"It's been a day.
It's felt like an age.
Since I have seen you,
A face to face so we can say what we need to.
I know you've changed.
You don't look the same.
We all make mistakes.
These growing pains, it's just a phase we have to go through.
I've been wasting all this time
Trying to keep you off my mind,
Yeah, you off my mind, but no more."
Going to the doctor had been the best decision of my life. I wasn't sure if I wanted to, since I was trying to hide from Kol, but I did, without getting any new identification first. Under the name Darcy Gilbert, I went and had my first ultrasound done, to check on the health of our baby.
It was suddenly very real. The idea of it all wasn't just an idea anymore. It was actually happening. There was a baby inside of me.
Correction: there were two babies inside of me, most likely. The ultrasound nurse told me that from the looks of it, I was barely even six weeks along, which meant that the very first night Kol and I had sex was most likely the culprit of impregnating me. It made sense; we had gone for hours.
Very faintly, we could hear a heartbeat, and she said that there looked to be two gestational sacs, which could explain why the heartbeat was harder to monitor. It sounded almost like there were two heartbeats, or just one extremely irregular one.
Since going to the doctor, I had gotten far away from West Virginia, traveling further down South in hopes of blending in with society. As much as I liked to pretend that I wasn't your typical "Southern Belle," even travelling to just West Virginia showed that I was, in fact, a Southern girl, with an accent that might make me stand out amongst the crowd.
Georgia was off limits. There were ties in Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi, so I planned to stick to Alabama and Florida. For now, I found myself in probably the most rural place in Alabama I could've found, with a sign that boasted its population of less than a thousand. There were barely even gas stations, with only a single small inn for me to crash at.
I didn't plan to stay here long, but it was a good place to catch my breath, to get some travel stuff that didn't require me to throw up on the side of the interstate. Barf bags weren't ideal, but neither was stopping in the middle of crowded interstates and puking my guts out for everyone to see. Eventually, that might lead to someone remembering me, and I couldn't be remembered.
After checking myself out of my inn room, with a polite goodbye from the kind woman behind the front desk, I went to the diner she recommended I try on my way out. There weren't many places to eat around here, but she suggested I not leave town without trying it. Of course, I had to agree, as I was eating for two, possibly three, so food was a necessity.
It was everything you might expect from your stereotypical small-town diner. Waitresses dressed in modest but form fitting dresses with bright lipstick that made their shining smiles stand out even more, décor that resembled that of the drive-in days from the seventies, and the smell of greasy French fries stuck in the air, as if nothing else could take its place.
It was like it was from another time, but that was a bit endearing. I found myself strangely drawn to it, so much that I couldn't pass it up.
There was a sign that told me to seat myself, so since the place was practically empty, I sat myself in a high-backed booth.
A menu was already waiting at the table, so I began looking through, seeing what looked appealing to the ones inside of my stomach. The more I went along as a pregnant woman, the more I learned to eat carefully, to imagine each dish and see what made me nauseous.
There wasn't much that didn't make me immediately want to barf, only a French toast breakfast that sounded pretty good. All pregnancy rules said that I should keep the caffeine intake to a minimum, but right now, a cold Dr. Pepper sounded amazing.
The waitress who was meant to serve me hadn't even come to my table before the door to the diner opened again, and in walked a tall, slender woman, with a beautiful face and perfect golden ringlets that fell perfectly past her shoulders.
Her eyes, which from a distance seemed to be a perfect blend of blue and green, found me in an instant, and a smile that extended past the borders of Southern hospitality pulled onto her delightfully pink lips.
She headed in my direction, and my heart began to clinch in anticipation and fear. She looked so kind, but right now, I had to be prepared for anything.
She sat down with me and settled back against the booth across from me. "Well hey there. You look lost."
My eyes remained on her, and she began shedding her coat and scarf. "That's the idea."
"How can I help?"
It was a question I never actually expected to hear, not from a complete stranger. Back in Mystic Falls, people helped out the people in town. We took care of our own, but that same courtesy wasn't usually extended out to complete strangers.
I didn't even know her name, yet she was offering to help me?
"You can't, but thanks," I said.
She laughed, which scared me more than her direct approach to me. "Sweetie, you haven't even begun to touch base with what you are, and you wanna tell me you don't need help?"
My eyebrows furrowed. "What are you talking about?"
"I've had dreams about you—and I know that sounds creepy," she said, giving me a nervous smile in return. "But I know who you are. You're the witch-werewolf-doppelgänger girl carrying the children of an Original vampire."
It felt as if she had punched me in the chest, grabbed onto my lungs and squeezed them so tightly that they couldn't actually get air inside. "W-What? How do you know that?"
"The spirits reach out to those who might cross paths with someone they need taken out," she said, and her eyebrows rose. "In this case, that would be you."
"Please." My eyes began filling with tears, my heart wrenching again. "I just want to have this baby—these babies—safely."
"That's all I want for you, too," she assured me, and my eyebrows rose. "And I wanna help you understand what it means to be a siphoner. You have to keep it to yourself, though. The Gemini Coven doesn't like siphoners."
"A what?" I asked. "And who?"
She laughed again and leaned forward towards the table, folding her arms over onto the table. Something about her posture didn't seem forced or uncomfortable; as a matter of fact, it felt familiar, like she wasn't scared to be around me.
"Oh, sweetie, we have got so much to learn."
Esther had become desperate. The arrival of Sage, paired with Kol's growing distrust, had her plan falling to shambles around her, and the pregnant doppelgänger was gone. She had mastered her own locator spell centuries ago, but even that wasn't working to find the doppelgänger.
Esther couldn't understand how a doppelgänger could hide from her, but she grew very desperate at the possibilities.
She was past desperate, really, and that was where Rebekah found her, scouring through the drawers in Rebekah's dresser for any traces of the last dagger. Kol was a liability, and it was only a matter of time before he shared his thoughts with his siblings, if he hadn't already done so.
There was also the more urgent matter at hand, which she knew Kol would never allow her to do, no matter how selfish it was to stop her.
"Mother, what are you doing?"
Rebekah wasn't alone in the doorway of her room for more than a few wordless, panicked moments on Esther's part. She had waited until Rebekah left to come into her room, so why was she already back?
All of her brothers stood behind her, even Finn, who knew of their mother's plan to kill them all. He also knew it had failed, and he no longer cared to sacrifice himself, not now that the woman he loved was no longer lost to him. For his mother's sake, he had kept her plans to himself, and now he realized that he had been stupid to hope she would've changed her mind.
"I was making sure you were all being kind to one another," Esther finally said, when some lie came to mind. It wasn't a good one, and she knew that, but it was all she could think of at the moment.
Elijah stepped forward and pressed his lips together. "Enough of the lies, Mother. We know you want us all dead."
"Right now, there's something more urgent going on," she said, and she fixed her eyes towards each of her children. "Something that doesn't just threaten this family but the entire world if brought into it. Where is the doppelgänger?"
There were two doppelgängers, but everyone knew she wasn't referring to Elena. Elena was very much in town, threatening Kol almost daily at this point. She had refused to give Esther her blood for the traditional locator spell, since Elena was the only blood relative anyone knew that Darcy had still amongst the living.
They all knew she meant Darcy.
Before anyone could move to stop him, Kol rushed across the room and grabbed his mother by the throat, pinning her body against the wall.
"Running from you!" he screamed. "What the hell do you mean where is she? You scared her so much that she believed she was safer on her own!"
Kol could feel his mother using a pain infliction spell on him, but it didn't work like it usually did, didn't immobilize him like it once might've. Maybe it was the strength of his broken heart, the emotional pain burning within him so powerfully that he could overlook the physical pain with ease.
"Isn't she? Look at what you're doing to me."
"Put her down, Kol," Klaus said, using a commanding tone that only infuriated Kol more, especially coming from Niklaus.
Kol didn't think twice about what he was doing. With a simple bit of added pressure to his grip around her neck, he watched the life leave her eyes, the sound of her bones cracking echoing through the otherwise silent room.
He took advantage of their shock and horror and brushed past them all, heading through the rounded hall and towards the staircase.
Elijah recovered in time to chase after him, however, grabbing onto his youngest brother's arm before he could take his first step down the stairs.
"What have you done, Kol?"
Koll allowed some of his rage to show in his glare towards Elijah. "She was going to kill us all, Elijah. You know that, and she said it herself!"
"She was, but you heard her!" Elijah exclaimed. "There was something more urgent going on, a threat to our family! Whatever it is, it has to do with Darcy. Do you know where she is?"
This was it, Kol's breaking point. Up until that moment, he had been holding it all back, letting only bits of anger show here and there.
No more.
"Why does everyone keep talking about Darcy?" he yelled right into his brother's face, scaring even Elijah. "She's gone! She's not here! Do you think for a single moment that if I knew where she was, I would be here? I wouldn't! None of you give a damn about me, but I met someone who, for once, does! If I had a choice in the matter, that's where I'd be, but I don't know! I don't know where she is, why she left, or when she'll come back, but what I do know is that our mother, who threatened her life along with all of ours, can't hurt her anymore. If you believe for one moment that Darcy would hurt any of us, you haven't been paying attention at all! Except you, Nik. I'm sure she would love to hurt you."
Kol's unbridled fury surprised them all again, and he was actually able to get away this time. Rushing down the stairs, using his vampiric speed to his full advantage this time, he was out the door and slamming it behind him in less than two seconds.
He heard the door frame crack, with the glass within the window of the door shattering to pieces at the force of the action. Klaus wouldn't like it, but Kol cared less about what Klaus thought than he ever had before.
His siblings, however, stood horrified at the top of the stairs, looking down at the shattered mess with varied expressions of horror and distress.
Klaus, known for his own fits of rage, was able to recover much faster than the rest of his siblings, who didn't seem to have any words to say. "Well, something must be done about him."
"He's hurt," Rebekah snapped. "Leave him alone, Nik."
Elijah, as much as he hated to admit it, was on Klaus' side about this one, the revulsion of watching his brother snap his mother's neck still fresh in his memory. "Who has the last dagger?"
Rebekah scoffed. "You can't be serious. We can't dagger him."
"We absolutely will not dagger him!" Finn exclaimed. "If we do, we're no better than Niklaus."
"He just murdered our mother," Klaus pointed out, knowing that Finn absolutely doted on their mother more than any of her other children. "What choice do we have?"
"She was going to kill us all," Rebekah said. "He did what we were all too afraid to do, and isn't that rich? The pot calling the kettle black."
They didn't agree on what to do, but there was nothing more that any of them could do. Rebekah didn't know that the dagger wasn't safely stored away within the hidden panel in her closet. She didn't know that Kol had snuck into her room days ago to remove it, to place the final dagger out of his reach somewhere that Klaus could never find them.
He made sure to protect himself, for situations just like the one he found himself in. Without Darcy around, he was finding himself slipping into madness, back into the sanity that was his life before her, and he was scared to go back there.
Would he be able to stop himself from taking lives without her? Could he be a better man if she wasn't around?
A/N: Sorry I didn't post yesterday! I completely forgot to post a chapter, but here it is!
The lyrics at the beginning are from the song Give by You Me at Six. I love it so much. It's probably one of my favorites off their newest album.
Read, review, and enjoy! Only the epilogue remains. :)