Paper blue roses. There's a wall full of them, but Elena tries to focus on just one, thinking it might help her contain the nausea threatening to rise in her gut.
She's sitting with Damon in the floral-themed room of a small B&B - the first Damon saw when driving against her directions. She perches on the edge of a faded brocade armchair while he sits on the table adjacent, lean legs dangling, his mobile set to speaker and lying on the small segment of table space between them. He's explaining the events from the road to Bonnie, leaning forward slightly to better speak into the phone, one hand resting on Elena's closest shoulder in a deceptively casual gesture.
The truth is, he hasn't fully let her go once since parking the car around the back and materializing at her open passenger door. He practically manhandled her all the way from the lot to the room and into this chair. Elena thinks he suspects she'll take off into a doppelganger trap the moment his back is turned.
She hasn't forced him off yet. For one thing, though she'd never give his ego the satisfaction of admitting it out loud, she finds the contact reassuring - grounding even - in the current circumstances.
For another, she can't actually be sure he's wrong.
"We were off base, thinking they were trying a locator spell. It's more like... a summoning spell."
Bonnie's no-nonsense voice crackles over the speaker. "You summon spirits Damon, you can't summon people."
"The people equivalent then." His tone suggests impatience with this quibbling over mystic semantics. Elena notices that, despite the circumstances, Damon and Bonnie are managing to default to their standard bickering. She cuts in before it gets any worse.
"Damon thinks it's somehow drawing me in, and that it might be doing the same thing to Katherine," Elena explains, getting to the point. "And what's worse, I didn't even notice. I mean, it didn't make sense that I should know what I did, not really, but I didn't even realize anything was odd, Bonnie." She tries to contain the note of panic edging into her words. But she finds it profoundly disturbing to think of herself as an unknowing puppet. Bad enough that her actions weren't her own, but she hadn't even realized someone else was pulling her strings.
Damon gives the shoulder under his fingers a gentle squeeze, but when he speaks, his voice is all business. "Did you find anything out about how they might be doing this to the two of them? We need to know how to stop it."
Bonnie sighs over the phone. "Maybe. I'm still researching, but I have come across a possibility. If they had something that belonged to the original Petrova?... It would have to have been something she was wearing at the time she died, when the curse was created. Something that could store a lot of power…"
"Like a crystal, you mean."
Elena doesn't know if Damon is such an expert on crystals and their power because one featured so heavily in the tomb spell he spent over a century trying to break, or if being the ex-boyfriend of one witch and the ex-protector of a line of them has just clued him in on some things missing from her high school curriculum. She promises herself that when she gets home she's going to start spending less time on algebra and more on Bonnie's grimoire collection. Maybe she'll pick up something that gives her a clue next time someone tries to wave their magic wand all over her free will. In the meantime, she is fervently thankful for Bonnie.
"A crystal or some other kind of stone is the most likely thing, yes. The original curse required an extremely powerful ritual to seal it, and if the first Petrova had something like that on her as her life force passed and the ritual was completed, it would have absorbed a great deal of magical energy. Used correctly, it would make a powerful talisman." Bonnie's voice fades out, briefly overlaid with the scrape of heavy parchment pages being turned. "They'd also need something more elemental of hers to combine it with though - her hair, blood, something like that. If they had access to both those things, they could create a connection to the doppelganger ancestors and use it to channel an enchantment. If it's any consolation, the effect should be much weaker on Elena than it is on Katherine. The bond would fade the further away the descendant's blood is from that of the individual anchoring the spell."
Oddly enough, Elena does find it slightly mollifying to know that whatever she's getting, Katherine is getting it worse. She admits to suffering occasional feelings of bitterness about the way her doppelganger beats her out, comparatively speaking, in so many ways. That despite sharing an identical visage, Katherine is far older, stronger, and more worldly than she is. That she's had 500 years to work on her vampire tricks and charm. That she had the opportunity to slide her manipulative claws into the Salvatores 150 years before Elena even met them, ripping them both apart and leaving Elena's 17 year old human self to deal with the messy aftermath of her legacy.
She looks at the eldest Salvatore brother, arguably the messiest aftermath of the two. His dark head is bent as he focuses with complete intensity on the stream of information coming from a girl he can't stand, just so that he can keep Elena safe.
She supposes she hasn't got it all bad.
"The effect will also become stronger the closer to the talisman the doppelganger gets. If they're really doing what you're suggesting, Damon, then it will be physically located at the spot they're both being drawn to. Elena shouldn't get any closer. And, whatever she does, she shouldn't touch it. That will amplify the power and Klaus's witches will be able to tell the moment she makes contact."
Elena makes a mental note not to touch anything she might feel like touching. Even when she might not actually be able to tell she feels like touching it. Great. Piece of cake.
Damon cuts to the chase. "Can we break it?"
"Not knowing the spell, you can't take the enchantment off. But if you destroy the object of power, then it should break the connection."
"Right. That's what we'll do."
Damon's got that look that Elena's seen before. Focused eyes, set jaw. Man on a mission. She senses this call is all but over. If she wants to say something else to Bonnie, she better do it now.
"Damon says you can't do a spell to locate Stefan. Is that right?"
That does it. Damon finally frees her shoulder, leaning back to raise his hands in a "don't believe me then" gesture that Elena ignores. She swallows the momentary guilt she feels. She needs to be sure they're investigating all the options. Damon should understand that.
"I'm sorry, Elena. I tried. I can't find Stefan. We even tried finding Klaus with some drops of the blood Katherine gave Damon for his cure. But they're both well and truly untraceable. I'm sure it must be some kind of cloaking spell, like the one I'm using on you, but whatever it is, it's strong, and it must be some variation I haven't come across, so I haven't been able to find a way to break it." The frustration is audible in the witch's voice. "Jeremy and I are working on some ideas... we thought maybe instead of looking for where they are I could find a way to map the voids being created by whatever cloaking spell is in effect, but so far, it doesn't seem to be working. I don't really know why..."
Damon raises his eyebrows coolly at Elena in an "I told you so" expression, before directing his attention back to the phone.
"This doppelganger relic, could they use it to do anything else?"
"Damon, they could use it for a lot of things. It's just a conduit. But if you destroy it, then it will break the channel for anything they're doing to her."
Judging by the look on Damon's face, that's all he needs to hear.
###
"So what do we now?" Elena is looking at him, dark eyes serious, hands crossed in her lap, Miss Do-Gooder without a cause.
Damon has to admit it's an improvement on the way she looked when he first herded her in here. He'd wondered if she might actually pass out on him. Then again, that mightn't have been the worst thing in the world. Surely even Elena can't get herself into trouble while she's physically unconscious?
He hops off the table in one swift movement, so he can face her squarely when he says this. He wants to make sure there is no miscommunication here.
"We? No, no, no, Elena. What I am going to do now, is find somewhere to put you, and then I am going to find this doppelganger bait, and then I am going to destroy it."
"We're not staying here then?"
He's going to surmise from that question that Elena missed the bit about him getting a room with one bed. Normally he'd get some great mileage out of this, but decides that, regretfully, now isn't really the time. Since not so long ago he'd have been sure it's always the time, he's going to credit that as a tick under his personal growth column.
"We aren't staying here, Elena. I am. You are staying somewhere else. Somewhere safer. Somewhere that requires an invitation."
"You're worried about Katherine." She's frowning.
She frowns a lot lately. It's something else he wishes he didn't feel responsible for.
"Yes. I'm worried about Katherine. Of course I'm worried about Katherine. I need to find this witchy trinket, and I need to find her, but I can't run the risk that she finds me first and follows me back to you. Bitch that she is, she's also cunning, and resourceful, and dangerous. I don't want you anywhere near me while this goes down."
She looks at him, considering, fingers of one hand tapping the armrest of that ugly ugly armchair.
"Damon, you do realize if you destroy this... crystal... thing... whatever it is, she might be gone before you have a chance to get to her."
To be honest, while he'd hoped she wouldn't pick up on that, he'd figured she was bound to. And, similarly, that she might take some issue with it. No doubt she would rather be led to her death like a mystically-haltered lamb to the slaughter than risk having Damon do a little extra Katherine-chasing legwork.
Of course, it's not like she'd be the first to play sacrificial lamb this week. Her and his brother are birds of a feather in that respect. Seriously, if by some miracle all three of them make it to Christmas, he is going to gift Stefan and Elena with matching His & Hers T-shirts with the slogan "I want to be a martyr, tell me where to sign" emblazoned across the chest.
For now, Damon just shakes his head at her. "Doesn't matter, Elena, the risk is too great. We don't know what else Klaus and his witches might be doing to you through it. We have to deal with it first. We'll worry about the rest later."
"How are you even going to find it? I'm sure I could lead you to it fairly easily. If I was very careful not to-"
Oh, for Chrissakes.
"No."
He doesn't realize quite how forcefully it comes out until he hears it reflected in his own vampire hearing.
Elena is blinking at him.
After a moment, she collects herself. "Tell me this isn't where you are going to throw one of those undead tantrums again, where you vamp out and start threatening me with leaving my loved ones to die and stealing the soul of my first-born, because I have to say, last time-"
"No, Elena. No. Look I'm... sorry... about that, okay?" She would have to bring that up. As if he didn't feel guilty enough about it already. He can still remember crouching over her, watching her put that brave face on, the slight human girl defiant against the monster - even as he could see her chest flutter like that of a dove trapped under a lion's paw. Reminding him of what a bastard he really is. It cost him, to do that to her, but he'd been convinced at the time that it was for the greater good. Fat lot of good it seems to have done him.
She's looking at him imperiously now, eyebrows raised over those eyes that manage to cut right through to his soul.
"God, Elena..." He closes his eyes in frustration, wondering how he can explain this. Wondering if it's even going to make a difference.
"You just make me crazy sometimes. You have this tendency to jump into things, with absolutely no regard for yourself," and here he seizes on an important idea, one he hopes might actually get through to her, "and no regard for anyone else, really, because what you seem to forget is, your actions, they affect everyone else, too." They affect me. And if you die it will kill me.
"I really don't know what to do with you. How to get through to you. But I needed you to listen to me this time. It was important. I guess I was resorting to... the skill I'm best at. I thought that would be my best chance." He tries to tell her with his eyes, that he knows what he's done. That he gets it. "It was a mistake, okay?"
It hasn't worked.
Elena launches herself out of her chair, so that they're suddenly standing toe-to-toe. "Hang on a second there, Damon." Her face, beautiful in it's fierceness, is upturned towards his in clear accusation.
"I make you crazy? With my impulsive behavior, my lack of regard for the consequences on others? You don't know what to do with me?" Elena grinds her finger into his chest, and although her human power is no match for his vampire strength it takes everything he has not to instinctively step back.
"I guess now you know how I feel. When I know that any second of any day, you might go off on one of your impulsive, reckless, psychotic vampire kicks that have the unfortunate tendency to tear everybody's lives apart. When all I really want is for you to be the man I know you can be, and I don't know..." She shuts her eyes, like she can better find the answer without the proof of his flawed vampire presence standing in front of her. "...I don't know how to make you believe it." She opens her eyes again. "To make you want to be it."
"I'm the one who's never sure if I'm going to get through to you. And the consequences if I don't?..." She shakes her head, staring into space, not wanting to put into words the hell they both know Damon is capable of wreaking.
"Except, you know what? I don't have the advantage of vampire super-powers to try and beat you into submission with. No, the sum total of tools at my disposal is to ask nicely."
"But that works, mostly, doesn't that count for anything?" It's hurting him, this conversation. And though he knows he deserves it, he also knows that he needs to keep it together now, for both their sakes. And since feeling the hurt... feeling anything... doesn't help him with that, he's choosing to deflect instead.
Or that's what he tells himself.
He keeps telling himself that, right up until the point where Elena averts her eyes from his, trying to hide the burgeoning evidence of unshed tears from his gaze.
Oh shit.
He gives into the temptation to run the back of his knuckles down one soft, brown cheek, and her eyes flick back to his.
"You make me want to be a lot of things, Elena." God, but she does. He's been nothing but a flesh bag of wants, hopes and disappointments since he moved back to Mystic Falls and unexpectedly found her in it. He remembers taunting his brother, "Does she make you feel human?" Goddamn karma, paying him back in spades. Making him feel the impossible, want the impossible. Crave the impossible.
"I just can't." He drops his hand back to his side. Accepting of all the things he'll never be, and all the things he'll never have because of it.
Elena opens her mouth. She's about to say something, though he doubts it will do him any good to hear it.
But then she stops suddenly, looking past him as her brown eyes go impossibly wide.
Damon doesn't need the sensation of wind against his back or his vampire hearing to tell him the door has opened, that they are no longer alone. He doesn't need to turn around to know who it is. But he does it anyway, making sure to keep himself firmly between Elena and their new visitor.
A lithe figure leans her shapely hip against the doorjamb, red lips curved into a smile that means trouble.
And to think, Elena was worried they might never find the bitch.
"Hello, Katherine."
