Heritage

Elena was seated at her kitchen table glancing over some documents that Alaric gave her from Isobel. She was currently looking at her family tree. It documented her family going back centuries. Katherine was even listed there.

There was soon a knock at the door. Then Caroline and Bonnie walked in. "Elena!"

"Kitchen!" Elena called.

Bonnie and Caroline immediately went into the kitchen. "Hey. We're going to be late," Caroline said.

"Right, sorry. I got distracted," Elena said.

Bonnie peered over her friend's shoulder to take a look at what she was looking at. "Is that a family tree?"

"Yeah, mine, on Isobel's side. Ric gave it to me, along with a bunch of other things of hers," Elena said.

"I didn't know you were interested in learning about that side of your family," Caroline said.

"I wasn't, until I found out that because of my lineage, I'm supposed to be a sacrifice to help the first vampire to ever be created. If I'm going to die, I'd like to know exactly why," Elena said.

"You're not going to die. We will stop Klaus," Bonnie said.

Elena didn't argue the point. She didn't think that they'd stop Klaus, and she didn't want to try, given what happened to Katherine's family when she tried, but she didn't want to argue about it. "I just want to know why me."

"But we know that already. You're a doppelganger," Caroline said.

"Yeah, I've done a little research. The blood of a doppelganger is very powerful," Bonnie said.

"I understand that, but it has to have something to do with my family line, right? I mean, Klaus went after Katherine too. It's our family line that has to break the sun and moon curse. I want to know why. It also means there had to be at least one more person in my family with my face. Katherine was a doppelganger first. Someone else had to have had the face first. I'd just like some answers. Unfortunately, this family tree only seems to go back as far as Katherine's parents. I guess that is pretty impressive, given that she's over five hundred years old, but I was hoping for more," Elena said.

"Well, if this is really important to you, we'll help you find out all we can. Right now, we have to go to school though," Bonnie said.

"You're right. Let me just go put this away," Elena said before picking up the family tree and rolling it up.

"Hey, why isn't Stefan picking you up today?" Caroline wondered.

"I asked him not to. I love him, but he's been hovering a lot since we found out about Klaus. I just needed him to back off a little. I'll be right back," Elena said before heading up to her room.

Xxxxxxxxxxx

A few days later, Elena, Caroline, and Bonnie were all in Elena's room going through the contents of Isobel's things. Bonnie and Caroline had been helping Elena go through it every day since they found out what she was doing.

"Wow, Isobel had a lot of stuff, and a lot of it had to do with vampires," Caroline said. There were a lot of books about vampires. There was some stuff on other creatures too, but mostly vampires.

"Yeah, Ric said she was pretty much obsessed. That's why she had Damon turn her," Elena said.

"Do you think she knew that Katherine, her ancestor, was a vampire?" Caroline asked.

"Probably. Maybe that's what triggered her to want to become one," Elena said.

"Maybe you should ask Isobel about all this heritage stuff. We could find her, and you could talk to her. It would probably be easier than trying to find out through all this stuff here, assuming she knows," Bonnie said.

"No. Even if she would answer my questions, I couldn't trust anything she says. At least whatever she's got here would be somewhat believable. I don't trust Isobel and I won't bring her back here," Elena said firmly.

"Okay," Bonnie said. She could understand that. Isobel did some damage the last time she was around.

"Hey, I might have something. It looks like you and Isobel have something in common. She kept a journal," Caroline told Elena before bringing it over to her.

Elena sifted through the pages until she found something that she decided was interesting. "It's not exactly a journal, more like a notepad. I can't understand a lot of it, but this entry references Katherine."

Both girls peered at what their friend had found. "It references her as Katerina Petrova," Bonnie said.

Elena flipped through the pages some more until she found something else. "Look. Mystic Falls, 1864. That's when Katherine met Damon and Stefan. There are other dates and places too."

"She tracked Katherine's past movements. She had to have known she was a vampire before she was turned. Katherine wouldn't have even been alive during more than half of these periods if she'd been human," Bonnie said.

Caroline, meanwhile, started looking some more into the box of Isobel's things. "Hey, I think I found something else. It looks like another family tree, only not as old. This one looks like Isobel might have done it herself. It references Klaus."

Elena immediately took the offered paper from her friend and examined it. It had many names on it, but the beginning seemed to be Klaus, Elijah, and a woman named Tatia. "Elijah's here as well. There's a slash between him and Klaus, like Isobel didn't know which one of them had a child with this woman, Tatia. She also put the word 'brothers' off to the side with a question mark.

"Klaus and Elijah are brothers. I thought Rose said that Elijah was basically a henchman," Bonnie said.

"She could've been wrong."

"How did she find all this out when even vampires don't seem to know much about Klaus? And why didn't Alaric tell us about this?" Caroline asked.

"He might not have seen it, and even if he did, he probably didn't understand what he was looking at. He might have put it out of his mind. As for Isobel, she was a researcher, and she was obsessed with the supernatural. She could have found out on her own or found a vampire or a witch that knew all this," Elena said.

Bonnie looked closely at the piece of paper in Elena's hands. "Hey, where's that other family tree?"

Caroline looked at the papers sprawled out on Elena's bed. She found the one she was looking at and handed it to Bonnie.

Bonnie took it and the one Elena had. She put them both on the bed and put them together, one in front of the other. "These look like they might go together. I think Isobel might have completed her family tree, as much as she could anyway.

Elena examined the whole thing, starting with Tatia, who seemed to have had a child with either Klaus or Elijah, and going all the way down to herself. She gasped and looked up at her friends in shock. "That would mean…"

"It would mean that your bloodline can be traced all the way back to the original vampires," Bonnie said.

Caroline looked at her friend in shock. "It means that you're related to Klaus."