Rough times, y'all, rough times. I'm sorry I can't bring you more cuteness (YET!) than the little snapshot smack dab in the middle of this pitch-dark chapter. Everything will be worth it, I promise.

Soundtrack:
Knife Party – "Ghost Train" from Lost Souls EP
Laivue - "Kaarnalaivue" from Laivue
This Heat – "Health and Efficiency" from Health and Efficiency
Totorro – "Home Alone" from Home Alone


October 31, 2015

The first few months were like a nightmare so horrible the brain blocks out any memory of it, but not perfectly, so the nightmare forces its way through in stabs and flashes. Pinpricks of bloodstained light in an inky darkness: gnashing teeth, no, fangs, faces she doesn't know, the face she does know but just wanted to forget, the sneering moon, running water, soaking rain, the smell of machine oil and rust grinding against rust, dark thick red blood in a spreading pool across filthy concrete, fingernails clawing at the door of an intangible prison, those faces again, that face again, and the song, oh, the song. Her song. She hears it even now, quiet but defiant in the back of her skull, at once music and madness, lullaby and lashing. Telling her to do things without telling her at all. Making her do things. She's a puppet. She's a

"ID? Yes, hello? I need to see some ID."

"No you don't." Nora's green eyes bore into his dark brown ones, her pupils dilating.

The bartender shakes his head a little and his expression completely changes. He smiles a bit as he starts to say, "That'll be—"

"Free." She completes the sentence for him."

". . . on the house." He pushes the round of shots toward them. They're Halloween themed, with miniature lemon imitations on the rim colored to look like jack-o-lanterns.

"See?" Mary Louise looks even more smug than usual. "I told you it was better if you just let go." She looks at the bartender, then back at Nora. "Now ask him to tell us about the worst thing he's ever done."

"I thought we were off duty tonight," Nora returns pointedly.

"We're never off duty. Small price to pay for a free pass on an eternity of misery. Now ask him." Mary Louise, even in this pit of darkness, even with her humanity switch flipped past off into fallen completely off the wall, still knows how to glare at Nora in just the right way to make her do exactly as she says. And Nora hates herself for obeying—but is it Mary Lou she's playing servant to, or someone else?—but she does anyway, dissociates three feet above her body as she turns back to the bartender, compels him again: "What's the worst thing you've ever done? Be completely honest."

The dark-haired man furrows his brow. "When I was a kid, my little brother loved this little stuffed rabbit with long lanky arms. He was a showman, and always was dancing around, spinning, cartwheeling with that stupid fucking rabbit. I was two years older, got better grades, played more sports, but who cares if we can watch the cutie boy waltz with the bunny, right? Little fuckin' piece of shit." He smacks his glass-cleaning cloth against the bar. "So one night, after he was all finished with putting on the show of his life for my mom's whole side of the family on Christmas, sleeping soundly in his bed, I snuck down off the top bunk and stole that rabbit and took it outside and ripped its stupid head off and threw it in the sewer."

Nora glances at Mary Louise, who is laughing so hard she's barely even making any noise save the rattling noise the legs of the stool she's sitting on are making on the floor, before looking back at the bartender. "That's the worst thing you've ever done?"

"That's what you asked, isn't it?" He looks confused. Indignant, even.

"Nora, Nora, my love, you're doing it all wrong." Mary Louise is too at home in sociopathy. Now it's her turn to compel him as she asks, "What's the most illegal thing you've ever done?"

This time his face goes pale, and the words tiptoe out of his mouth like he's doing everything he can to hold them in. "A few months ago this crackhead was begging for money on the subway. I was the only one on the car other than him, but he still went around as if it were full of people, asking each invisible space for change. It was pissing me off, so I got up and slashed his throat with my pocketknife and then got off at the next stop."

Nora is speechless. It feels like ages before she finally musters the words to respond. "So you killed a person, another human being, THIS YEAR, and when I asked you to tell us about the worst thing you've ever done, you still said it was throwing your little brother's stuffed rabbit into a sewer."

He looks even more confused than before. "Well, yeah. I killed someone, sure, I guess, but I mean, it was just a crackhead, right? No one's gonna miss him."

Nora can feel Mary Louise's eyes boring into the side of her face, but she refuses to give her the satisfaction of returning the gaze. "You know that's an immensely immoral way to think, right?"

The bartender shrugs. "What are you gonna do, damn me to hell?"

When Nora knows her parasitic companion is no longer looking at her, she finally turns, but she regrets it when she sees the sadistic twinkle in Mary Lou's eye as she replies, "You know what, we just might. What time do you get off?"

With a look of both surprise and cockiness, obviously assuming things would go a very different way, he says, "usually around midnight, if someone else is staying on. Where can I meet you?"

"The alley out back," Mary Louise answers, with a seductiveness so palpably forced it's like there's cheap perfume surrounding her instead of air.

The bartender looks at her skeptically, then shrugs and smiles. "Sure thing. And what was your name again?"

"Sybil."

The music seems so loud, like a physical force beating on Nora's eardrums and the entirety of her skull, and all around them people are dancing, moving in a mass that undulates in jagged, erratic waves, and all the noise in all of her senses, sweat and copper and red light and pounding bass and an unsettling chill, starts to blur into a single . . . face.

"Nora, darling. How are you? It's been too long . . . in fact, I was beginning to wonder if you were shutting me out on purpose. That would be most unwise. A Siren always finishes her song, one way or another. Best to stay in key, hmm?"

"Get out of my head."

"You know, this would all be so much easier if you just flipped that pesky little humanity switch. Really streamlines the process, as it were. You and I are both well aware that you don't have much choice in the matter, anyway. Because I already showed you what awaits you if you don't serve me. And I can show you again, as a reminder, anytime you like."

"Please don't. Never again. I— never again."

"Then start getting those numbers up, girl! Mama Sybil is starving. Please and thank you!"


November 26, 2015

Sometimes she can find a bit of solace in daydreams and memories. Keeping Sybil out of her head never gets any easier or less taxing, and she doesn't have any time to think about anything or anyone else. But every once in a while, when one of them hoists the bare meathook stripped of an especially morally devoid meal, the Siren is temporarily sated and therefore distracted, and Nora can retreat into the part of her mind she keeps locked away from even herself, her thoughts retreating to the soft patch of light like a cautious tiptoe backward or a doze with one eye open. Because if she finds this, it's all over.

She kept track of the days, at first. She hasn't for some time now; it only ever made the despair cut sharper and deeper. But, somehow, she knows today is Christmas. And so, while in reality crumpled on the dingy cot in the corner of the slaughterhouse that reeks of rotten meat and dried blood, she closes her and curls up elsewhere, in one of the best memories she has. Her brain is tired and overwrought, so each recollection she calls up gets staler and staler the more she escapes to it; she's been saving this one. For when she needed it most.


November 27, 2014

"Okay, I'm gonna run through the checklist one last time. Just to be safe. Because who knows, maybe I put something out the window instead of in the fridge."

"Death by crockpot to the head, Fargo heater style. What a way to go that would be."

"Much faster and less agonizing than the stress of cooking this whole damn meal. Now I just want to eat it. They're getting antsy in there, I can tell. Alright. Stuffing."

"Check."

"Mashed potatoes."

"Check."

"Care's green bean casserole."

"All warmed up and ready to go."

"Damon's cranberry sauce."

"Chilled to perfection."

"Stefan's soup."

"Soupy, one might say."

"Matt's allegedly home-cooked stuffed mushrooms?"

"Still arranged in suspiciously uniform rows."

"Enzo's biscuits."

"Piping hot, with a bowl of 'butter' right next to them. And a knife. The kind one usually uses for butter." Nora's completely straight-faced when she says it, and it's all Bonnie can do not to fall to the floor laughing, but she continues her drill sergeant–esque reading of the list. "Salads."

"Check and check."

"Tofu scramble."

"Oh, it's scrambled so fucking good."

"Gravy."

"We're practically swimming in it."

"Pies."

"Stuffed precariously but snugly in the fridge."

Bonnie side-eyes her. "We barely got Matt to come as it is. If the boys don't get their pie . . ."

"I'll take the heat. They like me more anyway."

"Is that so?" Bonnie raises an eyebrow as they turn toward the room divider curtains together, which they'd installed specifically for this occasion because the only thing more stressful than hosting Thanksgiving and cooking for everyone is hosting Thanksgiving and cooking for everyone while they're all watching you. Nora yanks them open and Bonnie drops the sound bubble spell, and all of a sudden both rooms are twice as big and full of light and laughter. Not only have Enzo, Matt, and Damon not all killed each other, but they actually seem to be getting along, no doubt thanks to the glue of Stefan and Caroline. A game is on TV but none of them are really watching it; Damon's in the middle of telling some story to Care, hand gestures galore, and Stefan and Enzo are both listening to something Matt's saying at a much lower volume. Bonnie's Turkey Day playlist (referring to a day of celebrating turkeys, not eating them) is playing at a lower volume than she'd left it. Nora sees her smile a bit before doing what she'd been wanting to do since they started cooking that morning.

"COME AND GET IT, BITCHES!"

The range of terror to relief across all of their expressions is hilarious. And as they all get up at once, a little too quickly, Bonnie slips an arm around Nora's waist and squeezes the taller girl close to her, their heads and necks naturally interlocking, and in this moment Nora knows that "home" has never really meant anything until now.


Feb 19, 2016

"Fuck you both. I'm not telling you anything." The Alex St. John tied to chair in front of them looks like a haunted shell of the businesslike, ever-composed sociopath curator who had imprisoned both of them just months ago. Half of her hair looks like it's either been cut haphazardly or yanked out, her thrift store clothes are muddy and tattered, and her right is swollen in a nasty purple bruise. And all of this happened before they even found her. Nora silently hopes, as with everyone they reap, that they won't have to torture her. But Sybil wants what Sybil wants.

"You know what we should do, Nora? We should force feed her our blood, kill her, turn her, and then send her into the Stone. Give her a taste of all that misery she's wielded so flippantly." Mary Louise twirls the Phoenix Sword as if it weren't the infernal dark object that it is. Nora feels on edge even being in the same room as it, but for Mary Louise it's a symbol of power, having control over something that controlled them for so long. But she's never been in the Stone. She doesn't know. Nora does. She doesn't say anything in response to the suggestion.

"No matter what it is," Mary Louise continues, shooting an annoyed look at Nora who avoids direct eye contact, "your punishment will be long and horrid. Eternal damnation, one might call it."

"What the hell are you talking about, you lunatic?" Alex also has a look in her eyes she never had before, a crazed detachment that only comes from one too many snaps. "Did that year you were desiccated fry your brain?"

"Not at all. In fact, I've never felt more myself." Mary Louise holds out the Sword and slowly brushes it across Alex's cheeks, first the left then the right, the razor sharp tip drawing a thin cut that drips sheets of blood down her face. "Now here's the thing: cooperate, answer our questions, and thing will go much better for you. No stumpers, either, so that means no excuses. I'm sure you can imagine what we might do if you were to be . . . disagreeable."

Alex says nothing, electing instead to spit in Mary Louise's direction. It doesn't make it the full distance, but the blonde heretic reacts as if it did, whipping the Sword around and then, in one fluid motion, lopping off Alex's left foot above the ankle. The blade cuts through the flesh and bone of the leg as if it were warm butter. Blood starts to pour and pool around the severed appendage below the stump before Alex registers what's happened, her body probably charged through with the numbing effects of shock, but when she looks down she screams. The shrill sound scrapes at Nora's eardrums like dull razors.

"Now, a few stitches and a hearty dose of my blood could heal that right up," Mary Louise says calmly, the hand that isn't holding the now scarlet-spattered sword outstretched as she constricts Alex's trachea until her shrieks are barely audible gurgles. "Resources you'll only have access to if you answer completely and honestly. Got it? And stop screaming. Bloody hell, it's obnoxious."

Alex's eyes are wide as saucers as she frantically nods, then sucks in a giant gulp of air as Mary Louise releases her telekinetic grip and looks down at her mutilated leg again. She whimpers.

"First question. The Armory's shipment logbooks have a record of the receipt of a large parcel from Mystic Falls in 1883, containing a very large brass bell. Additionally, Dalton St. John's own personal writings list exact measurements for this bell, implying that it was specifically requested. But there is no record of the item ever being cataloged in the archives. It's as if right after the bell arrived it simply disappeared."

"So what's the question?" Alex asks weakly.

"Where is it?"

"Why do you think I know where some 200-year-old bell is?"

Mary Louise scowls. "Your smug dynasty of a family has been in charge of that dusty old museum the whole time since. You're telling me this artifact that your however-many-greats-grandfather specifically acquired and then subsequently hid from his own already ultra-secretive supernatural interest agency isn't important at all?"

"I wouldn't know either way. I swear. You can keep bleeding me until all of the vervain is out of my system and compel me and I'd tell you the same thing. Now can you please put my foot back on? I think I'm about to pass out."

Mary Louise rolls her eyes. "You are completely useless, you know that? Such a bitter, hateful woman who's never done anything but lie and cheat. The entire reason we were able to escape your nifty little witch prison is your naïveté and arrogance. So easily manipulated by the enemy you had under your own nose."

"What are you talking about?"

"Did you really think your sister was somehow alive in that vault? The Siren's song will coerce anyone into doing her bidding whether they wish to or not, but it takes a truly simple-minded person to be completely oblivious to the foreign presence in your mind. You truly thought you were doing everything you could to save her. It would be funny if it weren't so sad." But Mary Louise laughs anyway. It's a cold, cruel, grating sound.

Alex reacts to this news by bugging out her eyes, but then quickly after that the lids close and her head lolls as she loses consciousness. "Help her, goddamnit." Nora's voice is at once exasperated and apathetic. "She's barely told us anything."

"That's because she barely knows anything," Mary Louise replies, not even looking at her unwilling companion as she scours her manicure for damage. "We're not losing anything by letting her die."

"How do you think Sybil is going to feel about another failure? Another useless corpse in a long line of useless corpses?"

The one kind of fear a vampire without their humanity can experience is the direct possibility of death, and that fear flashes across Mary Louise's face now, even as she tries to suppress it. "It's her methods that aren't working. We're just doing what we're told."

"No, you're just doing what you want to do." Nora finally moves from where her feet had been planted on the filthy floor, crouching down to Alex's slumped, immobile body, ripping a strip of fabric from her sweatshirt, and using it to crudely tie the severed foot to the leg."

"Just what do you think you're doing, Nora?"

She refuses to turn around. "What won't get us damned to Hell."

"Oh, yes, because it's you who's the model employee," Mary Louise hisses sarcastically, and her presence becomes impossible to ignore when Nora feels the frigid tip of the Phoenix Sword being pressed lightly against the back of her neck. She puts her hands up and slowly stands, trying not to panic. "You will do what I say, because of the two of us I'm the only one whose judgment isn't clouded by emotion. Now, would you rather that, or another trip to your favorite vacation destination? Perhaps one-way this time?"

Nora still doesn't say anything. Her mind is racing, trying to come up with an out.

"Go on, Nora! Choose your hell!"

With that the brunette ducks and at the same time channels all of her magic into ripping the massive milling machine attached to the wall and pulling it through the air towards them at lethal speed. She hears the impact right next to her like the choked squelch of a massive meat tenderizer, plus the clatter of the Sword as it falls to the ground, and she turns her head to see the piece of machinery break through two consecutive concrete walls before slowing down and crashing to the floor, taking Mary Louise with it the whole way. Then Nora moves fast, first shutting her eyes tight and sculpting her mind into steel walls until she feels the last patch of Sybil's all-seeing eye be blocked, next setting her plan in motion.

Operation: Breadcrumbs, she'll later call it.


April 11th, 2016

"But do you really? Do you remember how much harder it was to adjust than you thought when you came back? Try doing that twice. Sometimes I have to pinch myself. Not to check whether or not I'm dreaming. To make sure I still exist."

"Look, I told you, I 'get it' because we found our way back to ourselves the same way. I'm not trying to make light of all your very brave and not at all dramatic sacrifices to the cause."

"Gee. Thanks. Such a good friend, as always."

"What can I—"

"Wait, what do you mean by 'found our way back the same way'?"

"You know what I mean."

"No, I'm not sure I do."

"Oh you do, you just won't let yourself see it yet. See, when I got back it was all teary-eyed reunions with the bro and drinks and laughs and hey—oh, my girlfriend erased every single memory of our relationship from her brain. It sucked. You remember how much the thought of seeing her again kept me going while we were stuck in that damn place. But the thing is, what would have happened if Elena had remembered me? We'd do the back-from-the-dead fuck-like-rabbits honeymoon thing of course oh don't give me that look, catch up on everything we missed in each others' lives, have some nice dinners… and then where would I be now? Empty. Hollow. I would have lost myself when I lost her again. We were confined to what I thought was my own eternal personal hell, and right after realizing it wasn't and that we were actually still alive, you did your annoyingly-honorable-witchy-martyr-save thing for the millionth time and beamed me back to an overstuffed world without you, the one person who made the understuffed one bearable. At first it was a worse hell than ours. Everything so loud all the time, I couldn't hear myself think. Retracing my steps with Elena helped me remember who I was. Someone who lived. We go through so much that it's easy to forget what happens in between. Even when Elena was gone I could still see what her being here showed me for the first time: that I like living. With or without her. Preferably with. But what I'm trying to say is that you have someone like that too. Who helped you learn how to be happy."

"Had. I had someone like that. And I don't like living without her. Only with her. I can't take it."

"Which brings me to my final point. I had to learn to live without Elena because we couldn't bring her back. Our favorite Heretic, on the other hand…"

"What? Damon. Don't fuck around with me. What are you talking about?"

"She's alive, Bonnie. And we're gonna go get her back for you."

"How do you know? I saw her heart blown out of her chest, Damon. It happened right in front of me. And then I died. Remember?"

"I will never forget. And I will never know what the hell suddenly compelled me to leave you there alone like a selfish shitbag. But as for the first part…"

He holds out his phone to show her a video. It's a grainy security cam clip with the date and timecode in the top right corner. The room looks like an atrium in a hospital; the walls and floor are white and sterile where they aren't smeared with blood and gore. Her eyes naturally gravitate toward the only visible motion in the footage. In roughly the middle of the corpse-strewn area, a lone figure crouches over something, presumably tearing it to shreds with its jaws.

But when the figure looks straight at the camera lens, Bonnie sees that it isn't an "it" at all.

Staring right into her eyes, blood dripping from her mouth and a torn-off, mostly chewed human arm clasped in her hands, is Nora.

"Help me," she mouths.

Bonnie doesn't say anything, or even move her eyes from the screen, for a long time. After like thirty seconds she can hear Damon saying her name, but it sounds like it's coming from 20 meters up from the bottom of the deep water tank she's submerged in.

"Bonnie."

She finally looks at him.

"I promise you this is real. Elena heard something through the grapevine about a catastrophe at a hospital in Waco that got hushed up. People thought it was some government thing. I poked around and, well, I found this. It's not edited or doctored anything, all the other cameras show her too. I don't know how it's possible, but then again, I didn't know how you coming back was possible."

Bonnie feels like not just the blood, but the everything has all drained out of her, and now she's just a dry husk. "I saw her body. With a massive fucking hole in its chest."

"So did I." Damon puts his phone away and sighs heavily. "How are you feeling right now?"

"I . . . I don't know."

Elena finally comes back into the room with a tray of all their coffees, but stops in her tracks when she sees Bonnie's and Damon's faces. "Oh . . . you showed her?"

Unable to decide whether to react to the news that the person she loved more than life itself is inexplicably alive or the gruesome, traumatizing images she's just seen, her mind elects to do both, and the result is a combination of joyful laughter, tears of both happiness and horror, and body-wracking sob heaves, a unsettling display of emotional overload that in the moment feels like it will never stop. Elena wraps her arms around her and holds her until she's still and whimpering, stroking her hair and rubbing her back. Bonnie finally finds some piece of stability and grasps it with all her might, then sits up and wipes her face with the backs of her hands. She has a mission now, and it feels good.

"So how do we get her back?"

Damon looks relieved, then flashes one of his half-grins. "Let's go get our Criminal Minds on."