The Sins of the Father

Leicestershire, England 1837

The first thing I did upon waking was thank God for the magical healing properties of vampire blood, and the second was to thank Kol, much to his amusement.

"There are better ways to thank me, darling, if you're so inclined," he suggested, slyly trailing his fingers over my hip. He was still wearing his bloodstained clothes from the night before and I envied him for it anyway, because I was still wearing mine, corset and all.

"Oh, Kol, you might have saved me death by alcohol poisoning and a no doubt wicked headache this morning, but you let me sleep in a corset," I told him, removing his hand from my person so that I could get up. "Unforgivable."

"I'll be sure to get you out of your corset next time, then," Kol murmured huskily, and then paused, frowning. "I saved you from that policeman. That should count in my favour."

I scoffed, sitting up and cringing at how stiff I was.

"You ate that policeman. It doesn't count if you just happened to drain him while he was trying to arrest me," I informed him, making a futile effort to massage away the tension in my shoulders. "Oh my God, I was nearly arrested! Edward was arrested!"

"Yes, and you kicked down a door trying to rescue him," Kol reminded me, smirking. His hands replaced mine on my shoulders, his clever, clever fingers doing with ease what mine could not. "It was quite impressive, darling. I couldn't believe you managed to balance on one foot long enough to lift the other with as much drink as you'd had, even less kick it in."

"Henry and George were taking too long with their rubbish 'lock picking,'" I explained, sighing. "I'm sure if you weren't too busy draining the constable's daughter, you would have broken down the doors yourself to save the time."

"Ah, yes. The tasty little blonde thing," Kol reminisced, licking his lips. "Delectable."

I leaned into his hands as they worked out the tension in my muscles, biting back a hum of pleasure just to deny him the satisfaction of it. Not that it did much good - when Kol next spoke I could all but feel his cool breath on my ear, his voice smug and self-assured.

"Am I on my way to being forgiven, darling?"

"Keep doing that and I'll consider it." I muttered, blowing a stray curl out of my face. "Do you think I've been banned from the post office? I wanted to send that letter to 'Lijah and Bekah and Nik-"

"Now why would you want to send a letter to those bores when you're in the company of the most handsome, fascinating, irresistible Original of all?" Kol asked airily, deliberately brushing his fingers over my collarbone in a way that made me want to shiver.

"Maybe I'm asking them to rescue me," I told him in a low, teasing murmur, tilting my head back so that I could look him in the eye. "Maybe I'm being held hostage by the wildest Mikaelson and am very desperately in need of saving."

He tilted his head down to better take in the sight of me - his eyes were dark.

"I don't care if they haven't banned you from the post office, minx," he uttered in a low growl. "I'll compel them to throw your letter in the fireplace."

"So cruel," I pouted, resting my head on his shoulder. "I bet if you read my letter you'd pay them double to have it sent there twice as quick."

He huffed.

"And have them demanding I return you to them sooner? Not bloody likely, darling."

"But I wrote so eloquently about how you've dragged me into your world of ceaseless debauchery and unspeakable depravity," I protested, because I knew he wouldn't be able to resist reading it now. "I wrote about Lady Fairbanks' dinner party and our night on the town in the slums of London - and of course I wrote all about what we've been getting up to with Henry. I haven't added last night to my detailed account of our scandalous, wicked degeneracy, but I'll get to it at once. Imagine 'Lijah's face! I expect he'll be appalled."

Even Elijah at his most relaxed would find breaking into a town, attacking a toll keeper, several policemen, and I suppose the man in the caravan we overturned at least a mite reprehensible, but if he didn't, I was sure defacing every house from Beast Market through the Market Place to Burton street, both the Old Swan Inn and the Red Lion, the Leicestershire Banking Company and the Post Office, painting everything and everyone we passed with the red paint we stole from the under-reconstruction gate, breaking things and overturning flower pots and pulling door knockers and throwing the Red Lion Inn sign into the canal…well, if attacking people wasn't reprehensible enough, I was sure terrorising the entire town of Melton Mowbray on an evening of legendary drunken carousing that started at the races at Croxton was more than enough to discompose him.

And that was before I factored in Kol draining people left and right, leaving some dead and others compelled to forget. That was without mentioning how much of his blood I'd taken throughout the evening too and that he'd had mine, too, and not for the first time, which was sure to piss off Nik even though it was probably the reason I survived the amount of alcohol I'd been drinking. That was even without the epic tale of how Edward had been arrested and we'd broken into prison to rescue him. I'd gotten to kick down a door like an action movie star.

Admittedly, I'd sprained my ankle terribly doing it because ladies boots of the late 1830s were not made for kicking arse and taking names, but that's what vampire blood was for. I was thankful that I'd remembered in my drunken state to kick beneath the lock and doubly so that the door opened inward - Kol would never have let me live it down if I'd tried and failed.

"And you call me cruel," Kol mused, tangling his fingers in my messy, slept-in hair. "You know I can't resist stirring up trouble, and now I'll have to pay for your mischief."

Nik, I knew for certain, would be furious with Kol when he got my letter, but it was Nik and I couldn't resist riling him up.

"It's not as though you actually mind," I pointed out easily, because he didn't. Irritating his siblings - specifically Nik - was what he lived for. Well, aside from blood and mayhem.

"Minx," Kol accused, but it was a term of endearment - it had always been. He let his hands fall from my person. "Go on then, finish your letter. We'll post it at once."

"We're going to have to move on soon, aren't we?" I asked him after I'd slipped away from him, after a few minutes of searching for my letter. "Back to London, I expect?"

The letter wasn't on the end table where I'd left it, and it wasn't on the desk.

"No, I was thinking somewhere else. Italy, perhaps," Kol suggested idly. "Or Egypt. You know Bekah will throw a tantrum when she finds out I have you. Elijah won't say a word, but his mouth will set in a straight line and we both know what that means. And Nik, of course, won't stand for it - he'll send someone along to fetch us, I'll kill them, he'll send someone else, just for you this time, and I'll kill them too, and then he'll decide to get off his arse to come fetch you himself and I don't feel like sharing you."

"I could simply not send the letter," I proposed lightly, because I wanted to be with Kol. When I'd arrived all those weeks upon weeks ago, I'd been a mess. And Kol was Kol - he had no use for a morose companion. He dragged me out of the mire of the guilt and grief I had finally been getting the chance to feel by force - dragged me into a whirlwind of non-stop parties, of drinking and dancing and murder and mayhem. There was no time to stop, to think. If I couldn't even catch my breath, how would the bad things catch up?

I wasn't ready to leave Kol. With Kol, there was only chaos and him at the very heart of it. Kol was freedom. Kol was wild abandon when he wasn't scheming, and would accept no less than that from me. With Kol, there wasn't the stability of a permanent residence, there wasn't any kind of stability at all. We alternated between high society and the slums, went anywhere and everywhere we pleased. The only constancy I had was in Kol, and it was a relief to relinquish control to someone else. All I had to do with Kol was whatever I pleased - he took care of everything else.

He and I had an odd dynamic - I liked to imagine that he had changed the least out of the Originals from when I had dreamt them before. He was racy and lascivious, always teasing, delighting in the chase - and there had been chasing since I'd arrived, though Nik wasn't there to tackle him to the ground for me. He was short-tempered and jealous with my attentions as he had been as a human - a Mikaelson trait, I was sure. I remembered during the three months I'd spent with them in my last dream, Rebekah nearly took my arm off pulling me away from Tatia the first time I'd spoken to her, and that was just in case.

The only people I was allowed to pay any real amount of attention to were Kol and the compelled Henry and his fox hunting posse. I liked it, strangely enough. It created a polarised environment in which the fae morality I had been struggling against became something that I could understand, if not yet embrace.

No one else mattered. There was Kol, who I loved, and Henry and George and Edward and Harry, who I was terribly fond of, Henry most of all, of course, and the rest of the fox hunt who I liked. Everyone else was superfluous. Kol killed as he pleased and as long as I didn't witness anything more than him draining someone, I didn't think twice about it.

If I had to choose between some nameless person and Kol or something that would make Kol happy, of course I would choose Kol and his happiness. I would choose him, I realised now, precisely as I would choose Elijah, or Bekah, or Nik. Exactly as I would choose Damon in the waking world. Exactly as I would choose Stefan…

Or Bonnie.

Even though I knew the past five months weren't real, I felt the passage of time in the dream as though they were. When I woke up, it would be anywhere from minutes after the sacrifice to two days later, once Klaus returned. For them, at least. But for me, it would be nearly half a year. Five and a half months in which the sharp sting of betrayal had dulled into a constant, buried ache. Five and a half months in which I put Hanley's memory to rest - in great part due to the fact that I knew she didn't blame me. Five and a half months of being Saoirse, just Saoirse, who was as free as her name. No responsibility, no obligation. Just Kol and whatever we wanted. But still, there were moments when I thought of Mystic Falls. Of Damon, who I missed. Of Stefan and Bonnie, who I missed just as much. And when I started thinking about them, all I could think of was how much Damon had done for me - and how I'd felt when Bonnie shoved me away from her and Stefan took that single step back in dismay.

It hurt.

"Whatever you're thinking of, Saoirse," Kol said in a warning tone as he lay casually back on the bed, "I would advise you to stop. I don't like that look on your face."

Kol didn't comfort people. The closest he might have come would be to rip someone apart and present a limb or something in place of a 'my condolences' card, and there was no one to rip apart in this case. He didn't like it.

"I want to stay with you right now," I told him simply because when I got to the very heart of the matter it was the truth. "That's all."

Whatever he was thinking was beyond my ability to read in his face. Elijah might have been the one on whom the most minute shift of facial expression could indicate the difference between riotous amusement and unbridled fury, but no one, no one could read Kol if he didn't want to be read. He usually didn't care - he usually embraced what he was feeling, gave himself wholly, completely over to rage or hunger or lust - but when that almost terrifyingly blank expression settled on his face there wasn't a being alive who could guess at his thoughts. It passed as quickly as it came, but it left me wondering what it was that I'd said that put that look on his face.

"Write that in your letter too," Kol commanded suddenly, sitting up just to better look me in the eye. "Those exact words - 'I want to stay with Kol.' Rebekah will have a fit."

If I hadn't been with Kol for five and a half months in this dream, I would have been surprised that he said Rebekah and not Nik.

"Just let me find the bloody thing," I agreed easily, and just like that we were as we'd been. Kol's mercurial temper was even less predictable, vividly more intense, than it had been in my dream in which he and his family were human. It was something that I had become accustomed to, had even grown to appreciate. He had his moments, but they went as quickly as they came and I had never been afraid for myself in his presence.

It was my dream, after all, and though I'd been wary, at times, of setting him off further, I felt safe around him in a way it wasn't possible to feel safe around Kol, who was certainly more frightening and unpredictable than Klaus.

"You do that," Kol agreed in satisfaction, laying back and lounging on my bed as though it were his, as though he'd been staying in it every night since we'd come to Henry's, as though by simple virtue of it being mine it belonged to him. "Henry's not up yet but I want to be there when he goes back to Melton to 'see the works his hands have wrought.'"

I stared at him for a moment, for the first time really thinking about how actions had consequences and while Kol and I were exempt, Henry certainly wasn't.

"You won't let him go to prison, will you?" I asked Kol anxiously, because I couldn't really tell. Kol was about as fond of Henry as it was possible for him to be fond of any mortal, human being, but that fondness was entirely dependent on the delicate balance between entertainment and the miniscule amount of effort Kol could be bothered putting in to preserve the source of it.

"I was thinking of turning him, actually," Kol said casually, and I nearly dropped the glass writing case I had picked up to see if I hadn't folded the letter beneath it.

"What?" I asked, and only just resisted adding, 'Are you bloody serious?'

We officially met Henry de La Poer Beresford, 3rd Marquess of Waterford, at a dinner party at a grand house outside of London which, had it been open to the public, probably would have gone down in history just like yesterday would.

(I knew it was just a dream, but a little part of me was thrilled at the idea that I had been there to paint policemen and inns and houses and unfortunates that happened to stumble across our party with the red paint of the gate. I'd gotten drunk, gotten wild, and, in my dream, at least, helped birth an expression that would immortalise our night of wild debauchery - even if no one remembered where 'painting the town red' really came from.)

We unofficially met him two weeks earlier in the slums when he leapt out of nowhere with the intent to frighten me out of my wits - he mistakenly thought I was walking alone - and was pounced on by Kol. We'd read about Spring-Heeled Jack in the papers, you see, and Kol had been delighted to meet the terror of London. So delighted, in fact, that he just compelled him and let him go on his merry way.

Kol usually killed anyone that disrupted our degenerate festivities, but Spring-Heeled Jack had amused him so much that he decided to let him live despite the fact that I spent the rest of the walk back to the tenement building we'd been staying in all but clutching at his arm, spooked. In fact, he had been so taken by the bizarre, flame spitting mad-man that actually wore a strange pair of custom made shoes that allowed him to jump much higher than an ordinary man, that he let him go without unmasking him.

To preserve the novelty, he'd said in explanation, laughing.

I hadn't found it funny at the time.

The second time we met the Henry, we found him looking far more lord like than Spring-Heeled Jack had any right to, having sex with two women at Lady Fairbanks' infamous 'First of the Season' party - a very, very exclusive gathering of the most discreet and degenerate of London's high society. Kol had heard a few things whispered between servants sent to the slums to procure opium for the party and had been intrigued. Neither of us touched opium - Kol said the blood of addicts was tainted, so it followed that he didn't want to indulge for himself and I knew far better than to have anything to do with it.

Still, the rumours had peaked Kol's interest, and it was understood that opium was far from the be all end all of Lady Fairbanks' plans for the evening, so he decided to compel us an invitation. It lived up to every inch of its reputation.

There was drinking, there were an abundance of women for Kol to have his way with, and there was plenty of enjoyment to be found for me without dragging a man to one of the guest rooms, which Lady Fairbanks, or Jane, as she insisted Kol and I call her after he gave her the ride of her life and earned himself and any friend of his a permanent place in the exclusive club of those she favoured, left unassigned specifically for that purpose.

The entire house was free reign barring Jane's own bedroom, which Kol got a private tour of before dinner and revisited at some point during the dancing.

Kol had been with me during hide and seek, though, which was when we found Henry in the library with the wife of an earl, a woman of the same supposed breeding as me (my gran would have been appalled) and a scullery maid. The countess was on her knees in front of him and the maid was sprawled out on the chaise longue.

Even Kol was rather surprised, though not quite horrified as I had been, when the man decided it was only appropriate to introduce himself. Which he did - without ceasing his activities. He was right pissed at the time, of course, but he managed to do it rather eloquently for someone who smelt like brandy from across the room.

Needless to say, Kol found the entire thing hilarious.

I spent the night caught up in a whirlwind of games and dancing, sometimes with Kol, sometimes with out him: at one point I was stumbling across the room playing a rather naughty variation of Blindman's Bluff in which wandering hands were featured, then spent an exhilarating few rounds of the most inappropriate game of hide and seek I'd ever witnessed, and then later even dragged the orchestra outside to play for us because I'd found the most delightful spot in the garden - convincing them hadn't been difficult in the slightest. I'd just asked and there they were.

It was a fairy ring, I'd laughed, my voice high and clear and utterly carefree. It was a fairy ring, I told them all, and I was one of the síth - not the sidhe, I'd corrected, giggling childishly. Couldn't they tell by my accent that I was Scottish? I danced in circles in the ring and soon drew Henry in to join me. The others followed suit - Kol had been last of all, chancing upon our little garden party while seeking me out. I held my hand out to him, laughing in giddy exultation when he took it with a wicked smirk, and the dance went on.

I'd woken up in the morning with my face so close to Kol's our noses were nearly touching, with my fingers tangled with Henry's, lying flat on my back on the grass with my hair strewn about me like a mermaid's in the water with a lopsided, messy crown of flowers in my hair. I vaguely remembered being hailed as Queen of the Wee Folk but pushed the blurry memory to the side in favour of being grateful that I was sandwiched between Kol and Spring-Heeled Jack of all people, wearing a warm, warm coat and a full complement of heavy skirts or I would have been frozen.

We weren't the only people still outside. Several of the people that had danced with us were sprawled out in a mess of tangled limbs and scandalous positions.

Henry woke shortly after I'd woken Kol, clutching at his head in what was no doubt an bloody terrible hangover, and promptly decided to wake the others. When Kol commented on how kind of him it was to get them in from the cold, Henry laughed and said that wasn't it at all - he was dying for another drink and a spot of breakfast, and it was 'Lady' Jane Fairbanks' way that the party wasn't over until the place was in ruins and it wasn't yet. Anything to get back at her useless husband, he said. It was why he liked her.

Kol had laughed, and a beautiful friendship was born.

Thus it was that we were honoured guests in Henry's home now.

I'd grown quite fond of Henry in the time we'd spent with him, but despite that, I knew that turning him into a vampire was a terrible idea. The man was a raging alcoholic - and an admittedly pleasant, if a bit mad, drunk - with a temper nearly as changing and vivid as Kol's had been when he was alive. Turning him would end in disaster, compulsion or not.

"Well, I won't change him now that we're leaving," Kol said with a dismissive wave of his hand. "I shan't have you in a carriage or even the same train car as a baby ripper itching to sink his teeth into your delectable throat - even if he's been compelled not to touch you."

In other words, Kol didn't want to kill him and he would without a thought if he looked too hungrily, too long or lingered too near, too much. It wouldn't be the first time a vampire had died for eyeing me in a way that Kol found…objectionable.

I resisted the urge to sigh in relief and went back to searching for the letter. The sooner I found it and finished it, the better. I was dying to get a maid upstairs to help me out of the damn corset and into a hot bath. Henry wouldn't be up for hours yet anyway since he didn't have the benefit of Kol's jealously guarded blood in his system, so I wouldn't be missing the aftermath of last night.

I couldn't find the bloody thing anywhere.

Of course it turned out that Kol had it.

"I quite like how you described our night at the theatre. 'It must have looked as though Kol was ravishing me against the wall during intermission,'" he read, adopting a put-on, girlish tone. "'I suppose I'll have to specify, next time, from which vein or artery he's permitted to drink in public.' Is that an invitation to try other veins and arteries in private, darling?"

I snatched the letter from him with a prim sniffle but couldn't quite manage to smother a laugh, though I gave it a valiant effort.

"You get the neck and the wrist, Kol, and that's it," I told him, amused. "It makes for a lovely implication though, doesn't it?"

"It doesn't have to be an implication, darling," Kol purred, flashing right in front of me and letting his hand slide down my hip to my thigh, where he tapped where I knew my femoral artery to be with two fingers through my skirts. "We could always make it reality."

"The closest you'll get is in your dreams, Kol," I informed him crisply, and then shot him a wicked, wicked grin. "Although I'm sure they'll be very good ones."

"Minx," he accused in a low growl and lunged for me with a leering grin of amusement.

I let out a little shriek of surprise when he caught me - of course he did - and tried to squirm out of his grip. I burst into a fit of giggles when he tilted my head to the side and lingered there with his fangs a scant inch from my throat.

"Perhaps I should give you a taste," he murmured in that way of his, giving me a playful little nip. "So that you're the one dreaming."

I pulled myself out of his grip, laughing, and then faltered, glancing around us in sudden, wary confusion. It sounded like-

"I don't suppose you can hear that, Kol?" I asked, praying he would say yes, that he would wave his hand dismissively and tell me it was just one of his witches casting a spell just down the hall. I wasn't ready. I didn't want to wake up, to leave - and I knew instinctively that I was going to have to.

"Hear what, Saoirse?" Kol asked in a low, dangerous murmur. His shoulders were tense and his eyes never left mine. He knew I was leaving. Of course he did. And it was almost like he didn't want me to go, either.

Oddly enough, I had to blink back tears.

"I think I'm waking up now. Being resurrected. Whichever," I admitted, though of course he knew I was leaving him. He was just a figment of my imagination - one that I had grown unhealthily attached to. "I can hear the witch that's bringing me back chanting."

It felt like someone was trying to wrench me out of the dream by force.

"Saoirse, it sounds rather like you're telling me you've been killed between when I saw you last and now," Kol informed me in a pleasant tone that made me stiffen in abject terror despite the fact that I knew the fury beneath it wasn't meant for me.

One moment, I was afraid. The next, I wasn't. The chanting was louder, more distinct - a nearly hysterical giggle bubbled up in my throat.

"I was. Well, not killed, exactly." I resisted the urge to wrap my arms around myself. "Kol, I don't want to go back. Not yet. I want to stay here, with you. I don't-"

I didn't want to go back to a reality in which I was the only person that took flowers to Caroline's grave, in which Hanley was dead and I wore the weight of that and the rest of the world round my neck like a millstone. I wanted to stay with Kol where I could do anything I pleased and know that he was there, that I didn't have to be afraid of anything. I didn't want to go back, not yet. Not when I'd wake to missing white oak in the hands of a stranger who just so happened to have a dagger, not when I was sure Silas was going to rise whether we hunted for the cure or not. Not when Mikael was still out there - why, oh, why hadn't I killed him before he could become a problem? Not when there was New Orleans to prepare for and God could only know what else.

My head was splitting.

"Thank you, Kol," I said to him quickly, so sincerely it almost hurt. "I wish-"

In the end, I didn't wish for anything because I was gone.

I came to with a desperate, shuddering gasp, immediately rolling over, raising myself up on shaking arms, and dry heaving over the floor. I was lying on the same platform I had no doubt fallen on to when I died. There was no Klaus in sight.

"You're up," Greta observed with narrowed eyes, and then half dragged me up off the ground and shoved me into Maddox, her eyes narrowed on an indistinct figure I couldn't quite make out, bleary as my vision still was.

"Tell Klaus our business is done," the other person - a woman - advised Greta, and I couldn't help but think there was something vaguely familiar about her voice. "This site is mine. If he plans to use it to perform the sacrifice again, he'll ask me first."

Her voice brooked no argument, not that Klaus was there to argue.

I didn't quite catch what Greta's response was, if there was any, because Maddox started pulling me away, his grip on my wrist too tight.

"Wait, please," I managed awkwardly, my head spinning. "Can you - you're hurting me."

Maddox's grip loosened reflexively, though the pace he was setting didn't falter.

"Sorry." His shoulders were tense. "I hate goddamn Expression."

I blinked, stumbling.

"Expression?" I asked, and it must have been obvious from the way I said it that I knew what it was, because Maddox shot me a stiff look over his shoulder.

"How else did you think he'd bring you back?" He asked, and dragged me along faster.

He didn't stop until we made it to the car and Greta joined us a few minutes later.

"Let's go," she commanded, looking back the way she came with an inscrutable expression. "It's too - Klaus will meet us at the apartment when he's done."

It wasn't hard to guess what she was leaving unsaid. I distinctly remembered her saying that the site of the sacrifice felt wrong somehow - I shuddered to think that it might have been because it was a massacre site, as I was unsure of how an Expression using witch would go about resurrecting a dead person at a place that wasn't.

Whether it was or wasn't, I was glad either way to have been bundled into Alaric's car by Maddox like an invalid and strapped in so that I wouldn't try to do a runner - not that I would have bothered, anyway. I didn't even realise I was crying until I heard Maddox ask Greta if the other witch had 'fucked something up.'

It was going to kill me, I thought numbly to myself, when Elijah got his family back. I'd seen Elijah before I'd dreamt of his human days, so it was rather easy to dissociate him from 'Lijah. It hurt when I saw traces of Nik in Klaus, it did - it was hard not to call him Nik sometimes, when he could have almost been him and that hurt even more. I missed them, the Elijah and Nik from my dream, in the same that I would miss Bekah and the Finn that called me 'little bird' when they woke - and that was after three months with them. I'd spent nearly twice that with Kol, with just Kol, after-

It was going to kill me when Kol called me the doppelganger instead of minx, when he sneered at the inevitably hurt expression that would flicker over my face at the words and walked away instead of telling me to change it and dragging me out until whatever it was that hurt was so far gone from my mind it was as though it didn't exist.

I kept to myself for the rest of the car ride - and the rest of the night.

Just one night, I told myself. I was stuck waiting for Klaus, anyway. I'd already called Damon and John respectively to let them know I was alive and everything else could wait. One night to pull myself the fuck back together because I couldn't go on like this. I had too much to deal with to be sitting on Alaric's couch, crying my eyes out like an idiot over a particularly vivid dream until Klaus got off his happy wolf train.

I was still awake was despite the onset of day when my phone went off.

I'm partial to the bar near which we met.

That was all the text message said. It was also all it needed to say.

"Hello?" Damon grumbled tiredly when he finally, finally picked up the phone.

"Damon, I need you to come get me," I told him quietly, slipping stealthily off Alaric's couch and doing a quick scan of the apartment for paper and a pen. "I'll tell you everything later, but I need you here, now, before the witches wake up."

"I'll be there in five," Damon assured me, all traces of sleep gone from his voice.

It was eleven past six in the morning.

I found a pen but no paper - instead of wasting more time looking, I took a napkin from the table and scrawled a quick note telling Klaus that I wasn't running, that something vital to us both came up and I would tell him all about it when I came back, and that if I wasn't already back by the time he returned to the apartment, which I knew would be within two days time, I would text him an address.

Surely the sight of all those blood bags I'd been stocking up on for months, at this point, would do something to mitigate his anger.

I didn't dare tell him I was going to sort out the white oak problem he hadn't the foggiest clue of, because he'd no doubt go spare when he found out about it and there wouldn't be much he could do until I got back anyway, since he wasn't here now and it was clear from the text message I'd received that I needed to meet Hal today.

"So, what grand adventure are we going on next?" Damon asked when I slipped into the back seat of his car and told him to drive, drive, drive.

"Road trip to Georgia, to Bree's, if you feel up to it," I told him, quickly digging through the bag of clothes I'd brought with me when Klaus picked me up from the Boarding House. "I've got a date, apparently. I wouldn't say no to some drive-thru breakfast, though."

Damon adjusted his course accordingly.

"What are we doing in Georgia and who's this date of yours?" Damon asked casually, glancing briefly at me in the rear view mirror. "If it was Bree you've got business with, you'd have said so."

"Eyes on the road for a minute, please," I requested, and pulled my shirt over my head when I was sure he wasn't looking. I quickly changed into the one I'd pulled out of the bag and shimmied out of my jeans. "Remember how Hal attacked Elijah and was going to send him to the sacrifice with a message for me?"

I pulled on a clean pair of jeans, wishing I'd had time to take a shower.

"That message was an invitation to play a game of billiards with him," I continued, and added a distracted 'you can look now' as a side note. "If it was just that, I'd have waited until Klaus got back rather than risk ticking him off, but I haven't got much choice. He texted me today - I'm dead certain it was him - telling me to meet him at the bar nearest the place we met, which if you recall is when he saved our arses from Lexi's ex after I was kidnapped from Bree's. Two and two is four."

"He's got something over you," Damon surmised, and he was absolutely correct.

"Yes, he does, and I'm going to do whatever it takes to get it back," I told him bluntly, because white oak in anyone's hands but mine - and I was the exception only to take Mikael out - was something I could not, would not allow. "By the way, on our way out of Mystic Falls, I need to make a quick detour to burn down Wickery Bridge."

If Hal hadn't done it already, I added to myself, berating myself for the oversight.

"Alright, so our plans for today are donuts? Donuts sound good?" Damon asked idly, tapping a finger against the steering wheel. I nodded. "Good," he continued. "So donuts, arson, and then some drinks and a couple rounds of pool at Bree's. Why can't every day be like this?"

I laughed a little breathlessly despite myself.

"I've missed you, Damon," I admitted, my heart clenching at the truth in the words.

Damon shot me an odd look in the rear view mirror for that, but I didn't care. I needed to say it. I had missed him - even if it was just in stolen moments in a dream.

Things were quiet for a while after that. We stopped for donuts, at which point I switched to the passenger seat, and then for gasoline - and matches. It turned out that Hal hadn't touched the bridge itself; the sign was missing, but the rest of it was more or less intact. I distantly recalled there being a fundraiser to restore it at one point but quickly shoved the thought aside.

Damon compelled a man we found at the gas station to set the bridge on fire and make sure there was nothing but ashes left of it. We stayed long enough to make sure the entire bridge was on fire before setting out.

The drive to Georgia seemed to pass in a stilted crawl - I didn't trust myself to sleep, so I forced myself to endure the whole of it awake. Damon seemed to sense my reticent mood because he didn't ask about the sacrifice, instead talking about the plan and making light conversation here and there - well, what passed for light conversation in his black-hearted little world, which was entertaining in an occasionally rather mean-spirited towards others sort of way. It put me in mind of when I'd danced with him at the Founder's Party. It was almost fun.

Of course, the easy atmosphere between us fizzled to tense wariness hours later when we arrived at our destination and found all the lights out - except for the neon sign advertising 'POOL TABLES' in the far right window of the establishment.

It flickered.

"Still want every day to be like today, D?" I asked after a moment in which I gathered my wits and debated how to best go about dealing with what was promising to be a disaster.

"Oh, yeah," Damon said sarcastically. "You know haunted bars are my favourite, L."

The look on his face told me he was wondering if Bree was the witch Hal had been working with. He looked like he regretted letting me keep him from killing her.

I, honestly, was more concerned with Hal himself.

He was dangerous.

Father, I implored quietly in my mind, willing him to hear me. A bit of help, please?

For a brief, wild moment, I thought of Tyler, of all people, and hunger stirred in the pits of my stomach. I swallowed, hard, blinking the image away.

"You were dead," I breathed in aching, desperate hope. "You were human. How-"

I felt like I was going to be sick.

"We have a hybrid - fine The Hybrid - a vampire, an Original vampire, a witch who can't use magic, and…and me. Fantastic. It's fine. We'll be fine. We're only going up against-"

My stomach lurched and I doubled over.

"Impossible-" Klaus snarled. "You'll beg for death before I'm done with you."

No, no, no, that wasn't what I-

"It was Silas. I - I saw myself talking to you, and I thought, I thought I would finally-" I wanted to die. "I thought it was real. It wasn't. He was just fucking with my head. He made me believe that-"

My head felt like it was being stabbed.

"I promised, do you remember?" He asked, his hazel grey eyes fixed on mine in single-minded intensity. "That I'd never hurt you. That I'd never act against your interests. Prince Hal conquers the kingdom and makes Fair Kate queen. You know you can trust me. Didn't I prove myself to you when I gave you the white oak? When I-"

It was a torrent of images and sounds, most of which were utterly incomprehensible to me. The only fragments big enough to understand were snippets of dialogue that I didn't understand - things that hadn't happened yet, that might never happened.

If my visions usually came like tap water from a sink, this time they had come from a high-pressure hose in the hands of a drunk.

"Damon," I managed after a minute. There were two things on my mind - two things only.

"Vision?" He guessed. I nodded.

"Hal - trustworthy." I wrapped my arms around my midsection to - I wasn't sure. Prevent myself from using them, perhaps. "I'm-"

Hal could be trusted - I'm sure that was the purpose of that snippet being the focal point of the mess, both the longest vision and the last. Two things. Two things on my mind. Hal was trustworthy-

And I was nearly dizzy with want.

"I'm going in," I said instead of telling Damon that, because it was manageable still. I slammed it into the farthest reach of my being - I wasn't starving, I'd just been hungry for a minute. That was all.

"Not by yourself you're not," Damon scoffed, his hand settling on my shoulder. "Are you okay? You look-"

I swallowed hard and tried to centre myself.

"I'm fine. I just - I asked Father for some guidance and he gave me a vision. Of sorts." I resisted the urge to step away from him because nothing screamed 'I lied, I'm not fine,' quite like attempting to escape expressions of concern. "I just got a touch of vertigo for a minute there is all. Now, we have a frankly terrifying looking bar to stupidly walk into. If you're coming, keep up."

I was fine. It was fine.

"Are you sure this guy is trustworthy?" Damon asked lightly as we approached the black building and the eerie 'POOL TABLES' sign in the window, which conveniently flickered again right as he spoke.

"He gives me back what he took - and at some point before that promised not to act against my interests," I told Damon, though it was very hard to trust in that when Bree's bar loomed dark and terrible before us in a way no bar should ever look at night. "Father - the cù sìth - he wouldn't lead us into a trap."

It was hard for someone like Damon to trust in something he couldn't see, which made me appreciate it, appreciate him, twice as much when he trusted in me instead.

"If we die here, I'm going to haunt your every step on the Other Side," Damon promised throwing an arm around my shoulder and practically dragging me towards the bar. "I swear to God, Lena, you're going to be so sick and tired of me hounding you you're going to build Another Side out of legos and even that won't get you away from me."

"I suppose it's a good thing neither of you shall die, then." A horrible cracking sound resounded throughout the parking lot. "Well, not permanently, at least."

Damon fell and I only just managed to catch him.

"I'm afraid I lured you here dishonestly, lady mine," Hal lamented with a sigh. "We shan't be playing any snooker tonight."

I was so struck by the colour of his eyes - that hazel grey - that for a moment I stared up at him in bewilderment. I'd thought he was a vampire, but-

"What are you?" I asked him without thinking, and immediately regretted it.

"A liar," he answered easily, though his eyes never left mine. "Among other things."

Footsteps crunched on loose gravel behind me and I turned around, unwilling to expose my back to Hal, to find Bree - the same Bree whose life I'd saved, who I'd grown to like during her various trips to Mystic Falls - walking towards us. I clutched Damon tighter in my arms, wishing he'd wake up and vamp speed us both the hell out of there.

"Why am I here, Hal?"

I'm not sure why, but it unnerved me more when his face grew grim than it would have if he had laughed and not stopped laughing.

"Because I'm running out of time and we're going to kill Mikael."

I'd seen those eyes before. Eyes of hazel grey…

To be continued in The Sins of the Father II.