A/N: Thank you so much for all the wonderful reviews! :):):) & I don't know about this chapter, but I have a feeling everyone is going to like the next one lol Just to give you the heads up ;)

Disclaimer: The Vampire Diaries belongs to L.J. Smith & CW. Song lyrics in this chapter from Bed of Roses by Bon Jovi.

Chapter 3

"You're in Italy?" Alaric almost shouted into the phone. "As in, on another continent?"

Jeremy snorted in genuine amusement, unable to wipe the grin off his face. It was a wonder his face didn't hurt, because he was grinning non-stop since yesterday.

"Is that really the most interesting part of what I just said?" he asked into the receiver, shaking his head and laughing, glancing around the sunlit street and marveling at the sudden emergence of colors, sounds and scents. It was blinding and overwhelming, this ability to notice all of these again. He would have to re-learn how to live in such a vibrant world.

"No, that's the most... transparent part of what you just said," Alaric said cautiously on the other side of the line. "You know, the part I can actually comprehend."

"And that's coming from someone who was dead for a year," Jeremy said with another laugh. Paradoxically, the laughter was making Alaric worry even more, although it thankfully sounded rather normal and not hysterical. "Listen," Jeremy continued in a cheerful tone, "I don't have much time to talk. Elena went to grab some breakfast and we're meeting Verona, the witch who is helping us, in an hour. She'll try to do a special locator spell. She isn't sure it will work, because being on the Other Side even for a short time erases some aura layers. Anyway. I'll explain that in detail later. It may not work right away, but we have to start trying as soon as possible. For now you can just tell everyone what we know so far."

Alaric closed his eyes and stifled a sigh. "Jeremy. You don't know anything so far," he said carefully, holding his breath while waiting for Jeremy's response.

Jeremy groaned, not a trace of discouragement in his tone when he spoke. "Elena was right. We shouldn't have called you so soon."

"No, Jeremy, I'm glad you called, but..." Alaric shook his head with a grimace, searching for the right words. "Maybe you just shouldn't be getting your hopes up too high. That's all I'm saying."

There was a pause.

"I've got to go," Jeremy said in a lower, but firmer tone, with the faintest trace of irritation in it. "We'll call later with an update," he added and hung up before Alaric had a chance to say anything more.

xxxdelenaxxx

"See that guy over there?" Bonnie asked, bumping her shoulder against Damon's.

They were sitting on the steps near the hospital park entrance, watching other patients walking around, reading, breathing in the fresh air.

It was the first time the state of Damon's leg and his knee was good enough to allow him to sit next to Bonnie on the steps and not in a chair. It felt strangely refreshing to feel the stone texture under the palms of his hands when he touched it. However, the sensation still wasn't as striking as everything he was feeling in his dreams. Damon looked away with a pensive frown. For some reason he felt alive in dreams, but not so much in the reality. The reality felt so distant, made up, not real. He couldn't quite explain it, but there was something off, something missing about every moment he spent awake.

"The one with the drawing pad?" Damon questioned, squinting against the sun, absently playing with the ring on his finger that Bonnie had been making fun of for the first few days after they had woken up. He took it off, put it on, took it off again.

"Yes," Bonnie said, tilting her head to the side, watching the boy who was sitting across from them on a bench in the other side of the garden. "When I look at him-"

"You get a feeling," Damon finished the sentence for her, sending a faint smirk her way when she narrowed her eyes at him.

"Laugh all you want, Clyde," Bonnie said with all the confidence she could muster. "But it will all fall into place one day, you'll see."

"If you call me Clyde one more time-" Damon started in a low, ominous voice, but Bonnie cut him off, tossing a magazine onto his lap.

Damon rolled his eyes and hid his face in his hands.

"Oh, come on," Bonnie said with a frown, grabbing his hand and making it hover near the page the magazine was open at. "This is supposed to be fun."

"It's not fun. It's stupid. And guess what. It'd still be stupid even if we actually knew when our birthdays were," Damon said, uncovering his face and looking grimly at the page.

"Hey, no peeking!" Bonnie said, covering his eyes with her free hand. "And it's not stupid," she said the words before thinking them over and was a little surprised by the amount of resolve in her voice. Of course she didn't think it was stupid and that's why she had said that. But she was also under a strange impression that in addition to believing it wasn't stupid she also knew that it wasn't.

With a resigned groan, Damon blindly pointed to one of the horoscopes. Straightening up, and giving Damon an authoritative smile, Bonnie snatched the magazine from him and kept it open in front of her face, pretending to be reading from it.

"I predict," she started in a solemn tone, but then stopped for a second and put the magazine down, "that this year is going to be kick ass," she said with a smile that Damon returned, shaking his head with a soundless snort. "And I predict," Bonnie continued, "all the sad and dark times are over and you are going to be beyond happy-" She trailed off rather abruptly, a deep frown appearing on her forehead, because the words started reverberating in her head, spoken in her own voice and yet it sounded a little different...

Damon was about to ask what was wrong, but then they were interrupted by someone appearing right in front of them.

"I've got my dad's permission to steal James for three hours," Amanda said with a smile, glancing at Bonnie and then shifting her eyes to Damon.

"His name's Clyde," Bonnie said with a completely straight face and Amanda blinked, but then chuckled when Damon placed the magazine over Bonnie's head.

"Witch," he said with a lop-sided smile, rising to his feet.

Bonnie laughed and watched him and Amanda walk across the park toward the parking lot. When they were out of sight, Bonnie placed the magazine back in her lap, closed her eyes, and picked a random horoscope with her finger.

"Let's see," she muttered and started reading:

"This week is going to be full of opportunities for you! An exciting job could become available soon. More benefits come with more responsibilities, but don't be afraid to take the risk while taking necessary precautions. Also your social life will receive a boost. You may even meet the love of your life within the next few days! But be careful. Someone you haven't seen in a while might make an unexpected appearance and their ambiguous intentions can put your loved ones in harm's way. Remember to stay calm in crisis, trust your instincts and follow your heart. And don't be surprised if by the end of this week you'll receive the most extraordinary present from the least likely benefactor."

Smiling to herself, Bonnie rolled her eyes and put the magazine away with a sigh.

xxxdelenaxxx

"Are you serious?" Caroline asked, giving Alaric an incredulous look.

Alaric sighed. "I'm not liking this any more than you do, but since it's nothing too complicated, I think we should just do what they're asking for, let them carry this through and... come back when the whole thing fails," he finished the sentence in a low, sad voice, the words leaving a bitter taste in his mouth, and he didn't know if it was because what he had said was true or because he believed that what he had said was true.

Caroline threw out her arms in exasperation. "Did they really need to go to Italy to do a locator spell? And what's the point anyway of doing a locator spell for someone who is dead?"

"That's the whole point, Caroline," Alaric said with a stiff smile. "This witch told them Damon and Bonnie aren't dead."

Caroline looked away with a worried frown before shifting her eyes to Stefan who was standing beside her in silence. "Well, what do you think?" She asked in a gentler tone, trying to interpret the expression on Stefan's face.

Stefan stared at the floor for a longer while before looking up at Alaric. "How much did they say they need?" He asked a little breathlessly, as if he was making an effort to make his voice sound casual.

Caroline blinked.

"Just a small vial should be enough," Alaric said with a shrug. "A few drops of blood of a relative, that's what she told them."

"Do we know where Bonnie's mom is?" Stefan asked, wrinkling his forehead.

"I'm sure my mom can find her," Caroline said reassuringly, her eyes not leaving Stefan's face.

She began wondering if she had overlooked him secretly harboring that impossible belief along with Elena and Jeremy because he had been hiding it so well or perhaps it was something completely new, a newly rekindled hope that she found herself in no position to question.

Or reject, she thought with an inner jolt caused by the memory of Bonnie's contagious smile.

"Alright," Caroline said, placing her hands on her hips and thrusting up her chin. "Let's join the crazy squad."

xxxdelenaxxx

"I'm so far away

That each step that I take is on my way home."

Amanda lightly tapped Damon's hand and smiled thinly when he almost jumped in his seat, as if someone had just woken him up from sleep.

"I'll take a leap of faith and assume that you zoning out has nothing to do with the quality of my company," she said, taking a sip of her drink. The dim lights above their table were making the ice cubes on top of the glass glimmer.

Damon smiled faintly and shook his head. "I was just... listening to the song."

"Really?" The girl said, straightening up and listening for a second to the song that was playing in the background. "So you like Bon Jovi."

Damon shook his head with a grimace. "No."

"I want to lay you down on a bed of roses

For tonight I sleep on a bed on nails."

"No?"

Damon looked around the restaurant thoughtfully for a second. "I don't think I do. It just..." He trailed off with a sour half-smile when he realized that he was about to deliver one of Bonnie's 'I just get this feeling' lines.

Amanda watched him for a while, but the prolonged silence was becoming uncomfortable. Damon, lost in thought, seemed once again completely oblivious to his surroundings.

"I see this wasn't the best idea," Amanda said, glancing around the cozy restaurant.

Damon blinked, the words shaking him out of his reverie once again. "I'm sorry."

"And she's giving me the eye

I might have said yeah

But I laughed so hard I think I died."

"Don't be," Amanda said, leaning against the cushioned back of the booth. "It's my fault. I keep forgetting how hard and weird it must all be for you. I can't even imagine. So I'm sorry if I'm being too... invasive."

"It's not you."

She rolled her eyes. "Right. It's you."

"I just... It's just... that no matter what I do I can't shake this feeling..." He frowned, trying to choose the right words to explain exactly what he was feeling, but then deciding that the truth wasn't necessarily the most tactful thing to say. Or most sensible. And he really didn't need another set of therapy sessions to know that being in love with a figment of one's imagination wasn't probably the healthiest thing to do.

"When you close your eyes

Know I'll be thinking about you."

After waiting for a few moments for Damon to finish his sentence, Amanda gave up and rose to her feet. "Let's go back to the hospital. It's late anyway and I promised my dad that I'd prepare and send out today all the invitations for the conference. It's such a hassle," she said with a small sigh. "Ever since they moved the Society meetings from Whitmore to here all the paperwork is killing me," she said with a smile. "Let's go."

xxxdelenaxxx

Elena tilted her head to the side and looked at the tree that curiously seemed to grow in the middle of the pavement. Its tiny green leaves shivered in the wind and she smiled faintly at the quiet sound they made that her vampire hearing allowed her to catch. She hadn't really been using it much in the last months, she realized. She hadn't really been using any of her senses much. Everything had been dimmed and muffled. Colorless. Everything but her dreams and her memories. Mostly memories, because that's what had allowed her to take each day at a time and believe that tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow there would be a breakthrough. But now also the dreams returned and she couldn't stop imagining the future, imagining finding Damon and Bonnie and bringing them home... which could be anywhere, really, any place could become home once they were all together.

"Ric said the vials with Stefan's and Bonnie's mom's blood should be here tomorrow," Elena said, reaching for a spoon and stirring her coffee at a pace that indicated more anxiety brewing in her mind than her voice was betraying.

Jeremy looked around, watching people hurrying or moving very slowly across the square in which the small café they were sitting in was located. "Just one more night, I know," he said with a nod, checking the status of the package for the thirtieth time, even though it probably couldn't have changed in the last several minutes.

"You should turn this off until tomorrow," Elena suggested, glancing meaningfully at Jeremy's laptop.

"I'm reading the entertainment news," Jeremy said, changing the website and giving Elena a weak smile over the screen.

She shook her head, rising the coffee cup to her lips.

Absently cutting the tiramisu with a small fork, Jeremy flipped through different sites, his mind wandering off, his eyes skimming over the images flickering on the screen without giving any of them much thought.

Elena propped her head on her elbow, following with her fingertips the floral patterns on the white tablecloth. "How is the tiramisu?" She asked listlessly, not looking at Jeremy.

A gust of wind lightly tugged on her hair, making the coffee cups rattle quietly against their small plates, steady noise of surrounding conversations filling the silence at their table.

Her attention primarily focused on memories flitting through her head, it took Elena an additional minute to notice that Jeremy hadn't answered her question. She looked up at him.

Jeremy's face was drained of all color, his eyes wide and shining, glued to the computer screen.

"Jeremy?" Elena asked with an anxious frown, quickly leaning toward him, but when Jeremy's eyes darted to her there was such incredible light in them that anxiety vanished almost immediately, replaced by a vaguely exciting sense of bewilderment.

Elena blinked and even though Jeremy didn't say anything at all, she felt tears gather in her eyes when a small smile that appeared on Jeremy's face began turning into a grin. With shaking hands, Jeremy picked his computer off the table and gave it to Elena who nearly dropped it at the sight.

Hospital Selfie

The Greatest Digital Project in the Land of Enchantment

New Mexico

portrait no. 133

Bonnie and Clyde