Elena hesitated, because how could she not? She held perhaps the most interesting piece of evidence tucked into the waistband of her pants, and she'd just offered to hand it over to someone who hours ago, had been her rival. But there was something changed in him, something in the way he spoke with her, the way he'd followed her out, apologized. She didn't want to trust him, but it seemed as if she didn't have a say in her own feelings regarding Damon any longer.

So, she slipped the small leather-bound journal out of its hiding spot and placed it on the table with her hand over it, guarding it with everything she had. It, after all, was the only hand she had to play. Despite everything, this still was a game between them, wasn't it?

"I found Harmon's journal a long time ago," she started, pulling her hand back to flip open the front cover. "It's mostly the ramblings of a man going slowly insane. But there's these symbols," she said, flipping the book around so he could see them, but never taking her hand off of it. "That I could never quite figure out."

His eyes didn't leave hers, didn't look down at the journal between them. "Find heart in which you trust," he said, a smirk and a roll of his eyes. "In the bank downtown, there's a safety deposit box with a small heart etched into the door." He chuckled, like he'd just solved something that'd been nagging him for weeks. "I hoped to find something there, but it was empty."

"Strange," she said. "I found it tucked between two books in the campus library. I wondered how it got there."

"Maybe some scholar on the same hunt before us."

That piqued her interest. Were the clues always the same? Was there more information out there to find? Had they only just begun to scratch the surface? If someone else tried to follow the same clues outlined in Damon's note, would they find something else in the tomb, something else in the safety deposit box? Would someone return these pieces eventually for the next round of scholars hoping for a shot at the society? So many questions, of which could only be answered with more research, more digging, and unfortunately, by working with Mr. Salvatore.

He looked at the journal now, eyes flicking between the piece of paper he'd rubbed graphite on against the stone tower's messaging. Taking out a pencil, he began to scratch out a message on his scrap piece of paper.

"This is the cipher," he said, flipping his own paper around so she could see it. It was a series of symbols, lines and dots in combination. Each symbol had a corresponding letter. "It's not complete."

She scanned the page. It only showed nineteen symbols and their corresponding letters. "So," she started, looking between the pages at the information they had. "We translate everything we can and go from there? Try to fill in the blanks once we're done?"

He nodded and reached for the journal, but she pulled it back. So much for trust. But he didn't look hurt by her actions, not at all.

"How often do these symbols appear?" he asked.

She'd read the book cover to cover, every scrap in a language she could understand, at least. It was a small book, with maybe only fifty or so hand-bound pages. Some pages featured English journal entries, while others had drawings she didn't understand and those symbols. There had to be at least ten different instances of them appearing in different arrangements.

"Quite a bit," she said, flipping through the pages. "What I still don't understand is why?" she asked, meeting his eyes again. "Why do all this, why spend the time to craft a cipher that's erected in the town square, why encrypt a personal journal and hide it for someone to find a hundred and fifty years later?" She placed the journal back down on the table between them.

"He was likely insane," Damon said, hands clasped in front of him on the table.

"Anyone seeking immortality must be."

"You wouldn't want to live forever?" he asked.

"God no," she said simply. "Life is short for a reason. I imagine it must lose its sense of charm, once there's no fear."

"Fear, that's what makes life special?" he asked, almost mockingly.

"Yes," she said, seriously. "The gods tried to understand the world as humans did, tried to understand love and power and strength, but they didn't. Because they never had anything to lose. When you live forever, I assume, you can take liberties—you don't have to worry about time or loss or, well, anything. There's no pressure. And isn't that kind of what makes life worth living? The pressure to grow and change? To adapt to the world around you as it too grows and changes?" She shrugged. "I only fear I'd grow stagnant, lose my drive."

"And we wouldn't want that," he said, the corner of his lip turned up in a smile.

"What about you?" Elena asked.

"What about me?"

She rolled her eyes. "Would you? Want to live forever, that is?"

He cleared his throat. "Of course not." And that was the end of the conversation.

There was a beat of vaguely uncomfortable silence before Elena took another sip of coffee and set the mug down with a thunk. She pushed the journal in his direction. "Take a look," she said finally, as if it pained her to do so, pained her to part with the piece of evidence she'd kept so close to her. "I suppose I trust you." Another pause. "If I must. But we work on this together. And you," she pointed a finger at him. "Don't keep anything from me."

He nodded. "Of course."

"And I get a copy of the cipher."

"Yes."

"Then let's get to work," she said, digging around in her bag for her own leather-bound journal and thick graphite pencils. Laying them out on the table before her, they did exactly what she'd said, and got to work.

Arthur Harmon likely intended for the cipher to take up a good portion of time. It was, after all, a complex system that required a close, keen eye. However, he likely hadn't accounted for two scholars studied in translation who desired nothing more than to best the other. So, when they'd split the journal into halves, copying down the symbols on scrap pages, it had become a competition of its own.

Once they were both finished it was mid-afternoon and there were pieces of torn paper spread out across the table. Elena was on her third cup of coffee, and her hand was gray with graphite. They'd swapped pages back and forth over the past few hours with questions of, "Which symbol is this supposed to be?" and "Does this mean anything?"

So far, it didn't mean anything. Each scrap of paper only had half the symbols filled in, and the result was a scattering of letters that didn't form words yet, despite the fact that they'd used the cipher to translate all of the symbols they could.

"Maybe there's another cipher somewhere," Elena suggested, cheek resting on her hand and eyes strained from squinting at the small text for hours on end.

Damon drummed his fingers on the table, looking over their hard work. "Or a different kind of key."

She picked up the page with the cipher on it, scanning the letters. "There's nineteen letters here."

"A seven letter key," he said.

"Exactly," she said, writing down all the letters that were missing from the key, in order. A, E, I, M, P, R, V. As soon as she wrote down the last letter, she frantically turned around the first sheet of paper and began to write the keyword below the symbols that had been without letter counterparts. V under the first, then A under the next blank, and so on, spelling out the word VAMPIRE over and over until she'd gotten through all the spots.

Damon sat in rapt silence as she worked. Elena tapped the end of her graphite pencil to her lips. "But how does it translate," she said aloud, to Damon, but also to herself. She picked up the journal and flipped through again, for any sort of information she'd missed the first hundred times. "My father," she felt strange speaking of him. "He used to send letters in code. They were easy to break, the key word was Gilbert. Not very original. But there was something to compare the word to. Another letter." She tapped the pencil against her lips again, thinking. "We know the code word for the blanks, but that isn't helpful if we don't know how to translate it. Is it every letter plus one? Mirrored?" she ran through everything she'd learned about codes from mystery novels, but nothing came up. "There has to be a missing piece."

He still stared at the word she'd scrawled over and over on page after page. Vampire. And until she saw his face, she hadn't even thought about it. But once she did, the pencil fell out of her hand and clattered onto the table, rolling over a few sheets of paper. But Damon only cleared his throat and brushed off whatever thoughts he'd been momentarily plagued with.

"I suppose we could try them all, see if anything clicks," he said. "Try one letter up and one letter down, and I'll try mirrored. See if that gets us anywhere."

She wanted to snap at him for giving her orders of any kind, but she was in too deep to care. On the first scrap of paper, she tried moving one letter up from the key in each of the blanks. That resulted in absolutely nothing. One letter down only yielded the same result. Damon, however, had written out the alphabet and drawn a line down the middle.

"A for Z. There couldn't possibly be that many Zs in this message," Elena commented. "Hold on," she said, as he continued to work through his idea on paper. She looked at the different symbols, the ones without letter pairs. "Even though the cipher is missing seven letters, there are only two different symbols here. What language only has two letters?" she asked.

Perhaps Arthur Harmon too had been a fan of translation. A light bulb turned on above Damon's head. "It's binary code. Zeros and ones."

"Binary code?" she asked, but then waved a hand. "Unimportant. Try this symbol," she pointed to the first one to appear in the text, "as zero, and this one as one. For zero, use the letter, for one, go forward in the alphabet by one?" she said, voice raising at the end as a question, uncertain of herself.

He'd already started. "I think that's it."

She'd moved to the other side of the table and was reading over his shoulder as he broke the code. Without thinking about it, she'd placed a hand on his shoulder, eager in the search for knowledge, adrenaline at the idea of it being nearly in their hands.

"It's an address," she said, shaking his shoulder as he wrote, making his penmanship messy. "It's an address!" she said again, with more enthusiasm. They'd done it. She could have kissed him right then if it wouldn't have completely ruined everything.

He wrote the address neatly on a new piece of paper, then again a second time on another, and handed it to her. She dropped her hand from his shoulder, and grabbed the page, holding it tight between finger and thumb.

Damon leaned back in his chair, satisfied, and Elena sat back down across from him, still looking at the piece of paper like it was a lifeline. In some ways, it was. That small scrap of paper was everything she'd been working toward over the last year. And though she loathed to admit it, she couldn't have done it without him and his cipher. She certainly wouldn't have scaled a clock tower.

"Now what?" Elena said, lamely, in a haze of excitement.

He flipped the paper around to show her the address like she wasn't holding an exact copy in her hands. He smiled a true smile. One of very few she'd seen on him. "We go here."

"Together?" she asked, eyebrow raised, uncertain if they were still a team, still working together, even though they'd used each other for everything they had. At least, she was certain he'd given her everything, and she'd given him almost everything. She'd given him enough. That measly 'M' she'd left off hadn't ended up meaning anything anyway.

"Yes. Together," he said, his wide smile dialing back into a much softer one that fit his face better, that she was more used to seeing. "Couldn't have done it without you," he mumbled, like he didn't want to say it, didn't want to give her the credit.

But she was too excited, she didn't care. She didn't care that his words were forced. "I guess reading all those mystery books was worth something. That'll prove my father wrong for sure. And you," she said, joyfully. "Binary code! I couldn't have done it without you, either."

"Are you saying we make a good team, Gilbert?" he asked, and her infectious energy must have been rubbing off on him because his grin didn't disappear.

She crossed her arms over her chest with a similar grin, a smile that wouldn't fade because they'd done it. They had a location. "I guess I am." She paused, then said, "Except, we don't have a time. Or a date."

This didn't seem to phase Salvatore in the slightest. "All the more reason to head to that address. More to learn."

Those words spoke to something deep in her chest, her soul perhaps. Because he was right. There was always more to learn. And as she was coming to find out, she as hungry for that knowledge. For once in her life, it felt possible to learn everything she hoped. For her, nothing was out of reach. Not anymore.

And in her bright, unending joy, she didn't have time to think about anything else, didn't have time to wonder why the code-breaking keyword had been vampire. Hadn't had time to think about why Damon's face had turned to stone at those seven letters. But her happiness, in that moment, couldn't be broken by anything, not even a confirmation of her fears, a word in writing from a hundred and fifty years ago that reflected the nightmare that plagued her. No. Worrying about that would have to come later.

A/N: This was one of my fave chapters to write! Hope you enjoyed. Also check out my short story An Autumn Duel, which has two chapters uploaded currently and a third (and final) on the way next week!