22nd August 2010
The decision was reached that brining a body into the hotel room was unnecessary and risky and thus formed an unnecessary risk. Although the receptionist didn't even look up as she took the cash and signed out the key, Grace was still glad they didn't try and chance it by bringing Ray in. Thankfully the motel didn't have a no dog policy so her new puppy happily followed them in.
The room they had been given had two double beds but before Grace could even broach the topic of sleeping agreements Nik announced he was going to return to the bar for a drink and left. She could hear the car pull away a minute later.
Feeling defeated and tired she crashed down onto the nearest bed.
Silently, Stefan gently sat down on the edge of the bed next to her.
"The more bodies he leaves the more publicity and human scrutiny follows us."
"You are upset with him, for how things went at the bar? Or is if something else."
"No I mean I get it, this isn't my world and it's his one thousand year old dream he's chasing so I get he's motivated. I don't know I just..."
"Feel perturbed?"
"Ohh nice big word. I guess I am feeling a bit perturbed. Ever since discovering this other world
Everything has been so different, first the coffin and coma and then being locked inside in house arrest and now travel cross country hunting down a wolf and his pack. At times it feels for someone who has been planning this for so long at times he can be a bit myopic." Straightening up she turned to face Stefan. "I guess I can just get a bit frustrated."
"Look I've been like this for 150 years and it sucks, he's been like this for 1'000 I can't even begin to compute what that would feel like, what that would do to you."
"Are you trying to defend him?"
"No. I'm just trying to say you won't always be able to level with him."
"I don't won't to level with him and I get it - your humanity, his humanity it's unstable but it's still there. You're not all monster."
"Humanity is the wrong word for it because we have no human left. Our morality exists but its hanging on by a thread in both of us."
"So when you flip the switch, turn it all off, it's your morality that goes." She has heard Nik and Stefan discussing flipping the switch before. It had taken her a while to figure our what the turn of words meant.
"Yes. Our remaining humanity dies along with our mortality so to speak."
"But that only stands to support my point."
"Grace."
She sighed. "I don't know, I just...."
"Grace it's alright to be conflicted, nothing about this is normal. I was about your age when I turned..." - "When you died." - "...when I died. And I was confused and I have always been conflicted."
"How did it happen? Sorry that was quite blunt."
Stefan's face was blank. Void of emotion, it was as if the question didn't even register.
"You don't need to talk about this with me. Your pain is decades long - what's talking about it with me going to do?"
"You know I'm pretty sure confronting your emotions, your past can be healing." Stefan responded. He sounded like he was reading the slip from a corny fortune cookie.
"It can also be traumatic if not done properly. Besides I'm not sure I'm the person to be doing this."
"How about we trade?" He asked, pushing himself back onto the bed more so that he could turn and face her instead of sitting side on.
"What?"
"My trauma for yours - pain for pain."
"Look opening up about my past is hard on a good day and this hasn't really been the most emotionally stable of days." Not that she felt particularly emotionally stable enough on any day to discuss this.
"You talk about your parents all the time though."
"Accepting their passing and confronting what happened to them and to me are two entirely different subjects."
"Have you told Klaus about it?"
"That is part of why I am so conflicted. When I'm with him I feel like I can tell him anything but afterwards..."
"You begin to regret it."
"Sometimes."
"The easiest place to start from is the end."
"I guess that makes sense."
"Well my trauma begins and ends with a man locked up serving multiple back to back life sentence."
"Go on."
"When the judge handed down his sentence it was so long on account of past criminal conduct and the multitude and serverity of the crimes."
"So he was a pretty bad person."
"He had been in jail, serving something like a three year sentence for aggravated assault and when he got out he made his way into town, where I lived. He started down at Clappers Junction and made his way up our street. He must have been so angry at the world because he was breaking and smashing things the entire way.
It was Christmas time so a lot of the neighbours houses lucky were empty - ours wasn't. My parents were really busy so they decided to take some time off round the holidays so we could spend time together. He went through our neighbours garden into ours, he had an axe that he had picked up from someone took shed."
She paused, her breath far more laboured. Her eyes were wide as she recounted that night of horror.
"It took him fifteen seconds to kill my dad. Half an hour until a neighbour phoned the police reporting hearing disruptive noise. I'm told they sent a patrol car but he didn't see anything. Only one of our neighbours actually had burglar alarms that weren't decoy.
My mum was dead by the time the sirens arrived. He killed them in front of you. Then taped my hands and mouth and put me in the back of our family sedan. I was a missing person for well over a week until they found him, it was purely accidental as well. It was Sherif Forbes who pulled him over, out of state plates, single male driver matching a vague nation wide BOLO in a sedan with a kicked out tail light that was otherwise spotless."
"Liz Forbes found you?"
"She helped me get through the trial and then fostered my afterwards as well."
"I understand why you don't like to talk about it."
"As far as formative childhood events go, it pretty much ruined me."
"I don't think it did, you could have completely collapsed in on yourself but I see you Grace, you're vibrant."
"It's a shame." Grace lamented.
"What is?"
"That we can't be friends."
"And that would be why?"
"Elena."
"I get you too don't get along."
"You don't get anything."
"Okay perhaps I understated slightly but..."
"You are just too close to her and it is not my job to destroy your image of her nor is my job to make you choose because if one thing is for sure there can't be both - there can't be both me and her."
She paused, thinking as she looked off I tot he distance.
"If you didn't love her, I think I could like you."
"That's your conclusion? So not only can't we be friends, you don't even like me?"
"You're growing on me that's for sure."
"Aw cute." He replied mockingly.
"Like a tumour. A cancerous tumour that needs removing if I want to survive." She countered, equally mockingly.
"Ouch, you don't pull your punches."
"Never." She said slugging him in the arm, he predictably didn't even flinch but they were both grinning their heads off.
Suddenly his smile drew her in, she could see flecks in his eyes that she know she shouldn't ever have gotten close enough to witness. Backing away and taking a breath a ghost of her laughter played across her lips again, forming a faint smile.
The added distance gave her time to look at him again but from further away and she could see he was strained.
"Why do you react so differently to human blood than everyone else?" She blurted.
"All vampires react violently upon exposure to blood." Stefan was calm with the direction change in conversation, giving a nonchalant reply.
"I was in the house with you, I've seen vampires drink before. You dismembered them Stefan. It wasn't pretty."
"You're right I do react differently to human blood than other vampires..."
"Go on, I mean if it's alright?"
"Very early on after I became a vampire I found I lacked control when it came to curtailing my hunger."
"So you over feed then?"
"No I become...violent when exposed to blood it's why I've been living of animal supplements these last few years it restricts my urges."
"And this urges are..."
"I'm what's known as a ripper because when I feed I..."
"You rip them?"
"It's normally their heads. I can't stop while I'm feeding - I get too engrossed so much so they loose their heads."
Graces hand slowly rose to her own neck, gently touching it in some sort of reassurance.
"Have you ever managed not to?"
"Not really."
"Why does Nik want you to keep on feeding if he knows what happens to you."
"Probably because he does know. He said he wants me to revert."
"Why would he have known this whole time you were a ripper? The first time you've done it all summer was at the farm house and I was the only one inside with you."
"I had a bit of a reputation in the 20s - I can only assume he figured out it was me."
"The Montgomery Ripper?"
"How do you even know about that?"
"I'm pretty sure almost every teenage girl has an unhealthy obsession with true crime and unsolved murder, everyone loves a true crime docuseries. I may not be that good as history but I know my serial killers - The Montgomery Ripper is a famous early twentieth century serial killer it never occurred to me he might be a vampire."
"Well I mean you only found out about the supernatural a few months ago so I think you can be forgiven."
"So," Grace drew her legs up so she was sitting cross legged, leaning slightly forward Stefan could see she was concentrating, her eyebrows always pulled in and her nose scrunched, if she was particularly focused it would twitch a little. "Your first feeding, the one that solidified the transformation - that couldn't have gone well."
"I killed my father."
"I'm so sorry."
"No don't be. I was shot by a hunting party assembled from the men of Mystic Falls - they were called together to hunt down my vampire girlfriend but instead killed my brother and I. We both had blood in our systems. Damon didn't want to turn, I did and in the end I chose for both of us. Our fathers blood sealed our fate and we became vampires."
"Kat was the one responsible for you turning, she was the vampire whose blood you had ingested?"
"Yes."
"She ruined your life. Your life and Damon's for that matter. Why is it that all the people every hates seem to get along fine with me?"
"In the world we live in, people like you are refreshing, almost life giving. I don't think anyone could hate you."
"Elena does."
"I haven't quite figured that one out yet."
"She's your girlfriend, you have as good a guess as any."
"Nope, none. Has she always been this way towards you?"
"Like I said, the Forbes were my foster family after what happened to my parents. With Caroline being part of that family it made sense for me to try and fit into her group of friends."
"Did it work?"
"Caroline introduced me to Elena a week before school, when I stepped through the doors of Mystic High almost everyone hated me - especially all of Caroline's friends. And well Bonnie, we may have gone to the same school for long enough but I hadn't really even met her until..."
"Until she put you in a coma and I buried you in a cemetery."
"You see why I have trust issues."
"And yet you're here with Nik."
"He's never don't anything to hurt me or put me in harms way, that's more can be said for a lot of people."
"The dynamic is a bit exhausting though isn't it?"
"What dynamic?"
"Between you and him it's an emotional rollercoaster and that's from the outside looking in. You seem to be baying for his trust and he just slips from mood to mood like he does with everyone else."
"It's not quite like that. I'm at an impasse, him being kind and gentle to me and horrible to everyone else just doesn't cut it."
"But he has been, kind and gentle I mean. Aside from the odd mood swing he's given you his world."
"Has he though? He lets me in to these little bits of his life, I forget that I'm shut out of everything else." She sighed, with every passing day her conflicting thoughts mounted. "I like him, I really do but I'm a child compared to the lives he's lived. I just, I just haven't decided if this is the path I want to go down yet?"
"Well you've come this far - that's a pretty big leap of faith if you're so unsure."
"I didn't feel like I had a choice," she whispered, more to herself than him, "maybe I did?"
"You always have a choice Grace, in this case you can choose to go your own way. Like you said, you may be a child but don't take that to mean you are naive and defenceless. It means you have your whole life ahead of you."
"Go where though, my options are what they were the day I left - a childhood city I have no connection to anymore, a town where no like more of know I even exist anymore or an adventure with an immortal."
"You have the world before you, they are not your only choices."
"I've already traveled the world, Elena has the postcards to prove it."