It's been a pretty fucking awful week, for both global and personal reasons, but I still managed to finish this chapter in a reasonable amount of time. Those who were never fans of all the time-jumps, rejoice: this is the first chapter in which every event takes place on the same day! Most everything will proceed more linearly from here on, with a few flashbacks to fill in some gaps. I say this every week, but I'm still excited about where this story is going and I hope you are too.
Soundtrack:
Le Loup – "Morning Song" from Family
Clinic - "Harmony" from Walking with Thee
Giles Corey – "No One Is Ever Going to Want Me" from Giles Corey
Reminder: Search fic title on Spotify or Apple Music for full playlist with songs from all chapters
April 18, 2016
The sight of Vincent sitting across from her at the table on the newly rebuilt Grill patio, sipping his coffee as if he were any other oblivious resident in this tucked-away small town, is a slightly surreal one. But his presence is also a comfort, because usually, and this happens everywhere really but especially in Mystic Falls, she's the one who feels like the alien, the invader from another dimension, and now she has someone who's been through similar things to anchor her.
"Coffee's actually decent," he remarks with a raise of his eyebrows as he sets the mug back on the saucer. "I'll have to come back later and try the beer."
"I don't spend too much time here anymore, to tell the truth, so I can't really give any recommendations." Bonnie slumps back in her chair and looks around. "Some new owners bought the place when everyone moved back in after the evacuation, and they remodeled what had already been remodeled. We blew it up once. Long story."
Vincent chuckles. "I'm sure you have plenty of those."
"You have no idea. Actually, you definitely do. But anyway, they tried to recapture the 'original spirit' of the place or whatever, and— I don't know, it just doesn't feel right."
"I'd wager you hung around here a lot when you were still in high school?"
"Oh yeah." She grins, all the fond memories welling up at once in a warm jet. "It was like a second home. I tried to avoid my dad's house as much as possible because we weren't getting along at the time, so pretty much whenever I wasn't at school, visiting my Grams, or sleeping, I was here. Wish I could go back and make the most of the time I did have with my dad, though. Everything we fought about seems so pointless now."
"So it goes," Vincent says heavily. "What I wouldn't give to have just one more drink with my old man. Tell him I really am grateful for all he did. Because I sure as hell didn't express that when I was a lil' shithead kid."
"What happened?" Bonnie realizes how blunt the question is. "Sorry, I just—I've never heard you talk about him."
"He pissed the wrong people off. Like father, like son, I suppose. 'The wrong people' in both of our cases being the New Orleans vampire coalition."
"They killed him?"
"No one knows what truly happened. Not even my mom. But that's the short version, yeah. Even before Marcel used Davina to keep the witches hog-tied, the vampires have always controlled the city in one way or another, at least ever since the Mikaelsons rolled into town. Which is why this truce we have going is so important, but it's also why it's so fragile."
"And you're sure everything won't fall apart while you're up here?" Bonnie already feels bad enough for making him drive up; she'd prefer for him to actually have a home to go back to.
"If that were the case, then I'd be quite the shitty regent." He chuckles. "And hey, if the damn levees break all over again, metaphorically or literally or both, I'll just shack up in that giant-ass mansion you told me about."
Bonnie imagines Vincent, Stefan, and Caroline as roommates, brushing their teeth in front of the same mirror and passing the cereal box across the table to each other in the morning. The mental image is hilarious. "I think after a few days, whatever apocalyptic wasteland awaited you would start to look pretty enticing."
He laughs. "Gotcha. Although, if you could see some of the living companions I've had to deal with... and that's not even including the power-hungry, child-murdering ex-wife."
"Well, you can judge for yourself, I guess. Do you want to head over there now?"
"Let's do it. You're driving though. These middle-America country roads put me right to sleep."
"Okay, thanks. No, he's still in and out. Yeah, I will. You too. Bye."
Abby hangs up the call and looks at the couch in front of the hearth to see if her guest had heard any of the conversation, but his eyes are still closed, face and body twitching frenetically as if he's having ten nightmares at once. She's heard about what the period after getting out of the Stone is like from Damon, Stefan, Valerie, and Nora at various times, but to witness it in person is another thing entirely. And to make things worse, the raw, animalistic fear in Enzo's eyes when he's awake and pounding on the invisible barrier Bonnie set up all around the living room area reminds her of the way she felt when she gave up her magic to desiccate Mikael all those years ago.
Three days prior, when Damon stabbed Rayna with her own Sword, every vampire she had marked with an X-shaped wound (or at least, every one they knew of) got knocked out and woke up with blood but no scar, as if it had reopened and then finally healed for good. The damage caused by the original injury didn't heal, though; Beau's vocal cords were still severed, and the skin on Enzo's chest and back was mottled from where the blade had impaled him. And Rayna...
Well, Bonnie and Vincent will figure it out, she thinks.
"Who was that on the phone?" she suddenly hears, and she almost drops the banana she just took out of the bowl on the counter in surprise.
"It was Bonnie. She and Vincent are going to try to see if they can reverse Rayna's amnesia."
"Amnesia?" Enzo looks confused, and his tousled post-sleep hair is messy in just the right way. Is that relevant?
"Yeah, she woke up around the same time you did, but she doesn't remember anything beyond the actual huntress spell being cast. It's like all her extra lifetimes never happened, and she's just picking up where she left off in 1857."
"Curious." He seems good, present at least, but she can't let her guard down. "I watched an episode of a television crime procedural with a similar premise. Serial killer gets total amnesia, can't remember any of their transgressions. Is he a new person worthy of forgiveness? Or are memories irrelevant to what is just?"
Abby chuckles. "Criminal Minds, right?"
That roguish grin should be illegal. "You're a fan?"
"I may or may not have a small crush on Matthew Gray Gubler."
"He's cute, yes. You know, I believe one of the episodes was inspired by me."
She arches an eyebrow. "Is that so?"
"Indeed. It's been a tick, but if I remember, the gist was 'lunatic burns down house and himself inside it.' "
Abby's on the move before he even starts to take off his ring, yanking both sets of curtains closed against the early evening sun, the room suddenly near-dark in that dusky, orange, cozy kind of way, the self-proclaimed lunatic only getting a brief sizzle for his efforts. "Nice try," she tells him with narrowed eyes. "But Damon told me you'd try some shit. I'm prepared for everything."
He suddenly zips forward, his full body weight bashing against the magical barrier, that desperate look haunting his eyes again. "Please. Please, let me out. You don't know what it's like."
"And I hope I never will," Abby retorts, doing her best not to flinch or step back in response to his sudden closeness. "But it's for your own good. We have time to lay low, this cabin is secluded, I have plenty of blood to keep us both sane but not hunger-crazy. It'll be okay."
"Why are you doing this? Why are you helping me?" He asks the question the way only someone who at their core genuinely doesn't know why someone would ever care for them would. And that breaks her heart. Because she's heard it before. From her own lungs.
"I hope that when we're done, you won't need to ask."
"I suppose I should tell you this isn't the first time I've made the drive up to Mystic Falls, Virginia," Vincent suddenly says when Bonnie ends the call with Abby and puts her phone on the console, the quiet music resuming.
"What do you mean?" Bonnie's glad she had that extra cup of coffee; even after being back here for so many months now, the country roads still put her to sleep.
"I've been here before. Well, not really, because I was just in some random patch of woods. But see..."
He proceeds to tell her the story of Lucien, the serum, Marcel, and the fall of the Mikaelsons. It's a lot to take in, and by the time they pull into the driveway of the Salvatore house she feels like she just binged a whole season of TV in ten minutes.
"How have you not told me all of this before?"
Vincent's standing on the grass in the lawn, marveling at the gigantic mansion. "Time wasn't right," he answers almost absentmindedly. "Plus, one, I knew you and Freya were pals, and I'm not exactly proud of how everything went down with her, and two, I'm not exactly proud of bringin' not one but two ultra-Originals into this world. I don't know if Ms. Sheila Bennett ever looks in on me from the Great Beyond, but if she does, shit, she is tappin' her foot and shakin' her head."
Bonnie laughs. "And I know just what she would say if she were here right now."
They say it in unison: "Do not get involved in vampire business."
"Oh, the time and tears I could've saved if I just shut my damn mouth and listened." Vincent chuckles. "Alright, let's get to work. And not just because I'm dyin' to see the inside of this place."
It's been three days, but Nora still can't stop unconsciously placing a hand to her chest just above her heart and feeling the smoothed skin where her scar used to be. It had been an anchor point for her, even though it was an incessant reminder of the worst experience of her life; Bonnie had taught her to see the poetry in scars, as she did in her own from Kai's knife. It was a symbol of survival, perseverance, not pain or weakness. And now that it's gone...
What she does know, at least, is that someone followed her clues and found the Sword. All she wants is to let her imagination run wild with wondering which of her loved ones has undertaken a rescue mission, but she can't let Sybil see them, she needs to focus on holding the mental steel wall that has protected her most cherished memories from being violated. She can't even feed the spark of hope that ignites deep in her core at the possibility of being herself again, because one note of the Siren's song would snuff it out completely.
And anyway, how could Nora ever go back to the way things were? How many lives has she ruined, how many people has she brutally killed in the last eight months alone? With her humanity switch still stubbornly flipped to ON the remorse and self-hatred are snowballing into a vicious, neverending cycle with the blood, so much blood, so much hatred, blood, blood, blood. And who is she kidding? There is no "way things were" anymore. She's gone. The name is too painful to invoke, even if she weren't keeping everything under wraps in the shadows of her brain. She, who made life worth it again, gone. And the blood washes it all away again.
"You know, Nora, you really did put up quite a fight for a while there. I was impressed. But everyone breaks eventually."
The voice is familiar, but something about it is profoundly different. Wait. She's not hearing it in her head. She's actually hearing it.
Her thoughts crash back to reality, the dim lighting of the dive bar and the quiet small-town patrons like shrouded bodies reasserting their skeletal presence. And a new face, right across from hers. Long dark hair, chiseled Mediterranean features, lips perpetually plumped in a slight smirk, eyes like tunnels straight to the abyss. It's her.
"Sybil."
"So nice to finally meet you, darling. Handshakes are still a thing, right?"
Enzo's given up trying to break through his supernatural cage and is now quietly sitting on the floor, thumbing through the books on one of Abby's shelves, which she moved closer to him—she isn't heartless, after all.
He suddenly slams the large hardcover he was looking at shut and turns to look at her. "How much time would you say you spend here? In this adorable little cabin?"
Abby stops chopping carrots and meets the heat of his gaze. "Maybe one or two weeks a year, I don't know. I haven't had it for very long."
"And yet you keep this many books lying around," Enzo says, gesturing around the room at the many other shelves spaced out along the walls. "Does every dwelling you ever call home contain a horde of such richness?"
She chuckles, mostly to herself, and goes back to chopping. "Mostly. There are so many here because the previous owners left a lot of them behind. They were vampires too, actually."
He cocks his head, clearly interested, and for once seems to mostly if not entirely free from the dark echoes of the Stone. "Really?"
"Yeah, this couple I met through one of the connections Bonnie and Nora sent me from New York. Turns out our species is a lot tighter-knit than I thought, at least among the ones who can find a friend of a friend of a friend or whatever."
"What was it, like an AA meeting but for blood? An AB meeting?"
"You're hilarious." The sun is starting to set and she's feeling a bit sleepy, so she puts some music on and then starts on the potatoes. "I don't know, we just... talked. About ten people showed up, people who would never even meet otherwise. A 16-year-old kid, even. Everyone had their own story, and most were like me—already came to terms with everything, as much as one can, but doesn't know what to do next. The couple, they just spoke about they'd been together 94 years and didn't plan on giving up anytime soon, and that eternity can only grow stale if you believe its lie that there's no end, because there is an end, eventually, just like with everything, and we're just taking our sweet time getting there." She scrapes the giant pile of veggies into the broth simmering on the stove. "But anyway, yeah, they found out I was from Virginia and told me about this place, and that I could have it when they left for 'the next chapter,' as they put it. And voilà."
Enzo has an expression on his face she's never seen before, and she realizes he's speechless. But soon he steels his countenance once more—his defense mechanism. The sarcasm, the charm, the nihilism. It's all an act. And beneath it is a man who wants to love and be loved, but doesn't know how either works.
"I'd never even met another vampire, besides Lily of course"—he scowls—"until Damon ended up in the next cell over at Augustine."
"I think it's always a beautiful and important thing to connect with people on that level. 'People.' " She makes air quotes and flashes Enzo a wry grin, which he mirrors.
"I suppose. But you know very well how that all ended up." He looks away.
Abby chooses the words of the question carefully. "Do you remember what you said when they first pulled you out of the Stone?"
Enzo's face says "yes" but his mouth utters, "No." Then, "why?" She can't tell if there's hostility in it or not.
She presses on anyway. "You went right for Damon and screamed, 'Why did you leave?' Was it part of your hell loop? Him abandoning you at Augustine?"
Enzo's face goes completely blank. The instant, total shutdown is unsettling to witness.
"I'm sorry, I shouldn't have pried. You can tell me when you're ready. Or not, if you really don't want to."
He still doesn't say anything. His eyes are pointed in her general direction but they're staring at something an infinite distance beyond her. She feels terrible. She was just trying to help.
"I'll give you a minute. Gonna go outside for a minute. This just needs to cool down and then we can eat. I hope you're hungry because I made a shit ton." Abby's talking faster than normal because she's guilt-spiraling, a deep-rooted tendency only exacerbated by her vampirism. On her way out the door she forces herself to turn and do her best to look right at him and say, "I want you to feel safe here. I really am sorry."
As she takes her first step onto the porch he could swear she hears him respond, in a near-inaudible whisper, "So am I," and that's what she thinks about as she slumps onto the wooden swing and sparks a joint and tries to calm herself down, tell herself that she's not perfect and that's okay, that it's not her fault Jamie doesn't answer her calls anymore and it's just that not everyone can deal with the supernatural in their life and that's okay, that Enzo needs her because he doesn't have anyone else and she looks up at the sky, orange slowly fading to indigo, clouds skittering like stray cotton fluff across a colorful rug, the same clouds and the same sky that swirl above the Salvatore house 200 miles away.
"So, this is the world-famous Rayna Cruz. The great huntress who once nearly brought Klaus Mikaelson to his knees on the steps of St. Anne's Church."
"I told you, I do not know anything about that." The amnesiac Rayna's English is cautious and awkward, fluent but just barely, and her voice no longer has the gritty southern half-drawl she'd picked up in her first few lifetimes, instead inflected with the lilt of a native Spanish-speaker. "My father was a vampire hunter, and he trained me. But now he is dead. The last thing I remember is shamans casting spell. Now I am here."
Vincent strokes his chin and looks at Bonnie. "I mean, I believe her."
Bonnie nods and scrubs a hand over her face in exasperation. "Yeah. Which means she can't tell us anything about Nora or anything else that's going on, or what the hell really happened at the Armory, or how her sword came to be stuffed in some random slasher movie closet, or..." She trails off, the last "or" half an exhausted sigh. "I've studied the huntress spell so many times I know it back to front. The only lead I can possibly think of is that a few documents mention something about the eight shamans being completely preserved until their life force was used to resurrect Rayna, and then after that all the decomposition would catch up. So maybe those old dusty dudes represent her lives somehow. But she's died eight times now, right? So now they're all just mush."
"A predicament indeed." Vincent scratches the back of his head and again looks at Rayna, who's been freed of her restraints after they discovered she'd retained none of her supernatural abilities, and also seemed to have no desire to escape at all. If what she said is the truth—and the more time that passes, Bonnie is increasingly convinced it is—then she just skipped a century and a half of not just the world, but her own life, or lives. She can't imagine. "And you've tried sifting through her mind with magic?"
Bonnie nods. "And both Caroline and Damon went in it vamp-style. Nothing. She doesn't have any of the immunity she used to, either. It's like the spell never even happened."
"And what happened to the Stone? You know, the miniature prison full of hundreds of bloodthirsty souls?"
Bonnie gives him a look that says come see for yourself, and then motions for Rayna to follow them; they can't confine her to this awful basement forever. The former huntress puts one foot in front of the other like she's only ever practiced walking and not actually done it, each step choppy and carefully calculated, but she soon seems to fall back into a groove and makes it up the stairs without a hitch.
When they reach the dining room, Caroline and Stefan are setting the table, she lighting candles and he putting full plates down at each spot. They both look up at the exact same time, and for some reason Bonnie suddenly thinks of something Tyler used to say all the time: "It's never 'like that,' until you become 'we' people. And then it's too late." Her two beautiful friends are most certainly well past the "we" people stage, and she couldn't be happier about it. But if she said seeing any happy couple together didn't always hurt at least a little bit, she'd be lying.
"Did y'all make all this?" Vincent asks in disbelief, making a beeline for the plate with the most generous helpings.
"Mostly Chef Salvatore over here." Caroline lights the last candle and straightens up into her impeccable posture the way only she can. "But I made the rice! And the drinks!"
"Still better than I could ever do. I'd make the rice too strong and burn the drinks." Vincent chuckles at his own joke as he sits down, and then finally sees what's lying in the middle of the table.
"Oh, do you like our new centerpiece?" Caroline looks straight at Stefan as she talks. "It's totally not creepy and menacing at all, right?"
"I told you, it's cathartic for me," Stefan shoots back as he takes his own seat. "Not anywhere close to the most gruesome thing this table has seen either."
The Phoenix Sword is still mostly intact, but most of its surface area is charred with a sooty layer of black, and where there once shone a luminescent orange orb from the hilt there is now only a dark hole filled with cracked pieces of what looks like dull amber glass.
"So all the vampires that were in this thing, they're where now, exactly?" Vincent's voice is wary.
"We've seen souls escape from the Stone and occupy both human and vampire corpses, so a zombie apocalypse was one of the first possibilities that sprang to mind." Bonnie does her best to eat, even though her appetite has been fucked up for months now. "But unless someone's keeping it entirely under wraps, there's been nothing. No reports, no social media. It's like everyone that was trapped in there just disappeared."
"Well that's... disturbing," Vincent says slowly. "What about whoever hushed up the hospital massacre? You said it looked like someone or someones with a lot of resources."
"I doubt even whoever that is would have enough reach to stifle news of a thousand random resurrections." Stefan seems to be enjoying his own cooking the most out of all of them; he's halfway through his plate. "But on that topic, do you have any idea what's going on there? It was wild."
"It makes me uneasy as hell to say no, I got absolutely no idea." Vincent leans back in his chair and puts both hands behind his head, looking up at the ceiling, clearly deep in thought. "Too many damn things without a single explanation to be found."
"Yeah, speaking of that..." Bonnie takes a folded piece of paper from the pocket of her flannel, spreads it out on the table, and then turns it to face him. On it is a drawing of the symbol they saw first at the hospital and then at the warehouse: four intersecting lines like an occult compass rose, four jagged spiky triangles capping each end on one side. Even reduced to the innocuity of ballpoint pen on paper, the symbol still vibrates with the same kind of dread as had radiated from the version drawn two stories tall in blood. "Have you ever seen this before?"
As soon as he lays eyes on it, Vincent physically jumps in his chair. He immediately seems much less composed. "Where— where did you see that?" he eventually asks her, shakily.
Bonnie feels sick to her stomach. "It was on a wall at the hospital and then on the door of where we found the Sword."
Vincent balls a tight fist and brings it to his mouth. "That there is the same symbol I saw on the last page of Eva's— my late wife's diary before she went totally off the deep end. I always thought it was some obscure dark magic thing she was messin' with. But now I'm seeing that everything is connected to whatever the hell this represents."
"I think that is what it represents," Bonnie says. The sounds of clinking silverware and shuffling have faded to silence—no one's eating anymore. "When I look at it, I feel the same... doom I felt when I was dead. When I was with Arcadius, in what he called Hell." She can feel both Stefan and Caroline's eyes on her; she told them bits and pieces, but never the full story. Even she isn't sure she knows the full story. Trying to remember the conversation is like recalling a dream, every word, every image constantly escaping like sand through cupped hands. But she can remember the feeling, the same one that had sporadically plagued her mind since the Other Side was destroyed. The abstract yet violent promise of a despair deeper than anything anyone alive has ever known.
"So what does that mean?" Caroline eventually asks impatiently, breaking the grim, pensive silence.
"It means wherever Nora is, whoever, whatever is making her do all of these things, it's something we've never fought before. Maybe something no one has fought before." Internally, Bonnie does her best to refuse to cede to the pessimism of her own words. It's getting harder and harder by the day.
Vincent nods gravely. "And it also means we might be lookin' at the actual end of the world if we lose."
Abby's zoning out on the porch, watching the last of the sunlight slip away, when she hears a repetitive thumping noise from inside. She panics and checks her phone, thinking she lost time, but it's only been two minutes. The thumping noise is being made by Enzo's head, which he is brutally slamming against the floor over and over again as he lies sprawled on the rug, his eyes still set in glassy deadness, a small pool of blood starting to radiate from the impact point. She runs to him, spreads her body out next to his and wraps one arm around his head to stop the pounding and the other around his shoulder and chest and pulls him to her, whispering, "It's okay, it's okay, you're okay, everything is going to be okay," even as she hears him muttering over and over like a skipping record: "Please. Not. Forever. Please. Not. Forever."
Sybil hums her cold, haunting song, the simple tune that always makes Nora's veins turn to ice as she remembers everything it had made her do, everything it might still make her do. The scraggly bartender wanders over to where they're sitting in a stumbling trance, makes the Siren an extremely complex cocktail without a second thought, his eyes completely unfocused like a broken doll's. Sybil takes the drink and stirs the straw, her abyssal gaze still boring straight through to Nora's soul. "Cade loves his duos, you know. Before even us, my sister and I, there were others, now lost to time. I dare say the Sirens have made a much greater impact on history. But I'm no braggart." She grabs a cherry from the bowl on the bar with her long, perfectly manicured fingers and pops it in her mouth. "Anyway. Back to everything you've been hiding from me."
Nora's stomach drops.
"I was originally skeptical of you and Mary Louise working alone. But I have to say, the numbers have been impressive." Sybil licks her lips and Nora shudders, trying not to tally the countless pounds of bloody, ravaged flesh that had passed between them. "And it's also had the pleasant side effect of my being able to finally break through the defense you'd so carefully set up and see right through to the gooey goodness inside."
Nora still doesn't say anything, just suddenly stands up and takes a step back, the rotted wooden stool clattering to the grimy floor at her feet.
"Say Nora, how do you think your friends in Mystic Falls will feel about your new gal pal? Shall we pay them a visit and find out?"
