Set in 4x15.
One world apart, part 15: Falconcreek
"You know, there's no point mulling over the possibility of a missing grim reaper when the only person who can answer our questions is not here."
Damon rolled his eyes, but stopped pacing.
"Thank you Captain Obvious, but the alternative is to mull over the fact that Jeremy's dead, Elena's heart-broken, and we still have a great deal of problems to take care of. So I'd rather wonder about what happened to the 'missing' grim reaper, especially now that I remember Ariane told me about him... He's dead. Problem is, how do you kill a grim reaper? And, speaking of which, who else than the grim reapers knows about that? Is there even a chance someone will try to murder my friend any time soon?"
Then he paused, and turned around to look the ghost in the eyes.
The ghost who, by the bye, was currently sitting in the library of the boarding house, his eyes glued to an imaginary glass of bourbon. If imaginary bourbon had the same effect as true bourbon, it would have been great, in fact, because these days, Alaric felt nothing could go worse... Though he knew it could. It obviously could. Mystic Falls' supernatural occupants knew it could always get worse, because that was usually how it worked in the small city.
"No, because really, losing yet another friend is exactly what I need right now, and while the threat is almost non-existent, I'd rather be puzzled searching for an answer than brooding about what happened lately. There are too many people affected already, and someone in this city needs to get their head around the facts and prevent the situation from worsening, and the hell with it if I'm not the only one who seems to realize that!"
Seeing as Alaric was, in fact, at this very moment, getting himself depressed by staring at a glass of imaginary bourbon while remembering now and then that Jeremy was dead, the ghost didn't feel entitled to point out that Damon was surely not the only person in town who was still thinking clearly. Besides, he knew Damon, and the vampire wasn't going to allow himself to show his feelings about Jeremy's death just like that. Maybe later that night, when Damon would bring out the alcohol, and when he drowned his annoyance at the world with him, but not for now. Not yet.
Damon would not mourn, or at least not show it, until he had nothing else to do. And if, like this day, the vampire had nothing to do, then he'd find something to busy himself with to postpone the moment of release.
So Damon preferred to wonder about the mystery of the dead grim reaper, for now.
"Ariane will soon be back with Carol Lockwood and my cousin, Damon. You'll ask her when she gets here. It shouldn't be long, now. What are the odds that she'll be attacked on the last twenty minutes of traveling from where they stayed to the boarding house? And even if she was attacked, there is little to no chance that it would be by that one person who possibly knows how to kill a grim reaper."
Then the front door of the boarding house was pushed open, and ghost and vampire heard the footsteps of someone coming to them, as well as the unmistakable accent of a formerly roman woman.
"I hope not! But unless that very attacker who knows how to fell me is hiding in your kitchen, Damon, I dare say I made it to you without damages."
Ariane strode into the library, and let herself fall into the nearest armchair.
"Carol Lockwood has been delivered to her home without so much as a scratch, Magdalena Haguenhauer is growing fairly suspicious of what is going on in this charming little town, and Ariane who-won't-tell-you-her-real-name-because-it-sounds-way-too-odd-in-this-day-and-age has not been killed by a mysterious attacker. Mission accomplished. Now, what did I miss, and why are you discussing my possible murder?"
Damon grumbled a greeting, and Alaric looked up from his imaginary bourbon.
"Aside from convincing Klaus not to try and murder you and the mayor, everything went downhill these last days. The teens went to an island to get the Cure for vampirism, only to discover that it could be taken by only one person at a time, and Jeremy got murdered by his sister's evil doppelganger just before he reached the grand prize."
Ariane sighed, wondering once again why she was friend with Damon. At the speed tragedies occurred in Mystic Falls, maybe it wasn't so far-fetched to think she'd better watch her back...
Howsoever Damon and his personal ghost had ended up talking about the way to kill a grim reaper in the first place.
Damon thought it necessecary to add his sarcastic comment. Surely his way to cope with grief.
"And I'm sure there are one or two other things that happened at some point too, but I failed to register after the part about the expedition being a failure and Jeremy Gilbert dying."
Ariane rose from her seat. She made to leave until she remembered she didn't actually have a place in town and was crashing at the boarding house. Then she stopped, and looked back at the two brooding vampires, one undead and the other dead-dead. Because no matter what Damon pretended, the vampire was brooding.
"I'll go and take a shower if you don't mind, and then we could speak about what prompted you to question my immortality? What do you think?"
Damon waved her away, and the grim reaper rushed upstairs. Whatever the two lovers would talk about now, it was not her right to eavesdrop.
Ariane gone, Ric looked away from his imaginary glass of imaginary alcohol, which returned to the true state of every imaginary thing: non-existence. The ghost found Damon quiet, his back leaning against a wall, with anger in his eyes. Alaric went to him, and adopted a similar position, only keeping his hands in his pockets. It wasn't as if he could hug the vampire in his current not-so-imaginary ghostly state, so he figured it was better to keep the temptation to a minimum.
"See, the answer came to us. Now speak to me."
The vampire glared at him, and refused to answer, biting his lips.
"Damon, there's no point in denying you cared. Jeremy's gone, and you can be an ass about it, as always, but you should speak to someone and be honest, even if only once. Even if only with me."
Damon scoffed derisively, his eyes searching his ghostly boyfriend's face in search of a heartbreak he was sure he wouldn't find. Alaric wasn't heartless, far from it. But he wasn't a normal person either. He was a Falkenbach, and dealing with death was something so natural to him, that he didn't really know what to do with his emotions when it struck someone close to him.
With Jeremy, it seemed to be bearable, but Damon had seen the hunter's reaction at the his agony by werewolf bite, a few months ago.
"Because you do so well with grieving!"
He didn't mean to underplay Ric's feelings about Jeremy's death. But he didn't think Alaric could help him cope. They were too different, if only on that point, for it to work. The ghost was cursed, and his emotional center was not complete. He lacked something to be humane, and speaking of grieving fell right into that category.
Damon witnessed the hurt on Ric's face being washed away by concern, once again, and he felt disgusted with himself. But he didn't know what else to say. Jeremy was dead, and it hurt. But beyond that? There wasn't much else to say, and truth be told, it wasn't the first time someone the vampire cared about died.
"Damon, please..."
But the vampire wouldn't give in, and it was only Ariane's return that broke the silence, a few minutes later.
The grim reaper was still in the process of getting her grey t-shirt into the right position when she passed by the library in search of her car key, which she had left... somewhere between the entrance and the armchair. The two got a nice sight of her stomach, efficiently distracting Damon from his brooding. The vampire was about to point it out with a smirk, when Ariane turned around, having not found her keys anywhere near the armchair.
"And I forgot my phone in the car. Great. If the Apocalypse happened while I was taking a shower and I couldn't react because I forgot to take it with me, I swear I'll..."
She was cut by a double gasp of surprise, and stopped on her tracks.
Turning around a bit, just enough to see the two's faces, Ariane frowned.
"Is something the matter?"
Damon was surprised, alright, but it was more Alaric who concerned her, as he looked... well, utterly shocked. Ariane followed their gazes, and her eyes fell on her t-shirt. It didn't take her long to figure out what was making them gawk like that. Her suspicions about Alaric Saltzman, as well as his cousin Magdalena Haguenhauer, were suddenly confirmed, and now she could say without hesitation that she knew why the two, ghost or alive, felt so vaguely familiar.
"This tattoo... It's an eight-pointed star, isn't it?"
The ghost reached for his left shoulder, but she wasn't even sure he had noticed his own gesture.
The grim reaper sighed, and turned back for them to take a better look at the said tattoo in the small of her back. It was, indeed, an eight-pointed star, made of four thin, turquoise lines, just the same color as the tattoos under her eyes. Just the same figure as the scar she knew Alaric to have on the back of his left shoulder.
It wasn't really a tattoo, as the marks under her eyes weren't either. All the grim reapers had these, the star, and the marks under the eyes. Ariane wasn't sure how, or why, but it had been another result of the ritual which had made them what they were. And for those who knew about the grim reapers, it was a way to tell them apart from mortals immediately.
"We were going to speak of the one person who ever managed to kill one of my kind, weren't we? Well, it is all related. Sit down."
The ghost and the vampire did as they were told, still to stunned to act otherwise. Ariane put her t-shirt right, and went to the armchair she had been using not so long before. There she sat down, and there she waited for the questions.
She didn't have to wait long.
"Do you know the means to kill your kind, and is there any risk of it happening again?"
The grim reaper looked at Damon, noticing with interest that he was avoiding the topic of the tattoo for now, as if he wasn't sure how to ask about it.
"Of course, it could happen again. There is always a way, always a loophole to immortality. But the one man who ever killed a grim reaper is long dead, and he did not leave instructions behind. As far as I know, no one knows, today, how he managed that particular feat."
This time, it was the ghost who spoke. His voice was carefully controlled.
"He was... human?"
Ariane laughed a bit, at the irony of being asked this question by this person.
"Oh yes, he was. It happened in the seventh century, in a town that would be situated in Germany today, had it not been... almost wiped out with that event. A true scene of slaughter, the few who survived left the place afterwards. Witches particularly hate the place, even today."
The grim reaper fixed her eyes on the ghost's, making sure to speak her next sentence with intent.
"The grim reaper's murder happened in a place named Falconcreek."
Alaric paled visibly as he realized what it meant.
"Falkenbach in German."
Next to him, Damon blinked once or twice. The vampire looked at the two people who shared a similar figure on their bodies, one as a turquoise tattoo, the other as a ritual scar which acted as a seal upon his incomplete emotional center. Finally it sank in.
Damon had to refrain himself from trying and putting his hand on Ric's shoulder. He still couldn't touch the ghost, after all.
"You mean, this man who killed one of yours, it's possible that he was... Alaric's ancestor?"
Ariane nodded, her face grave, as she remembered the trip she had gone onto as soon as she had heard the news. Herself, and the ten other remaining grim reapers, had arrived at Falconcreek a few months after the actual events, but they had found the man, and they had heard the story.
And they had seen the consequences of Ascagne's killing.
"The Falkenbachs were the descendants of the only man to have ever killed a grim reaper. As such, they became the greatest human killers to walk this Earth. Their curse is that even though they are human, they share Ascagne's blood."
Ariane gestured at Alaric.
"And you, Alaric Saltzman, are of this same blood. Welcome to the family."
And someone cursed loudly on the other side of the nearest window. A window, which was open.
