Darkness Visible ➳ TVD ✔️

🪁||34|| ''Think you can handle it? It's only a couple of feet.''

Chapter 34!
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It took over a week before I was back on my feet again. But I wasn't the same as before. Wherever I went, I was haunted by a strange and disturbing numbness; like my body's way of coping was shutting down and shielding me from every sensory input. Food was bland. Loud noises pain. Not so loud noises, I didn't even hear.

I hadn't had an attack in a few days. I didn't expect another one, but I still found myself hoping, whenever I thought about it, that I'd never have to experience one ever again.

Work was still postponed, mostly by my mother's orders. She was confident enough in my recovery to leave me alone at home, calling my current emotional state ''expected'' and ''passing''. She kept telling me things would be alright, and I supposed maybe they would if I just struggled through the mess I was.

Of course I could do it. But that didn't make it any less difficult.

I knew I could. I had to.

The not doing anything all day was beginning to drive me crazy. Once I'd gotten my strength up and my ability to estimate time had returned, the boredom set in. I was used to working, whether it be at the Grill, school, or just around the house – and once all the chores were done I couldn't very well do them again without feeling like I was losing my mind completely.

The days went by slowly. Damon had sent me two texts since the day he came by. Two concise, and I think very much needed, texts that I sometimes found myself looking at when I felt discouraged. His hands on approach and pragmatic way of seeing things reminded me that I just... I just had to keep going. Build everything up again. I just... I wasn't sure how. Somehow, everything had changed.

The guilt of not contributing at home I had learned to push aside whenever it surfaced. I kept myself busy though, at least for a while. Since Damon dropped them off, I'd taken several looks at the photos.

Every symbol was different.

A moon cycle. A wolf. A vampire.

One symbol had me preoccupied for several hours before I realised where I'd seen it before. Elena's necklace. But I still didn't know what it meant. They'd found it next to several symbols, so it was probably all over the wall.

Massacre. Chaos. A tree.

The runes took a Google search to figure out. When I wrote them down and saw what they all meant I really, really wished that Damon had prepared me, or that I hadn't been so inert and asked him for more information.

Niklaus. Rebekah. Elijah.

I stared at Elijah's name a few seconds longer than the others. Then I shook the strange feeling that had swept over me off and continued working.

There was one name I didn't recognise. Mikael.

His name was carved above the others, so maybe he was more meaningful. The question was how.

Damon was bringing Alaric by one of the nights my mother was at work, so we could go through it together. I knew Elena had wanted to come, and if she had I wouldn't have objected even though every time I saw her the image of her unconscious body flashed before my eyes. But, she was with Stefan. Coming back from how he'd been, what he'd done – that had to take time.

My memory of the night of the ceremony was coming back to me in snippets. Mostly, it centred around that woman. Had I seen her? Had my mind just made something up of the few sane bits it had left? I couldn't recall what she looked like other than what I'd told Damon. And, if it was as both he and Elena said, that Mystic Falls had been flooded by supernaturals with unfinished business, then... well. At least it was giving me something to do.