Each a monster, part 20: Overall, the same thing

Galswinthe moved to let her visitors in, frowning as she smelled the odd scent on Damon Salvatore. Apparently, Alaric had considered it fitting to pour his altered coffee on the offender. Strange how childish males could be, sometimes.

She closed the door behind her, and turned to see her husband sitting on the motel's bed and purposely avoiding his descendant's eyes, not that she couldn't understand his need to do so. Ric and Damon had taken the two chairs in the room and were looking at her.

Feeling that once again she had to do all the work, Gal rolled her eyes and sat next to Hans.

"How are you, Alaric?"

The hunter shrugged, saying that he had known worst. His ancestor raised an eyebrow, doubtful, but he wasn't going to tell her that he had already died twice. First, he didn't want to worry her, second, it wasn't a lack of trust or anything, but he'd rather keep the Gilbert ring a secret a bit longer. Too many people already knew of it, and he didn't want to be killed more times than necessary, just because it wasn't such a big deal and it was easier to disable him this way.

An unpleasant silence took over the room, and after a while Gal forced her husband to look up at his great-great-great-add-a-number-grandson.

"I know it's dull and all, Hans, but you could at least say 'sorry'..."

She had that exasperated tone which totally meant he'd better not drag this on anymore. Hans Falkenbach knew his wife well enough and decided the apologies were worth the unease, while the unease wasn't worth Gal's anger.

He turned his daylight ring around his ring finger, looked up, looked back down, and finally his eyes met Alaric Saltzman's.

The only human in the room looked at Hans with renewed interest. Now that he knew the man was his ancestor, and now that he wasn't bothered with thoughts about how there was a psychopathic vampire with Falkenbachs' instincts in a bar full of unsuspecting humans, he could see the likeness in their features. Sure, the two Falkenbachs didn't have much in common, it was to be expected after seven hundred years. But Ric was a typical Saltzman, and as such a typical Falkenbach, as the photograph of Karl Falkenbach had previously proved.

The hunter and the vampire didn't look alike, but they did look like members of a same family. Aside from one or two particular features that were obviously the same, their overall faces were like two versions of one basic idea, not exactly the same angles, not exactly the same color, but overall, the same thing.

"I didn't mean to."

Well, at least their voices had nothing to do with each other's.

Alaric was going to say that it didn't matter, really, while Damon was ready to be outraged and angry and unsufferable because hell, it was his boyfriend whom the older vampire had almost killed just hours before, and Gal was staring stubbornly at the ceiling wondering how in all freaking hell she had gotten herself involved with those kinds of people in the first place.

But Hans beat them to it.

"I mean, obviously I meant to kill the Petrova doppelganger, but I wasn't in my right mind, hadn't been in centuries, actually, and I know it's not an excuse, but it's the truth, and I can't do better. And I certainly didn't mean to attack you, Alaric, that's it, isn't it? You are my blood, after all, and I don't kill just for the hell of it. Not anymore, at least. But when I'm angry I can be rather unstoppable. I'm really, really sorry."

He had mumbled his apologies all along, but somehow, everybody in the room had understood his mumbling, and the two visitors were staring at him as if he had grown a second head. Galswinthe merely smiled.

This wasn't the same Hans Falkenbach as before. The cold, inhumane feeling Damon, Theo and Ric had felt when they had first talked with the vampire, the dread that had twisted their guts after the hunter had sent his cousin away, there was none of it when they listened to this Hans Falkenbach.

This Hans Falkenbach was a perfectly normal man – sorry, vampire – more normal than most of the vampires they had met thus far, and that included Damon who was anything but normal.

Finally, Alaric realized that his ancestor was nothing more than the usual Falkenbach. Normal, until he wasn't anymore. The one he had met at the Mystic Grill wasn't the usual Hans, but the Hans who used all of his Falkenbach abilities. The killer in him, that anger, hatred and revenge had pushed to the surface while burrying everything else.

Ric frowned. Had it been a switched-off Falkenbach vampire? He wasn't sure. The hunter had seen, had talked to, had killed switched-off vampires, and even if Hans was also a Falkenbach, it still didn't feel the same. Certainly, Hans had enjoyed the thought of hurting Klaus, destroying the Original Bastard from within, but not with the usual vampire detachment. After all, he genuinely wanted revenge. No switched off vampire wanted revenge. They could be gruesome to those who had wronged them, but because their pride had been wounded, and anyway they liked to see others be hurt.

And no switched-off vampire cared for their dead wife that they hadn't seen in hundreds of years.

No, obviously, Hans Falkenbach had not switched off his emotions. It had only been the deepest hatred of a man whose wife had been killed, boosted with a bit of inhumanity. Nothing that Ric himself couldn't match.

"It doesn't matter, really. I don't resent you for that. Damon did worst at our first encounter, you know."

All eyes darted to the younger vampire, who just glared at his boyfriend with a half-amused, half-annoyed look on his face. Then Gal raised an eyebrow at her descendant, while Hans watched, a bit lost. In his defense, he didn't know of Ric's relationship with Damon, not in that way at least. If possible, his wife intended to keep it a secret for one or two months, for she didn't want to stir him up too much and this soon.

"Alaric, what did he do exactly?"

"When I first met him, Damon was feeding on my wife."

Gal's eyes widened, and she tried to think back to the demise of one Isobel Flemming, to what Damon and Ric had told her about her vampiric return, and she frowned.

When the hunter noticed how Hans had tensed at the statement, he glanced at his boyfriend and thought it would do to smooth things a little if he didn't want a dead-dead vampire boyfriend instead of a kind-of-dead one.

And he liked Damon quite a lot. Kind-of-dead was way better than dead-dead.

"No one does murder anyone before I finish. Damon killed Isobel, so I went after him for two years to kill him, but he hadn't actually killed her, not in the definitive way at least, and she had chosen to disappear and leave me behind on her own, so I don't blame him the least about what happened."

Ric left out the part where he died for the first time, for he thought it wouldn't have been wise to do otherwise. He had seen the look in his ancestor's eyes when he had talked about a murdered wife, surely thinking of his own... misadventure. And for the first time, the teacher mused that their stories, while completely different, held many troubling similarities.

They talked a bit after that. Gal gave them her cellphone number. Hans asked what was a cellphone, his wife paled as she realized that he had not only missed most of the newest inventions and she'd have to teach him about it, but that he had been half-oblivious to everything that had happened even when he hadn't been locked up in an underground prison, too busy with his revenge. Sure, Hans had learned what he needed to adapt to the new world he burst into each time, but nothing more. Gal was lucky that he knew what a dustbin was.

Ric and Damon were about to leave when Galswinthe stopped them with a slightly worried look on her face.

"I simply wondered, do you know of a good place to bury a corpse?"

Alaric blinked at that, and withdrew his hand from the door handle. This wasn't the kind of conversation he'd have outside.

"Why are you asking me that?"

"I met one of Klaus' vampires a while back, that he had left behing certainly to 'watch out for something suspect' or anything else the paranoid Original could think of, and well, with Elena being supposedly, you know, dead, I thought it'd be better to get rid of him. Besides, the guy had his emotions turned off, and was feasting like crazy in the nearest towns. With Mystic Falls being Mystic Falls, I thought it'd be wiser to simply... off him."

And better for the humans too. There was a world between feeding and slaughtering.

Damon and Ric looked at each other, certainly worried about the possibility of another spy reporting Elena's survival to Klaus. Gal quicky reassured them.

"So, I buried the body in the forest, and went looking for others. That's why you didn't see me much lately. I actually found a second one, sent by Klaus just to check on things, you should have one month before he does that again, yesterday, but when I went to get rid of the first one, I was almost caught by a sheriff deputy. With them taking vervain, I can't do much, and if you know of a better, safer place..."

The hunter nodded, thoughtful. If they were a bit lucky, Klaus hadn't ordered to his lackeys to report if there was nothing to say, just to go and live their lives. The Original didn't really care about most of the vampires working under him, he usually picked one in the town he was in, compelled them to do his bidding, and forgot about them. It wasn't as if he had friends, after all. Not anymore.

"Where did you leave the body?"

"Actually, it's in the car trunk. I went to you after I killed him, but you were... a bit busy."

"'Way to say it. I guess you were too busy too after my... accident, and anyway, it isn't as if you knew of a place to get rid of it."

Alaric shared a look with Damon, and finally they proposed to do that themselves, so that the couple could finally go on their trip. They had nothing better to do for now.

Gal and Hans argued a bit, not too willing to burden them with a body, which was understandable, but finally relented. Hans really needed to spend time with his wife, and it was obvious that he had been deeply hurt with the last centuries and his own actions.

The four of them left the motel, discreetly moved the corpse from one trunk to another, the vampire couple cleansed the trunk, and went back to their motel to pack their things before leaving.

Ric and Damon then headed to their favorite burying spot, because really, you needed one when you lived in Mystic Falls and dealt with original murderous vampires and others psychos. Damon suspected that Liz had her own spot for the sheriff department, since the authorities in Mystic Falls had this habit to make the stranger deaths just... disappear.

Damon swore loudly when a sheriff deputy stopped them on the side of the road, and Ric had to discreetly poke him in the ribs to make him shut up.

"Papers, please."

Damon complied, wondering what had triggered the inspection. After all, Mystics Falls was a quiet place. At least, it was supposed to be.

The sheriff deputy nodded, and asked them to open the trunk.

Ric and Damon looked at each other, then looked at the man oddly. They had a bit of a problem, and the sheriff deputy was certainly under vervain. Luckily, Damon was known as an anti-vampire activist by the Town Council, as hilarious as it may sound, and if he had a vampire's body staked in the chest in his trunk, it wouldn't be so strange, would it be? But still, only Elizabeth knew that Ric knew too, and they'd have liked it better if things had stayed this way.

"May I ask why?"

The hunter's tone was polite, slightly surprised, all in all, very well toned, but there was something that unnerved the sheriff deputy a lot about it. Like, it was making him shuder, as if he knew this voice from a previous and unpleasant encounter, but he couldn't remember it.

"I'm sorry, it's only that the FBI is in town about a serial killer, and we were asked to perform searches on the locals' cars for some reason, though I have no idea what they are looking for..."

Ric mentally swore that he'd strangle Theodoric next time he saw him, but complied while Damon turned off the ignition.

The sheriff deputy gasped when he saw the body, reached for his gun, realized that the body was all grey and venous and had a stake pushed in its chest, and he relaxed a bit. He glanced at Damon, at Alaric, and decided to talk about it with Sheriff Forbes.

"I suppose you won't talk about that to the FBI?"

"Obviously not."