You look like you just saw a ghost,
I caught you (caught you),
Now I know.
- Fefe Dobsen, Ghost
Nine hours, forty seven minutes, thirteen seconds. Nine hours, forty seven minutes, seventeen seconds. Nine hours, forty seven minutes, twenty two seconds. Nine hours, forty seven minutes, twenty six seconds. She'd been counting the seconds since she'd climbed into bed the night before, having intended to go to sleep and forget about all the stress that seemed to be ruling and controlling her life. She'd barely even closed her eyes.
The even breathing of the tree other vampires in the house seemed to rub in the fact that guilt was eating away at her so much, she was terrified to blink. She didn't want to mess up or step out of line and end up pushing someone away. She needed to get up and move and find a way to hold herself together while she was learning to adjust again.
With a sigh, she pushed herself out of bed at exactly ten hours, resigning to the fact that she wouldn't be getting any sleep. She stumbled toward her closet and scanned the hanging row of shirts and dresses and shorts and jeans and her lone jacket. It seemed stranger and stranger each morning to wake up in that bed, in this room, in this house, because it was no longer familiar. She felt like an intruder and she hated it.
Sinking to her knees and leaning against the closet door, she shook her head pitifully. She'd expected life in Mystic Falls to go back to normal, not for Caroline and her minion followers to cut her out completely. She felt like she was in a bad teen movie, like Lindsey Lohan's character in Mean Girls, and Caroline was her own personal Regina George. Despite what the blonde thought about Stefan, he'd been lying for four months, and there was no doubt that he would have kept lying if Jared hadn't come along and informed her of the truth. Everyone here had only seen the Stefan who ate bunnies and did everything he could to protect the people of Mystic Falls, not the Stefan who spent the summer draining the bodies of countless innocent people and lying to her face.
It wasn't fair that she was being judged when she'd only done what she needed to do to survive while Stefan had all the choice in the world to not kill and torture, but he chose to act as a ripper, to kill, to lie. He had no good reason to lie, except to stay on Klaus's good side. Even still, he could have filled her in and she would have willingly played along until she could make her escape. It wasn't her fault that Stefan was drinking human blood, or that he'd started killing again. His choices and actions had caused all of this; everything he'd done had led up to this moment, and she hated it. She hated him for it. She was absolutely furious. He'd had so many opportunities to tell her the truth, to help her get home, but he'd only helped himself. His getting on Klaus's good side wouldn't help her at all, and Stefan had only done things to help Klaus and himself.
She didn't even realize that she was on her feet until she was pulling the door open and moving silently down the stairs to the living room. She was done sitting around and doing nothing when she could be distracting herself with the mindless task of cleaning. Moving around the room systematically, picking up the pillows that had been discarded near the couch and stubbornly rearranging the things on the small table.
"What are you doing?"
She spun quickly at the sound of Stefan's voice. It was his fault that she couldn't sleep or even close her eyes in this house anymore. She was opening her mouth to respond when a groan sounded from across the house. Sharing a brief look of confusion before making their way through the maze of doorways, they both paused when they finally tracked Damon down. "What the hell?"
He looked over at his brother with a shake of his head, his eyes narrowed threateningly. "Whatever kind of Ripper game this is, remove me from it before I get out of here on my own and drive a stake through your heart." Stefan rolled his eyes and stepped forward to break the chains enough for his brother to get out on his own before turning to push Lilith toward the door. "That's fine. I'll just untangle myself."
The front door closed and Stefan pushed his niece toward the sidewalk. "I'm enlisting you. Ric and Jeremy are meeting Elena for lunch in an hour, and I can't be anywhere near them. I don't need you to report back to me, but make sure you know where she is at all times." He didn't even giver her the chance to respond before he started down the sidewalk in the opposite direction. "Tell them I say hey."
*LIT*
It was exactly an hour later when she sat down across from Jeremy outside the Grill, tuning into the conversation at the sound of Alaric's annoyed voice. "Vicki could interact. She blew up my car." the sentence itself wasn't funny, not in the slightest, but it was how he said it that made her laugh. "I'm so glad my misery brings you humor," he commented sarcastically.
She immediately felt horrible, getting to her feet with a shake of her head. "I actually should go. I'll see you later." She hated feeling like this, like everything she said was judged or analyzed, and she needed out. Before anyone could stop her or even speak up, she was halfway down the block. It wouldn't be enough to just sleep in a tree at the edge of town, or to take a long walk to clear her head. She needed out. She couldn't stay here much longer with the hatred coming off of Caroline in waves, the fact that no one trusted her judgment, every single word or action being judged or analyzed. Klaus and Stefan were the ones who had lied to her for months and showed no signs of stopping. Why did everyone refuse to see that?
*LIT*
Damon revved the engine to get Caroline and Bonnie's attention as he pulled up to the curb, a deep frown where his usual smirk should be. The girls knew that his mood would only worsen the longer he had to sit there and they walked over to prevent any further frustration. "Hey, Barbie, Witchy."
"What do you want, Damon?" The blonde's voice was nearly dripping with annoyance as she stepped up to the car, glaring down at him. "Come to pull us into another ridiculous plan that won't even work?"
"I'm being haunted," he said, ignoring her tone. "You messed something up last night, Bonnie, because Mason Lockwood's ghost spit roasted me and tied me to a chair." Neither of them spoke as he paused, shaking his head. "I don't appreciate the deja vu."
Bonnie's eyes widened in confusion and she shook her head. There was no way Mason's ghost had returned to haunt Mystic Falls; she'd been sending Vicki away. How had he managed to find his way between the worlds? How many others had done the same? "No. That's not possible."
"Fix it." The vampire bit back. He'd returned to Mystic Falls to torture Stefan - he had promised him an eternity of misery, after all - and he'd stuck around for that and then to protect Elena. He definitely hadn't signed up for the ghost of a werewolf, who hadn't even been able to see through Katherine's charms, to torture him for two straight hours before he'd managed to get free. Not that he'd done almost just that to him. Before Bonnie or Caroline could respond or ask more questions, he was driving away, knowing his next stop would be the Grill to find Ric.
*LIT*
She'd spent the past hour just wandering around town, and had ended right back at the Grill as Elena headed in side. That was strange; hadn't she just eaten a little while ago? When Lilith followed the doppelganger inside, the first thing she noticed was that the main area of the restaurant was a bit more crowded than usual. There were people she didn't recognize that walked past her and barely gave her a second glance as she followed behind Elena at a close enough distance that the doppelganger knew she was being followed.
They stepped into the bathroom at the same moment and the scene they walked in on made them freeze.
"Jeremy?"
He pulled away from Anna quickly at the sound of his sister's voice, his gaze moving to Lilith as his lips curled down into a guilty frown. Her vision was blurry, and the lights seemed too bright. Everything hurt. There was a pounding in her head that she couldn't ignore, and the image of her best friend and someone she'd once considered her boyfriend wouldn't leave her head no matter how much she tried to shake it away. It wasn't like she hadn't been in a situation like this before; she had, and it felt just as bad every time. It always hurt, and didn't stop hurting until she put the entire relationship behind her and tried to move on.
Jeremy stepped forward and her eyes flickered to his lips - where Anna's had been practically glued only a few minutes before - and she acted on her decision before she'd even consciously made it. She bolted. Faces blurred past her as she moved toward the exit of the Grill, desperate for fresh air to clear her head and just to escape. She hadn't expected this to happen again, not with Ziela out of town for the foreseeable future. She hadn't been prepared, emotionally, for yet another big let down.
As crazy as it sounded, she almost wished she'd stayed with Stefan and Klaus. Yes, they'd lied to her for months, but at least they hadn't gone behind her back with the ghost of her best friend for who knows how long. She hated Klaus for lying for so long but, at that moment, she hated Jeremy more. She'd put genuine trust in him, not the blindly obedient form she'd had with Klaus, and he'd abused it.
The moment she felt fresh air in her lungs, he felt indescribably better. It only took a few seconds to clear her had, and with that single, stress free moment, she wanted nothing more than to be able to freely feed again, shunning all of Caroline's judgment and just letting go again. Even though she'd had virtually no control over anything in her life over the summer, it was still the most free she'd ever felt. She'd been taught to clean up her messes, and how to control herself if she really needed to; she'd been taught to behave as a true vampire.
Trying to act human again had been the mistake. Until she tried to get her old reality back, her life had been basically perfect. She'd gotten to travel and had been with people she'd, dare she even think it, cared about. When she'd tried to return to her old life, she'd been pushed into interacting with Caroline and her endless strings of judgment and assumptions.
Of course, in Caroline's mind, Lilith's opinion - that Stefan was in the wrong and she'd only been doing what was necessary to survive - didn't matter. Because it wasn't "right." Stefan was the patron saint of Mystic Falls in everyone else's minds, but she knew that he'd had less of a reason to go off and start killing, and she hadn't done anything nearly as horrible as tear her victims to pieces. At least she'd been clean about it...
"You've got a bit of lunch right there, Love." Lilith didn't swat his hand away until his thumb brushed slowly across her lower lip, her eyes narrowing with annoyance. "I just wanted to help." Klaus shrugged with an almost victorious smirk, putting his thumb in his mouth to remove the few drops of blood he'd managed to collect there.
The younger vampire rolled her eyes and brushed past him, leaving the bloodied girl discarded on the ground behind her. She knew Klaus would clean up her mess for her and she didn't feel like sticking around.
When he grabbed her arm and pulled her back to him almost roughly, she let out a short gasp. "Where do you think you're going, Love?" His voice was quiet, and his lips brushed her ear with each word, but she wasn't as frightened as she knew she should be. She had no reason to be. He wasn't going to hurt her. "Stick around and I'll teach you how to clean up your own messes." He released her a few moments later and she stood perfectly still the places where his fingers pressed into her arm feeling numb.
Lilith moved forward when he nodded for her to follow him, watching as he lifted the limp form of the girl into his arms and started for the door. This didn'tmake sense; he'd never shown any interest in teaching her to fend for herself - not even when she'd asked him to. What was so different this time? She followed him obediently, not sure what to think when they finally stopped near a small grove of trees.
"It can't look like she was anywhere but here," Klaus explained, letting the body fall to his feet. "Make it look as if she's been here a while." He knelt down as he continued, moving the leaves to make it seem as if they had blown into her victim's hair.
The young vampire froze at the thought, shaking her head as she stepped back slowly. Maybe it was the fact that she'd never been near a body for so long before, or that she was seeing how each and every one of her victims were treated - discarded and hidden so that no one would discover the truth until it was too late - but for whatever reason, it felt wrong. This girl shouldn't be treated like garbage just because she'd been naïve enough to fall into a vampire's trap.
"Stop!" She stumbled forward and pulled to hybrid to his feet, pushing him back away from the poor girl's body. It was more than a little obvious that he was letting her push him around, but she didn't care; she just wanted to guilt to stop. The single emotion was consuming her, eating away at her from the inside out, and it was tortuous. Neither of them knew when it happened, but at some point, she stopped pushing him away. Her fingers clutched desperately at his shirt and his arms wound around her to pull her closer.
Maybe it was how close he was, or how comforting his fingers felt when they moved through her hair, but she was slowly beginning to relax. It wasn't until he lifted her into his arms a short while later that she allowed herself to completely relax. It was strange how just being close to him made her feel safer, like the things outside of their bubble didn't matter. Being so close to him made everything disappear - enough that she didn't realize he was even moving until she hear Stefan's voice.
"What happened?"
He sounded worried, but she couldn't bring herself to care, keeping her eyes closed until she knew he was gone. When she felt soft sheets beneath her, she let her eyes close again, takingin the foreign comforts of the bed. She felt his fingers brush across her cheek when he tucked her hair behind her ear, relaxing further as he pulled the blankets up to her shoulders. "Rest, Love..." His lips ghosted over her forehead just before the light was flicked off, leaving her to her dreams...
She stepped into the Salvatore Boarding House, trying to banish all thoughts of Jeremy and Anna and Klaus and lips from her mind. She had to move on, to forget about what had happened and let it go. Holding on to the horrible experiences and memories wouldn't help her later on, only drag her down. Letting go was the best option.
Jeremy who?
*LIT*
The small, OCD part of Damon Salvatore was gathering the pieces of the shattered glass into a pile; the rest of him was more than a little pissed. Leave it to Mason Lockwood to come along at the most inconvenient time possible and make a mess of things - literally. So, he wanted an apology. Someone should wish him good luck with that.
"Good luck with that." Alaric Saltzman. Right on cue.
He definitely wasn't going to apologize to Mason; he hadn't earned on. If he'd done anything that merited he deserved an apology, it would still be a maybe. He owed Mason nothing. "Sometimes, I do things I don't have to do." There. That's all he was getting.
The ghostly werewolf let out a short laugh, shaking his head and leaning against the bar counter top. His thoughts were clear in his face - an amused smile pulling the corners of his lips upward, his eyes twinkling with something akin to delight. Had Damon really thought that would be enough? "Close enough." Mason knew the vampire well enough to know that that was all he was gonna get.
*LIT*
Elena left the bathroom with a huff, scanning the people at the tables for any sign of Lilith. She'd known she was being followed, and she never would have led her into the bathroom if she'd known what was going on. Once Damon found out, Jeremy would be a dead man in an instant - and with her mood right now, Elena would gladly help.
The last time Lilith had run off like this, she'd ended up going missing for four months, trapped with Klaus and Stefan and forced into situations that no one should ever have to go through. If Jeremy had pushed her into another position like that, so help him...
Her thoughts were interrupted when Lexi appeared in front of her and the doppelganger jumped with surprise. "You chose a good day to be thinking about me, Elena."
*LIT*
Damon crossed his arms triumphantly, dropping the shovel to the ground and turning to Mason beside him with a slight smirk. The hole stared gapingly at them from a few feet away and the werewolf shook his head. Sometimes, the Salvatore's impatience was useful. "You go first." The vampire's smile had faded as they stood there, a suspicious frown replacing it moments later. "That way I'll know it's not a trap." He nodded decisively and waved his hand toward the opening in the old, crumbled brick, his small smile returning as he followed the ghost inside.
*LIT*
"What am I supposed to say, Ziela?"
"Apologize! I got that you don't like my mom - no one likes my mom - but you don't have to go around advertising how much of a bitch she is!"
They'd barely made it out of Denver before the arguing had started, and Jared didn't know how much more of it he could take. Before he could shot back, the dhampir beside him continued. She'd sat through one of his speeches and taken it to heart, so now it was his turn.
"Yes, my mother has made questionable choices. Yes, she's a bitch. Yes, she's a bad parent. She's been running for over five hundred years because she doesn't want to die - and she somehow raised both me and my sister and we miraculously turned out just fine. She's a bitch and makes dishonorable decision and she makes mistakes, but no one is perfect. Not even you, Jared Petrova, no matter how perfect and wise you pretend to be."
Silence filled the car for along moment - him not wanted to spark another argument and her not wanting to inspire a speech of his own.
"Look, Z, I-"
"Save it."
*LIT*
A low groan fell from his lips when the vervained vampire opened his eyes, the dim light of the old jail cell seeming to make his headache worse. Out. The single syllable echoed through his head, the desperate need to escape resonating into his thoughts until everything else seemed like gibberish.
"Stefan."
The word wasn't a question, but just the sound brought everything into harsh focus. Even with the low light, he could make out every bump and crack in the stone, every smooth break in the floor. He'd never once been in this room before, but he knew exactly where he was based on his father's description. The vampire cell. It wasn't really a surprise to him that he'd been locked up - Damon was bound to resort to it at tome point - but he was surprised to see that his brother wasn't ever present. Instead, there was Elena, who was to be expected, and someone he'd thought he'd never see again.
Lexi.
It had been her voice that had pulled him from his thoughts before, and it was her hand on his arm when he blinked to dull the ache in his head and his limbs. "I used just enough force to bring him down - no vervain." When she spoke again, it wasn't to him. "You see, Elena, these ripper binges last a few decades at a time, and your life isn't quite that long - hence our dilemma. Luckily for us, I have to ability to give you a crash course."
The hungry ache in his throat grew almost infinitely worse the moment the words left her lips, and he watched his vampire friend circle his chair slowly. "This is ten months without blood." Her voice was cold and harsh as she watched him suffer and Elena's body spasmed in an impossible to hide flinch. "Eighteen months." the chains binding him to the chair felt heavier on his wrists, the slightest shift of the metal making them scrape against his skin. "Three years." His veins felt dry, and there wasn't even enough blood in them to flood under his eyes with hunger.
"I love you, Elena," Stefan practically pleaded, widening his eyes for emphasis. "I'm sorry. I won't hurt anyone again. I love you."
The blonde vampire still pacing around him scoffed and shook her head. She knew exactly what he was doing - appealing to Elena's humanity and emotion so she would let him free - but there was no way that would happen if she had any say in the matter. "He'll say anything for you to let him out, but you can't listen to him if you want this to work." Lexi kept her voice as casual and nonchalant as possible, but she hated seeing him like this. "Five years." She moved on quickly, pushing the image of pain in his eyes out of her thoughts as quickly as possible. This would be much harder if she let herself get involved
"I'm sorry, Stefan." The doppelganger's voice was practically a whimper as she shook her head, obviously struggling to hold back tears at the sight of the younger Salvatore brother in so much pain.
He erupted with anger when they didn't cooperate with his poor veiled manipulation, pulling uselessly at the binding chains around his arms and wrists. "I hate you. I wish I'd never even met you." His voice held a venom that neither of the girls were expecting and Lexi barely managed to hold back a flinch at his tone. "You've ruined everything!"
"Ten years." She had to keep pushing him or he'd never recover from his latest binge. "Push your emotions away, Elena - don't let him play on them." Her blonde hair flew up behind her as she sped over, tightening the chains on her closest friend's arms. "You have to get him weak enough and then apply pain."
At that moment, she dug her nails into Stefan's arm, silently reminding him that he could still feel physical pain even if he'd shut out the emotional forms of it.
*LIT*
Caroline searched impatiently through the big bedroom, pulling open drawers and pulling things out to look through every nook and cranny. When she was sure the necklace wasn't anywhere in there, she moved toward the connected bathroom, pulling open drawers with vampire speed and strength, huffing with annoyed irritation when she pulled the various soaps from the dish. "The necklace isn't anywhere in this room," she complained into the phone in her hand, crossing her free arm over her chest.
"Damon isn't answering his phone," Bonnie's voice informed her, more than a little frazzled. "I'll try to reach Elena."
The vampire sighed and put her phone back in her pocket, jumping with surprise at the sight of Lilith in the doorway. She reeked of alcohol - bourbon, whiskey, scotch - and she was barely staying on her feet with intoxication. "That's not even Elena's necklace. It's Rebekah's."
With a frown, Caroline shook her head and pushed her out of the bedroom. "You're drunk; go to bed. I'm not going to deal with you while you're like this."
Lilith let out a laugh, feigning astonishment at the blonde's words and shaking her head. Like this? Caroline had wanted nothing to do with her since she'd gotten back. Why would her being hung over and miserable make things any different? "You're kind of a bitch." She didn't even pause, too drunk to watch her mouth. "You're nice enough, especially to Stefan, but if someone does something you don't like, even if they're just doing it to survive, you are a complete and total bitch. It's almost funny because you're being a hypocrite the entire time." She laughed again, ignoring the look of pure anger on Caroline's face as she turned to brush past her. "You hate me because I've killed people, but so have you. It was your choice - albeit, you were a newbie vampire with no control - but I didn't have the luxury of stopping because I had a ripper and a hybrid breathing down my back. I may have been with Klaus and Stefan for months, but it certainly wasn't by choice."
*LIT*
The pain in his stomach was dull but it didn't go away. It was almost as if the four wooden spikes were wtill drilling into his flesh. If the ghostly pain was just a few inches higher, he would have thought he'd been staked.
"I told you to go left."
Speaking of ghosts.
"But I went right, and I found a vampire trap - meaning we're going the right way." For once, his lack of trust had helped them, but Ghostly Lockwood was still insisting that he should have gone the other way. He'd even said he wasn't all-knowing when Damon had made his smartass comment of the hour.
"Thank goodness you don't have the ability to trust anyone." They'd been travelling side by side for almost ten minutes when the vampire suddenly stopped, leaving mason to continue into a larger area alone. "Aren't you coming? We don't have forever."
A frown pulled the corners of the Salvatore's mouth downward and he shook his head. "I can't. It's like I haven't been invited in." He tried uselessly to push past the invisible barrier, shaking his head again and speaking firmly when he looked back up at his arch nemesis. "Wait."
"No. I'm not waiting for you when I don't know how much time we have." The werewolf shook his own head, offering Damon a shrug. "I guess you're gonna have to trust me."
*LIT*
The chains rattled as Stefan pulled at them, trying desperately for freedom and the blood he could hear rushing through Elena's veins. He knew he shouldn't feel like this, and he knew that it was wrong, but he couldn't bring himself to care. All he could hear was her heartbeat; all he could smell was the delicious, forbidden nectar of her blood; all he wanted was to drain her completely.
In his head, that's exactly what he did.
She struggled in his arms, and fear made her heart pound in her chest, the sound echoing in his thoughts and driving him to feed. His predatory fangs slowly drew a burning path down the side of her neck and her flinch caused a single drop of warm, welcoming blood to well up on her skin. The taste his tongue an instant later - metallic copper warmed to just the right temperature, the essence of her life that was already beginning to fade, and the slightest hint of fear to make it perfect.
He bit into her flesh moments later, more of the beautifully satisfying life coating his tongue, staining his lips and her skin with its brightly contrasting red. When it dried, it would be an almost sickly brown color, cracked and raw, unappealing and ugly and seen as nothing more than garbage. But now, it drove him crazy - crazy for more, for the supply to never end, for her to die so he could absorb so much more power to thrive upon.
Her body went limp in his arms when he pulled back, fresh blood dripping from his chin and drying slowly in her long, chocolate hair. Her eyes were empty - the life and soul and spirit ripped away from her without any warning. "Stefan..." Elena's dead lips didn't move, but her voice was enough to pull him out of his fantasy...
"You should be dead." His voice was a low growl, his entire body shaking with fury and anger at having the paradise he'd created in his head torn away from him so quickly. She made his life hell, and she deserved to suffer for it. "I wish you were dead. I wish I'd never met you."
The doppelganger in front of him flinched at his tone, shaking her head apologetically. "He's trying to push your buttons." How could Lexi be so calm about this? He wasn't being manipulative; he was stating fact. Elena was a cold hearted bitch. "Don't let him see that his words are affecting you. Don't let them affect you. the colder and harder you are, the sooner he'll give up and give in."
*LIT*
"I get that Jeremy's been an ass, but that doesn't give her the right to be a bitch."
Bonnie resisted the urge to roll her eyes at Caroline's endless complaints, shaking her head as she looked over at one of her closest and oldest friends. "Her boyfriend just made out with the ghost of her best friend. Adjusting has been hard enough on her to begin with."
"She's not adjusting; she's bitching." The vampire crossed her arms as she stared out the window, her voice mocking. "Oh no, being a vampire is so hard. Oh no, I killed someone. Oh no, no one likes me and my boyfriend kissed a ghost. Can you believe her?"
The witch beside her shook her head. "No, Caroline, I can't believe her." Caroline smiled in victory at the idea of Bonnie being on her side, the smile quickly fading when her friend continued. "I can't believe she went through four months of pain and grief and guilt and lies and someone managed to not completely fall apart. I can't believe she puts up with you as much as she does just so she can protect Elena so Damon doesn't have to worry. I can't believe Jeremy betrayed her trust and the worst thing she's done tonight is rant at you for excluding her form every little thing because of circumstances beyond her control."
Silence filled the small space after that, and when the blonde vampire finally responded, her friend didn't hesitate to do just as she instructed.
"Pull over. I'll walk."
*LIT*
Hours of silence made both of the people in the car uncomfortable, the static of the radio only making the entire situation seem worse. They didn't even dare to look at each other, too worried that another argument would start and bring on world war three. On the bright side, no talking meant no insults or jibes to anyone's upbringing or personal image - no matter how horrible either happened to be.
They were two hours into Kansas when Jared turned off the radio to eliminate the static. He was quiet when he spoke, knowing that Ziela could go off on him again if she wanted to. "I really am sorry about what I said." He waited silently for her to respond, continuing hesitantly when he didn't. "You aren't anything like your mother, and I never should have said those things either. My experiences with your mom are much different than yours. I was on a job when I met her. Niklaus hired me to find her so he could make her suffer for killing herself and turning. He made her sound like a demon, the way he talked about her, so that's how I saw her.
"And then I met her, and I found out that everything he said about her was a lie. You were talking about Klaus and I thought of everything he told me. But, as soon as I saw her again, my memories of her came back, and I never told him about her because I wanted to protect her. I never told her he sent me because I wanted her to trust me." He stopped, looking over at the dhampir beside him with a shake of his head. "I'm sorry. I'm boring you, aren't I?"
Ziela shook her head, taking a long moment to gather her thoughts. "What I'm getting from this is that you like my mom. Am I right?"
Jared shook his head, coughing back an amused laugh. Of course she'd be absorbed in the romance of it all. After a short moment of hesitation, he nodded, a small smile pulling at his lips. "Yeah, Z, I like your mom."
*LIT*
"I found something."
Damon stood up straighter at the sound of Mason's voice, leaning against the stone wall to listen to what the ghost had to say. "What is it? What's in there?"
"It's-" Before he could continue, he paused, frowning in confusion.
"Mason?" The vampire frowned at empty air, trying to lean in to see where he'd disappeared to. "No... Mason!"
*LIT*
She closed the heavy, metal door shortly after Lexi had disappeared, staring through the bars at Stefan with a deep brown. Elena had tried everything to get her old Stefan back, but nothing had changed - if anything, her efforts had only made things worse. Lexi had told her that it would take decades to get him back, but was it wrong to wish that what she'd done had at least produced some progress?
All she could do now was wait.
*LIT*
"Why did you call me of all people to help you?"
Alaric sat down beside Damon on the stone steps, shaking his head in confusion. The vampire had killed him multiple times and then ditched him for the ghost of Mason Lockwood to track down and resurrect Imhotep and awake the mummy's curse... or something. Why would he want his help?
"Because I need a human to get into the cave, and besides Elena, you're the only human I trust." The look on the history teacher's face only served to reiterate his theory that he would have to say more than that to get his help. "Look, about killing you, sometimes I do things I don't have to do."
"You're really gonna recycle that same half assed apology you used on Mason Lockwood?"
"Yeah, well, I didn't mean it with him."
*LIT*
When he walked through the front door of the boarding house hours later, the first and only thing Damon smelled was alcohol. Empty bottles were strewn around the living room. His first thought was that Stefan was going to have a very large splinter in his chest, and then he saw the familiar dark head of his daughter resting on the arm of the couch.
"Jeremy's an ass..."
He didn't bother asking what she meant as she pulled a blanket tightly around herself, simply setting to work on cleaning up the glass and bottles from the floor.
A/N
Two chapters in one night! You're welcome!
Me: Hi.
Damon: Hi…
Me: How are you?
Damon: Confused.
Me: *passes him a script*
Damon: "TheDhampir doesn't own The Vampire Diaries in any way, shape, or form."
Me: Thank you.
Damon: …
Me: …
Damon: …
Me: Would you like to be paid in gum?
Damon: Yes, please.
