The day was filled with guilty pleasures.
At least, they should have been extremely guilty pleasures. But Rosalind felt no guilt. So instead, it was just her finding ways to please herself at the expense of innocent people.
She started her day off with driving into Charlottesville to party at a bar and feed on several locals while drinking through half the bar's liquor supply. She hooked up with a waitress in the bar bathroom and left her a significant tip for being so sweet.
She had lunch (pasta and a musician) at a small restaurant beneath a group of trees. She was honestly surprised no one had called yet to bother her. Maybe it meant they'd listened and would be leaving her alone.
But when she got back to Mystic Falls before dinner, she found that they'd been held up for a different reason.
"Rebekah's awake?" she asked in disbelief when Klaus was explaining everything over a shared glass of blood.
"Apparently that idiot girl April Young woke her," he grumbled. "And then, the first thing the little brat did was kidnap the entire friend group to torment them. Compelling them to answer questions and say cruel things to one another. You'll be pleased to know Kol's in town. He apparently took the white oak stake from Rebekah after failing to kill that ridiculous Professor who appears to know far too much about the Brotherhood of the Five."
"Why would Kol want to kill the Professor?" said Rosalind.
"Because of Silas. Apparently Kol is quite superstitious when it comes to that. He's being foolish. And he is attempting to halt all attempts to find the cure."
"Well, from our end, they are halted," said Rosalind, narrowing her eyes. "Unless you, me, and Kol find it for ourselves."
Klaus made a face. "And why the bloody hell would we do something like that? You wanted it for your girlfriend, and—"
She stabbed the nearest object— a fake flower— into his hand, causing him to grow in pain. "Strike one," she said flatly, "don't call Elena my girlfriend because she means nothing to me."
She ripped the flower stem out and motioned for him to continue his train of thought.
Klaus did his best to conceal a scowl. "There is no reason to want it. Why would you care to find it?"
"You think I haven't considered what the others in the group might do to get my humanity back on?" she asked, lacing her fingers together. "They could ram the cure down my throat to turn me mortal. They could kidnap me and put me in the Salvatore or Forbes or Lockwood cellars to bleed me dry and torture me. I'm not going to let that happen. If I find the cure, I can decide what happens with it. Anyway, tell me more about this Professor Shane guy. Anything you found out that I don't already know?"
He nodded slowly. "He was the one who orchestrated the Young Farm explosion and the one who convinced that Hayley girl to trick Tyler. He is the reason the hybrids were all killed. There had to be twelve for the sacrifice. He also happens to be in possession of Silas's tombstone—"
She held up her hand. "I don't need to hear any more. I've decided I'll kill Shane, right after I suck out all the information I can from that well-informed little brain. If Kol is afraid of Silas, surely we can get the cure separately." She stood up. "I need you to find out where your brother is staying. I'm going to pay him a visit."
"And where are you off to now?" he asked as he typed a message to Kol. "I haven't given you a location."
She smirked. "I'm off to kill Stefan. I'm bored and I've always wanted to kill him. I really don't think my dislike for him will ever be solved even with my humanity and I despise him too much for hate sex to ever be an option for reconciliation, so... I'm going to give him that hybrid bite I've been promising him. You're not allowed to heal him if he comes begging."
"You cannot command me not to heal someone," he said. "If he offers me something in return for being healed, I may indulge him and take any deal he brings up. Besides, I do not wish for you to kill Stefan. He may be of use to us."
She stared at him coldly. "You know, if I were you and I arrived to undo the Hybrid Curse and someone was trying to stop me from getting the ingredients I needed, I would have just killed them. They were all so scared when they first heard your name, hell, even I was nervous, but you swept through town with minimal impact and as brutal as you can be, you reduced yourself to just being a thorn in our sides. You should have killed Damon and Stefan, you should have killed Jeremy, you should have killed anyone that might have stood in your way. But you didn't and you haven't despite repeated offenses. What I think, Klaus, is that you're a puny little coward."
His jaw tightened, itching to burst out something in response. His mood grew more sour with each comment she made against him. "Good boy," she said with a dark sweetness as he said nothing. "You're learning to hold your tongue."
He sneered, "Is that your aim?"
"My aim is to have fun and you were so nice and helpful earlier, which is why you were rewarded with all that sex we had in my bedroom. But I am still annoyed with you so if you want me not to hit you where it hurts, you best continue to be an obedient little boy—"
"Stop calling me that," he said tightly. Each time she said 'boy,' he was reminded of Mikael.
His phone chimed, saving him from her retort. "Kol will meet you at this address," he muttered, sending it to her phone.
"Good," she said, unbothered. "Don't wait up for me, I'll probably be spending the night with him."
She arrived at the location bearing no gifts, just the expectation that Kol would let her in and speak with her. She waited in front of the door to his apartment, raising her eyebrows when he finally opened after she knocked twice.
"I would think you'd be more eager to see me," she said as she walked past him. "Oh, that's a bad idea," she pointed to where the white oak stake rested on the coffee table. "You should hide that somewhere safe unless you want someone to use it against you."
"Rosalind," he said, closing the door. "I suppose Rebekah's session with the others earlier was informative. You do have your humanity off."
"Mhm." She sat on his couch, putting her legs onto the armrest. "But I'm not here to discuss my lack of humanity, I'm here to find out more about Silas and why you're being such a scaredy-cat."
Kol sat in the armchair beside the couch. "He's very dangerous. Going to find the cure risks waking him. A few hundred years back, I came across a group that worshipped Silas. His followers told me that he would rise again, and when he did, he would trigger the end of all time. You know, being an immortal, you can see why I'm opposed to time's ending. So I murdered all of them."
"And how did you just happen to come across a group of Silas worshippers?"
"I used to run with some witches. Africa in the fourteenth century, Haiti in the seventeenth century, New Orleans in the nineteen hundreds. They all knew about Silas; that he needed to stay buried. I actually hold witches in high esteem. They said if Silas rises, he'll unleash hell on Earth. I happen to like Earth just the way it is."
She shrugged. "We can get the cure without waking Silas. Surely there's a way to do that, right? I say you team up with me and Klaus. We get the cure so nobody can use it against us, we make sure Silas isn't awoken, and then, everybody wins."
Kol raised a brow. "And what do you want the cure for?"
"So it can't be used to turn my humanity back on."
"Sure you don't still care about helping Elena?"
In a flash, she had the white oak stake in her hand, and was going to sit onto his lap with the tip pressed over his heart. But he was quicker, and pinned her to the ground, her throat in his hand.
"Don't get cocky," he sneered as he ripped the stake away. "Nik may feel too guilty to kill you for your behavior but I won't hesitate to tear your heart out."
She wiggled her eyebrows at him, sliding a leg up his side and then hooking it around his waist. "I think I like you when you're mad, I hadn't seen that before." She used her strength to flip them over, straddling him. "How about you get angrier, Kol? I want to see it."
He shoved her off and tucked the stake in his inner jacket pocket. "I think that you want to feel accomplished. You turned off your humanity because you felt you failed people... your hybrids. If you manage to find the cure, you'll be achieving something no one has done before. You could give it to anyone you wanted. Except, you don't care enough."
She ignored him. "All I want is your help to get it. I want to control what gets done with it. And how fun would it be to screw with everyone else in the friend group? For them to chase their tails trying to find it only for me to have already acquired it? It sounds fun. If you don't help me, I'll tell your darling brother to dagger you. He knows I'll reward him for it."
Kol scoffed. "Are you threatening me?"
"I'm encouraging you to join us."
"What's in it for me?"
"I'll let you fuck me."
Whether it was intentional or not, he sat up with interest. "Are you still on about fucking all the Originals?"
"No," she said. "Elijah will never make the cut. You, however... come on, Kol, where's your sense of adventure? Let's get that cure and leave Silas rotting where he is."
"Shane mentioned something," he said. "He claimed he's already been to where the cure is buried. I'd say that means we don't need the Hunter's mark on Jeremy. That is more for the spell to raise Silas. We don't need more massacres and we likely don't need the tombstone. What we really need is Shane."
"Good," said Rosalind. "So, we go into his mind, extract all the information we can, then we kill him. Time for a trip to Whitmore."
He shook his head. "Oh, he's not in Whitmore. Rebekah had April Young tell Shane's crimes to the Mayor and the Sheriff. He's been arrested and detained right here in Mystic Falls."
"This day just gets better and better," said Rosalind sweetly. "Follow me. We'll take my car."
She drove them to the station, and sped in past the night secretary who was too tired to notice the door wiggling a bit upon them making their entrance. They searched until they located Shane, and plucked him out of his cell to take him to Kol's apartment.
"He can't be compelled," said Kol once they tied him to a chair in his living room, gagged and thoroughly bound. "He mentioned he picked that trick up in Tibet."
Rosalind brought forth two buckets stacked by the entrance, and took a kitchen knife to stab into Shane's femoral artery on one end and his external iliac vein on the other. With his legs cut, she placed the buckets where they'd catch the blood. "This will ensure no vervain is in his system," said Rosalind, licking the blood off of the knife as Kol and Shane watched her. "Mmm... actually, I don't even taste anything. I suppose we'll just have to get the information before he bleeds out."
"Or you could heal him," said Kol. "Otherwise he may die before he's fully useful to us."
"I don't want him to come back as a vampire. I want him permanently dead." She grabbed his head. "Come on, just open your mind to me, it'll all be over soon."
She saw flashes at first, faces of a woman and a little boy. The woman appeared to be practicing magic in some scenes, and crying in others. A few more seconds of searching informed her that it was his wife and son, who had died. He thought raising Silas would lead the immortal to bring them back to life.
Then, she heard him speaking, explaining to different people (one being Pastor Young) about his plans.
"Expression doesn't require a written spell. I will keep the witch from overusing magic."
She saw flashes of the tombstone, then, "The core of that tombstone is made up of Qetsiyah's calcified blood. In some witch circles, that stone's more valuable than the Hope Diamond. It will serve as payment to get us into that well alone, just me, the Hunter, and the witch."
"So, Jeremy doesn't need to kill anyone else," Rosalind mumbled to Kol. "The mark and map are not needed at all, that's for certain. Come on, Shane, now show me where we need to go."
Images of a forest, wilderness, a cave, all conjured into her mind from his. "Two hundred miles off the Nova Scotia mainland," he was telling someone, "The whole point was to hide the cure on the world's most obscure, desolate island."
Then, more memories regarding the Hunters. "Qetsiyah created a cure for immortality, and then she buried it with Silas, hoping that he'd take it and die, and end up on the Other Side with her for all eternity. But he wouldn't give her the satisfaction. So, many centuries later, her descendants created the hunters to find him, cure him and kill him. When Silas was buried by the witch Qetsiyah, she left him with the cure and two choices— stay immortal and rot or take the cure and eventually die in there of old age. But she knew that he wanted to die so that he could find peace, and be reunited with his one true love. So she created the Other Side as a purgatory for all supernatural beings, ensuring that if he died, he'd end up there forever. That's where the Bennett witch comes in. As Qetsiyah's descendant, she can make the Other Side go away."
She was reaching her limit, she knew it. Shane didn't have much else to give. The final scenes were memories, but the face of his wife appeared while he sat in a strange rocky well. As if he hallucinated her very vividly once inside the cave where Silas and the cure rested.
He bled onto the ground, and she appeared. The most interesting part was where she started to explain how he could wake Silas to bring her back.
"Caitlin," he was saying to the figure of his wife. "It's me, the guy who refused to serve a meat course at our wedding. I can't— I can't orchestrate three massacres."
"It isn't like that," replied Caitlin. "You're merely leading these people so Silas can bring them back from the dead."
"Why— why should they die just to be resurrected? That doesn't make sense."
"The spell that brings me back requires a witch to channel an extreme amount of mystical energy. Energy that doesn't occur in nature."
"Yeah, because it isn't natural. I'm sorry, Cate. I just— I can't do that to innocent people."
She reached out to caress his face. "Can you feel my touch?"
He nodded. "How is this possible?"
"Because you believe it is possible. You believe that you can see me again. You don't have to take a single human life yourself, Atticus. All you have to do is convince someone to believe that it is possible that they can see a lost loved one again. And they'll do it for you."
Rosalind withdrew from his mind as Shane gasped into the gag. "He's only done two massacres. The Young farm and the hybrid slaughter. He would have needed a third sacrifice. And a whole lot of blood to wake Silas. Well, I think it's safe to say he can't wake up if we go. Our blood isn't human, and Bonnie won't be performing any spells over any Hunters. We just have to break into that well I saw and we'll get the cure. He hasn't seen it, but surely it's there." She offered Kol her arm. "Go in. See the memories."
He took it, zipping through them much quicker now that she'd already analyzed them. Right as he withdrew, she swiped her hand out and cut off Shane's head.
"Aw," she said, noticing she had blood on her clothes. "I actually liked that shirt. I'll just make someone clean this for me." She glanced down at Shane's headless body. "Sucks for him, he was manipulated and he killed a bunch of people, which probably means he'll go to Hell while his wife and son are in limbo or at peace. He'll never see them again. And I doubt Silas would do anyone any favors just 'cause they woke him up. After two thousand years slumbering, you might be thankful but I doubt you'll be thankful enough to make anyone happy. If I were him I'd be hell-bent on getting revenge."
"What now, then?" inquired Kol. "We go to Nova Scotia?"
"Mhm. Use that Mikaelson money and mileage to get us some transportation. I'd say just you and me should go. Klaus can stay behind a few days without going ballistic."
They went to the Mikaelson Mansion to inform Klaus of their plan. He didn't mind staying behind. In fact, he seemed pleased about it.
"I have a mission of my own," he announced as they were moving around preparing what they needed to take. "That little wolf girl, Hayley, contacted me asking for my protection. It appears she made a deal with Katerina Petrova, which is what got her into this mess in the first place. She was after the cure, and according to my source, she might have even been brokering a deal with Elijah to ensure I'd grant her her freedom if the cure ended up in my hands. You two better find it. I am going to procure Katerina's location and torture her."
Rosalind just shrugged, currently not giving a rat's ass about Katherine. "Just know that if I catch sight of Hayley at any point, I'll kill her, and she won't need protection." She held up a shovel. "And I think I might keep her head as a centerpiece. I don't know, maybe I could hang it from the ceiling. String up the heads of everyone I kill." Her lips curled into a wicked smile. "Brighten up the place a little."
Kol snorted. "Bloody hell, I would have expected a creatively evil little comment like that to emerge from Nik's mouth, not yours."
"Don't worry," said Rosalind, "you can find out plenty about what this mouth of mine actually does provided you do everything I tell you to do on this mission."
"I don't take orders from anyone."
"You will if you want to fuck me."
"I can fuck anyone else. There really is no shortage of people who find me attractive."
"So do it. Fuck somebody else, I don't care. I'm going to actually do something so that the cure can't be used on me to ruin my plans to have a lot of messed-up fun."
Kol decided to go with her for the sake of being in control of whether Silas was woken up or not. Before heading to the airport, Kol compelled someone to retrieve Silas's tombstone from Shane's office in Whitmore and take it to his apartment for magical storage.
Rosalind had to kill someone every step of the way because she was so bored with the process of getting to Nova Scotia. She killed an airport security guard who grabbed a woman's ass while she tried to pick up her duffel bag. She killed an airport restaurant worker who splashed coffee onto her. She killed a flight attendant who 'looked at her strangely.' If Kol had a problem with it, he didn't voice it. He probably didn't mind the killing, but Rosalind was not sharing and also not cleaning up after herself. It probably bothered him a little, not that she cared.
She fed on several people during the flight and even went into the cockpit to force the pilot to teach her how to fly. Kol wondered if she'd be apathetic enough to crash the plane. Apparently, she actually did want to head to Nova Scotia, because the plane never tumbled down.
A compelled sailor took them to the strip of land where the cave with the cure could be found. Night was fast approaching, and Kol wanted to rest, but Rosalind wished to walk onward. She was in the lead, walking with a large branch out in front of her, sensing traps. Occasionally, Kol had to warn her. But she was getting pretty good at noting when something was up ahead, even if she couldn't see anything. She even found a trip wire that Kol hadn't realized was present.
She didn't stop until they reached an abandoned cabin, and decided that this was where they would rest for the night. They'd brought with them several large packs of supplies, allowing them to be comfortable despite the cabin's condition. Rosalind laid out an air mattress for herself with blankets, and curled up without even asking if Kol needed anything.
There was only one mattress, so whether she liked it or not, he climbed in beside her. She turned away, pretending he wasn't there. He didn't try and take the blankets from her, seeing no reason why she covered herself in the first place when they couldn't get cold. He simply relaxed, falling asleep after awhile of listening to her gentle breathing.
At the crack of dawn, she awoke him rudely by deflating the mattress while he was still on top of it. She packed and didn't ask if he was ready to go, simply walked out and continued on the path. Kol followed, rubbing his eyes and making sure he was fully awake.
"This is it," she said as they reached the cavern. "He walked this way..." she led them down the path, the stick still tapping the ground ahead. "And he went down that well." She knelt down, bringing out several ropes and stringing them together, secured so she could rappel down. Kol took the risk and just leapt down into the well, landing perfectly on his feet. Rosalind swung down to meet him.
"Look," he said, tapping a small crack on the floor with his foot. "Dried blood. This is where he had the hallucination. Silas must be beneath. I sense something."
Rosalind brought out the shovel, and started slamming it into the ground. Kol helped her, using the stick she'd had to navigate and find traps. It didn't take long to open a hole, what with their combined strength and disregard for the fact the cavern could collapse on them. Rosalind widened it as much as possible, then slid in, landing on a body that resembled a statue.
"Looks like a fossil," she said. "All stone..."
Kol climbed down behind her, the two reaching for the small box held in Silas's hands. "The box won't budge," said Kol as he tried tearing it out. "Best to—" he ripped a part of the wood off, which wasn't making contact with Silas's body. He frowned when he saw what was inside.
"What?" demanded Rosalind. "What is it?"
"There's only one thing in there," said Kol. "That's... strange. When we were in Tuscany, the Hunters swore it would bring about the end of the vampire species. As in, all vampires. This is only enough for one. Here, reach in, your fingers are smaller."
She dug her fingers inside to withdraw a singular vial of red liquid. "Only one dose," she murmured. "And now, it's all mine."