Author's Note: I'm on a hiatus for the next two weeks while I finish up a real-life project. But... I'll be thinking of you all the while? :) Your reviews and messages are so welcome.

I believe you can build a boat.
I believe you can get to water.
I do not believe you can get the boat on water.
Because there is no boat and there is no water.

-Jennifer Michael Hecht, from "Steady, Steady"

Chapter 9. "With Abandonment"

After hearing Damon pour out his love to Bonnie, Elena didn't let herself cry for very long out in the hall. She was terrified that Damon might come out to comfort her, or worse.

He might not.

So she took herself up out of the cellars and into the house, to Alaric's master bathroom on the first floor. And she cried there just a little longer, because she wasn't trying to win awards for courage, just hold it together enough so she didn't have to actually see anyone pitying her.

Since Elena had woken up, she had come this far: she knew that Damon's love had been something like a boat. She knew she had been afraid, once, that she would sink him. She knew she had been equally afraid that he would capsize with her aboard. She knew that both of those—the vessel to sail in, the possibility of disaster—had been the whole point of getting on board.

Now, though, there was no boat.

In open water, she was just drowning.

But Elena, whose lungs had once filled up entirely with river water and starved her brain of oxygen, knew drowning very well.

So get it together. You can't face a psychologist looking like this. Not and convince him that you can do what you know you have to.

A splash of cold tap water didn't undo the traces of what had happened on her face, let alone in her eyes and voice; that would take time. So Elena, apologizing to Ric under her breath, locked herself into the master suite, and threw herself down in his ottoman by the window. I just need a damn minute.

She had stopped at the Salvatore crypt this morning to pick up the rest of the contents of the trunk her friends had left for her, intending to move it to her bedroom at the Salvatore house. Now, she was carrying the second of the twenty or so volumes of Stefan's journals to her. This one started up about six months after the sleep curse had taken effect, that first winter.

Maybe Stefan would have some news from the past—about Bonnie, or Damon, or… anything.

Something that would change the way it felt to watch a boat, headed home, sail away without her aboard.

Elena—It's been… I guess it's actually been a good week. Relatively, of course. I don't know if I told you before that I've gotten involved with the historical society. On account of your mother's work, they asked Jeremy to present the annual award this October; he asked Bonnie since he was going to be off at school; and Bonnie kicked the ball to me because she's down in Charleston this month, passing more of those crazy tests to gain full membership in her coven. I normally avoid this sort of thing, 'cause there's always a chance that I'll know a little too much about historical events and people will notice. But I thought you'd want one of us to do it. For your mom.

I'm so glad I did. Because it led Connie Fell to ask me to come in and start helping her organize some of the town's old papers. There are so many people I know in the pages here. For example: I hadn't thought of old Albertina Maxwell in, well, let's say I haven't thought of her since the last time I caught a Brahms concert on the radio, which would have been in the time we still called that new invention "the wireless."

Miss Bertie. God, she was a character. When Damon and I were kids, she would come out to our house on Mondays and Fridays for piano lessons, but whenever Mother and Father weren't around, she would teach us and Paulie and Georgia—the house slaves, though we called them servants—how to play the banjo, all together. The banjo was Miss Bertie's favorite instrument, and she was a genius at it. She wrote her own music and even invented a kind of mandolin.

Turns out she left her whole musical collection to the town. All those beautiful old instruments, sitting in dusty boxes in the historical society basement, labelled with tiny little accession numbers—all that's left of a life. No name, no pictures, no stories. Just instruments which no one plays and a tall stack of yellowed sheet music.

I brought home Chopin's Waltz in A flat major, which Damon once knew by heart; maybe he still does. It's the song Father always asked for when he wanted to dance with Mother after dinner.

Damon was the musician, of all of us. He had such a gift for bringing those waltzes to life.

Hell. Just between you and me, I'm running out of ideas for how to break through to him. He's not doing well, Elena. He's gotten ruthless, like the old Damon, seeming to always be just one desperate moment away from snapping a civilian's neck to gain some temporary advantage. He's obsessed with breaking the sleep curse. We all are, but Damon's… I think he's actually lost his wits, Elena. He went a whole week without feeding recently. Said he forgot, but in a tone that just meant he wasn't going to answer questions about it. I suspect he likes the edge that his bloodlust gives him.

Since Miss Bertie's banjos and Chopin's Revolutionary compositions probably won't break the sleep curse, I doubt he'll have much time for them. I'm not counting on a miracle. Besides, I have another angle; looking for magical artifacts buried in the town archives is the reason I agreed to this gig to start with. Still, seeing Miss Bertie's collection helped me.

Connie Fell was surprised at my interest in it—"an unusual love of history in one so young," she told me, and it was worth having to compel her to forget to tell her that her great-great-grandfather was two years behind me in school. And then I felt bad, so I agreed to help her with the research for an exhibit on antebellum entertainments here in Mystic Falls. I could tell stories that would make her clutch her pearls in horror. Just to hear the old songs again—"Gentle Annie" and "Do They Miss Me At Home?"and "Abide With Me"—I remembered a hundred things I'd long forgotten. Do you know that we used to go to church every week? Catholics from the old country, the Salvatores, but my grandparents saw the writing on the wall and "converted" to Methodism before they ever got through customs, and then married their sons off to good Anglo-Saxon English girls. (Good thing, because I don't think they let Catholics be founding families in Virginia in those days, or pretty much anywhere else in America, for that matter.) Anyway, Miss Bertie was our church pianist, of course, and a lapsed Catholic Irishwoman herself. I remembered today that she once brought down the house by transitioning out of "Sweet Hour of Prayer" right into "Whiskey in the Jar." Old Addie Lockwood stamped her feet straight through and then laughed until she cried. We were all laughing by then. Well, maybe not Reverend Torvel. But then again nobody could resist Miss Bertie's good humor for long.

I suppose, whenever it is you read this, you'll wonder why I'm telling you stories from my childhood instead of stories from what you're missing right now. It's just hard to keep writing about what we're doing—digging a deep hole in the ground below where you used to live, to build an arsenal and prison cells. Failing to find anyone who knows how to break the sleep curse in a way that won't get you and Bonnie killed. Drilling ourselves on what to do if someone attacks the crypt.

It feels good to learn how to make an exhibit, I'm saying.

Anyway. I'm heading out to your parents' lake house later today. Will probably stay the night. No one winterized it and I'm afraid the pipes will have burst—we had a big cold snap this week. I'll stay out to see to repairs if need be. And I'll be more careful with it next year.

No. Maybe we'll break the sleep curse. Maybe you'll be back by next year. Here's hoping.

"I won't be," she told past Stefan. "You'll have to do a lot of winterizing."

There was something about reading Stefan's journals. Their calm, straightforward explanations for her; their meandering stories as he discovered something for himself. Their scrolling, old-fashioned script that was a legacy of having learned to write around the time Millard Fillmore was president. Their steady regularity, written at least once a week and sometimes in between if something struck him or something unexpected happened.

Well, but Elena knew this now, too. If Damon had been a boat, then Stefan was like her; he was an anchor.

If she'd held onto him, they both would have drowned.

She drew a deep breath. Steady—steady. The journals helped. Miss Bertie Maxwell helped, too.

Go fool the old shrink upstairs so you can get on with saving Bonnie, she told herself sternly. A bit of Damon in her intensity, her mental cadence.

And her feet obeyed.

Jasper had his feet up on his footstool, a copy of the third volume of the autobiography of Mark Twain open in his lap, a pipe drooping out of the corner of his mouth, when Elena knocked on the open door to his attic office.

"Dr. Rhine?" Elena asked tentatively. It occurred to her that it had been a long time since she talked to anyone his age. That's ridiculous. Stefan and Damon are each twice his age.

But they were going to be young forever, and this vampire would be old forever. He looked, in fact, like a Scandinavian Alan Ginsberg, aged past his worst madness and back into clarity, but still wild. Elena hadn't realized until she saw him how comforting it might be to sit with someone who actually knew that he was of a different generation than hers. It was a contradiction, maybe, but she felt herself, suddenly.

"Well. Elena Gilbert, after all these years," Jasper murmured, sliding a bookmark into the hardback volume and setting it on his side table.

"That's me," she said, hoping he couldn't see the remains of her crying fit. He's a vampire, Elena. He probably heard the whole thing. But as usual, she could maintain appearances until she knew for sure. That's all that courage is. That was one of her most successful lies. It helped her summon a smile, now. "I guess you've heard more about me than I have yet about you."

He snorted. "Call me Jasper, dear. And yes, you're right about that. The damnedest feeling came over me just now. Like seeing a celebrity in the grocery store and mistaking them for a friend just because they're familiar."

Elena cocked her head to the side. "I guess that's… flattering?"

"It's downright uncanny." He sliced the air dismissively. "I've become acquainted with a hell of a lot of versions of you. Bonnie's loyal best friend, Damon's wild girlfriend, Stefan's compassionate first love, Jeremy's protective sister, Caroline's… whatever you are to Caroline. But now I wonder—who is Elena to herself? So perhaps we'll get to know each other today."

"Well," she eased into the room, sat herself down on the loveseat. She felt a bit like she'd shown up for a job interview and been told the interviewer wanted to be friends. So it irritated her, how pointedly calm he seemed. She contained it. Folded her hands uncomfortably in her lap. "I suppose that's… basically what I'm here for. Since it seems I need your approval to be allowedto carry this baby. For Bonnie."

He raised a brow. "You need Damon's permission. It's his child. And you'd have to be sleep-cursed a hell of a lot longer before you could seriously believe that I or anyone could force Damon to give it if he doesn't want to." He shook his head. "If you think you're here for my permission, you can have it. You're of legal age. Just know that it won't take you very far."

She pressed her hands together. Looked down at them, up at him. "I think I have Damon's permission," she said slowly.

"Ah. That was you listening to him with Bonnie, then."

So much for the hope he hadn't heard. "Umm. I didn't really mean to. At first. But… yeah." Elena drew in a breath, trying not to think about the the other person who most certainly heard her crying in the hall. "It was."

"I see."

Elena looked at her hands again, made a show of studying her fingernails. Why was this so awkward? Wasn't he supposed to be asking her questions? What did it feel like to hear your boyfriend tell your best friend that he's sorry he didn't stop loving you sooner? Right. Vicious thought. She tried to shove it aside, too. Why did so many of her thoughts, lately, feel like they were like heavy furniture she couldn't move anymore? She blinked back the tears that sprang back into her eyes fiercely. Not here, Elena.

When she finished pretending to examine her own hands, she saw that Jasper had opened his book back up and returned to his reading. "Aren't you… supposed to be asking me questions?" she asked, aloud this time.

Jasper looked up in surprise. "I thought you came here for my blessing of your plans. I gave it."

"I thought you were… a therapist or something."

"Yes. Both, actually." At Elena's blank look, he elaborated. "A therapist and 'or something.' I have two doctorates, one in medicine and one in psychology. But you should know that they were granted about sixty years ago from the University of California at Berkeley, so they're as crusty as I am. And I'm unlicensed here in the state of Virginia. Even my Oregon and California licenses have been lapsed for longer than you were sleep-cursed." He grinned now, and she was surprised by how white his teeth were, almost as white as his beard. Another advantage of becoming a vampire, she figured. "Turns out you don't really need a license to practice on vampires and their friends. But all that is really beside the point."

"Which is?"

"Which is that it didn't take me fifty years of practice to learn that you can't work with a person who won't work. I may talk to myself sometimes, but I don't call it teaching."

Now it was her turn to respond meditatively. "I see." But then she realized that she didn't. "So. I'm… hopeless?"

Now Jasper tucked his bookmark back into his book more slowly, but also more finally. "Well, since you suggested it," Jasper ventured easily, maybe a little too easily, "I think I will ask just one question. If you're willing."

Elena felt again the heaviness of thoughts crashing in at her center, all disorganized and jumbled, all hard to push apart. She nodded, just once, very slowly, left her chin low to watch him. "Did you just reverse psychology me like we were out on the playground?"

He ignored her even as she heard how ridiculous she sounded. "My question is, what do you think you did to earn the Salvatore brothers' love?"

Nothing.

Elena's fingernails dug hard into her palms.

What do you see, what do you see, what do you see? "What do you… mean?"

"I mean, why do you think they loved you? Either of them, or both. You choose."

You choose. God, she hated those words. So she followed her favorite star and didn't. "I… I was kind to them. I believed in them." She cleared her throat as truer answers tried to form there. Swallowed them. "They thought they were… evil, broken. I reminded them that they could be… good."

"You think Stefan, when you first met him, needed a reminder that he could be good?"

"I… well… no. Not exactly." This was a safer question; this was about Stefan, about what she thought he'd seen in himself. She could answer this one. "He was determined to be good. It was all he thought about. It was a paradox, you know. It was important to him that he was better than Damon. And he was, actually. He was better, kinder, wiser, more… ethical. More compassionate. But he also thought vampires were bad in their nature. And he thought that Damon was actually right to hate him because of all his old sins."

"And was Damon right to hate him?"

"No." Elena didn't hesitate. "He was… Damon must have had some kind of disease. One of those fixation disorders Stefan said you deal with. He got stuck in some of his feelings. He… he does that…" She trailed off uncertainly.

"You mean like his love for Katherine Pierce?"

"Yes." Elena could be safe here, again. "You don't love or hate someone for a hundred and fifty years without seeing them, without some serious devotion."

"I suppose not. Is that what you saw in Damon, Elena? His capacity for…fixation?"

"Sure. He loved Katherine for so long. I thought…" She trailed off again, this time more tellingly. Damn it. But she could hear Stefan, saying to her, just be honest with Jasper, please, and this much honesty seemed basically harmless. She was entitled to this feeling, wasn't she? Not like the others. "Well, OK," she said slowly. "So—yes. I thought his feelings would last the sixty years I expected to be asleep. Rather than six years. Or maybe less."

"You feel rejected."

"No. I was rejected. While I was basically in a coma."

Jasper didn't argue the point, and Elena felt it sink into her stomach. "But if I'd asked you—before your, errr, your coma—why Damon loved you?" Jasper leaned forward just slightly, seemed to catch himself, and leaned back. Dropped his shoulders. "What do you think you might have said?"

"I would have said that he… well, that he needed me to remind him of the man he'd once wanted to be. That he could be that man still. That he was worthy of love."

"So he didn't love you."

"I didn't say that."

"You said he needed you to love him so he could meet his own goals. Which is different from loving you. Isn't it?"

"It… no. He loved me. He did."

"OK." For his even tone and clear blue eyes, she would have thought he believed her, but since she suspected he shouldn't, she also believed he didn't. Especially after his next question. "So how did you know?"

She scrambled for a defense. "He fought for me. Traveled through time for me. Wouldn't let go even when I didn't remember him—but did let go when he thought my feelings were just on account of the sire bond—put his life on the line for me on the Island, in the cemetery, and when Katherine came after me, and when Klaus did." Elena took a breath. "He helped my friends. Forgave Stefan. He… became better."

"And that was all for you?"

Elena swallowed. Not really. "He thought it was."

"Hmm." It was disquieting, that Jasper seemed to hear what she didn't say as much as what she did. "Is that why you loved him?"

"Because he… changed?" Elena bit her lip.

"Because he fought for you and changed for you."

"I loved him for himself." Elena didn't hear herself speak in past tense. "Just for—everything he is. Before he changed. And after."

"Ah. And what Damon is, that's better than what Stefan is, and that's how you chose between them?"

Elena frowned. "Well, no. Neither one of them is better than…" She sighed. "Is it always like this, talking to you? You just… make everything about something that it's not?"

Jasper turned to reach for the notebook he had tossed onto his desk. Consulted it a moment, scrawled a couple of words only. "Maybe it doesn't seem like it, but I prefer to say what I mean, Ms. Gilbert. Here it is. I believe that relationships are, in a word, relational. What I am trying to encourage you to consider is that you loved Damon not only in himself, but for what he gave you that you didn't have, and that Stefan couldn't, or wouldn't, give you, that Matt didn't. Just as you can already see that he loved you in part for what you gave him—a better self-image, a reason to be the man he wanted to be."

"That… makes sense, actually." Elena thought for a moment about what he'd asked before. Why did I—I mean, why do I—love Damon? "I feel like… everyone thinks that I loved him because he protected me. To the exclusion of every other goal. And because he didn't care about anyone else. Not really."

Jasper's brows shot up. "Is that what you really wanted?"

Yes. Elena heard the echo of what Iris had levelled at her drunkenly the night before. You just want, and want, and want… "That would make me pretty needy," she said flatly, "to love someone so I could be the only star in their goddamned universe."

"Wanting unconditional love is not typically considered a psychological disorder. It's rather the human condition," Jasper said carefully.

Elena sighed. His manipulations seemed so transparent. She'd known for a long time that Stefan and Damon, their impossible strength, their comforting immortality, had spoken to the orphan in her. Especially when they'd professed to love her. Still. "They didn't replace my parents." Just saying it left a bad taste in her mouth, and smell in her nose.

"I don't believe any of your feelings, even for your parents themselves, are as simple as you're accusing me of suggesting," Jasper said firmly. "Listen to me. I think I should speak plainly, because you seem to believe I'm asking you questions even though I already have the answers, answers you also think are wrong. I don't have answers. Not yet. Think of your life as a play, Ms. Gilbert. If I know certain things about it, it's because I've been to this theater before, and I know the stage. And I've seen some of the major players in your life in… other works. But still. You have the script. It is your story. Anything could happen here."

"You say that, but deep down you think you understand what's wrong with me better than I do," Elena said softly. "You think I'm a poor little broken orphan girl you can fix." Does he? she wondered, thinking bitterly that she didn't understand herself anymore. And then, some quieter, feebler voice, who lived somewhere darker: Can he?

"No. You can accuse me of many unsavory intentions, Ms. Gilbert. I'm no saint, and God knows I have my own vices. But not that." He cleared his throat, thought a moment. "Mainly because it doesn't square up with how I see my own profession. A diagnosis, even an accurate one, doesn't fix anything in and of itself. And I don't yet have one. Still, perhaps… perhaps you'll let me tell you about the way, ahem, the way plays like yours are typically… staged and set. But don't mistake me. This won't be a script. Any more than a diagnosis is a cure."

"Fine. Try me," Elena gritted. He would probably miss all the points, which would be fine with her. Then she could walk out and face Stefan and Damon with a clean conscience. And if he didn't then, well, why not have just one person tell her that he knew she was a failure, and finally hold her accountable? Hadn't she been waiting for just this? Maybe it would be a relief.

This was a familiar feeling, not knowing quite what to hope for, but hoping nonetheless to somehow get caught. That feeling felt like home, as much of a home as she still had.

Jasper leaned forward onto his own knees, staring at her with unflinching blue eyes under his bushy white brows, a look somewhere between a glare and a compulsion stare. "Someone in your situation might, for starters, have what are popularly called 'abandonment issues.' An imprecise term, and not one that I myself favor. The term masks a whole cluster of competing symptoms, including self-abnegation, anxiety, depression. Associated use of sex or chemicals or seeking out of dangerous activities, all of which function as distraction from pain, and hence are self-soothing. Very relatedly, abandoned people often suffer from an incapacity to think concretely about the future. And, oh, what else, let's see. Well. People who've been abandoned, particularly by their parents—"

Elena held up both hands. She had disagreed with his premise all along. "I don't have any of that. They didn't abandon me."

Jasper ran a quick hand over his beard, at that; it struck her a show of surprise. "Didn't your father ask Stefan to save you and not him or your mother?"

"Yes. He saved my life."

"And you've never felt that he abandoned you to life and went on to death without you?"

Elena reared back at that, feeling like he had just pressed hard on some button deep inside her that no one had ever touched. Her mouth fell open, ready for words that wouldn't emerge.

But Jasper didn't need an answer.

"Not to mention that your biological parents gave you up at birth, and then each of them failed to protect you, quite willfully, at crucial moments. And of course, Stefan, who you thought was your soulmate, left you to save Damon, and left himself in the process. Abandoned you so thoroughly he literally almost killed you. We'll leave aside Jenna. Jeremy. Ric. For the time being, anyway. Because now Bonnie and Damon have also—"

"OK!" she held up her hands, waved them back and forth across her chest almost frantically. "Alright. Alright. OK." She felt the water flooding into her brain, her lungs, drowning rational thoughts, and struggled to take deep, steadying breaths again.

Jasper seemed to find it better not to leave her there, but seeing she now understood him, instead kept going. "Like I was saying. People who've been abandoned," he emphasized those words softly, "are often attracted to certainty, and hence to authoritarianism; for some people it's religious or political, but around here I'd think it could manifest in attraction to superhuman near-immortal beings. Certainty is so important that, in moments of indecision, the person often gets unreasonably attached to the first solution she hears, even when better options come along."

Elena had squeezed her eyes shut; she could barely hear him now over the tidal pulsing of blood in her ears. "And I should say that it would be quite typical if such a person both had unreasonably high expectations for her lovers, and also felt deeply unworthy of their love. Like she needed them to prove that she was wrong in her belief that there were good reasons in her character as to why she deserved to be abandoned. Such a person would tend to believe that she was a failure, guilty of not having prevented her own abandonment. That's a form of self-hatred, of course." Jasper sounded, and looked tense, like he would rather not be saying what he was saying. "And… one final thing. Forgive me, but such a person's survival instinct is often… unreliable."

Elena, who was outright trembling now, to hear all of this plainly stated, fought the quaver that came in her voice, but couldn't face the fear or the anger that came before it. Those were still clear in her question. "Unreliable?" she managed.

"If I had offered you a choice between answering my question about why the Salvatore brothers loved you, and cliff diving, which would you have chosen?"

Elena's eyes flashed yellow light at him for a moment. "Depends on the cliff."

"The reason is that self-loathing—the sense of being unworthy of the regard of others—tends to activate our survival instinct. Whenever we brush up against that feeling that we're unworthy, our survival instinct says to us, 'don't touch it. If you do, it'll swallow you up and you'll quite simply die. Look away so you can survive.' Do you need a moment, Ms. Gilbert?"

"No," Elena gritted. She needed a hundred. And she didn't want to need anything from this man. "Just—go on."

"Very well. When you obey and look away, you tend to look in the opposite direction—to things which make you feel alive, those self-soothing things I mentioned before. Things like sex, intense love, drugs, adventure, rebellion. You wanted to run when I asked my question because you want to live, even if the running is actually much more dangerous." He paused, saw the way her throat was working, the hand she had pressed against it, where air once hadn't come, where vampire bites had... "Am I striking a chord or missing the point, Ms. Gilbert?"

She shook her head. Angrily, again. He knew he'd hit several nails on the head, had actually pounded on some of them. "Don't play games with me."

"I don't think your life is a game, Ms. Gilbert." He stroked the cover of his book thoughtfully a moment. "But I think maybe you've been treating it as one for a long time. Hide and seek, to be precise. Mostly hide. When all of that—looking away—that I mentioned happens continually, it tends to seal up the feelings that drive it. And that unworthiness grows and festers and takes over more and more of your sense of self. Elena," his voice gentled, "I have been worried about you from the first story I heard about you. You think the rest of us were at war. But what, I have often wondered, must your dreams have been like?"

She blew out her breath at that.

Fine, then. He'd seen.

Was forgiveness really possible, after all that? She didn't want to let herself hope. That would be the cruelest of all. Or… was it forgiveness she wanted, or something else?

Just try to tell Jasper the truth, Stefan had said. Please, he had said.

Honey, he had said.

"They were lonely," she said softly. She drew in a deep breath. Said the rest. "My dreams. They were lonely. Because… everyone kept leaving me."

Jasper shoulders squared, at that, as though tensing against slumping at a blow. His ice-blue eyes, though, went liquid. "I guess they did," he said gently.

She couldn't bear those eyes on her, the pity she sensed in them. She didn't deserve it. She knew she didn't.

Still, there was that small voice in her clawing up out of the darkness, the one that had heard what Stefan had asked her to do, the one trusted Stefan without any reservations at all. "He said… Stefan said you saved his life," that voice managed to speak to the air. Elena braced herself. Whether against the idea that Stefan might not have been saved or that she herself might be, she wasn't sure. Both were unbearable.

"He saved his own life," Jasper said mildly. "I went along with him."

"And now… you're gonna tell me how to do it."

Elena felt like she'd just signed a confession in blood. Like she'd said something momentous.

Jasper didn't blink.

"No. I'm going to ask you to tell me what you're going to do. While you rethink what's happened. Because history isn't destiny, Elena." He tilted his head toward the window, where a day that had started out sunny was starting to seem overcast, to look like it might all end in a downpour. "Look out there. Something's coming. Something always does. But then it'll go. Like I said before, people in your situation often struggle to imagine the future. They see a perpetual storm or a permanent holiday. Or sometimes that manifests itself in total blankness, an unwillingness to make solid plans. They speak in unrealistic ways—they say 'never' and 'forever' instead of 'last month' and 'next year.' Among immortals, I think, it can be especially hard to realize that that way of thinking might be a manifestation of a death wish. A desire to live outside of real time. And that's why I think your course of treatment has to involve not only rethinking your past, but especially your future. This time, with specificity. Clarity. Goals. Timelines."

There were parts of Elena's chest cavity that felt like they were getting air for the first time in her adult life, now. "You want me to make a plan for my life. My real life."

God. What a thought. That seemed both… Elena struggled to figure out how it felt. Impossible. And exciting.

Jasper smiled now. "Yes. You're a remarkable young person, with a lot of talents and a lot of years ahead of you. What do you want to do? Who do you want to be, outside of your friends and loved ones, just—for yourself?"

She held his eyes now like a cat holds one—blinking, to show trust, but not seeming to be able to look away. "I have absolutely no idea," she admitted finally, and looked away for not finding answers in his face. "I used to want to be a writer, but… I haven't thought about doing something, you know, something outside Mystic Falls, in a long, long time. The things that have happened to me… I can't write about them." She took a deep breath, then gave in to cowardice and deflected. "What did you want to be? When you were my age?"

Jasper's smile widened. "When I was your age, young lady, Jack Kennedy was president and every other day seemed like it might bring nuclear war. But I was a young idiot, and all I wanted was to play professional baseball. Could barely think about anything else. It was all I did—played baseball, read about it, listened to it on the radio, talked about it with friends, even as they all came and went from Vietnam."

Elena blinked hard, at that. "So…. what happened?"

"Nothing. I wasn't very good at fielding. And to be honest, even though I still love it just as much, I found watching regular old baseball pretty boring once the intensity faded away. I haven't even followed the Giants—that's my team—since the eighties."

"Huh." She could barely imagine that—imagine letting go of things she had loved and letting them change while she wasn't looking. Who are you holding onto them for? There was that feeling of her mother's hand on her shoulder, again. "Well. That's a long time," she murmured.

"Yes, my dear. It is. Very long." He tapped the cover of his book emphatically. "Now leave me to finish with this nonsense. I'll see you again on Thursday morning and you'll tell me what you used to write. What movies you like and don't like. What you haven't read yet." He gestured to the rows and rows of books on the shelves behind her. "What you might or might not get out of a college degree."

"Alright." She paused in the doorway, felt awkward, turned back. "And I guess… we'll talk about everything else, too?" Bonnie, and Damon. And Stefan. Stefan and Caroline. Her heart skipped a beat, but though she couldn't quite say aloud what she meant, her brain was on a runaway train with it all, now. And Jeremy, and his daughter, and my parents and, God, my other parents, and Aunt Jenna, and the sleep curse and the Pegacite curse and… all those years of dreams, the way everyone seemed to keep disappearing, over and over and over.

Maybe Jasper knew what she meant; he must have known some of it. And he definitely heard the low, warning dread in her tone. "I've got an eternity ahead of me, my dear. We've time enough for all that and a cup of tea. Maybe we'll even take in a Giants game. I've got a hankering, just lately, to turn a game back on. Just to see how it's all going these days."

The crack of laughter that burst out of Elena's mouth should have split the room wide open. Had she ever heard a more ridiculous plan? An afternoon someday this summer, once it was baseball season, when she might or might not still be in this plane of reality, and she'd spend it just sitting and watching baseball with an old newly-turned vampire who wouldn't know any of the players any more than she did.

She laughed, grabbed the doorframe and laughed harder, and noted as she did that the thought of it made her feel wildly, unexpectedly free. She thought of her dad, of hearing him explain his preferences for this pitcher over that one, holding forth about the invalidity of designated hitting. And shook her head. Still smiling. "Well. We'll see," she said, not withholding the sound of her reservations. "I'll… I guess I'll see you Thursday."

"So you will."

When he heard her hit the front door, he picked up his pen and began scribbling impressions, ideas, and treatment goals on the pad in front of him. Fifteen minutes later found his pen hovering over where he'd underlined one word. Self-destructive.

"That could have gone worse," he mumbled to himself. He was worn out; he usually liked to let the patients do most of the talking, but it was his hunch that Elena had pushed her feelings down for so long she couldn't reach them by herself. So it had felt like he'd been whispering a song to a venomous snake, which would kill him if it fell asleep and kill him if it suddenly woke up all the way. He'd done it, though, and he could understand a bit more now about the woman he had heard about at such great length for so many years. Not what he expected; she was actually closer to understanding herself than he would have thought possible, for one thing, given that she'd spent years tumbling over cliffs and then turning around to pull friends off their own crumbling ledges. A terrible cycle, that. You needed solid ground and a bit of time to get a real grip on anything at all. "Well. It may still."

He turned back to his Twain. What was it the man had said? Oh, yes. A man who carries a cat by the tail learns something useful that can never grow dim or doubtful. He'd learn what the Salvatores had, then. Bright and clear.

Though Elena wasn't a cat—more like half-dove, half-lion—Jasper figured he'd seen enough of her scratches in the furniture of this town to know he wouldn't be spared.

He thought of Stefan, this morning, his head hung low. I'm still in love with her, he had said. Jasper's heart had slumped like Stefan's shoulders. It would be hard, maybe impossible, for Stefan to keep his distance. But Stefan knew it, just like Jasper did: probably the last thing Elena needed at this moment was to be saved by a man's love. She needed to find a reason to live within her own life.

Good thing I spent a lot of years working on his resilience, he thought.

And he thumbed to the next page, wishing for Stefan's sake that the dark days ahead of him were already contained in a good book.