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"Wow, red carpet's all rolled out for me." Eileen said absently and Elena peered over her shoulder to read the text only for her eyes to widen as she yelled for Stefan. Damon who was driving the car jerked at the sound sending their seatbelt digging into them and Elena was left not just with a growing sense of panic but also physical pain.

"Klaus knows!" Elena couldn't help but say and Stefan turned to look at her but the rest were unfazed, Damon going so far as to shoot her a dirty look.

"You didn't have to yell," He said, rolling his eyes and Elena felt lost. Did they not understand what was going on? Their enemy knew of something he shouldn't have.

"Elena, we discussed this ages, ago. Klaus was bound to know." Eileen said.

"Not to this extent! He knows your cellphone number, that's not the same as knowing you exist!" They had reached the boarding house, dropping Alaric off at his apartment and Elena was...she was just losing it. Her lungs felt all closed up, every breath was a hardship and she could hear her heart beating away fast all the way up in her throat. Her vision blurred and as the lightheadedness grew, Elena hardly felt it when she was pulled out of the car, turned around and hugged to another chest. As the person holding her steadily breathed in and out, Elena followed their pattern. She had no idea how long it took but it felt like ages had past since the panic passed and she could breathe on her own again.

She turned to find that it was Eileen who had done this, who had calmed her down while the others gave them their space. Another thing to add to the tiny little list of things she knew about her twin, that she knew how to deal with people in the middle of a panic attack.

"Elena, don't freak out, yeah? You have got to chill out. Judging by the way things are going in this town, this is your new norm. You have to adjust to it or just leave, deal with it or move on."

"How can I not freak out, you're not listening to us when-"

"No, don't think about it, okay. You're not going to change my mind, that's out of the question. It would go against everything I believe in if I backed out of this." Elena started to protest but Eileen stopped her looking her straight in the eye, firm and unmoving. "Everything has a price. I wanted my sister back and this is the price I am willing to pay for it. That's not going to change. Now if you want to freak out about the fact that Klaus apparently has some way of tapping in on your conversations then that makes sense but you've got to really think about it. Figure it out, figure out how he's doing this, how to stop him. Pull together the resources you have and do that. But you've got to understand that you'll be doing it for your peace of mind, so that you can maintain some control over your life. Don't make it about me."

"But this is about you!" It was about Eileen and the fact that she was going to be sacrificed just so that some Original vampire could unlock his heritage. It was all about her.

Wasn't it?

"It's really not. Look, all of this, Katherine, Klaus, the werewolves even Damon, they're all problems that you've been facing for far longer than you even knew I existed, and they'll continue to be thorns in your side after I'm gone. You owe me nothing. We may share the same DNA but as you've found out, that's not exactly a rarity. Just for a moment imagine that someone escaped the whole purge that Klaus did of Katerina's family. Imagine that there's two bloodlines, maybe even more, of Petrovas, and consequently other possible doppelgängers . You and I have about the same in common as those hypothetical other doppelgängers . Practically nothing."

Every word Eileen said felt like a blow to her gut.

Maybe it was all in her head, but Elena had gone to find her expecting a sister and what she got was a stranger who shared the same face instead. Even now Elena couldn't help but want more, wanted something that was even an iota of what she and Marlene shared and it was heartbreaking knowing that she'd never get it.

But...but Eileen was right too. Not about them being nothing to one another, Elena was not yet willing to accept that as an answer but she was right in that this was Elena's life now. She could never go back to just being a normal teenager again even if she wanted to. Being normal wouldn't change the fact that her best friend was a witch, and the other was a vampire, that she was in love with a vampire, didn't change that Tyler was a werewolf or that she was a Gilbert, that her brother's ring brought him back to life when he died.

Normal was never going to be something she was so she had to learn to deal with this.

"You okay?" Stefan asked and she realised it had been quiet for far too long.

"I'm fine, I just…needed to hear that."

"Alright, I'll be right upstairs if you need anything, okay?" He asked and she nodded, realising now that they were the only people there. Soon Stefan was gone and Elena was left there in the living room of the Salvatore Boarding house alone. In a glass vase was Eileen's bouquet that Marlene and Elena had chosen. Orange blossoms, hydrangeas and lemon verbena. Marlene had chosen the lemon verbena and Elena had no way of explaining why she was laughing so much back then. 'I love the it smells', Marlene had said and Elena had wondered if she would ever grow to love the smell of vervains like that.

Such a tiny, tiny little thing and so deadly to the big, bad vampires even the Originals. Elena would learn how to be that. But for that she needed to know more about Klaus, about doppelgängers , about everything.

There was one resource that they'd left practically untapped. So Elena went down the stairs, down into the basement and pulled the white oak dagger out of Elijah's chest.

The commotion woke her up. Eileen had just settled in for a little nap, having stayed awake the entire trip, when the sound of doors slamming loudly echoed through the empty house and then Damon bellowed, "He's not here."

So, yes, she woke up. Trudging down the stairs, she found herself following the raised voices, trying to yell over one another until indistinct and found herself in the kitchen. Damon and Elena were yelling at one another while Stefan kept a careful eye on the other man in the place.

He was a vampire too, that much was obvious from the blood bag he was happily glutting himself on. He stopped suddenly looking at Eileen with unabashed shock and curiosity.

"You're not Katerina." He said and Eileen sighed.

"No, I am not. What gave it away? The fact that I'm not as stacked as her?" If Elena had been mistaken for Katherine then they must have looked alike and that was one of the things that was distinctly different between her and Elena, the fact that she was a lot more curvy than her.

"You're standing in third position." The man said dryly and Eileen looked down to see her feet had done exactly that.

"Eileen Henri," She said and held out her hand for him to shake. The blood bag was put away and the man rose to his feet, bending over her hand to kiss it.

"Elijah Mikaelson. Pleasure to meet you."

Eileen blinked. "You know, I have wondered, why do you want to kill Klaus?"

"I'd like to know that too." Elena said and completely ignored Damon to sit down at the table. Elijah took a seat as well and drained the blood bag dry before beginning.

"Klaus is my brother."

"Of course, that makes perfect sense," Eileen turned to Elena who was clearly still processing this. "Remember when you wanted to kill Jeremy and you planned alliances with his enemies so that you could weaken him and do exactly that?"

Elena caught on quickly, "Yes, it was the time of my life." She grinned exaggeratedly and waved her hands in 'excitement'. Elijah frowned but finally continued.

"Our parents were humans. My father was a wealthy landowner in a village in Eastern Europe. Our mother bore seven children and...there aren't as many of us now but we're known as the Originals because we were the original vampires. We were always a close family but my father and Klaus didn't get along. When we were turned into vampires we discovered why. Klaus was not his son. He was a result of our mother's dalliance with a werewolf. Of course, when my father found out he hunted down my mother's lover and her entire family."

"What does that make Klaus?" Elena asked.

"And how does all of that make you want to kill Klaus instead of the parents. You're not blaming him for breaking up the family are you?" Even as the words left her mouth, Eileen knew that wasn't true. Elena and the others had explained that Elijah was once a good friend of Klaus' and that the falling out was a relatively recent thing and they must have found out about their mum sleeping around back when they'd first turned into vampires.

"The Curse of the Sun and the Moon, it's a fake. Just a way to get both warring species looking for the same objects. To make it easier for us. There is a curse but it's one on Klaus, binding his werewolf side. The truth is he's a hybrid but for a thousand years the curse our mother put on him to keep his werewolf side dormant."

"Okay, so the curse is something specific to Klaus, we get that. Your family really needed counselling, we get that. But why does that make you want to kill him?" Eileen reiterated. She wondered if this was how it always went in Mystic Falls, a good hour of dramatic posturing before they got to the point.

"Well, Klaus was not my only brother. I had siblings, parents. I had a family. Over the centuries, Klaus hunted them down one by one and he took them from me. He scattered them across the seas where their bodies could not be found."

Eileen threw her hands in the air. This was getting nowhere. "You are talking about centuries, right, centuries? But see, Katerina and all that stupidity happened what, five hundred years ago, yeah? So until at least five hundred years ago you were still your brother's right hand man."

"More than that." Damon said, finally entering the conversation. "Rose said things changed a hundred or so years ago. That it was only recently that they thought they could appeal for mercy from you because you had broken from Klaus."

"A hundred years, that's not really that much time at all, not to someone who's... what, a thousand years old? So what changed? What changed for you? And what changed for Klaus that after nine hundred years he did something to drive you off?"

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