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Chapter Two

2012 — Mystic Falls, Virginia

   Elena Gilbert sat by the fire, her father's journals by her feet as she slipped through them. Each one of them were filled with the experiments he did on other vampires. Numbers instead of names. Subject This-Number and Subject That-Number, as if their name didn't matter one bit to him. It was another side of her father that Elena saw, another side that completed the image of him in her mind.

   Grayson Gilbert: father of two, doctor, vampire hunter, leader of the Founder's Council, and member of the Augustine Society.

   Elena wondered how many more secrets could she handle about her family. One more and she was sure she would explode.

   "It's weird," she said to the familiar presence that walked into the room. She turned to him and shook her head. "Even as a kid, there was something about that basement that creeped me out." She flipped through the pages and read as fast as possible, her eyes scanning word for word for anything that would reveal another secret.

   Damon cleared his throat. "Sure you want to give yourself nightmares reading that thing?" He took a seat on the coffee table and eyed the journals. There were many of them, at least two or three per year. He wondered if her name was there.

   "And I remember my dad talking about this little girl." Elena looked up at him with a small smile on her face. "I think he was talking about my roommate Megan. Look: January 1999. Saw Megan King today. Megan is seven years-old. She suffers from a congenital heart defect with a life expectancy of two months. A single injection of vampire blood appears to be an effective life-saving solution." She finished reading and looked up at Damon, a sense of elation running through her system. "That's why Megan had a picture of my dad on her phone—because he saved her life."

   Damon made a face. "A hundred pages of horrific torture, and you find the one happy passage." He almost laughed at her sense of hope to her father. 

   It was one of the many reasons why he fell in love with Elena Gilbert. But, even then, he wondered how the hell could she find the good in her father. The man had literally cut into vampires thousands of times and didn't care about their well-being, their pain. 

   Elena shut the journal and laid it on her thighs. The smile on her lips spoke of hope, of a secret that meant good. "My dad used his research to save people, Damon. Children, families."

   "Yeah, and dissected vampires along the way," Damon added. "Newsflash, Elena: you are a vampire. I mean, do you honestly think that he would sit here and see you as anything more?"

   Elena shrugged her shoulders. "I don't know. He was my dad. I can't not defend him." She opened the journal again and scanned through the words. Even though he had done terrible thing, they were for good. He saved people. "I see the good in him, Damon. He helped so many people with his research."

   Damon inhaled deeply through his mouth and eyed the journals. "Does he have names of the vampires he experimented on?"

    "No," Elena sighed and grabbed another journal, slapping it on her thigh. She pressed her hand on top of it and imagined her father leaning over it, scribbling down everything that was on the inside. "Why, what's wrong?"

   "How many test subjects?"

   "I don't know. Two, I think."

   "Two," he repeated. "And you met one of them."

   Elena tilted her head to the side and opened her mouth in words that disappeared into thin air. She licked her lips and nodded. "Enzo," she remembered. "He was strapped next to me. Why are you asking me this, Damon?"

   Damon grabbed the journals and flipped through them. The years blurred by, all of them full of experiments and blood work on both subjects. He knew Enzo's number by heart, had made himself remember it as if it were his own name. The other number, on the other hand, haunted him. It flashed like thunder. It made him want to turn back time so he could prevent what happened on the 4th of July.

   On the journal from almost eighteen years ago, he stopped. He glanced at Elena before he began to read out loud, "August 1993. Subject 63584 is a newly turned vampire, weeks old in this new life. It refuses to drink the blood we give it to keep it from desiccating, which makes it more difficult to do our experiments. A half-desiccated vampire means little to our experiment. Wes want to get rid of it, I refuse. This new vampire could allow us to learn more about the species, if it has evolved like humans did." 

   Damon stared at the words with bile in his throat.

   Elena nodded and stared at him. "I already read that." She crossed her arms and tilted her head back a bit. "What are you trying to tell me?"

   "He doesn't even call her by her name..."

   She watched as his hands closed around the pages of the journal, bunching them up in his fists. A few of them ripped from the seams. She laid her hands on top of his and gave them a gentle squeeze. "Hey, what are you talking about?"

   He sighed and pulled away to flip through several pages, and continued to read out loud. "September 1993. The blood of Subject 63584 is not as different from Subject 12144. Although we found an six extra chromosomes on the DNA, there's not much difference between the subjects. We have to dig deeper, operate longer, but the subject keeps loosing consciousness. It screams for the first forty-eight minutes of the operation. At one hour and twelve minutes, it shut down. At hour three, it lost consciousness. We had to end it there. For now, we know that Subject 63584 can last three hours awake on the operating table, longer than any other subject we've had. We don't know if this is because it came to us right after it transitioned and has yet to feed from a living being, or because of the diet we've supplied for it. Either way, this is a discovery of the differences between the vampires that transitioned almost a hundred years apart. The healing time is quicker; we hat to cut and cut again to keep the wound open. Like silly-putty."

   "It's horrible, but for the good of science. That vampire helped save so many people!" Elena wanted to believe that her father was a good person. He was her father, after all. The man had wanted nothing more but the best life for her, even supporting all the wrong she had done and calling it a lesson in life.

   "She was just a kid!" Damon threw the journal to some corner of the room  and began to pace. He had gone through the same thing for five years, knew exactly how she probably felt on top of the operating table. Five years were nothing to the eighteen years she had spent.

   If he had learned anything about the Gilbert family, it was that they were strong. Stronger than any other family, even his own. But, he knew that even they had their limits. He wondered just how much did Grayson Gilbert hurt his little sister.

   Damon glanced at his girlfriend and shook his head. "She's just a kid, Elena..."

   Elena laid her hands on his cheeks and let his thumb move carefully under his eyes. "Who are you talking about, Damon?" She leaned down at eye level and gave him a small smile. "Talk to me."

   When Damon Salvatore stared into the eyes of Elena Gilbert, they reminded him of the same eyes that stared up at him that stormy night. Bright, careful, full of some hope that only a Gilbert could have. He wondered just how much hope could a Gilbert hold, just how much wonder.

   Out of all the bad Damon had done in the world, he regretted only a handful. That girl was one of them.

   Damon swallowed hard and laid his hands on her waist. "Subject 63584 was someone I knew back in the early 90s," he told her. The words fell from his mouth as careful as possible, as if they would cause both Elena to break. "She, um, was a great person. She saw the good in me when I had my humanity off, and wanted me to be a better brother to Stefan. In other words, she was a lot like you." He licked the corner of his lips and folded his hands on his lap, glancing away from her. "You would have loved her if you met her, Elena."

   "Did you date her?" Elena crossed her arms and took a step back.

   "What? No. God, no. That would have been weird..." He trailed off once he recalled who she meant to the Salvatore's. Not only had she seen the good in him, she had been someone special to his brother.

   "Who is she, Damon?"

   If there was one thing about Elena Gilbert that everyone needed to know, it was that she was more curious than a cat. It was one of the many reasons why her parents didn't keep that many secrets in their home. She would find out about them, she would comment about them, and a fight would ensue. So, her parents took it upon themselves to be open. But, not as open, she came to realise. 

   Her parents were great liars, even more than her. They lied about their monthly meetings at City Hall, saying that it was only about the town and not about them being vampire hunters. They lied about her father's work, in a way. He was a doctor and he did save lives, but at the cost of torturing vampires. 

   Elena understood the bad in that. But, couldn't some bad be good for the world?

   Damon licked his lips and stared at her. "Did you have any other family other than Uncle John and Aunt Jenna?"

   Elena crossed her arms and glanced around before her eyes landed back on him. "Aunt Florence," she said with a careful nod. "She died when I was, like, one... Why?"

   The eldest Salvatore inhaled. "Subject 63584 has a name. Her name is Florence L. Gilbert."

   Elena took a step back and stared at her boyfriend. The words sank into her head like the many other secrets that she had discovered about her family. But, those words were like the house had fallen on top of her head. She laid a hand on her waist and the other pressed to her forehead. "What?"

   "Your Aunt Florence died in 1993, right?" he asked. When she didn't answer, he took that as his answer. "The Florence I knew died in 1993, a few days after July 4th. Car crash, the newspaper and news said. She was fine after the accident, and then some complications happened and she died."

   "Yeah, that's all in the newspaper," Elena agreed. She knew the story of her aunt by heart.

   Her mother spoke a lot about Aunt Florence, a girl who wanted nothing more but to have everyone to be happy. She even gifted her the teddy bear that rests on her bed when she turned one. Pictures of her and her aunt had rested on her dresser and in her photo album, pictures of a girl and a baby throughout the year they had known each other.

   "Are you telling me that this vampire and my Aunt Florence are the same?"

   Damon nodded as he glanced down at the carpet. "Subject 63584 is Florence."

   Elena laughed as she shook her head. "This is a terrible joke, Damon. My dad wouldn't... He wouldn't operate on her, his own sister!" Her laugh died down as the words rang in her head. She swallowed hard and her chest ached as she realised how she much she had read about her aunt's torture. "This can't be real..."

   Damon stood and wrapped his arms around her shoulders, pulling her to him. "I'm sorry..."

   Elena pulled away from him and began to pace back and forth. "My dad was experimenting on his own sister..." The words felt like bile as she said them out loud. She grabbed the journals and opened one of them, shaking her head as disbelief filled her up like when she drank blood. "Damon, he doesn't even call her by her name. He calls her an it, as if she was no one when she became—"

   "A vampire," he finished for her. "Yes, Elena, your father hated vampires so much to the point where he didn't care about torturing his own sister." He sighed and pushed one hand into his pocket. "Don't... Don't mention this to Stefan, okay?"

   Elena stopped pacing and turned to him. "What? Why? What does my aunt have to do with Stefan?"

   Damon scrunched his face up as he thought of the words. "They sort of dated..." He let out a short laugh and shook his head in the disbelief of his own words, of what was happening. "She was his epic love from the summer of 1993. That why's Stefan always gets a bit moody during the summers, because he's remembering her."

   Her mouth fell open as she heard the words. She closed it as soon as possible and blinked. "Are you telling me Stefan dated my Aunt Florence?" She made a face and stuck her tongue out a bit. "Oh, my God, you two do have some fascination with Gilbert women, don't you?"

   Damon smiled and stood, walking over to her to lay a peck on her lips. "And another thing, she's still with the Augustine Society."

   Elena pushed herself away from him and let out a loud groan. "Damon! You're telling me this now?"

   "And she has her humanity turned off."

   "Really?" She crossed her arms and began to pace in front of the fireplace. "So, not only do we have to deal with Katherine being human, the Augustine Society literally wanting to kill us, and now my aunt has her humanity turned off? Jesus, Damon, how long do you think she's been like that?"

   "If I know what the Augustine Society does, I'd say years." The words were rough in his mouth, which surprised him. He hated the fact that he cared for another person other than his brother and Elena. But, he loved Elena, and Florence was someone that meant a lot to her.

   "We need to do something!" she insisted, running her hand through her hair again. "We need to get my aunt out of there and bring her humanity back. And..." She turned to him and frowned, shaking her head. "And we need to tell Stefan. He deserves to know that she's still alive."

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