A/N: Thanks to WinchesterGurl1967, who beta'ed this chapter in no time, I'm able to post it today! You're amazing, thank you!
I hope you will love it!
Chapter 3: Let's plot, okay?
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The next day found me, exhausted, walking through Duke University Department of Anthropology. I was woken up at the beginning of the afternoon by a call from Vanessa Monroe asking me if I could pass by. The need to look at Isobel's research as soon as possible, and to be back at Mystic Falls by tomorrow, helped in my decision to accept.
"Hi, I'm looking for Vanessa Monroe, please?" The brown-haired woman behind the desk looked up at me curiously before recognition crossed her eyes.
"You must be Ann Andrews?" I nodded politely. Honestly, when I had to imagine a fake name, that was the first thing that I thought of. I didn't really know if Isobel still has contacts here, and the only thing I really remember about Isobel is that she worked with Katherine; the last thing I wanted is for Katherine to know that a Forbes is putting her nose in her business. "I'm Vanessa, nice to meet you."
She stood and walked around the desk, making her way toward a door at the end of the corridor. She mentioned for me to follow her with a wave of her hand. "I talked with the professor in charge of the Department, he's fine with you looking into Pr. Flemming's research and taking copies with you." She stressed the word 'copy' with little subtlety. "As long as her husband wasn't against it. I called Mr. Saltzman and he doesn't have a problem with it. You are free to look into her note here. Also, I made all the copies you'll need, they're in this." She finished by grabbing a flash disk from the desk of what I assumed being Isobel's office.
"Thank you," I took it and slipped it into my pocket. "My paper is about the mystical creatures and their impact on history, and I was wondering if there is anything else about it here..."
"You can look around if you want, but I think that everything is on the flash disk."
"Again, thank you, you saved my semester."
Vanessa just laughed before heading back to her desk. "I'll let you look around but, if you need anything, I'll be at my desk. Just call for me."
Once she was out of view, I quickly reached the bookshelves, looking for the only thing that I knew was here from my previous life. I found the black book on one of the middle shelves, the word 'Petrova' written in gold on the edge.
Grabbing the thick plastic folder from my bag, I put the book in it, closed it, and put it back in my bag. I knew that stealing was bad but, it wasn't like Isobel would miss it, alright.
Damon was going to take it in one year or two, anyway. I knew it because Ann was constantly whining about it. For her, Damon didn't use it correctly; it would be of better use with me.
Being already there, I looked at the papers on the desk for another twenty minutes or so, before heading out. Vanessa was on the phone and just waved her hand at me with a smile.
I sighed when I pulled my car out of its parking spot, the sooner I was at Mystic Falls, the better.
"Okay Claire, spill the beans," I looked curiously toward Caroline at her words. It was now three days since Christmas and we were at the Lake's cabin for two or three days, before New Year's Eve, just her and me. It was my idea. Mostly because I wanted Caroline far from the conflicts at home. And because I wanted to talk to her privately.
"What do you mean, Care?" She raised an eyebrow at me, her eyes clearly questioning if I thought she was stupid.
"I know you, Claire. I believe you when you say that we're here to take some distance with Mom and Dad, but… It's not just that, is it? You brought me a coffee at the Grill before we left. You hate coffee, and everything about it."
"That thing is disgusting," I said defensively.
"And, the only times you ever buy me coffee, is when you want to tell me something but you're afraid of my reaction," she continues as if I hadn't said anything. "Like when you lost my favorite earrings, or when you broke.."
"Yeah, okay, I get it. You know me…" I sighed and played with the spoon in my pot of ice cream. "It's true, I want to talk to you about something…" My eyes were solely focused on my cream, I was too afraid to look at her in the eyes. "There's something I have hidden from you my whole life and…" I stopped myself, not knowing how to continue.
"I know," Caroline finally said, making me look up at her with wide eyes. "Obviously, I don't know what, I'm not psychic, but I always knew there was something you didn't tell me. I told you, I know you, Claire," then she smiled. "I'm not mad at you if it's what you're afraid of. At first, I was worried but I knew you would tell me when you were ready to. If you're not, don't force yourself, I can wait."
I smiled at her, she was my twin sister, I knew she would love me, no matter what. "No, I need to tell you." There was so much to tell, I didn't even know how to begin. "I… remember who I was before Claire Forbes."
She blinked, taken aback by my words, but I continued before she could open her mouth, my eyes back on my ice cream. "I was an orphan raised in an orphanage in Seattle. I never had a real childhood, in fact, my life was boring until I left for college in Charlotte, in North Carolina. That's where I met Ann, she was my first and best friend. I died in a car crash with her four years later."
"Oh my God, Claire!" Caroline whispered before crossing the distance between us to hug me. "I'm so sorry…"
"It's not the worst part…" I said, my head pressed against her shoulder.
Disbelief was manifest in her voice when she talked. "What can possibly be worse than you remembering how you died?"
I broke the hug and moved back on the couch, distancing myself a little. "My best friend, Ann, used to watch a lot of TV shows. There was one, her favorite, it was named 'The Vampire Diaries' and…" I breathed in to calm myself and looked into my sister's curious eyes. "You were a character in there."
She didn't react, looking at me with a frown. "What?"
"The show, you were in the show!" I finally snapped, standing up and beginning to pace in the middle of the living room. "I don't know a lot about it, I just watched some episodes with Ann and listened to her rambling but… It was about Elena, who was in love with two brothers, the Salvatores. The brothers were vampires, and they find out that Elena was meant to be sacrificed in a ritual and the shit hit the fan pretty quickly. You and mom, you were characters in there, there was Bonnie too. And Matt, Tyler, his mom. But… I wasn't. I wasn't supposed to exist, this world was supposed to be fictional! But I am, and I do things that will change the future but what if I'm wrong? What if my meddling leads to the death of someone who was supposed to live? What if…"
I was brutally stopped in my rambling by a sharp pain in my cheek. "You… Did you slap me?" I looked at Caroline with astonishment, my hand on my harmed cheek.
"Yes, because you're losing it," she said, not looking sorry at all. "Take it slow, okay? What do you mean TV show's characters?"
"You don't think I'm bat shit crazy or a liar," I state blandly.
"I don't think you're bat shit crazy, Claire. And I don't think you're lying. But you have to admit, this is hard to believe… I mean… Vampires? Seriously? You really think that could be real?" She got back by the couch and picked up the pot of ice cream I let down with my existential crisis. "Are you even sure the show is accurate? I'm not telling you're crazy but, maybe you made it up as a child or something? I mean, Elena is dating Matt and he doesn't have a brother, just Vicki. And I would have known if Matt was a vampire." She added the last part as a joke, probably trying to make me relax, but I was way too panicked for that.
"I thought of that, too. It's why I never told you before today. My trip, last week… It was for that," I pulled out my phone and searched for the picture of the desiccated body of Mikeal. "Ann said that one of the villains, Mikeal, spent some years trapped in a cemetery at Charlotte before the beginning of the show. I found him," I told her, giving her the phone.
"Oh my…" She clapped a hand on her mouth, creeped out by his eyes open and weirdly alive on his face gray and dead. "What is… that?"
"It's Mikael. A vampire, one of the first actually. A very bad guy, and a worse father. I killed him," I said blankly, taking the phone from her hands, she didn't resist. "Here is the video that should, at least, prove the existence of vampires. I think."
She watched the video three times before putting the phone on the low table. "Oh fuck," she muttered, staring into space for a whole minute before standing up, grabbing the ice cream, and made her way to the open kitchen.
I watched her as she put the pot in the freezer and the spoon in the sink. Then she started to search into the closet under the sink and came back into the living room with an old dishcloth.
"Care… What are you doing?"
"Isn't it obvious, Claire? I need to clean up the ice cream, Dad will kill us if we ruin his flooring."
I spend the five next minutes watching in incredulity as Caroline cleaned up all traces of ice cream in the room.
"How much of a mess will be our life in the future?" She finally asked, wiping the table with a dishcloth.
"I don't know," I said, letting myself fall on the couch. "My memories about it are spare, everything I know is written in a notebook, and I found diaries of some of our ancestors who knew about vampires in Dad's room this morning…"
"Wait," she cut me off. "Dad knows?" She looked at me, with something I couldn't place in her eyes.
"About all the reincarnated-in-a-TV-show shit? No, of course not, you're the only one to know and I plan to keep it that way. But he knows about the supernatural creatures shit. And Mom too. At least, she knew in the show."
"Creatures? There are more than only vampires?"
"Oh yes, you don't even know… The Lockwood are descendants of werewolves, meaning that as soon as they kill someone, purposefully or by accident, they will change into a wolf every full moon."
"Excuse me… What?" She let her dishcloth on the table and sat across from me on the couch, turning her entire body to face me. I turned too, sitting on one of my legs.
"Yes, and Bonnie? Turns out her Grams isn't as crazy as she thinks. She's a witch, like magic and stuff. No Harry Potter wand and broomstick, but still."
"And Elena? You said something about some ritual earlier?"
"Yeah, she is the mortal copy of some chick who lived two thousand years ago and did bitchy stuff," I said, rolling my eyes at my sister's eyes shining with curiosity. "There was that guy, he was dating a powerful witch, okay? He told her how he wanted to spend eternity with her and all that, and pushed her to create an elixir for that and they planned to drink it at their wedding."
"This is so romantic!" Caroline's eyes drifted into space, probably thinking about how she would love to find a hot guy who would make the same thing for her. I smiled, happy to see her act normally again.
"Yes, but no. Turns out the guy was cheating on her with her maid—and probably friend—the whole time. They stole the elixir and left town with it."
"What?! Oh, the…" She searched for a word but nothing seemed to come, finally, she pouted. "Poor witch."
"Indeed, but don't worry too much. She found them and got her revenge. They're both alive, but both are eternally separated. But, since they can't die, Nature needed someone to die in their place, so she created their doppelgangers. Elena is one, and I know the other one is her first boyfriend but I can't remember which brothers it is."
"Elena will date brothers? Are they hot?" I look at her with amusement but still nod. "Damn. Lucky girl."
I laugh at her expression, "don't worry too much, the guy Ann shipped you with is hot too."
"Really?! Hot how? Who's it?"
"Well, hot hot. And, to be honest, it was kinda the villain. Sort of."
"Seriously? Wait, come to think of it, I'm not surprised. I always have a thing for bad boys," she laughed and laid down on the couch, her head on my lap. "And what about Matt? You talked about all our friends except him."
I stroke her hair absently while thinking, "well, I don't remember anything special… I think he dated a vampire at some point, but nothing happened to him particularly. Ann used to joke around about the fact that he was one of the only remaining humans of Mystic Falls."
We stayed in silence for a while. I was desperately trying to find a way to tell her about Mom's fate in the show when she talked again. "Claire… What happened to Mom and me?"
I looked down at her, startled. "How do you…"
She had a sad smile at the confirmation that, indeed, something happened to her and Mom. "You said Matt was the only remaining human of Mystic Falls and didn't mention something about us being witches or werewolves. I figured that Mom and I…" She looked on the side, avoiding my eyes.
"You're right." I grabbed her hand and squeezed it. "You were involved in a car crash, and your chances to make it were low. So Elena asked one of her brothers-boyfriends, Damon I think, but I can't be sure, to feed you his blood."
"Eeew! Why? That's gross!"
I chuckled half-nervously, "yeah, I know, but vampire's blood has a healing ability."
"Sill gross. But, if it healed me, then why did I die?"
I winced, just thinking about Caroline's death disturbed me. "Katherine Pierce, in short, she's a 500-year-old vampire and the ancestor-slash-doppelganger of Elena. For some reason I can't fathom, she killed you that night, while you had vampire blood in your system. That caused you to turn in one."
"I… See." she squeezed my hand holding hers, "and Mom? What happens to her."
I closed my eyes because I knew— I knew that I couldn't prevent Mom from what will happen to her. "She will be diagnosed with cancer around your first year at college."
I didn't open my eyes but I could sense Caroline getting up from her position. "That's why you insist that Mom and Dad do regular check-ups, right?"
I finally gathered the courage to look at her, "yes, that's why I do that. Maybe, if it's diagnosed early, she will have a better chance."
"And what about vampire blood? You said it has healing abilities, no?" She looked slightly distressed, and I could understand her, it was how I felt about it since I was eight.
"I think Ann said something about a try but, apparently, the blood didn't work with cancer patients because it actually accelerates the speed of cell production and doesn't make differences between the healthy and unhealthy ones."
She stayed in silence, her expression thoughtful then, her face became determined. "Okay, tell me everything you can remember about the show, and what we can do to change everything for the better."
"What? We?" I looked at her dumbfounded.
"You really thought I would let you sort that mess out by yourself?" She raised her eyebrows, surprised.
"Well… To be honest, I didn't think you would believe me in the first place."
"As if you could lie to me. I always know when you try to," she grinned at me patronizingly.
"That's not true! I've lied to you before, without you ever finding out!" I said defensively.
"You talking about that time, when you said that you brought me a birthday present months ago but, really, you were still at the mall trying to find one?" Her eyes were full of mischief. "Or that time, when you said that this guy from Whitmore…"
"Okay! Okay! You win, you win!" I almost screamed, moving my arms desperately in front of her and trying to shut her mouth with my hands. What happened with that guy from Whitmore needed to stay unsaid. "Let's plot, okay? You love plotting, don't you?"
She laughed at my desperate attempt to change the subject but agreed nonetheless. I got up to find my notebook and we browsed through it together.
I wrote every little detail that I remembered, for the last eight years, in there, along with all my tentative strategies to avoid the big bad news.
After those days at the Lake's cabin, Caroline and I grew even closer than before, and Mom was happy about that, surprised but happy. She probably thought it was because of their divorce, and neither Caroline nor I told her otherwise.
We talked a lot about the few things I could recall of the show, and we both agreed that the most pressing task on our list was Enzo.
The poor guy was being tortured in the basement of our community college.
We began to plan and investigate, trying to identify where he was and who was implicated in that. I remembered something about a fire in the past, where Damon left Enzo for dead, and after long research in the olds newspapers, Caroline finally found one in the 50s, at Whitmore House.
Concluding that it was probably there, we decided that we needed to snoop around the place and decided to go there by ourselves. Mom was rarely at home, trying to drown her failures in her works. We tried to stop her, at first, to let her know that she wasn't wrong because her husband came out and left her. But that didn't help, on the contrary, she seemed to take our words like another failure. We finally let her be, even if we missed our Mom.
That let us a lot of time to go to Whitmore for our investigation. The third time, we had a surprising meeting.
Caroline and I were sitting on a bench, not far from the house itself, when we heard the familiar voice. "Caroline? Claire? What are you doing here?"
We both stood to face him, surprised. Caroline was the one to recover first. "Dr. Gilbert? What are you doing here?"
"I already told you to call me Grayson, Caroline," he said with a smile, then turned toward the man with him. "I'm working on some research projects with Dr. Maxfield here. Wes, this is the twin daughters of my friend, Bill Forbes."
"Nice to meet you," there was something about him that set me off, but I couldn't tell what. "I already saw you around there, you don't seem old enough to go to college…"
"We are visiting my friend, Ann," I said before Caroline, my stomach was tightening because of his presence only, but I couldn't tell why and I hated myself for that. Bless my sister, who didn't even flinch at the bullshit she was hearing for the first time.
"Well, we will leave you to it," Dr. Gilbert put his hand on Maxfield's shoulder with a smile and they both made their way toward the house. Grayson seemed to say something at the younger doctor, who looked quickly in our direction with a suspicious glare.
That's when I recognized him.
I fought hard to keep a smile on my face until they disappeared into the house, then, I collapsed on the bench, paler than usual.
Caroline looked at me, worried, "Claire? What is it? Are you alright?"
"It's him, Care," I muttered. "He was the one I saw torturing Enzo."
Her eyes widened, and I could almost see my words made their way into her brain. I knew exactly when she came to the same conclusion as me. "Research projects… You can't think that… Come on, Claire, it's Elena's father!"
"But think about it Care! He's from a founding family, he knows about… All the stuff. You can't deny it, that seems plausible!"
She sat beside me, "Oh my…"
And indeed, a future investigation led us to conclude that Grayson Gilbert was implicated in those experiments. We were stuck, not knowing how to proceed or what to do with our information.
And then, it happened. On May 23, Elena and her parents had an accident, and the girl was the only one who survived. I didn't know why, but when I heard of that, I knew that it had begun. Soon enough, the shit will hit the fan in Mystic Falls. I needed to get Enzo out before then. Something told me I would need allies in the future.
Two weeks later, Elena asked Caroline and Bonnie to go with her to a soiree, held in her parents' memories, at the hospital. I wasn't that surprised by the lack of invitation for me, Elena and I weren't that close. No, I was more interested in the fact that all of Grayson's colleagues were invited. And by all, I mean even his colleagues from Whitmore.
Caroline didn't agree with me, of course, because she had to be with Elena that night, but it was the best moment to try and free Enzo from Augustine.
I needed to take out my crowbar.
And find a good lockpick kit, too.
