"This is stupid."
"Hope, just do the frikkin' spell!"
The Tribrid was still standing with her palms on the sides of Lizzie's forehead when the latter's bright blue eyes snapped open. Annoyed, she dropped her arms and folded them across her chest.
"Why can't you just get Josie to do it?" She questioned, knowing very well why but hoping that the reminder would get Lizzie to realize the ridiculousness of her request in the first place.
"Josie is taking a little 'break' from magic right now which I think is pretty selfishly timed considering her only sister needs her help. Her OWN sister!" Her eyes were wide with disbelief as she spoke and Hope had to try her best not to laugh, wondering if Lizzie was being intentionally oblivious.
"You're doing a spell to find some random piece of paper that you lost," Hope clarified. "That's hardly worth Josie interrupting her no-magic rule, a break that she needs right now by the way."
"Okay, first of all," Lizzie began, "That 'piece of paper' isn't random, it has some very important information on it that isn't safe in anyone else's hands."
"Right."
"And secondly," Lizzie continued like she hadn't heard Hope, "It's not exactly lost; I just kept it somewhere really safe and don't remember where…"
"It's lost."
"My point is," Lizzie said with gritted teeth, "Wherever it is, I can't just be strutting in and taking it because that will just make things worse!"
"Is that why you're not doing a good ol' locator spell and picking it up yourself?"
"Have I been talking to a wall all this time?" Lizzie's eyes went wide and it took Hope all she had to not storm off. "The spell we're doing will not only allow you to delve deep into my memory but also physically extract the object we're looking for so that we won't even have to go looking for it in the first place!"
"You do realize how complicated this is, don't you?"
"Yes and you already agreed to do this for me."
"I just thought it will be great practice for my magic," Hope shrugged. "You're the one who came to me, Lizzie. Should I be flattered?" She asked, placing her palm on her heart in mock surprise.
"No," Lizzie scowled, "It's because you'll be getting the chance to see my secret, maybe even embarrassing memories and you're the only one who no one will believe if you decide to tell those stories about me."
"Just admit it, you know I'm a great witch."
"Whatever, let's just get this over with," Lizzie narrowed her eyes at Hope who stepped forward and brought her hands to Lizzie's forehead again. Hope began to chant the spell and the two of them closed her eyes.
As the words flowed out and the spell began to advance, Hope thought back on her prep. She knew the basic theory; it was essentially part locator-spell combined with aspects of a teleportation spell which was, in hindsight, quite complex in itself.
Just as she began to suspect that the spell wasn't working, something flickered in her head and she saw a crack of light. Curious, she began to mentally push herself towards it but was suddenly sucked into the crack with a loud pop.
Hope opened her eyes and the first thing she saw was what looked like the ceiling of a run-down shed; only then realizing she was lying on the floor. She sat up and rubbed her head.
"Lizzie?" She called out softly. She got to her feet and looked around the very dusty room that was covered with drawings, articles and hand-drawn charts.
"Triad?" She read out loud from one of the extensively laid out plans that had been pinned up on a board and walked over to a large cluttered table in the middle of the room.
Is this what the inside of Lizzie's mind looked like? A war room?
She was about to start looking for a way out when something among the pile of newspapers on the table caught her eye. She rushed towards it and pulled out the roughly cut-out clipping with a large headline and sketched portraits of two criminals on the run. Her eyes went wide as she realized it was a picture of exactly who she thought it was.
Dad…?
A knock from somewhere further away and the murmur of voices snapped her out of her surprise as she gripped the paper in her hand. She could have sworn she heard Ric talking to someone.
All of a sudden, the room began to shake and the last thing she was aware of before everything went black was Lizzie's voice calling her name.
"Hope!"
In what felt like a split-second, Hope opened her eyes to see she was back in her room… with a very eager looking Lizzie staring back at her.
"Well?" She asked, "Did it work?" Hope grimaced, feeling slightly dizzy.
"I'm not sure, actually…"
"What is this?" Lizzie snatched something out of Hope's clutch that she hadn't realized she was holding on to all this while.
"Hey!"
"Why is there a picture of Mom next to your supervillain Dad in the news? No offense." Hope grabbed the clipping back from Lizzie.
"So, it did work!" She laughed, feeling the crumpled paper between her fingers to confirm it was actually there.
"I don't know what that spell did to your head but that there is not my note, Hope."
"No, I meant I managed to extract the object from your memories!" Hope scoffed. "Speaking of which, what even is this?" She waved the cut-out in front of Lizzie, who frowned.
"How am I supposed to know?"
"What do you mean, I got it from your memory! And the inside of your head was like this weird control-center room –"
"What are you talking about? I've never seen this before in my life."
Hope paused; despite the paper having come from Lizzie's memories being the only explanation she could think of, she knew Lizzie was telling the truth.
Lizzie was a lot of things but a liar was not one of them.
"That's weird." Hope began to wonder if something went wrong with the spell. "Maybe we should read the article. It might tell us something."
"Finally, something we agree on."
The two of them sat on Hope's bed and she laid out the paper before them, starting to read it out.
"So, the headline says 'Enemies of the State'… that can't be good."
"The date is current so that's even weirder."
"War wages on," Hope began to read, "as hybrid Klaus Mikaelson and his wife vampire–"
"Wait, did you just say wife?"
"Yeah, it says here," Hope ran her finger under the line, "Caroline… Mikaelson?"
"So… wife as in my mother is the 'wife' in this scenario?"
"That's what it looks like," Hope said with a shrug. Lizzie pulled the paper closer to her and continued.
"The couple, ugh, were last seen in Paris, as –"
"You know it's not that crazy an idea that your mom and my dad could be together," Hope interrupted suddenly.
"Oh please, Mom would never. No offense, Hope, but with that kind of gruesome history, I doubt she'd even consider hanging out with him, much less dating him."
Hope scoffed. "Well, you've clearly formed an opinion on my Dad based on 'The Chronicles of Ric' in our library where he is flatly labelled the 'Big Bad Wolf' in every way possible."
"The chapter is literally called 'Klaus Mikaelson: The Great Evil'."
"I saw them kiss once," Hope suddenly blurted out and Lizzie's face snapped to hers.
"What?"
"Okay, not exactly," Hope tilted her head at Lizzie who was still looking at her in shock. "It was more like an almost kiss." Lizzie stared at Hope for a moment before speaking again.
"You're lying."
"It was the night you and Josie extracted the Hollow out of me," Hope recalled. "Dad and uncle Elijah had taken me to the town square for one last night of fun before I…" Hope cleared her throat. "Before I was supposed to die."
"What was Mom doing there?"
"She'd come to bring us back to the school for the spell," Hope explained. "I was dancing with Landon when I saw her join Dad in the distance."
"Wait, you knew that thrift store hobbit before –" Lizzie shook her head. "Okay, not the point. What did Mom do?"
"I was too far away to hear anything and I don't think they knew I was watching," Hope shrugged. "At first it looked like they were just talking and then next thing I see my Dad and Ms. Forbes standing close and leaning into each other, completely unaware of the world around them."
"You're just making it sound romantic," Lizzie argued.
"I'm just telling you what I saw," Hope insisted. "If the bell in the Town Square hadn't struck at the time, who knows, they might even have kissed. Or maybe…" She sighed. "Maybe at the time I was just hoping for someone like Ms. Forbes in Dad's corner after I died."
"That's just incredibly sad," Lizzie nodded. "But… wife? Hard to picture that wedding."
"I feel like my Dad having lived that long would have been SO over things like marriage," Hope mused.
"Or he might have been a secret romantic with a whole themed wedding in mind," Lizzie suggested.
"Wait, you're on his side now?"
"I feel like Mom would have brought that out in him."
The two of them laughed together at the thought of Caroline bossing Klaus around to make sure the wedding festivities went perfect before continuing to go through the rest of the article.
"The couple were last seen in Paris, blah blah blah," Lizzie read.
"That's romantic."
"Okay, now you're just reaching."
"What are you guys doing?"
Both Hope and Lizzie's heads whipped towards the new voice in the room to see Josie standing at the door. Lizzie sighed and turned to Hope.
"Are you going to tell her or should I?"
Few minutes and a very briefly summarized version of events later, Josie sat at the bed with them and glanced at the newspaper clipping.
"We need to read the rest of that," she said simply and Hope picked up where they left off.
"They seemed to have interviewed some mysterious ex-friend of Ms. Forbes for information on how they met," Hope said, skimming through the article. "When asked how they met she replied 'I suppose they officially met at her house, Klaus had got her werewolf boyfriend at the time to bite her, so she was suffering from a fatal werewolf bite, Klaus went to heal her."
"That's dramatic," Lizzie commented.
"Wait a second," Josie said suddenly. "I think I know this story."
"You do?" Hope's eyebrows raised in surprise.
"Yeah, how do you know this?" Lizzie added, feeling a little left out. Josie turned to her.
"Lizzie, do you remember that bracelet Mom was always obsessed with keeping safe?"
"Obviously," Lizzie scoffed. "I've been trying to get Mom to let me wear it for the Miss Mystic falls event and she just won't let go."
"Well, one day she told me the story behind it and it sounds somewhat like what's on the article," Josie said excitedly. "It was apparently a birthday gift from Klaus Mikaelson when he came to heal Mom at her home."
Lizzie cleared her throat, trying not to pout. "So why didn't Mom tell me this story?" Josie shook her head.
"I guess you were just a little pre-occupied at the time," she replied with an awkward smile.
"I think we're forgetting the biggest question," Hope interrupted. "How did this end up in Lizzie's head? I'm sure I did the spell right so it had to be from her memories."
"I told you," Lizzie insisted. "I have no idea what you are talking about and have never seen this newspaper clipping before. You probably did something wrong or broke into the mind of some Alternate Universe Lizzie…" she scoffed, crossing her arms.
"What? You've been reading too many comic books."
"Who told you that? I'm not a nerd!"
"Oh, that reminds me why I came in here," Josie spoke, putting a stop to the other two witches' bickering. "Raf said he found a piece of paper in the common room…" she said, addressing Lizzie. "…with a love poem to The Flash signed off by you."
"He WHAT?!"
"THAT was what all this was for?!"