The silliest thing about Lillian Salvatore was the fact that she thought the boarding house belonged to her. She decorated it to her liking, put her personal touch to every damn thing she could find. The walls of the boarding house were freshly painted a lighter colour, as if she wanted everyone to know that the lightness could in fact make the rooms look bigger. Or maybe because she wanted to change the way her sons had it for years. Erase their memory from the very foundation of the house.

   There was brand new wooden furniture in every corner, vases full of colourful flowers on top and little trinkets beside them. The very atmosphere of the boarding house had changed with the presence of the Lily and the Heretics. It was overwhelming. It was no longer home, but a terrible copy of it.

   As soon as I stepped through the door with Damon by my side, Lily gave us a wide and warm smile. It was as if nothing bad ever happened between us; as if the two girls she claimed to be her family didn't torture me for fun. Her smile made me stiff, furious. It made me wonder how was she as a human, how would she treat me if I had met her.

   My mother used to speak of the "ever lovely Lillian Salvatore," with a solemn look. She used to say that they were good friends ever since childhood, even though Lily was older than her. They planned their weddings together, came up with names for their children, and even imagined them getting married. It was my mother who was happy that I had fallen for Damon, because her dear friend would have been happy that their dream did in fact happen. I wondered if Lily would have been as excited as my mother, as accepting of me as my mother was accepting of Damon.

   I blinked several times and pushed back those thoughts. There was no need for me to think if Lily would have accepted me as her daughter-in-law. It didn't happen; it probably never would.

   A quiet man walked around with a tray full of champagne. He smiled, but kept quiet. When he reached me, he bowed his head and his smile softened. It took me a moment to realise that this man was Beau, the very same man that had broken Valerie's spell on my skin. Even when Mary Louise and Nora kept me prisoner, he was quiet. It wasn't until Nora told me why that I realised the reason why he was silent. He was mute.

   Once in a lifetime, Beau was an opera singer. His voice was strong, resonant, and according to Nora, beautiful. An accident happened in 1903 that severed is vocal chords, leaving him unable to speak or sing. I had tried to use the small amount of sign language that I knew to speak to him, but he only looked at me strangely and continued on his way. Then, I had tried using British sign language since I thought he would be English and would prefer that instead of the American Sign Language. Just like before, he looked at me strangely.

   I grabbed a glass from the tray and smiled politely at him. "Thank you." Out of all the Heretics, he seemed to be the most calm. But I knew that if he were crossed, he would be the most dangerous. I was sure I still had several small pieces of wood from the exploding coffins stuck in my hair.

   Beau smiled. With his free hand he signed, "You're welcome."

   "Beau has taken it upon himself to learn American Sign Language," Lily said from behind me. "Maybe you can help with his studies, Clara."

   "I think I'm not suitable to help," I said. I sipped on the champagne and licked the remainder from my top lip. "I only know conversational." It was the truth. All I knew about sign language was conversational, the ones I learned through a quick video when I had wanted to speak to someone in a house full of silence.

   "So, all of these people..." I trailed off as I glanced around the room. The parlour was full of people I didn't recognise, people that were not residents of Mystic Falls.

   "Neighbouring towns." She smiled as it were something we were supposed to be proud of. "We promised them a night of drink and conversation."

   I made a face and nodded. "So, you compelled people to come to this party to prove what? That we're supposed to forget everything you did because you and you're family are civilised assholes?" The words left my mouth without hesitance. I had thought of them continuously but never allowed myself to speak them out loud, especially not in front of her. At that moment, I allowed my anger to get the best of me.

   I was angry at Lily and everything she ever did to her sons; I was angry at her for taking my home; I was angry at her for allowing Mary Louise and Nora to torture me. They all listened to my screams, to my cries. They had smelled my blood as it fell down my body and splattered on the floor. They heard the sound of the scissors rip my skin open. Had they done anything to prevent it? Had she, who wanted to be forgiven so much, had done anything to stop it?

   Lily swallowed and shifted a bit. "This is what peace looks like."

   "Peace?" I licked my teeth and let out a small scoff. "This must be a very strange way to showcase peace."

   Lily cleared her throat and gave me a small smile as she pressed her hands together in front of her. "I apologised for what Mary Louise and No-"

   "Your family is not the first to torture me and they probably won't be the last." I swallowed the rest of the champagne and handed her the empty glass. The moment her hand gripped it, I looked into her eyes. "Your apology means nothing to me."

   I brushed past her and decided to socialise with those that were compelled. They spoke with carefulness, yet spilled everything of who they the moment they were asked. After the sixth person I spoke to, I realised that they had all been selected to attend at random. A thirty year lawyer who just won a case that would allow him to retire, a music composer who is waiting for her big break in New York, a middle school teacher who only became a teacher so she could have the majority of summer off, a flight attendant who arrived home from Indonesia, a museum curator who hated art and only got into the job because of the money.

   They were all different. The only thing they all had in common was that they were compelled to come to the party, to feign knowledge in the story of the family. Each had a different story of how they met, or how they came to know each other. The lawyer met them when Lily was divorcing her ex-husband, and Julian has bumped into her into the hallway and spilled coffee on her dress. The music composer said that they had went to her concert in Richmond, and then commented of their love for her music. The middle school teacher said that their daughter, Mary Louise, had been friends with hers when they were small. So on, and so on. Elaborate stories for such a short night.

   I moved towards a recognisable face and grabbed him by the arm. "You don't appear covered in blood, so I assume Julian is still alive?"

   "Not for long." Stefan straightened his jacket as he grabbed a glass of champagne from a coming waiter. "Why, do you want to help?"

   I shook my head. "Actually, I'm with Damon on this one. You're being irrational, stupid. He's at least four hundred years older than you, which means he's powerful. What if you are the one to end up dead?"

   He shrugged his shoulders. "I don't think I'll die."

   I crossed my arms and took a deep breath to compose myself. When I was more calm, I looked at him with the small bit of anger that came through me. "I get that you want to help Valerie, to get rid of him because of what he did to her—"

   "How did you know?" His eyes were wide, as if my words had a terrible impact. The surprise on his face faded to one of confusion.

   At that moment, my anger faded. A small smile appeared on my lips as I remembered the exact moment Helen pointed at my stomach, how she said I was pregnant before I died. It was a bittersweet smile, more bitter, as if I had sucked on several pieces of lime. "You forger, I was pregnant, too. Although, how we lost the child was different, it was by people who were far stronger than us."

   My words seemed to have an effect on him. He looked down at the floor and licked his lips. "Clara, you don't understand..." He trailed off, picking his words carefully.

   "I don't understand," I repeated with a scoff. "Really, Stefan? Is that your honest reason? That I don't understand what's it like to lose something I had wanted so much?" I stepped closer to him and glared into his green eyes. Once upon a time, I had dreamed of those eyes and felt myself melt under them when they looked at me. Now, I felt nothing. My heart didn't quicken, my smile didn't appear. "Ask Damon how I reacted when I woke up from that sleep; how I went straight to Katherine and confronted her, how I almost killed her right there. Out of the two of us, I know more about losing. Don't try that bullshit excuse with me, Stefan Salvatore."

   I didn't wait for his response, but brushed by as fast as I could. Damon found me far from Stefan, a glass of whatever strong alcohol at my hand. He grabbed the glass from me and drank it before he said anything, then pulled me with him towards the centre of the room. He still said nothing. As if we were ordinary people, we mingled with the guests. We spoke carefully, came up with an elaborate life as the heretics had done when they compelled them. 

   Damon began the story. His story, his lore of us as humans in present time, we were a couple. At the sound of those words, I had looked at him with wide eyes. My heart felt as if it were at my throat, as if it would rip through my skin and land at my feet. Those words felt strange in my bones as I heard them come from his voice, saw his mouth move and form them. Because it was foreign, and strange, and felt as if I would have never hear them again.

   The woman in front of us laid her hand over her head as she looked at Damon with a hint of awe. "And, how did you two meet?"

   Damon let out a small chuckle and shook his head. "Oh, that's a story!" He took a sip of the bourbon and smacked his lips together. The silence was strange, as if he were carefully choosing his words. Or carefully making up the story in his mind. After a moment of silence, he looked up with a small smile. "She was dating my brother."

   My smile faltered as I realised that his words weren't about me. They were about Elena. The quickening of my heart faltered until it was a slow and painful beat, right at my throat. It blocked my breath, made my eyes tear up, my nose sting. I kept it at bay, though. I stopped myself from breaking in front of them, in front of him. 

   "Ooh!" the woman's husband laughed. "That must have been tough, buddy."

   Damon nodded, but kept that smile. "See, at first, I thought nothing of her. She was my brother's girlfriend, so I wanted to stay away and allow him the happiness he deserves. But..." He trailed off as the smile he had faltered. "You know how you want to look cool and hard in front of the girl you like? With her, I'd make a fool of myself a million times if I could see and hear her laugh."

   I forced a smile on my face as the woman looked at me and laid her hand on my shoulder. She thought his words were about me. She thought his story was about me, about us. That made it more painful. I swallowed my pain and choked back a tear by drinking the champagne and keeping it in my mouth for several moments.

   "That is so romantic!" the woman gushed. She looked at Damon with a wide grin, the pearls around her neck glimmering with the lamp besides her. "Then what happened?"

   "They broke up. And then I was in the picture."

   "Was your brother happy about it?"

   "At first he wasn't, but who could blame him? He loved her, a lot, but now he's okay."

   "That was so nice of him."

   Damon shrugged his shoulders. "I think it was stupid," he said with carelessness, "because out of everyone in the world, I'm the one who doesn't deserve her. That's why I kept pushing her away, kept saying that I loved another girl more than her, that my feelings for her had disappeared." His eyes shifted to mine. "I don't deserve any part of her."

   I swallowed the rest of my champagne and kindly smiled at the couple in front of me. "Excuse me." I turned and walked away as fast as I could. My breathing came in ragged, even though I tried to push every bit of feeling deep inside of me. I did not want to cry, I did not want anyone to know how his words effected me. They couldn't know how the walls I had built crumbled with every word that escaped his mouth. How it shattered so easily. 

   "Clara!"

   I stopped and turned. 

   Damon moved towards me, his brows fused to the centre in confusion. He stopped in front of me and tilted his head to the side. "What's wrong?"

   I shook my head and swallowed hard, searching for the words I could say. My mouth trembled as I opened it, and my eyes shifted to anywhere but him. "I'm not Elena," I finally said. "I'll never be Elena, Damon. I am not her, nor her replacement for the next sixty years, so please..." The tears I had tried hard to hold back decided to break free. "You already hurt me a lot, was that not enough for you?"

   His face softened. The way his brows creased together were not of confusion, but pity. The way his mouth fell was because he searched for the words that would probably make me forgive him, forgive everything he had ever said. And me, being me, would forgive him.

   He opened his mouth to say something.

   "I hate to interrupt the party, but I just wanted to introduce my dearest love, Julian." Lily stood on the makeshift stage, a bashful smile on her lips as she looked to the corner. "He just returned from, shall we say, travels abroad? My family is finally complete. My hope now is that in time, we can learn to accept each other and, together, restore this town, with its former residents, to a state of peace." She raised her glass for a toast. "Cheers!"

   "Cheers!" the guests followed. Glasses clinked together, champagne was drank, and people laughed. 

   "If she thinks her toast will ease the tension between us, she's wrong," Damon spat. 

   I inhaled deeply and brushed the tears away before anyone else saw them. I pushed them back, rebuilt the walls around them until I felt them want to break them. They wouldn't get through. "Let her dream," I said with disgust. "As long as they're here, this town will stay as it is."  I grabbed a glass of champagne from a passing waiter.

   "Haven't you had enough?" Damon asked. 

   "Not nearly as much as I want."

   Stefan appeared besides us, his eyes hard with anger. He moved his head in one direction, a signal for us to follow. He moved through the room, up the stairs, until we were in what used to be Damon's room. All of the old furniture he had had been replaced. What remained was rearranged, strange, as if it didn't belong there.

   "Huh," Stefan hummed. "Where the hell's your TV?"

   "Where's my bed?" The anger in Damon's tone almost made me laugh. His room was changed, and all he cared about was his bed. 

   "Wow, I guess Lily took over your bedroom," Stefan mockingly said. "And, I will bet you your old flat-screen that Julian isn't sleeping in the guest quarters..."

   I made a face of disgust as I moved closer to the window. "Please, keep those comments to yourself. I don't want to throw up."

   "Here I thought she slept standing up like a horse," I heard Damon say. I turned to see him with a sword in hand, sea-foam green underwear hanging at the point.

   "You two need to help me kill him," Stefan suddenly said, "or leave."

   Damon turned and swung the underwear to face him. "Do you know what this means?"

   If anger could make a man look stronger, Stefan would have been a giant. "Knock it off."

   "It means Mom's happy," Damon said. "Another couple months of this, and she'll have convinced herself it's forever, and that's when we strike, Stefan."

   "Look at your bedroom"! Stefan spread his arms wide to the room. "Our house is unrecognisable. Lily needs to go, and killing Julian is the start of that."

   "What makes you think she won't retaliate if you kill him?" I asked as I glared at him. "Damon killed one of her heretics, and I was tortured for it. You kill the love of her life and which one of us dies?" I licked my lips and crossed my arms.

   Damon frowned and tilted his head to the side. "You know something!" he said to his brother. "Look at you—murdery, vengeful. It's very humanity-off Stefan, except your switch is intact, which means you know something. So, spit it out!"

   Stefan was visibly irritated. "It's not my secret to tell, Damon."

   "Oh, really?"

   Matt Donovan stumbled in, a half-empty bottle of bourbon in one hand. "So, Nora showed me where they keep the good stuff."

   "Really, Matt?" I asked with a small groan.

   "Whoa, whoa, whoa!" Damon yelled as he marched towards him and snatched the bottle from his hand. "Hold on—does this bottle say 'Default Deputy'? No. No. It says, 'Damon's good stuff. Do not touch'." He took a drink and then began to gag.

   "Damon?" The scent of burning flesh made me realise that they had put vervain in the bourbon. The smirk on Matt's face only confirmed it. I went towards Damon and held his face in my hand, the burning scent only stronger. "You need to spit it out!"

   Matt stepped behind him and stabbed him in the neck with a needle full of vervain. When Damon dropped limp in my arms, Matt looked at me. The sight of the needle caused me to stop, my breathing to come to a halt. 

   Flashes of Mary Louise and Nora appeared through my mind. Their voices, their laughter, their hands as they pressed needles into any visible part of my body. My neck pricked with the faint sensation of past needles, my arms contracted as the memory of the pain and the vervain was visible. 

   I glanced up at Matt. "Don't you dare," I hissed. My voice was low, barely a whisper. In the silence of the room, it sounded as loud as a yell. A bomb in the quiet of town. A plead.

   Matt shook his head and stepped forward. "I'm sorry, Clara."

   The next step he took towards me, I stood and used my speed to stand behind him. I wrapped my arm around his neck and pulled him back, my fangs close to his neck. My eyes moved towards Stefan, who held a hand up.

   On his other hand, he held the needle Matt had dropped. 

   "Drop it," I hissed at him as I pulled Matt closer to me, my lips brushing just against his neck. The gentle thrum of blood passing through his artery made my fangs appear. For a moment, I was tempted to sink my teeth into his neck and drink him dry. I wanted to drink him dry. I needed to.

   The only thing that stopped me was the realisation that it was Matt Donovan, the only human in a town of vampires. He had survived through everything while he was a mere mortal. But, there I stood, with his life beneath my teeth and his fragile body at the tip of my fingers. I could break him. Without a thought, I could snap his spine and kill him.

   But, I didn't want to.

   I stepped back from Matt and apologised profusely, because I wanted him to forgive me. After so many years of hating me for being a vampire, he had given a little bit of thought that I had my humanity intact. Nonetheless that my actions proved that I was a body away from my humanity completely snapping like a rubber band.

   What surprised me most was how easily I was prepared to kill Matt over a syringe full of vervain. But, it wasn't because of the syringe, or the vervain, but what it brought. Pain was one. 

   The second was the laughter of Nora and Mary Louise, their taunts as they filled my body with more vervain than the blood I had. How they stabbed me with scissors, how I felt weak for days due to the amount of vervain they had put in my body. The moment I saw the syringe, I froze. 

   Their laughter rang at my ears. For a moment, it felt as if I were hanging from the ceiling and my shoulder was out of place. In that small moment where I saw the syringe, I felt as if Nora and Mary Louise would appear out of nowhere and all of the moment I had spent outside of this house was that they were in my head.

   Before another apology could escape my lips, Stefan had sped towards me and pushed the needle through my neck. I inhaled deeply as the vervain burned through my bloodstream. At that moment, I was back in Stefan's room, hanging by the arms and expecting Nora or Mary Louise to come in at any moment. 

   There was something soft beneath me when I began to wake up. The sensation was familiar, the scent as well. When I opened my eyes, the familiar sight of Damon's bedroom came into sight. The beat of my heart accelerated for a moment, until I realised that the bedroom was not at the boarding house, but at the Lockwood Mansion. It was the bedroom he had claimed as is. There were bits that were decorated just like his bedroom at the boarding house, but there was a terrible difference to it.

   Instead of the scents that made up Damon—blood, bourbon, cologne, and leather—it smelled like laundry detergent and coconut air freshener. That must have been Caroline's doing. She had a thing about keeping the house tidy, even though she was back at Whitmore, but she visited a lot.

   I pushed myself up from the bed and inhaled deeply, the sting of the vervain still in my system. After being tortured with vervain so much, I had thought I could become immune to the pain. I thought wrong. The pain was still there, like a thought in the back of my head. It took me several moments to stand, and make my way towards the room I had claimed as mine.

   It was the opposite of the one at the boarding house. There was more light shining in through the windows, more empty space, and a tidy mess. The bed was unmade, the clothes I had tried to neatly fold onto the dresser were now falling over the drawer, and the night table by the bed had several empty blood bags and half-burnt candles. It was a mess, like me. 

   I took of my dress and let it fall to the floor as I made my way to the bathroom. As soon as the hot water touched my body, I let out a shiver. It allowed the pain from the vervain to smooth over into a gentle ache. Once I finished, I got out and got dressed in something comfortable. As I pulled on my shirt, there was a knock. I turned my head to see Damon leaning against the wall, arms crossed and a tumbler full of bourbon in one hand. 

   "You knew about Valerie, didn't you?" he quietly asked.

   I stopped and turned back to him. "Yes," I said. "She didn't tell me, but I guessed by the way she spoke of Julian."

   "The same way you speak of Katherine," he hummed. 

   I swallowed hard and bit my lip. "I get that Stefan wanted to kill Julian for what he did, but it was reckless how he went in blind."

   "Like the many times you went in blind to do something." Damon pushed himself from the wall and walked closer to me. He brushed past me and laid the tumbler on the night table, then fell back on the bed with a soft groan. His hands were behind his head and he looked comfortable as he stared at me. "And here I thought you just wanted to be my date to the party."

   "Why would I want that?" I asked as I picked my dress from the floor. I stared at it, as the small stain of spilled champagne on the skirt. 

   "Because of the giant elephant in the room, Clara."

   I let the dress drop and turned to him. He had spoken those same words months ago, and I had almost fallen for them. I wanted to fall for them. He said there were still emotions between the two of us, unresolved or something like that. And ever sine then I had avoided that elephant, because it needed to be ignored. It couldn't exist. If it did, it would bring me only pain. I had enough of pain.

   "The giant elephant in the room can die," I said with a sigh. 

   Damon stood from the bed and moved towards me. "Clara..."

   "You don't understand, don't you?" My voice was louder than I had intended, but I didn't hold back. "I am not Elena!"

   "I know that!"

   "Do you?" I stepped towards him as I shook my head. "Every time Elena pushed you out, you came to me as if I were a replacement for her. I loved you, Damon, and you took advantage of that!" My lips quivered as the words flowed freely from my mouth. They were venomous for myself, for him. "Do you remember the Mikaelson Ball? Do you remember what you told me while we danced?"

    A look of guilt appeared on his features as he shook his head. "Clara..." His voice broke as he said my name. 

   "You told me you loved Elena more than you loved me." The words caused the invisible hands around my neck to squeeze tighter. Tears fell down my cheeks as my chest ached, as my finger tips felt cold, and my being felt as if I were being ripped apart. I spoke softly, almost a whisper. "That wasn't the only moment. The high school dance, one of them. You dragged me there after Elijah's compulsion wore off. You grabbed my hand and pulled to the dance floor, only to let go the moment you saw Elena. So, amuse me, Damon, because I'm tired of this—why do you say I'm not her replacement when everything you've ever done says otherwise?"

   Damon licked his lips and shook his head. "Because you deserve better than me," he said, his voice soft. His eyes were cast down to the ground, as it the shadows that danced on the wood were more interesting than anything else. His face was hard, as if the words were to painful to conjure. A moment passed, and he finally looked at me. "You always deserved better than me, Clara. And I try to push you away, but I just can't seem to do it right. For one, I don't want to push you away, but I feel like I have to so you can be happy."

   I opened my mouth but my phone began to ring. Instead of continuing our conversation, I decided to pick up my phone. My chest felt as if a storm was beginning to brew, as if thunder and lightning were having a dangerous dance. I picked my phone with shaking hands and answered without a second thought, "Hello?"

   "Clara? Where are you right now?" It was Caroline.

   "Lockwood's, why?"

   She muttered something inaudible, then a gasp. "Um, I need you to come to Ric's apartment. Right now. Immediately."

   I ran a hand through my hair and sighed. "Can't this wait until tomorrow? I'm tired, Care, and honestly, I don't—"

   "This can't wait!" she claimed, a hint of panic in her voice. "We need you to come right now. It's important."