A.N: Thankyou for all the wonderful reviews and your excitement for the fic! I'm amazed at the response and the amount of likes and alerts this fic got. I will happily continue to fic and add in many of our favorite and sometimes less favorite characters.

Bloody banana bread – Part 1

After founder's day ball, they found her covered in blood and high on hysteria.

It wasn't as if she was one of the stupid chicks in horror movies who went out into the woods by herself at night. She was Caroline the fearless, yet, practical baker. She would never jeopardize baking the chocolate, banana and raspberry bread later than 5 am in the morning, before the breakfast rush hour. The bread needed to cool down, cut into nice big slices before anyone could enjoy it with their morning coffee. And she was the only one who could cut the bread into the perfect, even, slices she liked to hand out to the early breakfast crowd.

But instead, she had to spend her morning trying to keep from screaming as her mother, Alaric, Bonnie and Matt sat around her hospital bed trying to get her to talk about what happened after the founder's day ball. And she clammed up, big time.

Alaric tried to reach a protective hand over hers, signalling sanctuary, even thought she felt numb with the passing of terror the earlier night, 'Caroline, we just want to know what happened, so nothing like this ever happens again...to anyone. Are you sure you can't tell us anything?'

First, Alaric was not town authority to be cajoling her into gently giving up the unnamed stranger that was responsible for her overnight hospital stay, and second, her mother was unusually quiet about the whole deal; as if she already knew what to make of the attack on her daughter. I was freaking her out!

If there were awards for clawing and screaming your way out of protective custody and hospitals, then Caroline should have got one. She had all of told all of them that on no uncertain terms will she talk about what happened because she had absolutely no memory of what had transpired during the ball. The only real memory she had was of trying to talk to Tyler Lockwood about his brother and him silently contemplating why she was being so nice to him for a change, while he smashed back drink after drink. She even remembered him offering her a drink and her turning him down.

The moron better not have something to do with this! It was as if the thought of an emerging memory made the bite marks over her shoulder and neck itch.

It's a few days later when she finds her nerve to get back to work at the grill and every once in a while she would catch Bonnie, Matt, and even Alaric look at her with something akin to fear, or maybe worry. It's just what they thought might have happened that was making it hard for them to be normal with her. All this she found completely maddening in a way they could never understand because she was the victim in the scenario.

The poor unassuming baker who had been lured in to the woods by something sinister and attacked brutally, leaving behind rivulets of blood running down her body.

It's what they didn't talk about that was bothersome because whatever they thought had happened to her was far worse than they admitted vocally around her. Had they assumed something more? Like sexual assault? She had already refused to comment on much of their quiet speculation on what could have happened to her in those woods.

The truth was, she had no idea, what had happened, just the piercing pain of being bitten and then blackness all over. Total and utter blankness, which betrayed nothing of what could have happened to her, much less who she had to blame for these lovely scars on shoulders and neck that were in the process of turning purple and yellow over her pale skin.

Caroline could hear Alaric and Bonnie all the way from the kitchen.

'Put on some damn clothes, you don't work at the Hooters!'

'Then fix the damn heating Ric!'

'Bonnie, I's just saying the next time i fire you will be the last time...'

'Oh we'll see...'

Bonnie was wearing a top that could hardly be called a top, the grill's over heating might have had something to do with it but then Bonnie was always a stickler for fights with their boss. Caroline sailed by with less cleavage on display

Her key lime pie was a favorite today at their lunch rush; the cooling tang of the pie kept the customers fight free. Alaric and Bonnie became silent as she passed by; she could feel the pair of their eyes watching her intently as if they were waiting for her to drop the tray or turn into a screaming banshee.

In the middle of the weekend rush, Caroline subconsciously checked her bandages were still in place whenever someone stared at her longer than she deemed necessary, and carried on baking everything and anything that took the attention away from her. She really tried to get into the swing of things, but people were still behaving too awkwardly around her. Or maybe it was just her own crazy need for normality, which was disconcerting to her mystic grill family. If appearances were anything to go by, Bonnie seemed to be taking off on double the breaks she used to, Alaric kept busier than usual; mumbling to himself or choosing to disappear whenever she tried to shop talk about kitchen stock, and Matt just plain looked away pained and scared every time their gazes met accidentally. That bothered her just friggin too much! The absence of their normal banter struck her an equally painful way.

And then there was the esteemed sheriff of Mystic Falls.

Meltdown practically around the corner, her mother decided to make inopportune trips to the grill almost every day. Caroline had the curious feeling she was there to check up on her. Lately, she had been suppressing the urge to constantly scream out loud 'I'm NOT an invalid!' and avoided making small talk with customers or staying late at work like usual. Nobody seemed to mind this, or at least they didn't see the point after one of her recent meltdowns during a fated close down time with the Mystic Falls sheriff, bearing down on her in her authoritarian capacity.

After 4 weeks of watching Caroline with obvious restrained impatience, Liz Forbes was determined to move her daughter back home and would just not take no for an answer.

'Caroline, I swear to god you are coming home with me tonight, or else?!...'

Maybe if she hadn't been feeling alienated in the Grill, or having horrible nightmares she avoided telling even Bonnie about, Caroline wouldn't have lost it with her. The screaming match was around the corner anyway because they had avoiding showdowns with each other for months now and it turned pretty ghastly pretty quickly. Both Caroline and the sheriff were in loud, frustrated tears after screaming at each other for a full forty five minutes; Caroline with her defensiveness and her mother with her pained insistence. Alaric, remarkably adult about the whole thing, kept trying to calm them both without success, while Matt banged dishes in annoyance somewhere in the kitchen.