"I feel like I should apologize," Elijah's voice was the precise tone and timbre of how he'd sounded in her dreams and Abi was struck by it, almost to the point she missed his words - the meaning, clicking together in her somewhat addled mind she shook her head.

"Please, don't.." She was certain she wasn't inadvertently using her power of persuasion, but he stopped as if she flipped a switch - "That's hardly the worst scene I've seen in my life."

He sat on the edge of the desk, making them almost the same height with her still standing. The better to be eye to eye. "Are you alluding to whatever pushed you into," taking a breath, a beat to consider how best to describe her entrapment for almost 150 years. "No one, not even the witch I entrusted to help me be certain that you'd be safeguarded when you woke, could tell me precisely what happened to force you to retreat so deeply into yourself."

Abigail considered Stefan and his horrifying display created through bloodlust and an urge to pay her court - if she wanted to consider it as such - and found that the fear that usually bubbled to the surface when near Stefan or when her mind conjured up the memory was absent. Putting the curiosity at what the reason for the change could be, she focused on the man before her. Finally alone and face to face, she wondered if he felt the urge to be closer - to recreate the vague intimacy from her dreams.

"You needn't tell me -"

"I don't mind," and she didn't. Telling him with an ease she hadn't felt about her past - or at least one fragment of time in her past - she went further back. Instead of picking up her tale at the night Stefan chose to rip apart family and friends, she went back to Katherine Pierce's arrival on the Salvatore doorstep, and the havoc her presence wrought, even after she'd presumably died. Weaving her tale, watching his face as he seemingly drank in her words, she ended at her awakening mere months ago - when Damon inadvertently confessed that Katherine was still among the living. "And here we are."

"Here we are," his voice was quiet, and his dark eyes so focused on her face that another person might have felt a shiver of trepidation - she felt a shiver, but it wasn't fearful.

And as if they were still tucked away in her dreams, a knock interrupted their conversation - just as she felt certain she might finally get close enough to learn the precise shade of his eyes.

Abigail was sure that she'd given ample time to the tea party, and - after giving Elijah her cell phone number - she said her goodbyes and was ensconced in her own home with time to spare. Time to consider just why she hadn't even flinched in retelling everything from her last moments so long ago - especially the macabre tableau that the man she was once intended for had prepared for her "pleasure".

Was it simply that she'd grown past the horror of it all? Has time truly healed all?

A flash of how she'd felt before she had left on her road trip to New Orleans and Chicago - the night she'd seen a flash of the Stefan from so long ago with that poor girl at the Miss Mystic Falls pageant and she the cold shudder crept through her. No, Stefan could still petrify her - make her forget that she wasn't powerless against him any longer.

If it wasn't simply time and effort that had aided her while monologuing the traumas of her past, then could it just be the person she was sharing with? Could Elijah be so comforting to her, so calming that the pain she'd gone through, the fear of what she'd seen really be as if it were nothing more than a story that meant next to nothing?

And if it were Elijah, then why had her mother pushed and pressed so forcefully for her to focus on Damon and not this man who she'd been bound to before she had even been thought of - before her first breath?

Damon wished he could focus on something important - aside from keeping Elena from suicidal tendencies, excuse him, he means "self sacrificing tendencies".

Which was why he was in a tomb holding the bitch who literally ruined everything from the moment he laid eyes on her. He was slightly mollified by the fact that she looked terrible - desiccation does that to a vampire. He'd known she wouldn't be feeling or looking her best, and knowing Katherine he knew he'd have to come bearing gifts.

Blood, clothes, and - a question. He needed to know if what John Gilbert muttered to him about killing an Original was true and the only person he knew who might be able to answer it happened to be trapped, desiccating, and a terrible bitch. He figured their mutual need to end the dick or dicks, since Klaus was definitely a looming issue, would loosen her tongue. After her presents, of course.

And considering she spilled, maybe a touch unwillingly, that it was possible - even at her expense, since she mentioned killing Elijah would force her to remain imprisoned - he had a plan. Or most of one forming.

"Is it true?" So focused on the creation of just a type of event that would make the murder possible, she had to ask again.

Raising an eyebrow, he waited.

"Abigail," he hoped he hadn't flinched, but her smirk told him he'd failed. "Little Abigail Morgan is awake and not only that -" could she really be relishing whatever bombshell she was about to drop in his lap? "Is it true that she's Elijah's Sleeping Beauty?"

"What?" A lump the size of Florida seemed to be growing in his throat.

Cackling, as if she had the upper hand finally, she came as close as she could. "I've traveled a lot, Damon." No shit, being on Klaus' hit list must have made staying in one place problematic. "And while I stayed as far away from them as possible, rumors aren't escapable." Rumors, is that all she had - but what rumor could pair Abi with that - "Her parents and his, well let's just say that while he was more than willing to catch my eye, he's unavailable for anything more lasting - unless her initials are A B and she went comatose back in the 1800s."

Somewhere he'd lost track - lost to a more nefarious player in the game -

"This has been a blast," glancing around her doorless cage, he pressed on, wanting to leave and refocus on - right. "Well thank you, you've told me everything I need to know." Swearing she'd told him nothing, he rushed on, gaining some of his swagger back, even if the lump hadn't moved. "You have. You have indeed confirmed that it is possible to kill an Original, which I will do tonight. Guess who's coming to dinner?" A dinner party - the perfect ploy, and as he left, his mind was on the details - definitely not listening to Katherine wonder if Abigail would be Elijah's plus one.

Abi's phone trilled and a glance at the screen showed an unknown number - smiling, she answered the call and was surprised that he was inviting her to a dinner party.