Willoughby Main Street - The Sunshine Diner

This was a long day, and it was a long time coming. Stefan and I had rescued Damon after Elena and Rebekah had stolen his car and abandoned him back in New York City. We managed to track down his beloved car, with the help of Sheriff Forbes. It was dumped on the side of the interstate, out of gas. We followed the trail, sightings of their next stolen car, this time from a family of tourists. That car was spotted just outside of Willoughby, the creamed corn capital of Pennsylvania.

It was easy enough to find them from there, Katherine and Rebekah were sat inside the only open establishment on the Main Street. A lot of time was wasted in that diner, Rebekah and Katherine bickered back and forth, a hand was crushed, and Damon got a few verbal jabs in, but we were still none-the-wiser as to where my sister was.

"I can give you a hint. Start by looking at the town morgue. She's probably dead." Katherine suggested, and was met by a chorus of unimpressed faces, waiting for her to elaborate. She rolled her eyes and told us, "She went to meet up with a friend of mine. You may know him-an Original brother, impeccable taste."

Rebekah, looking a little distraught, asked, "Elijah?"

"Elijah's here?" Damon groaned.

"Well, you sort of have to question Elijah's impeccable taste if he's friends with you." Stefan stated.

I scoffed in response.

"Oh, when I say friend, I mean friend." Katherine sang.

Damon, Rebekah and I all groaned in disgust. I told myself in that moment that my disgust solely came from the fact that someone I thought was on my side was sleeping with the cretin that had handed my brother over to Silas; and maybe from that smug untouchable smirk she had plastered all over her face. Had Elena not needed nor wanted the cure, had she been there with us, safe, the quietly quaint Sunshine Diner would have been on the 6 O'clock news that night.

"It probably took him about ten seconds to realise that she wasn't me, at which point he probably yanked her heart right out of her chest." Katherine determined.

"He wouldn't do that." I said, tersely.

Katherine's attention shot to me and she asked. smugly, "How are you so sure, Little Girl?"

"Where are they?" Stefan asked her, firmly, but she wouldn't give it up. He turned to Rebekah and said, "Rebekah, you do realise if something should happen to Elena, you have no chance of finding the cure, right?

"Fine." Rebekah sighed, and said, "They were supposed to meet at the gazebo by the park."

Stefan rose from the table, and said, "I'll go talk to Elijah."

"You deal with Elijah." Rebekah said, "Katherine will take us to the cure."

"No, she won't." Katherine scoffed, loudly, "The cure is my one chance to win my freedom back from Klaus."

"You're gonna broker a deal with Klaus?" Damon laughed.

"No." I said, leaning forward a little to enjoy every inch of her reaction, "She'll have Elijah broker the deal for her. That's why you need your little friend, isn't it, Old Lady?"

"Some things never change, Katherine." Stefan said, with a roll of the eye.

"Nope." Damon chuckled.

"Fine." Katherine huffed out and barked to Rebekah, "Move. You have to follow me."

Stefan turned to me, and asked, "You coming?"

"I'm good." I rasped, and followed Damon out of the diner.


Katherine's House (allegedly)

Damon had already warned Katherine before we'd made it through the threshold: No sudden moves. No tricks either. No Katherine-ing. Katherine, of course, took none of that on board. She sashayed around her house, and finally opened up a hidden safe behind her bookcase. She gasped with all the conviction of a black and white silent film star. Her cure, it was there, and now...it was gone! A few tussles, more back and forth, and some snide remarks later, it was deduced it had to be somewhere in this old lady house.

"You gotta get in the ride head space, Barbarino." Damon suggested to me, "If you were a paranoid, distrustful sociopath, where would you keep your most prized possession?"

Katherine chuckled, "Oh. This should be fun."

I narrated my search around the living room for our hostage, "Okay. I'd want it to be close, but not on me. Accessible but not obvious. I'd want to keep it safe, but not so safe that it'd be too difficult to grab and run." I stopped and pointed at her fish tank, and posed, "Well, that is a fancy little treasure chest-in a tank with no fish."

I glanced back at Katherine, but she said nothing. Damon sauntered over to the fish tank, gleefully, and said, "I think I'm gonna have to check that out."

He dipped his hand into the water and was immediately burned.

"Aah! Gah! Vervain water. Looks like we have a winner." Damon huffed, "Barbs, if you would be so kind."

I scooped out the chest. Katherine flashed across the room, and slammed me into the bookcase. She shoved Damon's head down into the vervain water, and then threw him across the room. Damon writhed around in pain. Katherine bolted for the door but Rebekah appeared directly in front of her.

"Give it to me or you're dead." Rebekah seethed.

"You're gonna kill me anyway." Katherine scorned back, "So, what's more important to you, huh? Killing me or getting the cure?"

Katherine threw a small pill-shaped object up into the air behind her, and dashed out of the front door. Rebekah didn't care. She had chosen long before that fraction of a second and she ran to catch it.

Damon growled, "Look, Rebekah...Don't even think about it."

Rebekah stood up, in complete unshakable awe that she finally held her long-sought-after cure in her own hands. I rose up from the shattered bookcase, and cricked my neck and jostled my agonized shoulder, checking I still could.

Damon groaned out, "Let's just talk about this, like the two rational vampires that we are. Rebekah?"

Rebekah, still staring at the mystical object propped between her fingertips, said, "Oh, give it a rest. Me taking this cure is the best thing that'll ever happen to you."

"Don't do anything stupid." Damon begged.

"Admit it!" Rebekah scoffed, "You don't want Human-Elena running back to Stefan whilst you're left out in the cold again. Go on, Damon. Tell me why you want Elena to have the cure."

Damon said absolutely nothing; he just lay there, flopped down on the floor, his skin sizzling and healing over in the silence.

"Damon!" I scorned at him.

Rebekah smiled, and said, "That's what I thought."


The Sunshine Diner

It wasn't the cure. It was a concentrated dose of Vervain; she was knocked out for all of two minutes, and then a letter opener sent hurtling towards her face confirmed that her reflexes were still far from human. It was all still to play for, right? There was still a chance for Elena? Not quite.

"Sit anywhere you'd like." Jolene the waitress sang chirpily to the Salvatore brothers as they entered the Sunshine Diner for the final time.

Damon and Stefan slid into the booth and each sat beside a Gilbert sister. I was sat opposite Elena, picking apart the bread roll that accompanied the soup of the day, which sat full, and ice cold before me.

"You all right?" Stefan asked, his gaze drifting between Elena and I.

Elena looked up at them both, but said nothing; I figured this cool calculating look had to be an ass-hole doppelganger trait.

"What's up with the silent treatment?" Damon scoffed, "You're the one that texted us and wanted to meet up."

"Wait for it." I said, darkly.

"You know I don't want the cure." Elena announced to them, "You need to know that I never will and I'm done talking about it. So...will you accept that and let me be who I am, or not?"

Damon and Stefan exchanged a confused look between them.

"Yeah...no." Damon scorned.

"Elena, this isn't you." Stefan implored.

"It is now." Elena said, and casually took a sip of her coffee, "And you two really need to accept it, like Rosanna finally has. If you don't accept it, there will be consequences."

"What the hell does that mean?" Damon scorned at me.

"Listen, I was in the exact same situation that you're in right now." Stefan said, "My emotions were off. I wasn't me. And you refused to accept that. You didn't give up on me. You didn't stop until you pulled me back."

Elena set down her mug at the side of the booth, which cued the return of happy, smiley Jolene.

"Let me just top that off for you." Jolene said, kindly.

Elena smiled a twisted fake smile at her, and said, "Thanks."

She flashed out of her seat and snapped Jolene's neck. The sound of the snap pierced my heart. Her body slumped to the floor; the pitcher of coffee shattered and splattered everywhere.

"Oh!" Damon huffed out, shocked at her sudden display of violence.

"Like I said, consequences." Elena explained, coolly, "That's one body you're responsible for. If you keep trying to fix me, there'll be a second, a twentieth, and a hundredth. It's your choice."

She smiled at us all, took in our stunned expressions, and then picked up her purse, casually, and sauntered out of the diner.

Damon and Stefan were fixated on the dead body beside our table. Damon sighed and eventually looked over at his brother. He asked him, "You still ready to ride off into the sunset?"

"I'm leaving." I muttered, and rose from the table.

"Yeah. Let's get out of here." Stefan said, glancing around at the mercifully empty diner.

"No." I said, and I stopped them both from following me, "I...can't watch her do this. I can't follow her trail of bodies for god knows how long and cling to a teeny tiny thread of hope that she's gonna come back."

"We are going to get her back." Stefan determined.

"Yeah." I huffed out, "Yeah, maybe you are...You know, I am always this close to burning down everything around me at any given moment...and yeah, my twin brother being murdered was a freaking hum-dinger. But I am still here...for her! And she couldn't do that for me. So, I can't do this. I just don't have it in me, anymore."


Elijah's Apartment - 23:05

I thought I would be done crying by then, I figured I'd be empty. I certainly felt empty. Numb. The whole drive back, in the car that Damon had compelled away for me, I was numb. Hot tears had strewn their way south from tender lashes and wove their way down to the very ridge of my jaw. Plop. To my chest. To the seat of the car. Down my neck. They left me.

I grew more and more frustrated as I paced around the apartment, throwing random things into a bag with varied force. I turned at the uncertain sound, and froze instantly upon seeing Elijah stood in the open doorway.

"Elijah." I huffed out.

Elijah entered his own apartment, tentatively, and closed the door behind him. He said, " I...was standing outside the charred remains of your family home."

Once his words broke the stinging silence in the room, I allowed myself to believe it. He was really there, stood before me. I turned away from him, and I wiped my eyes with hands buried inside sweater sleeves, and whispered, "Yeah. Wasn't me this time."

"I should have answered that call." Elijah stated as he approached me, and offered his pocket square to me, "A mistake I regret deeply."

I took it, hesitantly, and said, "I should have let it ring for more than two seconds."

Elijah released a small chuckle, and then he said, "I was unkind last we spoke."

My mind was clouded and clogged up with enough sadness, and grief, I didn't particularly want to hash this one out. My heart was shattered too fine, I couldn't tell which piece belonged to that night.

"Did you give the cure to Klaus?" I asked him, "Is that why you're standing outside my door? You need to tell me that face to face?"

"Well, there was no door to stand before." He joked, and said, "And, no. It is still in my possession. I intend to give the cure to the person who would benefit from it most."

"And, who did you determine that to be?" I asked him.

Elijah took a beat, and then explained, "Originally, I had it earmarked for Katerina's deal, with Klaus, as I'm sure you are aware, to buy her freedom. And then, Rebekah spoke up. I challenged her to live as a human for an entire day, to prove that her desire is not a mere whim, to prove that she truly understands what she is giving up."

"It comes up almost every time I've spoken to her." I told him, "It's no whim."

"I considered that speaking with you might change my mind one final time, hence the hour." Elijah said, "I worried my call would wake you, but here I see our conversation merely interrupts your...fleeing town?"

"I'm not fleeing." I replied, tersely.

"I'm so very sorry to hear about your brother." He said, "And your sister's...absence."

"Thank you." I rasped.

"May I ask where you are headed?"

"I'm helping out a friend of mine. Friend...now in the loosest of terms." I explained, with a heavy heart, "She needs help finding her family. And I can't stay in Mystic Falls because it feels as though I've completely lost mine." My voice wavered at the end but I recovered it, and stuffed it all down, and I told him, "But...Stefan and Damon and Caroline...they are ever-hopeful that Elena will come back to us, so she's left in good hands."

"Does a small part of you not share that hope?" Elijah asked.

I huffed out a lot of pent up emotion, and I said, "Of course. But I'm tired of feeling this way. It's like a wound that can't close over."

Elijah took the lead, and stood tall before me. His hands caressed my upper arms, and coaxed my eyes to focus solely on his as he spoke, "You need to heal. You need to think only of yourself for what I suspect is the first time. Your sister loves you, Rosanna, it is only the curse of a life she never wanted that grips her, and the sheer magnitude in which she loves you and Jeremy that has brought her to this place. It will end. She will come back to you, and you must make sure that there is something to come back to. Allow yourself to heal."

I allowed something of a smile to slip through the cracks, and I told him, "I...uh, I missed you. I could've done with the whole swooping in at the last minute thing. We had a good routine going."

"As I, you." He said, his eyes darting between mine, "You are not alone, Rosanna. If I may be so bold, consider that SOS radar back on?"

"You...don't have to do that." I said.

"No. I don't." Elijah replied, and stepped back, "Go on this adventure of yours, safe in the knowledge that you are not alone."

"Mm-hmm." I hummed.

"Take care of yourself." He said, and disappeared out of the apartment.