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Just a heads-up: due to RL stuff, updates may be a little slower from now on, but hopefully no less frequent than once a week ;)
Disclaimer: The Vampire Diaries belongs to L.J. Smith & CW.
Chapter 10
"If we got here on time, none of it would've happened," Caroline said with a distressed huff, pacing around the room. Stefan nodded thoughtfully. "We would've gone to that hospital together and they wouldn't have been able to-"
"What are you doing?" Elena asked with an incredulous frown, storming back into the room after closing the door behind Damon whom she had randomly (and only now Caroline realized how randomly and that it was indeed a little weird) asked to bring her a chocolate bar from the candy vending machine in the hallway.
Caroline blinked in bafflement, because for the half an hour since her and Stefan's arrival during which the four of them had been talking, Elena hadn't looked angry or irritated and the atmosphere seemed rather pleasant, only a little understandably awkward due to the whole memory loss situation and as happy as it could be considering that they were all worried about Bonnie and anxious for Jeremy and Alaric to return...
"What do you mean?" Caroline asked, wrinkling her forehead and glancing at Stefan to see if he had any idea what Elena was talking about.
To her surprise, he seemed to have an idea, because he winced. "I'm sorry, Elena," he said with an apologetic grimace, "it was dumb, I know, I didn't mean to-"
"OK. What is going on?" Caroline cut Stefan off in mid-sentence, still not understanding the reason for Elena's sudden change of mood.
Elena brushed her hair behind her ears with a humorless snort and crossed her arms over her chest. "Really, Caroline? He died, he was in a coma for three months, woke up with no memories and spent three months wondering who he was and if anyone was looking for him, and the first thing you say to him is that you hate him?" Elena's face contorted in a disbelieving grimace.
Caroline blinked, finally beginning to see what it was all about. "Oh my goodness, Elena!" She exclaimed, throwing her arms up in the air with a nervous laugh. "Are you serious?! I didn't say that I hate him. I said- Whatever I said- It was a joke! What Stefan said was a joke too!"
"A joke?" Elena widened her eyes at her. "If you say something that no one except you finds funny I'm pretty sure it doesn't qualify as a joke," she said brusquely. "Now he'll be thinking about what you said, wondering why you said that and what it was that he'd done in the past that made you say it-"
"Elena!" Caroline interrupted her with an incredulous huff. "Don't you think you're overreacting? A little? Or actually more than a little? Like... a lot more than a little?"
"Elena's right," Stefan said with a sigh, giving Caroline a mollifying look. "We should be more considerate of what we say to Damon and Bonnie right now."
"You mean we should lie to them?" Caroline asked, stifling an urge to roll her eyes.
"No, Caroline, not lie, just be a little nicer than you usually are," Elena blurted out and Caroline gawked at her.
"Oh, I'm sorry if I'm not in a heavenly mood," Caroline retorted in annoyance. "I wonder in what kind of mood you would've been in after spending a day re-killing Mikael, negotiating with an underage angry witch and striking stupid deals with Klaus instead of... whatever it was that you were doing today," Caroline concluded, shooting a meaningful look at the disarranged bed.
Elena stared at Caroline, rendered speechless for a few moments.
"I really don't think we want to be arguing right now," Stefan observed in a reconciliatory tone, but neither Elena nor Caroline seemed to be paying any attention to him.
"I'm sorry if you had a stressful day, but hopefully it wasn't too exhaustive after six months of doing nothing," Elena said wryly.
Caroline gasped, a sour grimace flitting across her face. "Of course. I was waiting for that. So now we're evil just because we weren't acting like desperate lunatics along with you and Jeremy for all this time?"
Elena was about to retort, but then Damon walked back into the room.
"Ha, I knew it," he said with a hint of amusement in his voice, narrowing his eyes at everyone. "Let's send the kid outside so we can argue in peace. What's going on?" He asked, walking up to Elena and handing her the chocolate bar she had asked for, a lop-sided smile flickering across his lips.
Elena gave him a small smile in return, but he frowned noticing the nervous tension and concern glimmering in her eyes.
"Nothing," Caroline said sardonically. "We've just been ambushed by the Damon's Peace of Mind Police," she said, widening her eyes at Elena who didn't seem amused in the slightest by Caroline's ongoing tirade.
Damon stifled a smile and Stefan froze, caught off guard by the sudden impression that it was almost two hundred years since he had seen that kind of smile on Damon's face, a completely happy, involuntary, wariness-free smile.
"Yes, I've met these guys," Damon said, draping his arm around Elena for a second and pressing a soft kiss to her cheek. "Very stubborn," he said with a faint smirk, his eyes wandering around Elena's face with worshiping intensity that almost prompted Caroline to either clarify if they had really met a few hours ago or suggest that the memory loss was just a hoax, both inquiries probably being a bad idea seeing how Elena's sense of humor was apparently MIA.
"I'm sorry, OK? I didn't mean to be nasty or anything," Caroline said, looking at Elena and holding her gaze until her expression softened a little. "I was just making a humorous allusion to the fact that we used to fight a lot," she said, shifting her gaze to Damon and enunciating every word in an exaggerated matter as if she was making a momentous announcement. "No big deal, right? As for what Stefan said," Caroline continued before Elena had a chance to appreciate the apology, "a long time ago you and Stefan were dating Katherine who was stringing you both along. And Stefan and Elena had been dating before you swooped in and spirited her away. Are we happily in the clear about everything now? Or did I just ruin your inner nirvana?" Caroline asked rhetorically and rolled her eyes, apparently considering the whole problem solved.
Damon's mouth twitched. "No," he said after a pause, glancing between Elena and Stefan who were staring at Caroline in stunned silence and despite all these revelations being essentially uncool, he couldn't help finding their expressions a tad bit hilarious. "But I think you might've ruined theirs."
xxxdelenaxxx
"You're crazy," Bonnie said, not sure why she even felt compelled to be stating the obvious, but somehow she wasn't able to stop herself.
It was getting dark and for some reason the fragmentary, flickering lights hanging crookedly under the ceiling were making Bonnie feel uneasy. She wondered if they were reminding her of something, or perhaps it was this half-demolished building, chipped walls that reminded her of something, the wind flowing through the row of broken windows making her think of leaves dancing around her in the air...
Enzo merely smirked at her. "I know it's a lot to take in."
Bonnie laughed humorlessly, springing to her feet and giving him an incredulous look. "You don't actually expect me to believe that I'm a witch who is also a part of some vampire squad fighting anti-vampire organizations," Bonnie said with a grimace. "But if you're testing some story ideas on me, I'd say, give it a shot. I'll read it."
Enzo slowly rose to his feet, his eyes still bright with amusement, but focused and calm in a way that Bonnie found endlessly unsettling.
"I know deep down you know it's true," Enzo said in a low voice, holding her gaze and Bonnie clenched her jaw, refusing to let it show in her expression that she did feel that what he was saying wasn't entirely false. But if she really was to trust her instincts, his words didn't feel entirely true either. "I can show you I'm a vampire, that's easy enough to prove," Enzo said and then to Bonnie's horrified bewilderment, a net of veins appeared under his suddenly bloodied eyes and he sank his fangs into the palm of his hand, tearing it open.
Bonnie stared at the blood oozing from the wound, but only for a second, before the wound began to heal all by itself almost immediately... just like Elena's face in the cafeteria, Bonnie suddenly thought and tensed at the realization.
"They started putting vervain in the water," Enzo said, as if reading her thoughts. "Vervain is toxic to vampires but if you digest or carry it with you as a human it makes you immune to compulsion, to mind-control and it also renders your blood rather... unappetizing." He smirked.
Bonnie stared at him with a grimace, desperately fighting a strange inclination to believe him. Inexplicably, she felt that if she believed him, something awful would happen. It was a bizarre conviction, but so nagging that she couldn't ignore it. When she was repeating his words to herself, when she was trying out thinking about herself as a- as a... witch, all she could feel was pain. She couldn't associate it with anything specific, her memory was still a book with no title and mostly blank pages. But this pain was enough to make her certain that she was better off blocking it all out.
"What do you say, should we call Elena?" Enzo asked, shaking Bonnie out of her reverie and giving her a mildly sardonic look over the phone he was holding in his hand. "Someone's got to start working on finding a way of making your magic grace us with its presence again," Enzo added when it didn't seem that Bonnie was going to say anything.
"You don't understand," Bonnie said slowly, making sure to pronounce each word very clearly. "I don't want to be a witch."
Enzo looked at her, for a split second entertaining the thought that she remembered more than she was letting on, but then he noticed that she was almost surprised by her own words. She averted her eyes from him, absently scanning the empty surroundings as if she was trying to guess where the thought behind her words had come from.
"Oh, but you are a witch," Enzo said, tilting his head to the side and Bonnie's eyes darted to him. "So it's not really a matter of choice."
"The past is not a matter of choice, because it already happened," Bonnie said in a low, but firm voice, a glimpse of defiance flashing in her eyes. "But the future is. And even if I was a witch, right now I'm not and I'm telling you I don't want to be."
"Freedom of choice is a beautiful thing," Enzo said with a weak, crooked smile, looking back at his phone and dialing the hotel's number. "Unfortunately, unless we turn off our emotions, we're never free," he said, bringing the phone to his ear while holding Bonnie's wary gaze.
xxxdelenaxxx
Damon really didn't seem to mind Caroline's outburst, but when in response to it Elena hastily turned on her heels and headed for the door with tears in her eyes, Damon gave Caroline what could probably be considered a mild glare before he made to follow Elena.
"What did I do now?" Caroline asked, giving Stefan a questioning look.
Wordlessly, Stefan just closed his eyes, slumped onto the couch and covered his face with his hands.
"I need to call Matt," Caroline said, struck by the thought and deciding not to be stressing over people overreacting while they had so many problems to deal with. Stefan propped his elbows on his knees and looked at Caroline with a half-amused, half-baffled expression on his face. "What? We need to stick to the plan and I'm pretty sure Bonnie and Damon would back me up on that if Bonnie wasn't missing and Damon wasn't starring in The Truman Show, Elena-style."
Stefan gave Caroline a weak smile and she chuckled tensely, slumping onto the couch next to him.
"I'm sorry, I always talk too much when I'm stressed out," she said with a sigh.
"Nah," Stefan said dismissively, wrapping his arm around her and pulling her close. "You talk too much even when you're not stressed out," he said after a pause and Caroline poked him playfully in the ribs with a small smile.
xxxdelenaxxx
"Elena?" Damon dashed out of the room after her and stopped in his tracks relieved that apparently Elena wasn't planning on running anywhere very far.
She was leaning against the wall in the hallway right next to their room, her arms wrapped around herself, and the sight evoked an unclear image that flashed across Damon's mind: an exterior corridor... dark sky... light breeze... flickering lights... Elena abruptly turning around and running to him...
"I was going to tell you, just... not like that," Elena said somberly, glancing at the door with an annoyed frown before shifting her eyes to Damon who stepped in front of her and cradled her face in his hands. She smiled softly at the gesture.
"There's no reason for you to be upset, Elena," he said sincerely and then added with a glimpse of humor in his eyes. "You're not the wretch who seduced his brother's girlfriend."
Elena smiled weakly. "That's not what happened," she said, sliding her open palms up his chest and onto his shoulders.
"So you seduced me?" Damon asked, widening his eyes at her in mock dismay.
Elena laughed under her breath. "No. It just... We just... We were fighting it for very, very long," she said in a low, serious voice. "And nothing happened until I broke up with Stefan."
"Nothing," Damon repeated somewhat dubiously and smirked when Elena's eyelashes fluttered slightly as she tried to keep herself from smiling and rolling her eyes.
"We kissed," Elena admitted after a pause, squinting.
"Once," Damon said, mirroring her expression.
Elena sighed. "Twice. Well," her eyebrows furrowed at the memory of the deathbed kiss. "Three times. Three and a half," she amended after a moment of consideration.
An amused smile flickered across Damon's face. "Three... and a half!"
Clasping her arms behind his neck, Elena leaned forward, pressing her lips to his. "Yes, the third kiss was rather... intense, but Jeremy walked in on us, so it ended."
"And it wouldn't have ended otherwise?" Damon asked, not letting Elena get away with the implication.
"I don't know," Elena shrugged with pretended nonchalance. "I just don't remember thinking about stopping or about telling you to stop," she said matter-of-factly and smiled against Damon's mouth when he kissed her, sneaking his arms around her and pulling her as close to him as possible.
Elena threaded her fingers through his hair, keeping one hand on his cheek, caressing the side of his face with her thumb.
"Seriously. There are 500 rooms in this hotel."
Damon and Elena pulled away and Elena smiled at the sight of Jeremy and Alaric, however, despite Jeremy's humorous remark they both looked rather worried and upset and Elena's smile quickly turned into an anxious frown.
"Where's Bonnie?" She asked, shifting her eyes between them.
"We need to talk and decide what to do," Alaric said, gesturing to the door that suddenly opened and Caroline stepped outside. "At last," Alaric said, glancing over her shoulder and noticing that Stefan was also in there. "Did you get on a wrong plane?" He asked with a small smile.
"Don't even ask," Caroline said with a grimace. "Where's Bonnie?" She asked, looking right and left and then giving Alaric and Jeremy a questioning look.
"According to the hospital, she's gone missing," Alaric said skeptically. "I looked around a bit, but didn't find anything. We don't know if they're telling the truth or not, but I'm not sure why they'd be lying about it. If they wanted to lure us in," he said, glancing at Elena," they would've let us know they had Bonnie."
"Unless they're insane like other Augustine people and just think they're doing a fellow human a favor by keeping her away from us," Caroline said with an irritated huff.
"Should we really be shouting about all that here?" Jeremy asked with a wry grimace, glancing around the corridor.
"Great. I'm doing everything wrong today," Caroline said, a little miffed and stepped back into the room.
Jeremy raised an eyebrow, giving her a questioning look before following her inside. Elena and Damon also turned toward the door, but after motioning for Elena to walk inside Damon shifted his eyes to Alaric.
"Can I talk to you for a minute?" He asked and then turned to Elena. "We'll be right back in," he said, leaning in for a kiss.
Elena nodded and smiled, pressing another kiss to his lips before closing the door behind her, leaving Damon and Alaric alone in the corridor.
"I may know how to check if they're telling the truth," Damon said after a moment of silence, keeping his voice low, his eyebrows furrowed in thought. "If they have Bonnie or not."
Alaric's eyes lit up with interest, an uncertain smile flitting across his face. "Why are we whispering?" He asked under his breath, squinting a little.
Damon shot him a grim look. "That Dr. August who was treating us, the one you and Elena think may have something to do with that weird secret society... I know where he lives."
"Ah," Alaric straightened up with a sigh. "You want to go and see if we can torture some informations out of him."
Damon blinked, giving Alaric an odd look. "No," he said with a grimace, a little stumped by Alaric's utterly pragmatic tone of voice.
Alaric's mouth twitched as he quickly checked himself. "I was just kidding," he said with a brief, strained chuckle. "So... what do you want to do?"
Finding Alaric's reaction definitely suspicious, Damon nonetheless continued, resuming his former tone. "I want to go talk to his daughter."
"Now I know why we're whispering," Alaric said with a ghost of a smile flickering across his face that Damon wasn't sure he liked at all. They were whispering, because he didn't want Elena to worry and he knew she wouldn't like the idea of him going to the house of someone as dangerous as they believed Dr. August to be, but before he had the time to clarify that, Alaric added. "But I don't know if that's a good idea."
"Do you have a better idea?" Damon asked with a shrug. "We'll at least know for sure if they're keeping Bonnie or not."
Alaric looked at him, considering it in silence for a moment. "Alright. We can say we're going to go get some spy gear, so we can drop a few bugs in the hospital and keep tabs on what's going on in there."
"Sounds good," Damon said, reaching out and pushing the door open.
"What do you mean Enzo didn't tell you we were in New Orleans?" Caroline was saying when Alaric and Damon walked into the room.
"He didn't say a word about you," Jeremy repeated, the frown on his face deepening.
"He was supposed to contact you and let you know what was happening with us," Caroline continued, perplexed, looking between Elena and Jeremy. "I told him you were in New Mexico and he didn't even mention he was here too," Caroline added, beginning to suspect it was all not a result of negligence on Enzo's part, but rather a deliberate decision.
"I knew we shouldn't trust him," Jeremy muttered grimly. "But why would he be doing anything against us? It makes no sense."
"Maybe he just ignored that we asked him to deliver that message to Elena and Jeremy?" Stefan said uncertainty. "Maybe he just had more important things to do," he said with a humorless snort.
"So what did Matt say?" Elena asked, looking at Caroline. "You started telling us, but-"
"If you don't mind another interruption," Alaric cut in and everyone's eyes shifted to him. "We'll just go very quickly to get a few things," he said, glancing at Damon. Stefan, who was sitting on the edge of the couch slowly rose to his feet. "We need everyone to have a cell phone," Alaric said, giving Elena and Jeremy a mockingly scolding, pointed looks. They smiled faintly in response. "And maybe we could get some listening devices to leave in that Dr. August's office."
No one seemed to have anything against this plan and Stefan opened his mouth to suggest he'd go with them too, but Elena cut him off.
"I'll go with you," she said, springing to her feet and quickly marching toward them.
"No, Elena, that's not necessary," Alaric said with a dismissive wave of his hand when she stopped in front of them.
"I know, but-" she said, shifting her eyes to Damon and trailing off when he grasped her hands, raised them to his mouth and leaning down pressed one kiss to each.
"We'll be fine. It will take us a couple of hours at most," Damon said, squeezing her hands in his.
Elena didn't look too happy about this, but when she glanced at Alaric she realized that maybe it was a good idea for Damon to spend some time with his friend, as they hadn't really had a chance to talk yet and she was certain Alaric wouldn't bring up any objectionable subjects from the past.
"Alright," she murmured, still somewhat reluctantly and slipping her hands out of Damon's grasp threw them around his neck and hugged him tightly, mouthing 'watch over him' to Alaric who nodded with a quick and a little uncomfortable smile, hoping that everything would go well and he wouldn't have to be explaining himself to Elena.
"I love you," Damon murmured in Elena's ear before drawing back.
"I love you," Elena whispered against his mouth, brushing her lips against his and taking a step back, letting Damon and Alaric out of the room.
Caroline looked at Stefan when he slowly sat back on the edge of the couch and it quickly occurred to her that he felt disappointed not to be included in the little venture. She wrinkled her nose, feeling a twinge of guilt at the suspicion that it might've been her careless comments that ruined the chance for a clean slate and instead made the brothers' reunion unnecessarily awkward.
Elena closed the door behind Damon and Alaric and came back to the room where Caroline, prompted by Jeremy resumed recounting her quite astonishing conversation with Matt.
"How does Klaus even have a child?" Jeremy marveled out loud, befuddled by the very idea.
"How can I know?" Caroline snapped, more annoyed than the question probably warranted.
"And how Klaus can help with the Travelers' spell?" Jeremy inquired with a frown.
Caroline threw her arms up in the air with a groan. "If instead of asking questions you'd actually let me talk and explain everything, I bet you might've known by now," she said, crossing her arms over her chest and shooting Jeremy a look.
"To be honest, I couldn't care less about all things related to Klaus right now," Jeremy said, his expression darkening. "When no one knows where Bonnie is and if she's OK." He looked away with a grim look and Caroline nodded wordlessly.
Elena was about to say something, but then the phone rang and she walked over to the nightstand where the phone was and picked up the receiver while Caroline took a deep breath and went on summarizing to Stefan and Jeremy the contents of Rebekah's letter to Matt. The most curious thing about the letter was that Rebekah hadn't seemed to be running from Mikael, like they had suspected. She wasn't mentioning Mikael in her letter at all. What she had mentioned, however, was some "unhinged scientists."
"Yes?" Elena asked into the phone, frowning at what Caroline was saying, her mind preoccupied with creating endless scenarios of what was going on and how they were going to solve all of this.
"Ah, just the person I wanted to speak with," Enzo said on the other side of the line and Elena's eyes flew wide open when he added. "Bonnie and I are having a chat, would you like to join us?"
xxxdelenaxxx
"So what is you plan exactly?" Alaric asked, after starting the engine and driving out of the hotel garage.
Damon turned his head to look at him, a flicker of a smile flitting across his face. "My plan is to talk to someone who will know if Bonnie's really missing, but you're clearly not buying it for reasons that I'd love to hear about."
Alaric smiled, looking right and left before making a turn and then glancing at Damon. "What did Elena tell you? About your life, I mean? About you?"
"I could probably make a living touring the country as a role model," Damon said wryly.
Alaric chuckled under his breath. "That's a bit of a stretch, but if you're looking for someone to berate you, Elena and I've been there, done that. You can't blame us for not wishing to talk about it anymore. We're past that. You're past that," he added, turning his head to look Damon straight in the eyes for a second, before glancing in the mirror to change the lanes. "I know that you may feel like you need to know everything, but... do you really?" Alaric slowed down before the traffic lights, staring pensively into the distance. "I was thinking about that on my way here and at first I thought that yes, sure, I'd like to know everything if I was in your shoes. But then," he looked up at the green light and the car started moving again, Damon's eyes drifting from Alaric's face to the dark street as he was listening intently in silence. "Then I remembered," Alaric continued in a firm, thoughtful voice, "some things from my past and I thought how great it'd be not to remember them, you know? Not because they were bad, but because eventually they turned out to be irrelevant. Of course, everything that happens to you makes you who you are and all that, but... Maybe all you really need to know are the things that made you who you wanted to be? Who you are now? Whom you've become once you broke through all those walls and shadows holding you down? That person that Elena was fighting for?" Alaric added after a pause and Damon's gaze darted back to his face. "The person she fell in love with," Alaric said with a small smile, holding Damon's gaze, "the person she was seeing before anyone else cared to see, even you, especially you?"
Damon looked away, his eyes absently following the changing images outside the car windows. It started to drizzle and the blurry shapes of buildings and people were blending with the streetlights.
"That's all the more reason to know," Damon said after a pause, his voice low, but resolute. Alaric gave him a questioning look. "I don't want to be living in a happy bubble while she's carrying all those memories, burdens with her, not only hers, not just ours, but mine, all by herself."
"Why don't you indulge us and let us carry those burdens for a while?" Alaric asked with a flitting, warm smile and turned off the engine. "Is that it?" He asked, gesturing to a large, well-lit house in front of them.
"Yes, but... I thought we were first going to-" Damon started, but then Alaric produced a listening device and a few other things from an inner pocket of his jacket.
"I always carry a couple of these, just in case," Alaric said, handing a miniature microphone that looked like a button to Damon and stepping out of the car.
Damon turned the device between his fingers before getting out of the car as well. "If it turns out Bonnie is here, I'll get her out. But if she's in the hospital or somewhere else, you should go ahead and go there as soon as possible," Damon said, adhering the microphone to one of his shirt buttons.
"Let's not make grand plans just yet. You never know what unexpected complications will ensue," Alaric said, glancing over his shoulder at the house.
"OK, now, you just have to bite me and I'll be all set to go," Damon said matter-of-factly, pulling on one of his handcuffs with his teeth, tearing the black fabric a little.
Alaric blinked, perplexed. "I just have to do what?" He asked, giving Damon a questioning look.
Damon tilted his head backwards, giving Alaric a mockingly scowling look. "I can't just happily stroll in and ask about Bonnie. I have to put on a little show. I can put on a good show, can I?" He asked as an afterthought, feeling the need to confirm the inner conviction.
"Oh yes," Alaric replied so immediately and with such absolute certainty in his voice that it actually made Damon frown.
"That was subtle, thanks," Damon muttered.
Alaric shrugged, stifling a smile.