake up. And we're working on eliminating those threats that we have to.
As I'm writing, he's in Osaka, Japan. I got a text from him this morning that said, and I quote, "Remember that old proverb, 'Never sign a blood contract with Japanese hybrid vampire-fairies once you're past your fourth cup of sake'? Why do you never remind me of common folk wisdom, brother?" The lack of distress emojis told me he was fine, if hungover.
In the first years of your absence, he was in turns been furious, melancholy, euphoric, and unnaturally calm, sometimes with the heights of one emotion lasting months, sometimes all chasing around after each other inside one evening at home. I will let him be the one to tell you about how he came out the other side, but I will say this: as much as your loving him was the making of him, your absence has been the solidification of the man you made. There have been bad days, Elena, and very bad mistakes—by all of us. And there have been changes. I cannot say that any of us has kept faith with you perfectly, because honestly, there were too many threats, and they came too many ways. But most days, my brother is his best self cast in bronze.
Honesty demands that I add that his best self is still an ass.
Now you can get of that crypt with a little less mystery, Elena. One last thing: when you step outside, someone will be there, an Original. Don't be afraid. They serve as a rotating guard. It's part of the armistice. The part that threatens their lives, of course; the only inducement they recognize.
Elena. I have missed you unbearably. Come home and tell me what you dreamed of.
With love always,
Stefan
War and grief and family and plans and changes. All the things he hadn't had space to tell her had been glaring on the page—hints about long-standing wounds, about new commitments. About Damon moving on, if she was understanding his quiet implication. Fourteen years. It seemed so real once he tried to wedge it into the last four pages of a bound journal in his small, old-fashioned script.
Fourteen years. It had at least been fourteen years. Three times as long as she'd even known Damon and Stefan. She had given Bonnie that much time.
Not long enough. But what could have been?
Elena put the last journal back in the trunk and grabbed the first one, along with Caroline's "New Year's" album, and slid them into the satchel they'd put aside for her. She carefully placed all the mementoes back in the trunk and withdrew the magical key from its lock. When she stood up, her legs were steady beneath her. The light was still hard to read through stained glass, but she guessed it to be an afternoon in winter, with precious daylight fading away rapidly.
She didn't let her hand pause on the doorknob to the world outside, but shoved it open forcefully; she was ready, now, for the world and the war it had brought—that she had brought—to her friends. Yes: it was early winter, with its near-bare branches, the bite of frost on Virginia soil, and the smell of clean air stripped of all the smells of life, all its agents of change. And then Elena outright smiled when she saw who was standing, not languidly but as a soldier on guard and expecting a barrage—that most original of the Originals himself.
"Ah, Dorothy, you finally clicked your heels together. Or rather Bonnie did it for you," Klaus corrected himself without pause. "Sorry to torture the metaphor, darling, but I have some bad news about your yellow brick road. It seems to take an unfortunate detour right into hell."
She took in his sentinel posture and the way his eyes kept warily scanning the woods around them, his smirk. His familiar face. "Well, Scarecrow," she said finally, "I'm not gonna lie and say I missed you most of all."
"Honesty's always best, dear, but now there's no time for it. Since you haven't asked, I'll volunteer that it's December 4th, 2029. Your wicked little witch is trapped under a house and right now there aren't enough wizards and cowardly werewolves and heartless vampires to save her." Klaus had her by the arm already and was bustling her toward a car parked twenty yards away, low-slung and with a surface which, when she touched it, felt like more like tile than metal. So much had changed that this barely registered. "So it'll have to be you, and then back to beddie-bye."
Elena didn't blink at his implication that Bonnie might be saved.
She'd counted on it.
"Bonnie and Stefan said I should go to the Estate," she said serenely, just as though she weren't giving a name she knew about only from desperate dreams and magic trunks. Klaus, of course, didn't blink; it likely wasn't even the most surprising thing he'd heard all day. Or maybe the Estate had been around so long that he didn't even remember she shouldn't know about it.
"And so we shall, then. To the main house. There's no place like home, eh, especially the Salvatore's, now that yours is a bunker…"
Blocking out the rest of Klaus's stream of obscure observations and caustic questions, most of which he seemed to be answering himself, Elena leaned her head back against the passenger side car rest as it pulled back onto the main road.
Not to sleep—she had slept enough—but to turn her long dream into hard steel.
