Damon was stressed.

He was having the hardest time figuring out how the hell he was going to salvage as much of her journal as possible. They'd done their best to dry the pages, but some were stuck together, others were completely wiped clean because of the chemicals, and a few had smudged so badly, the numbers and letters were completely lopsided.

He wished he'd paid more attention to Maribel's rants. Maybe if he had, he could remember everything she'd said perfectly. Maybe he could remember the numbers she shot out.

He transitioned to trying to fix the tape recorder. He forced Kai do to every spell he possibly knew to dry the tape and reverse the damage. Kai made his efforts, and some parts were able to be heard clearly, but not all.

He spent the night writing down everything he managed to understand Maribel saying in the tape, marking an asterisk next to words he knew he probably spelled wrong. Any number he could find, he'd circle for her to access easily. If she mentioned any 'law' or 'principle,' he underlined it so she could reference it again.

Sometimes he found himself smiling when she went off on a tangent talking about unrelated things, such as how Meredith would react if she could see her doing all this research in this prison world, day after day. How her mother would laugh if she saw her tending to a silly little garden in the backyard.

Hearing her voice even when it was garbled made him feel relaxed. Ever so often he'd stop the tape and listen upstairs, glad whenever he perceived a steady heartbeat as she tried to sleep.

"So, when's she gonna come out of her room again?" asked Kai as he devoured some pancakes Damon had made for himself and Bonnie.

Bonnie stared at him from across the table. "I don't know. And it's polite not to ask. She'll come out when she's ready."

"Well... we still need to get out of here. What are you doing to fix that?"

"I'm doing my research. And I'm going to be teaching her magic theory, too, so she can try and focus on something else. She's good at creating things, good at seeing patterns. She may be able to transfer her intelligence to this new topic and create the spell herself if I can't find it."

"Here," said Damon, offering a plate of pancakes. "She needs to eat."

"I'll take it to her, but I can't guarantee she'll touch them."

"You better make her touch them. She can't starve herself."

"I'm trying, Damon. Let me handle it."

"Well handle it better!"

Kai watched with great interest as Bonnie glared at Damon, who tried to turn away and withdraw from the conversation. "Genuine question," he said slyly, "but who's Maribel angrier at? Me or Damon?"

"She's mad at both of you," snapped Bonnie. "Don't think you're her favorite at all.

"Okay," said Kai with a smirk, finishing his last pancake.

Damon dragged him back to the garage after he ate, demanding he make several more tries to dry the journal or at least attempt to undo the damage. He finished transcribing the rest of the tape, managing to get a full five pages of things she'd said before it really did get too messed up to understand.

"That's the best I can do," said Kai, tossing the journal to him. "It's completely dry but I can't put the words back and I can't unstick the pages."

Unhappily, Damon started another page and transcribed everything he could gather from the journal, repeating the same process he did with the tapes of circling numbers and underlining important concepts.

"You know, it won't be good if she starves herself," mentioned Kai while Damon worked carefully to separate two pages. "She'll die in here."

"I know that," snapped Damon. "Bonnie will get her to eat."

"Will she?"

"She will."

"We both know she won't listen to Bonnie."

"You've served your purpose here," said Damon coldly. "You couldn't even undo the full damage on this journal, so you are not needed anymore."

"You know that with me dies her hope of being able to do magic on her own. She can't siphon forever. Trust me, I know. She'll grow desperate. Very desperate. Mad scientists are still a thing, aren't they? She'll go crazy. And you'll lose her forever."

Damon gritted his teeth so hard, he swore he chipped a tooth. "Stop. Talking."

"What's wrong with me theorizing? Or thinking ahead?"

"Stop talking about her!" demanded Damon. "You're the reason she's suffering!"

"I'm not the one that actually knocked all her stuff down. I told you, temper's gonna get you in trouble, Damon. You're never gonna get the girl like that."

Kai smirked when Damon slammed the journal down and went to stand over him. "Here we go," said Kai, leaning back against the cabinet, purposely making it so that if Damon attacked him, even more glassware would be lost to his rage.

Damon yanked him up by the throat, ignoring the beakers that fell at their feet, shattering on impact. "I think I'll take my chances," he sneered in his face before snapping his neck.

He started to feel an irritating pulse in his chest, knowing he shouldn't have done that. Maribel hadn't wanted Kai dead. And this didn't improve his chances of fixing the journal or the tape, either.

But it did grant him silence.

At least until Kai sat up, massaging his neck.

"Something I forgot to mention," said Kai wickedly as Damon stared at him in disbelief, "I'm linked to this world. Can't die no matter how hard I try. You three, on the other hand, aren't linked to it. If any of you die, it's lights out for you. You really shouldn't have made me mad. Who knows what I'll do now."

Damon's eye twitched as Kai got to his feet, cracking his neck one more time before he left the garage. He decided he wasn't going to stay, either. He took the journal and the tape, going to sit in the living room where he could supervise Kai, who, for now, seemed to be more enticed by the idea of messing with all his belongings. But Damon knew it wouldn't be long before he tried to cause problems for Bonnie and Maribel as revenge.

"Did you know Damon killed me?" asked Kai at dinner.

Bonnie snapped her head to look at him. "You did what?"

"Yeah, even knowing that it was against Maribel's wishes, he just..." Kai let his head fall to the side, pretending his neck was broken again. "He was willing to take away her chance to do magic just 'cause he's jealous."

"She doesn't need to know," muttered Damon. "It doesn't matter, apparently he can't die in here."

"Now you want to lie to her?" asked Kai. "You're not earning any points for yourself."

Damon slammed his fist against the table. "I will kill you on repeat until we get out of here and then, as soon as we're in the real world, I will kill you for good."

"And then Maribel will hate you in the real world, too. You are never getting in her pants."

Bonnie swiped her hand out, magically catching Damon's arm before he could decapitate Kai. "Stop it!" she hissed. "How is any of this going to help her?"

"This idiot doesn't know how to fix her journal or the tape recorder any further," said Damon. "We'll find another siphoner."

"Maribel spent two decades not knowing she had powers," said Kai. "How, pray tell, are you going to find another siphoner for her to use?"

"Both of you, stop," urged Bonnie. "None of us are getting out of here if things continue like this."

"Does that mean you've finally realized I deserve to leave?" asked Kai cheekily.

"I still think you deserve to rot in here, especially after lying about the Ascendant and pretending you knew the spell when you didn't. You killed innocent children and if it were up to me, you could stay here and I wouldn't lose a wink of sleep over it."

He smirked, putting his hands behind his head. "But Maribel needs me. And you respect Maribel while you..." he nodded to Damon, "want to fuck her so badly—"

"I will rip your tongue out," threatened Damon, eyes darkening. "You may be able to come back to life but you won't be able to talk anymore."

"I struck a nerve," said Kai, wiggling his eyebrows as if this was news to him. "Noted."

Damon didn't sleep that night. While Bonnie spent another night comforting Maribel and Kai roamed around the house looking for things to destroy, he was in the library with a pile of biology and genetics textbooks waiting to be read. He zipped through the pages as fast as possible, trying to absorb every drop of information he could to maybe figure the procedure out on his own. Maybe this, combined with his memories of Maribel's explanations, could be enough for him to come up with the procedure and give her a guide.

"How the hell does she remember all this without a vampire brain?" he muttered to Bonnie when she came to check on him in the morning, offering him a mug of coffee. "It's ridiculous."

"She's good at memorization," said Bonnie, sitting beside him.

"How is she?"

"She's still very depressed. She ate a bit, drank some water, but she's mostly been sleeping. I think she's hoping the numbers will come back in dreams or will conjure themselves up if she concentrates hard enough. She's already tried writing everything she remembers but it doesn't seem to be everything she needs. She's still frustrated and sad. She doesn't cry as much but I can tell she's hurt. And... she did mention you came to see her."

"She hadn't told you?"

"She must have still been processing everything. It seems she asked you why Kai's comments made you so mad and you didn't tell her the real reason why you snapped. And earlier she'd been crestfallen when you didn't want to talk to her about what I mentioned."

"She dropped the 'just friends' card first."

"She's much quieter and more nervous than you are, Damon, of course she said that. As soon as I blurted all that out, she shut down, closed off, got shy. I know it's still a two person effort and both of you need to have the guts to admit it but we both know that it isn't going to be her that says it first. She's scared."

"Of me?"

"Of admitting that she likes you. If I had to guess, she could never imagine you liking her back."

"Why would she think that?"

"She's very smart... a lot of people get intimidated by that. She focuses on her job and school more than anything, people assume she won't have time for them. And most of all... she knows she's not Elena. You've been in love with her for a while already. Maribel probably doesn't think she can reach that level, ever, even if she helped you become aware of how toxic that relationship was."

"I like her because she's smart and focused on her job. I like her because she... she..." he struggled to make himself say it, "She makes me rethink things 'cause she had the balls to tell me to my face that I was in a toxic relationship when all anyone else ever did was say I was bad for Elena, that I was a bad person in general. She doesn't make me feel like a bad person, she doesn't try to change me, she makes me laugh..."

"Tell her that," urged Bonnie.

"She's not happy with me right now."

"That shouldn't stop you from telling her the truth. What, you'd rather leave an opening for Kai to flirt with her?"

"She'd never go for a guy like him. If we were together, he would never leave her alone. He'd hurt her."

"You think liking her makes you weak," reasoned Bonnie. "You think showing that you care for her is making yourself vulnerable."

"It is," argued Damon. "I mean, I have hurt Jeremy to get to you. People have hurt Elena to get to me and to Stefan. Maribel won't survive an attack like that. Not from someone like Kai, not from someone as bad as the enemies we've faced in the past. I destroy everything I touch. Everyone I care about. I'd just ruin her."

"Why don't you give her a choice in this, Damon? You can't decide for the two of you that it's not worth pursuing. We're surrounded by danger everywhere we go. Maribel knows that. She's here because of that danger, because everything went wrong. She will understand the risks and I think she will be willing to put up with it. You know her, she likes adventure, she likes solving problems. That's not going to be enough to pull her away because she jumps headfirst into anything she is passionate about. She cares about you. And I know she'd rather be with you a little while and be happy than never take that opportunity and lead a boring life."

"I can't tell her, Bon. Not here. Not when Kai is close enough to hurt her. When he's gone, when she's safe from him, I can tell her. I don't want anything to happen to her. And I know he'll just twist things... he'll get back at me through her. I already have a feeling he'll screw her over as soon as she gives him full access to his powers. She's a siphoner like him and if he gets full powers and retains that ability, he'll be a lot stronger than a witch like you that can't hurt other witches that way. She'll be his competition even if she's a newbie. And he'll kill her for it, I know it. I don't trust him."

"Just don't take too long to tell her," said Bonnie carefully. "Or she might lose interest completely. Might assume it'll never happen and withdraw."

"Do you think she's up for a visitor?"

"I don't know if that's a good idea if you're not going to confess your feelings."

"I need to see her, I need to know she's okay."

"Go try and talk to her, I guess. If she lets you in, then at least it's her choice. If she ignores you, respect that."

He went to her door, slowly tapping his knuckles against the frame. "Beli? Can we talk?"

He heard her sit up on her bed, but it didn't seem like she was coming to open the door.

"Beli, please," he begged. "I have something for you. It's not much but..."

He heard her sigh. Then came a shuffling sound as she made her way to the door, opening it just enough so he could see her face.

"Hey," he said with a small, reassuring smile. He held up the pieces of paper he'd transcribed from the tape recorder and the journal. "Everything I could get that wasn't damaged. It's far from being everything but it's some of it. I added in the margins a few notes I took from some textbooks we had here. I'm trying to pick at my own brain, to see if I remember any numbers you told me. But that's kinda all in your mind, so..."

"Yeah," she mumbled, slowly smoothing out the papers to look at them. "Thanks." He saw her eyes darting back and forth over the page, faster and faster each time, as if she'd had an idea.

"What is it?" he asked, unsure why his heart was jumping so much in excitement. There was that pensive look, those furrowed brows, the pouty lips.

"It's all in my mind," she repeated. "Which means it can be extracted. Either by a vampire who can search minds and conjure up the images or with this... pieces of where I put that information... surely there's a spell that I can do with the remnants of the journal and tape recorder... use it to conjure up the moments where I wrote everything, so I can see it, take some sort of magical screenshot or have someone write it down quickly as they witness it. Like... like a spell that reaches into my neocortex, hippocampus, amygdala... piece by piece putting the procedures back together. I don't have a photographic memory, that's not fully a real thing, but I did hand-write them, I did a certain degree of short and long term memorization, pathways that are still in there, if I can just find them..."

"Bonnie was right," he mused encouragingly. "You're good at creating things, seeing patterns... if anyone can figure out how to make a spell for that, it's you. Already trying to innovate even though you just started doing magic..."

"There's no point to me doing magic if I'm not constantly improving it," she muttered, mindlessly leaving the door open as she went to her desk, laying the papers out and tapping her fingers against them, still formulating her plan. "I could never do spells just to do them, I could never just memorize them to make things happen, I have to invent them, have to improve them, have to feel as connected to magic as I do to science. If this is who I am, I have to have it grow as I do. I need to start my own grimoire, I need to learn spells I make, not spells the Bennetts made. There isn't much theory to it, it's just words in the languages native to the witches who practice... I can put words together however I want, as long as I have intention, as long as I understand the herbs— the herbs, the salt, the candles, all that is important to memorize, everything that acts as a conduit to help the magic flow, to help it be potent and precise— then I can style the spell. I need to study other forms of magic, not just one. I need to learn all the theory before I even attempt to do more spells. I need.... I need a magical encyclopedia..."

He wasn't entirely sure if her rambling was a good sign, but he knew better than to interrupt her when she was in the middle of a breakthrough. "I used to tell Meredith," continued Maribel, now taking another page and scribbling her ideas, "that there was no reason she needed to be messing with vampire blood. I told her that it wasn't wise to incorporate magic with medicine unless one was a witch and a doctor so they could control the outcome a lot more. I'm a researcher and now I know I'm a witch, too, and this... this is what I neded to make all my cures work. I can cure anything. Not just Rippers. I can cure cancer, I can cure Alzheimer's, Huntington's, you name it. I can really give these people hope and health and it would cost me nothing. I can use my magic for good 'cause as far as I know, vampire blood can't fix these things, if it did, Meredith would have known, I would have known..."

She held up the page of her notes, looking at it. "If I can conjure the memories and rewrite my entire journal— no matter how much it hurts— I can get back to my normal pace, I can focus on researching magic for awhile, I can learn to incorporate it into my research, I can become a new kind of witch, a new kind of researcher, and I can do anything. I can fix anyone."

He almost flinched when she whirled around to face him. "I need your help," she said. "I need you to go into my mind to get the memories when I figure out the spell to bring them to the front. Every word, every number, you write the fastest and you're the only one who can see into my head."

"You're sure about that?" asked Damon slowly. "Opening your mind up to me?"

"I may be mad at you but I never stopped trusting you," she mentioned. Then, it was as if she suddenly remembered what'd happened the last time they spoke face-to-face. Her expression fell, and she suddenly looked very hesitant to follow through with what she'd already been planning.

"Beli," he said quietly, "I'm sorry."

She said nothing. He tried to add on, "There are things to talk about... things to say... but I don't want to say them here. Not while we're trapped. When I tell you how I feel... I want us to both be free. And safe. I'm sorry, Beli, I didn't mean to ruin your stuff, I didn't mean to hurt you. I don't trust Kai or like him and I can't stand the way he talks about you, or the way he looks at you, because I know he'll just hurt you and I don't want anyone to hurt you, ever."

She stared at her feet. "I was never stupid enough to think you would like me," she said softly after a minute of silence. "I didn't want to make assumptions, I didn't think it was right to. What could someone like you ever want with someone like me? I didn't want to say anything, either, because I thought you'd just assume I was using you. I advised you to find a way to be happy with yourself and I didn't want to tell you how I felt and ruin that progress and..." she shook her head, "I thought maybe it was something worth talking about..."

"It is," he insisted. "It is, just..." He decided there was no point in delaying. Though he knew the risks, he didn't care, he was going to take them, "I was being stupid. I didn't think you'd like someone like me. For over a hundred years I was convinced I'd only ever be with Katherine. And when I found out she didn't love me, I moved onto Elena and was convinced for another long while that she was the only one I'd ever love and the only one who'd ever love me. Then I meet you, this girl who is too smart for her age, who says things as they are and told me that I deserved better than a toxic relationship. Nobody ever told me I deserved better. Not even my own brother. You don't try to make me change the way everyone else does. You listen no matter what I say and you are... everything I didn't know I needed. Everything I didn't know I could want. I want this. I want you. And I don't mean I want to sleep with you, I mean I want to do stupid stuff like watch you buy whatever the hell a 'P200' is, I want to listen while you rant about 'ligases' and 'hydrolases,' I want to sit next to you while you drink your shitty little strawberry daiquiris and do homework I could never begin to understand even after reading every genetics textbook in the house. I can see myself doing that forever, which is... weird and oddly terrifying."

Her eyes shone as she looked up at him, trusting he meant every word of it. He was surprised when she wrapped her arms around him, laying her head against his chest, a gentle sigh escaping her as if a weight had been lifted off of her.

Damon heard a rustle behind him. He didn't even need to turn around to know that Kai was there.

"How cute," he said, causing them to pull away from one another, a malevolent grin on his face.