I Will Never Leave You

Chapter Twenty One

Chapter Twenty One

It was strange coming in the back door instead of the front one but Elijah had insisted that it would be the safest because he could pull right up to it. After she had hung up the phone she had practically been bouncing on her seat, she had all this excess energy she needed to somehow use but she was stuck in Elijah’s car so she couldn’t do anything useful until they got back to the boarding house.

The house was eerily quiet; she had definitely expected someone to be waiting for her. She had expected that someone would be waiting to explain exactly what had happened after she left. Thankfully she knew the giant house well enough to find her way to the sitting room even from the back and made her way there quickly.

She sighed in relief when she saw Bonnie sitting on the very end of one of the couches. Her friend was wringing her hands together and was so out of it that she didn’t even notice Elena until she was standing right in front of her.

“Elena,” she gasped jumping to her feet and pulling her best friend into a tight hug, “thank god you’re here.”

Elena returned her hug feeling thankful for some familiarity but when she pulled away she asked, “has anything changed? Has he come back yet? ”

Bonnie looked down at the floor and shook her head slowly.

It was like all her energy had been completely sapped from her body. All the urgency that had been keeping her going since she got off the phone with Bonnie just disappeared completely leaving nothing in its place. It wasn’t like she was tired because she still felt wide awake, but she felt like her body was made of lead and even her smallish movements seemed sluggish. It was basically impossible to just ignore this feeling and she knew that even if she was still feeling fine she would have to get the full story before she could do anything.

So instead of struggling to do anything right away she let herself collapse on the couch just opposite of Bonnie. All of her optimism that the emergency Bonnie had told her about earlier had left completely making her very grim.  

“Tell me what happened,” she demanded with her hands folded on her lap, keeping them like that was the only way to stop them from shaking. She thought that once she got back things would be better, at the time it seemed like it was impossible for things to get worse than how they already were. She thought she would be able to come back, apologize to and make up with Damon, make things okay with everyone before the ritual and return to the original timeline with no problem. She hadn’t expected to come back and find that things had become even more complicated.

Bonnie bit her lip and hesitated slightly before she said, “are you sure you want to hear everything?”

She breathed deeply before she said, “I need to hear it Bonnie, I need to know how it happened.”

Bonnie still looked a bit uncertain and it seemed like she was going to argue again but instead she took a deep breath and began to explain, “It all started a couple hours after you left…”

Caroline was waiting for her in the hall, her head was hung and she was still sniffling delicately but she was no longer hiding her face in her hands. Bonnie rubbed her shoulder reassuringly before she began to lead Caroline to her room.

She just couldn’t believe the nerve of Damon, and then there was Alaric, he actually defended him after what he did. For anyone else it would be easy to make an excuse for that, say they didn’t know Damon well enough, say they didn’t know what he was capable of. Except Alaric did know, after it was clear he would be staying with them Elena had filled her in on why Alaric hated Damon. It just didn’t make sense to her how a man could defend the vampire that had turned his wife into a monster and then killed him.