Chapter 28: The Sounds of Silence
STEFAN
I hold the plate very carefully as I descend the basement stairs, the creamy scent of freshly melted mozzarella drifting up toward my face. I left the dishes undone so I could get Cali her food while it was fresh, but I should probably hurry back. Dirty dishes make Damon crazy and today, the least I can do for him is to wash them.
I still can't believe it was my fault. People think vampire's memories are perfect and maybe for some people they are. But mine are always muddled, sometimes two or three different scenarios sticking in my head so I can't remember which happened and which I just hoped might happen. It's a scant fifty years later, and I can't remember if I thought Damon had already flipped his switch when I found him standing over the body of Robert Salvatore in 1958. I remember his face was stiff when he told me about being kidnapped, but looking back I can't be sure if I thought it was from too little emotion, or too much.
I've always figured he flipped his switch in spite of me, not because of me, and the weight of the difference is more than I can bear. But it always is, isn't it? And the days keep coming anyway.
My feet slow on the basement stairs, and it takes a supreme effort to start moving again.
After Damon told us the truth about what happened in the fifties, he went up to his room and everyone else scattered along with him. I could hear him talking to Elena, and I made as much noise as possible while I was cooking to keep myself from listening.
I desperately want to try to sort this all out on the pages of my journal. I need to mark through the old words and make new ones until I can understand what really happened all those years ago, but I'm the only one left to bring food to Cali and that has to come first.
I should check for a possible ambush before I open the door to the dungeon, but I can't look through the bars without picturing my brother inside, so I focus on the bolt instead as I slide it gently open.
"I have to pee," Cali snaps when she sees me. "Even jail cells should have a bathroom, you know."
Nodding, I look for a place to put the plate. It doesn't seem right to set it on the freshly patched concrete encasing Silas, but I don't want to put it on the blankets of her cot without asking permission.
She saves me the internal debate by snatching the plate out of my hands and setting it on the cot, her eyes lingering on it for a second too long.
"I bet you don't even care that I'm a vegetarian." She bristles.
My chest shrinks a little at her words. "I'm so sorry. I didn't even think to ask. I made chicken parmesan because it's the only thing I really know how to make, but I can get you something else."
She snorts, relenting. "Not really a vegetarian."
"Oh," I say, not sure how to take that.
She shifts her weight, looking uncomfortable rather than angry for a brief second. "It smells really good," she admits, then presses her lips together. "Look, bathroom break now, food later," she says, her voice sharp.
I lead her down the hallway and open a door with a brief, apologetic smile. I stand halfway down the hall to give her some privacy, though my hearing doesn't really allow that these days, for any of us. It's the only thing I miss about the animal blood diet.
I hear the sink running for a long time before she comes out, and I wonder if she's upset and using the faucet to cover the sound of crying. I edge closer, pain echoing through my chest at the thought, but then she yanks the door open and brushes by me, eyes dry and chin up.
"Leave me some water this time," is all she says. "Humans can't live on dust alone, you know."
"I'm sorry."
She whirls on me so fast that I take a step back.
"If you say that again, you're going to be tasting my jewelry collection," Cali snaps, flexing her ring-heavy fingers at her sides. "You're not sorry enough or I wouldn't be here."
I press my lips together and nod, but instead of going back to her cell, she presses her advantage, her light eyes narrow and vicious in the dim hallway light.
"You need to let me call my aunt, at least. My grandma can't be left alone this long. She needs her medication and she needs to be turned so she won't get bedsores and sometimes her IV line slips and you better pray to God that you didn't scare her into a heart attack because I will–" Her face is contorted with anger, but I hold up my hands to stop her.
"Your grandmother is fine," I say soothingly. "Didn't Damon tell you that when he brought your food last night?"
Confusion flickers across her features, softening them. She pauses, pushing up the too-long sleeves of her army coat and crossing her arms. "How fine is she, exactly?"
"Elena arranged for home health care for her, the best rated agency in the county, and went over her care requirements with them based on the files you kept in the kitchen." Panic starts to creep into Cali's eyes and her fingers twitch against her sleeves, so I hurry on, not understanding her reaction. "Elena compelled the staff to take care of your grandmother like she was their own, to be attentive and kind. She even compelled the medication schedule into them so they couldn't forget a pill. They won't screw up," I promise. "They can't."
"She's not some kind of pet that you can just find a good sitter for." Cali stops, eyes flicking over me as if she's just processing what she's seeing. "The permanently young and beautiful people like you are probably all about pulling the plug the first second you can't go dancing at the club anymore, but this part of her life is still important," she hisses, "even if you can't understand that."
Resentment rises in my chest. "You're wrong," I argue. "I can understand that better than probably any human could. Humans grow old before they're ready, always. It's only my kind who have enough time to realize that there's something we're missing."
"Oh, really?" She looks deeply skeptical.
"Some of us are terrified of it," I tell her quietly. "And some of us would give up anything to know what it's like. You might be surprised."
She stares at me, the shock of bright blue edging her pupils almost mesmerizing. When she finally blinks, I feel strange, like I've forgotten something important.
"Well, they'd better take good care of her," Cali grouses. "Otherwise electrifying your family jewels is going to be the least of the miseries I make of your life." She stomps into the cell, and I find myself smiling at the empty hallway she left behind.
It eases my guilt a little that being kidnapped and locked up doesn't seem to have fazed her for long.
She's perched on the edge of her cot and already three enthusiastic bites into her dinner when I step into her cell, leaning against the doorway and tucking my hands into my jeans pockets.
She swallows and gestures with her fork to the casket in the corner. "So, apparently the vampires need to sleep in coffins thing wasn't crap, but frankly, I'm having some trouble figuring out how the cement fits into the equation."
"It's…complicated," I tell her, throwing an uneasy glance at Silas's final resting place. I didn't want to leave her in here with him, even with the concrete refreshed. But Damon insisted it was the safest place for Silas, if he started to break free. "Is there anything I can get you?" I ask, mostly to distract her.
Damon brought her books and blankets and clothes already, because he was dead sure she'd talk me into freeing her if he let me do it. But wherever he went after the argument with Jeremy in the library, he certainly isn't worried about me now. Strange that the thought tightens my stomach even though I was annoyed with him for interfering before.
"I suppose a drum kit is too much to ask," she grumbles. "What about a guitar? Violin? I can play a little of almost anything except the kazoo, and there's got to be some kind of instrument in a mausoleum like this. And paper."
"You're a songwriter?" I ask her, cocking my head.
She rolls her eyes. "Why the hell does everyone always think the drummer is the dumb muscle in a band? Just because we're stuck sweating upstage in every concert doesn't mean we can't do shit."
"You know if you write any songs here, you won't remember them?" I remind her gently.
She stops eating, her fingers squeezing the fork, and a pang drops through my chest. I've never created anything like a song, but I can't imagine what it would feel to have it taken away from me, to make something and then have it unmade so simply.
She shakes her head, her streaky ponytail swishing angrily. "Doesn't matter. I'm going to go batshit crazy sitting down here with nothing to do."
"But why would you want to spend the time to make something new, when you know you can't keep it?" I ask her, curious in spite of myself.
I've never played a song that wasn't already inscribed on pages within the neat boundaries of a staff. What would it be like to make a whole new sound?
She cocks her head at me. "You hear that?"
I freeze, listening. A light breeze ruffles the trees outside, the sound a touch more papery than it was in the summer as the leaves grow brittle with the chill of approaching winter. There is a TV on in the den.
Cali's still watching me expectantly and I close my eyes, really focusing in. I can hear the faint hum of electricity, the rumble of the chest fridge in the room down the hall, and four heartbeats other than my own. Two fast, two slow. Ric's gone and Damon must not have left after all, but wherever he is, he's not moving. The thought makes my skin feel tight and uneasy.
I open my eyes, still puzzled. "What?"
Cali's lips curve into a playful smile and I blink at the way it changes the sharp lines of her face from standoffish to sweet and.
"Silence," she says in a hushed voice. "It's just begging me to fill it."
My lips want to smile along with hers, marveling at how she can draw joy into this tiny room that I've trapped her in, how it seems like a game she's playing and not a sentence forced upon her by the shameful secrets of my family. Damon would have been like this too, I realize, in his own cell. He was probably toying with the guards, trying out plan after elaborate plan for escape, making up insulting nicknames for everyone.
Damon said he learned how to enter animal's minds when he was locked up, and I can see it in my mind, his arm dangling carelessly through the bars of an open window while he passed the time by pretending he could control the things he saw on the other side. Until one day, it worked. It must have been such a comfort to him, and my smile grows sad as I wonder if he could fly along with his birds, if he could feel the freedom rushing beneath their tilting feathers while he waited, heavy on the ground below.
Damon would have been all right. Five years wouldn't have been nearly enough to beat the fight out of him no matter what they tried. After everything, he made it through and fought his way out, and it was my words that broke him, my words that were the final blow he couldn't endure.
After that, he was notorious, standing out even amid the uproar of the tumultuous sixties and seventies. He was always starting fights with famously old vampires and drinking down humans like he had an endless thirst that cared nothing for exposure: models and celebrities and housewives and groupies and even a few politicians. He went underground by the eighties but I doubt that means he calmed down much.
My words may as well have ordered every one of those deaths.
"Jesus, don't cry about it," Cali says and I blink, looking back to her.
"What?"
"Why are you so sad all the time, anyway?" She arches a disdainful eyebrow. "Did you run over your dog or something?"
My jaw clenches. "How old is your grandmother?"
"Seventy-two." Cali gives me a strange look. "Why?"
"I'm one hundred and sixty-four," I tell her sharply. She flinches, surprise registering though she tries to hide it. "I'm living with the consequences of so many wrong choices that some days, I can barely move under the weight of my regret."
Her chin tilts up and her eyes change again, thoughts swimming behind them as if she knows something about me that she shouldn't.
"And just when I am trying," I say hoarsely, "to put it all down, I find out I didn't even know the extent of my own sins."
"What's the difference?" she asks.
I frown. Of course it's different. How can I try to let it go, to forgive myself, if I don't even know everything I've done wrong?
"Guilt is a useless emotion," Cali says, and takes a bite of chicken. I'm not sure how to take that, especially since her eyes are more sympathetic than her voice, so I don't answer. She finishes her food and puts her fork down on her plate before she gets up. "If your conscience only works in hindsight, what's the point?" she asks me, and holds out the plate. I take it automatically. "If you want one less thing to feel bad about, let me the fuck out of here."
She's only here, in a cell just like Damon's, because of me. But I've caused us all so much trouble by not erasing her memory in the first place, and Damon's been working so hard to teach me to feed. If I let her go, we'll all be in danger.
"I'm sorry," I tell her, even though the words ache in my throat. "I can't do that."
"You're not that sorry then."
The human blood swimming through my body seems to both speed and slow everything, so I know she's going to hit me even before the pain explodes through my cheekbone, the swell of each one of her rings a separate epicenter of pain. I let her do it anyway.
She half-stumbles, flubbing the follow through, and her fist jerks reflexively back toward her stomach, face paling as she tries to hold back a cry of pain.
I reach for her hand, worried she might have broken something, but she jerks it away and turns her back on me.
"I'll bring you my guitar." I close the door behind me, the bolt loud no matter how I close it.
The welts from her rings sting as they heal, but I don't mind. She may hate me right now, but erasing her memory is the right thing to do to keep her safe, to keep my family safe. And any pain I might have felt is hidden by the memory of her words.
If your conscience only works in hindsight, what's the point?
I've hurt my brother so many different ways: when I forced him to transition, when I fell in love with the same girls as he did and couldn't give them up. I can't take back what the Augustines did to Damon, or the people he killed because I didn't believe in him when I should have. But is there some way I can make it up to him, to make things different between us now than they've always been in the past?
I wash the dishes, and bring Cali my old acoustic guitar before I go up to my room. I sit down in front of my heavy journal, the pages of this latest edition only half-full. Words tumble through my mind, but I don't pick up my pen.
I think about my brother, and I think about Cali, and I think about myself. I think about what I would have to do to not fail all three of us.
When he comes in my door, leather jacket hooked over his shoulder by one finger, the light beyond the windows has faded to a burning orange that angles low and makes every shape inside my room look a little bit different than it did this morning.
"Ready to go drink away this shithole of a day?" he drawls.
I pick up my pen and tap the end against my still-closed journal. "I think I'm gonna stay in tonight," I tell him, studying his face.
I heard him and Elena arguing earlier, but he looks more relaxed now, tension still etched into the corners of his eyes but his shoulders loose. I try hard to be happy for him, and not to think about how she might have made him feel better.
Damon groans. "I'm not in the mood for your vegan vamp argument tonight, Stefan," he warns.
"No, that's not it," I tell him. "I think I'm going to cut back a little bit, that's all. As much blood as I've been drinking," I say, shrugging uncomfortably, "makes everything...too sharp."
He studies me for a long moment, his face unreadable, then he jerks a nod. "Okay. So what do you want to do then, brother?"
He swaggers inside, dropping into the chair next to my desk and putting his feet up, crossing his boots carelessly atop a small stack of books.
I'm a little surprised he didn't head back to spend the evening with Elena, but I get distracted when I realize he has his foot on a first edition Tolstoy. I frown and rescue the books from under his boot and he smirks, linking his hands behind his head.
"I'm bored," he complains.
I look across the desk at him, everything he told us today swirling through my mind. He looked different when we were young, when his hair was long and still had a soft bit of curl to it. Beneath his brutally short new haircut, his features are hard, his eyes never as unguarded as they once were. But he's still the most familiar thing I ever see, his face older and more dear to me than any of the treasured objects packed into this room.
I want to tell him I don't think he's a monster, that I never wanted to think that, but the words don't feel right. Instead I reach into my bottom desk drawer and pull out a football, flipping it up and over the desk without warning. Damon catches it perfectly and raises an eyebrow.
"It's dark. You sure you're up to catching my death spiral in the forest on a new moon?"
"I'm a vampire," I tell him, trying on a smirk of my own. "I think I can manage."
His eyes flare a little with surprise and he bounds out of the chair, shrugging on his jacket on the way out the French doors.
"Your funeral," he says, and drops off my balcony. "Don't come crying to me when you run headlong into an oak in the dark and stake yourself," he calls back up, tossing the ball back to me just as I vault the railing.
I stretch to catch the ball on my way down, and it leaves me in a bad position when I land. I nearly twist my ankle and struggle to shake it off before he notices, tucking the ball in against my side and putting a nonchalant look on my face.
"Where do you want to play?"
"The clearing?" He nods to the east. "Race you?"
He takes off without waiting for an answer and I scramble to keep up. When I don't see him right away I push harder, calling on more speed than I've had in decades, letting the rush of the human blood catapult me through the night until I'm dodging the trees by instinct alone, my sight nothing more than a blur in shades of charcoal and dying umber. Twilight is nearing its end when we burst into the clearing, laughing and gasping for air.
"Shit, Stefan, you leave your walker at home for once?" Damon teases, bracing his hands on his knees as he tries to catch his breath.
I'm smiling, and the words slip out before I can think them through, falling almost belligerently into the crisp night air. "I'm not sorry, you know."
Damon glances at me, my tone giving him pause.
"I'm not sorry I made you turn," I rush out, steeling myself against the guilt that twists in my belly, and in spite of everything it feels good, too, to finally say it out loud. "It wasn't my choice to make for you, and it was wrong, but I'm still not sorry."
His lashes flare with surprise, emotions flickering across his face. His gaze comes up to meet mine, and he looks at me like he can't quite believe what he sees. But when he nods, it's firm.
He takes a step forward and I tense, not sure what he means to do. His lips tip upward and he lunges a little bit so I flinch and then he smirks and steals the football out of the crook of my arm.
"Well you're going to be sorry by the time I kick your ass with your own ball," he tells me, and starts to jog toward the trees. "Go long!"
"Got it!" I call out, falling back so I'm in position to catch whatever he lobs my way.
And when I'm sure he can no longer see, I grin.
