Chapter Text
Sylvie knew something was very wrong the moment she regained consciousness and found herself staring blurrily at an intricate ceiling pattern that certainly didn’t belong to her shoebox-sized apartment downtown. She blinked a few times, trying to clear the fog in her vision. Her eyelashes felt… strange, heavier somehow, irritating her eyes to tears.
It took her a moment to remember that these weren’t her natural lashes. No, these were big and clunky and completely over the top, but Ana had insisted she wear them to compliment her “sexy masquerade” look.
Groaning in annoyance, Sylvie tried to lift her hands to her face to plug them off. It was only then that she realized that she couldn’t actually move her hands. At all. They were bound together by a thick and rough piece of rope cutting painfully into her wrists.
'Okay, Sylvie. Deep breaths. Maybe this is just some very weird BDSM sex dream you’re having. Maybe your libido really is desperate for some action, as Ana would say.’
If this was a dream, she could wake up from it. All she had to do was close her eyes and will herself to wake up from… whatever this was supposed to be.
And Sylvie tried. She tried desperately to will herself back into her cramped little apartment with the peeled off Grandma wallpaper and chipped kitchen counter that had probably last been deemed in ‘acceptable condition’ in the mid-sixties but was cheap enough to be affordable for drastically underpaid preschool teachers who still had to pay off their asshole ex-fiancé’s gambling debts. But when she opened her eyes again, still irritated from eyelash glue and those fake monstrosities, the fancy out-of-place ceiling pattern was still staring back at her like she owed it something and the rope was still scraping against her tender flesh.
‘So much for just a dream, Sylvie.’
Her memories were a blurry mess, starting with that masquerade ball her best-and only-friend had dragged her to and ending with way too many glasses of champagne just to stomach the hungry , not-so-subtle stares on her cleavage and that damn leg slit, like her body was calling for open buffet.
She remembered her head buzzing from all the champagne and her posture starting to sway—and not in tact of whatever cheesy early 2000s pop ballad was blasting out of nearby speakers. She remembered slurring something about ‘checking the parking lot’ for her pearl earring that she lost sometime during the evening and leaving Ana to her flirty dance with Sexy Cinderella.
And she remembered loudly complaining about her heels to no one in particular as she stumbled down the rows of cars, squinting her eyes at the ground to scan for that clunky white-cream colored pearl earring.
Sylvie wasn’t even sure why she was looking for it. She hated those earrings. They had been a birthday gift from her ex-fiancé some years ago, an uncannily exact copy of the ones her mother always wore.
They were too big. Too ugly. And sometimes, too painful to even look at. But she had worn them for years, day by day, too afraid to put them down, even years after her ex-fiancé was sentenced to twenty years in prison. Maybe it had been a version of self-deprecation, a way to remind herself that no matter how many miles or prison bars were between her and her old life, she would never be able to escape it fully.
Its shadows would haunt her until her dying breath.
Sylvie didn’t know how long she continued staggering through the barely lit parking lot in front of the Lockwood estate, searching the ground for that damn earring. She only remembered that at one point she got frustrated—at the heels, the darkness, her own stupidity—and sat down in the middle of the parking lot like a stubborn toddler and cried.
Some people became violent and angry when drunk, others clingy and adorable. Sylvie though, she just became… sad.
And very, very emotional.
She remembered pulling the glittery mask from her face, the silver-white sequins stitched to the soft material reflecting the light of a nearby lantern. She remembered how dizzy she became all of a sudden, the world tilting funnily in front of her eyes in a way that couldn’t just stem from one too many glasses of champagne.
And then… nothing.
Lights out.
Sylvie’s eyes went wide all of a sudden, as a terrible realization began to creep through the post-drunk haze.
The champagne!
Someone must have drugged her.
That, or she cried herself into unconsciousness. But given the strange surroundings and circumstances she had woken up to—the ceiling that wasn’t home or the Lockwood estate, the piece of robe around her wrists—she was willing to bet on the first.
A cold and damning sensation crawled up her chest, pressing down on her lungs until she couldn’t breathe anymore. That was the moment the severity of her current situation fully sunk into her.
She had been drugged. And kidnapped.
Sylvie tried to pull herself up from wherever she had been dumped on, but with her body still fighting the remnants of the drug and alcohol in her system and her hands firmly tied up together, something so simple suddenly proved to be an impossible act.
“Someone… please…” she croaked weakly as she slumped back down, her vision blurring again. “I… I… need…”
She didn’t really expect anyone to answer. But an answer came nonetheless—in the form of a brunette teenage girl in a pink Henley with a suspiciously red stain on one sleeve who suddenly towered over Sylvie, a mix of concern and sympathy etched across her all too young features.
“Hey. You’re alright. Everything’s gonna be fine, I promise.”
Sylvie didn’t know where the girl had suddenly come from, much less who she even was. She was quite confident she had never seen that particular pair of warm brown eyes before.
For a painfully long moment, Sylvie just laid there, staring at the stranger as if that alone could answer all the questions swirling through her head. The girl was thin as a twig and perhaps sixteen or seventeen years at most. She hardly looked strong enough to have dragged Sylvie’s unconscious body off the Lockwood’s parking lot without anyone noticing.
She couldn’t have been the one who kidnapped her. At least not without help.
And yet Sylvie still flinched as the girl reached for the rope around her wrists. It was an instinctual reaction, more than anything, heart beating fast against her ribcage as the cold sensation continued to press the air out of her lungs. A terrified sound escaped her lips, something between a gasp and a yelp.
The girl instantly stopped whatever she was attempting to do and instead pulled back, the faintest trace of an apologetic, reassuring smile pulling at her features.
“It’s okay. I’m not gonna hurt you.”
Sylvie eyed her skeptically. She wasn’t usually so skittish or mistrustful of high schoolers, but she still couldn’t make sense of the girl’s presence and role she might have played in this whole act.
The girl didn’t look scared. Or calculative, or however kidnappers or kidnapped victims were supposed to look like. But there was still a hint of guilt in her features as she nodded at Sylvie’s still tied up wrists.
“I just thought you might want that removed. Doesn’t look comfortable to me.”
Whatever retour had been lying on the tip of her tongue, it never made it past Sylvie’s lips. Instead, she just stared at the girl who had just offered to remove the rope, utterly dumbfounded. What was she to make of this offer? Was it genuine, or just a trick to lure her into a false sense of security?
Sylvie couldn’t tell. All she knew was that this girl was acting very suspiciously—and Sylvie didn’t like that.
Not one bit.
The girl was about to open her mouth to say something else, when another figure appeared in Sylvie’s peripheral vision, so fast the movements blurred in front of her eyes. It was a woman this time, an adult, likely Sylvie’s age. Her dark hair was cut into a short spikey bob, and her light green eyes as unfamiliar to Sylvie as the girl’s.
The woman didn’t waste any time on courtesies. Instead, she grabbed the rope around Sylvie’s wrists despite the latter’s audible protests and fearful squeaks, and untied it with quick, decisive fingers.
Sylvie blinked—once only—and the rope was gone, along with the scraping, tight sensation. In its place were two angry red marks burning into her fair and sensitive skin around her wrists.
The woman sucked in a sharp breath at the sight of it, the previously stiff and determined expression on her face making way to something more akin to panic.
“Trevor! I told you not to tie her up too tightly!”
There was a moment of silence before another voice answered, distinctly male this time and coming from somewhere behind the woman outside Sylvie’s vision.
“I didn’t!”
Then, just a few seconds later, a man appeared next to the woman, towering over Sylvie, his eyes falling on the rope burns around her wrists.
Sylvie fought the urge to hide them behind her back.
“How am I supposed to know humans bruise that easily?”
Sylvie furrowed her brows. Why was he talking about her as if they were two separate species?
The woman, meanwhile, looked anything but consoled at the man’s words. “Do you have any idea what you just did? We can’t hand her over in this state. He’s going to kill us!”
Sylvie’s eyes widened and her breath hitched, the now all too familiar cold pressure on her lungs returning in full force as she stared at the strangers towering over her.
Who was ‘he’? And what did these people want with her? She had no money, no family treasures and no rich friends either. All she had was her run-down shoebox-sized apartment, her barely sufficient preschool teacher salary, a whole lot of debts to pay off… and Ana.
Ana, who was probably worried sick for her right now, and with any luck, already alarmed the sheriff’s department.
If they were hoping to exchange her for a mighty ransom, they’d picked the wrong person.
Suddenly, a terrible thought pushed itself into the foreground. What if this wasn’t about money? What if these people were human traffickers about to sell her to some multi-billionaire as a sex slave?
Women like her disappeared all the time. Women that were young, healthy and pretty enough to attract buyers. Women that weren’t important enough to warrant national search efforts.
She had seen too many missing person posters of blonde and blue-eyed women in their late twenties wasting away on public clipboards or lantern poles, never to be found again. She had read too many newspaper articles about these women being found dead and cut into pieces wrapped in plastic bags and buried deep in the woods months or even years later.
If they were found at all.
All her life, Sylvie had been so careful, especially after everything that went down with that asshole of an ex-fiancé. She learned early to never leave the house without pepper spray in her bag, to never enter dark alleyways alone, and if she absolutely had to, to always call someone on her phone while crossing through it, her keys hidden between her fingers, ready to scratch across the face of whoever could potentially attack her from behind.
She also learned to never leave her drinks unguarded. For this wasn’t a safe world, especially not for women like her.
All it had taken was one moment of carelessness, one drunken search for an earring she didn’t even like, and her worst nightmare had come true again.
“No… No… please, don’t—“
Her heartbeat picked up speed, drumming relentlessly against her chest, her breath quickening, her vision blurring until her kidnappers’ faces and her surroundings faded in front of her eyes.
Suddenly she was back in her twenty-four year old body, back in that godawful delivery van speeding across the highway, her arms bound to her body and her mouth sealed shut with tape, helplessly watching these men in masks laughing about how easily her fiancé had sold her off to their boss to save his own hide.
“Such a pretty little thing. A shame she’s reserved for the boss.”
Their cruel laughter got too much to bear any longer. Sylvie trashed around, as much as her confinements allowed her to, her screams muffled by tape on her mouth, eyes wide in terror.
She needed to get out of here. Back home. She wanted nothing more than to get back home and forget all about this nightmare.
“What is wrong with her? Trevor, what did you do?”
“Why are you blaming me? I haven’t done anything!”
“Then why is she like this?”
The voices were distorted, entirely out of place. But they were coming from the men in masks sitting with her in the back of the delivery van… except that one of the voices was distinctly not male. Suddenly the masked men and the insides of the delivery van faded out of vision, replaced with the confused faces of a man and a woman towering over Sylvie, only for her to snap back into the delivery van.
“That guy’s such an idiot, thinking he can just hand over his pretty little plaything and everything’s good. No one screws over the big boss and gets away with it.”
“Oh I bet he’s having the time of his life right now with the cops on his ass.”
“How did such a loser end up with such a hot chick? Poor judgment, the lady, I guess.”
They just wouldn’t stop laughing. Sylvie couldn’t see any of them clearly—their faces covered entirely by black masks—but their eyes, oh their eyes. They were staring at her with the same hungry expression every man she encountered did, ever since she came of age.
Like she was a drug they just couldn’t resist.
“Hey, you. Calm down.” A hand landed on her shoulder, holding her in place. “You’ll hurt yourself if you keep on going. You’ll be alright, but I want you to calm down.”
But the female voice was too far away, too distorted. Instead, all Sylvie could see and hear was one of the masked men crouching down in front of her as the delivery van stopped moving, grabbing her chin and caressing her face with a gloved hand.
“Shhh, don’t you cry, pretty little thing. The boss is gonna take very good care of 'ya.”
“Hey! Human! Snap out of it!”
“…such good care, you’ll see…”
“Hey! What are you doing to her?”
“Now be a good girl and follow us, alright? Running’s pointless.”
“Just compel her to calm down, Rose. Before he gets here.”
“What do you think I’m trying to do here? It doesn’t work! She’s too far gone.”
“There’s nothing out here for miles. If you run we’re gonna have to shoot you and then the boss will get mad. So don’t.”
“Then just knock her out. She’s hysterical.”
“No! Please don’t do that. Let me talk to her, try to calm her down…”
Suddenly there was a hand grabbing the side of her head, slamming it against something solid. And before the pain of the impact could fully register, everything went black.
There were voices talking close by. That was the first sensation creeping back into Sylvie’s consciousness.
“…he’s here! This was a mistake.”
“No. I told you I would get us out of this. You have to trust me.”
“No! He wants me dead, Rose!”
“He wants them more.”
Sylvie furrowed her brows, eyelids fluttering open to reveal a now vaguely familiar-looking ceiling. The voices—a man and a woman—sounded somewhat familiar as well, even though she couldn’t quite place them at first. She squinted her eyes, trying to clear the fog that had gathered in her head. Her body felt funny, too, and strangely lightweight, as if made of fluffy clouds of cotton.
Where the hell was she and what had happened?
“…hey! What are we?”
“We’re family, forever.”
Then it suddenly struck her like a bolt of lightning. The kidnapping, the girl in the bloodstained Henley and the man called Trevor and his companion, Rose—the human traffickers.
She had been kidnapped from the Lockwoods’ masquerade to be handed over to someone!
Sylvie shot up with a loud, horrified gasp, slightly dizzy from the too-fast movement. Her eyes scanned her surroundings, realizing quickly that she had absolutely no clue where she was. The room looked like it had stood empty for decades, abandoned to the whims of time, enclosed by tall walls built of sand-colored brick and an upper section that had once been painted or wallpapered, now flaking with age. It was separated from the brick below by an elegant ornamental molding. Next to it, dark wooden transom windows hung over French doors that had been sealed shut with cardboard from the outside, blocking out the sunlight.
It was barely furnished. Antique console tables lined the wall, an old armchair with a muddy pattern and a matching antique two seater she was currently sitting on made up the center of the room along with an elegant chandelier burning dimly and forgotten on the floor. Lamps in different sizes stripped bare of their shades were scattered throughout, all turned on. A small, split staircase led out of the room into what looked to be an equally stripped bare hallway.
It didn’t look like any place she’d seen before in town. If they even were still in town, that was.
Her eyes slowly moved back to her hands—or rather, her wrists. The pain from where the rope had burned into her skin was gone, and so were the red marks. Come to think of it, the drug and alcohol haze had disappeared as well. Sylvie swallowed hard. Just how long had she been knocked out?
Her body felt… strange. Too light. Too… calm. Like her system had been rebooted and cleaned up while she had been unconscious.
“Hey, you alright?”
Sylvie startled at the sound of a voice coming from somewhere behind her. She turned around only to find the brunette girl in the pink Henley smiling at her hesitantly, a mix of concern and… something else written over her face. Her shoulders were drawn in and she kept fidgeting with her hands, as if bracing herself for something.
Sylvie swallowed hard.
“I‘m… not sure.“ God, how she hated the sound of her voice. So brittle and weak, barely above a whisper. “W—What is going on? What are you going to d—do to me?”
A hint of sympathy spread across the girl’s face as she stepped closer, sitting down at the edge of the two-seater. Sylvie instinctively pulled her legs up to her chest, making sure the soft, flowing silver fabric of her masquerade dress sufficiently covered her most intimate parts. She could only imagine what a mess her hair and make up must be. Some strands had come loose from her braided updo, falling on her exposed shoulder like a soft waterfall of molten gold. Her glued-on eyelashes were still irritating her eyes, causing her to blink and tear up excessively.
Now that her hands were finally free, she carefully reached for them with the tip of her fingers and pulled at the lash band, one at a time. The adhesive detached itself fairly easily from her lids. Once both lashes were gone, Sylvie almost sighed in relief. She’d never let Ana convince her to wear these stupid things again.
When she looked up again, she found the girl watching her intently, still nervously fidgeting with her hands now in her lap.
“I’m Elena, by the way.”
Sylvie blinked at her for a moment, caught off-guard at the sudden introduction. Then, she cleared her throat gently.
“Sylvie.”
The corners of Elena’s lips curved up into the ghost of a tortured little smile trying hard to look more reassuring than it was. She parted her lips, likely to say something in return, when someone close by cleared their throat a little too aggressively.
She followed Elena’s gaze towards the split staircase leading out of the room. Pacing in front of it like an anxious tiger was the man from before—Trevor. He glared at them before placing a finger to his lips, signaling them to be quiet.
Sylvie furrowed her brows. He seemed strangely… nervous for a kidnapper, even more so than the girl. Also… where was his mask? He was either very foolish, letting her see his face… or very confident that she would never have a chance to report him to the authorities.
A cold tremor ran through Sylvie’s body at the thought.
Her hand moved, unbidden, to the silver sequin heels at her feet. They hadn’t removed them while she was unconscious.
Good. That at least gave her something to use as a weapon.
Sylvie took a deep breath, willing herself to stop shaking while she wrapped a hand around one of her heels, quickly and quietly pulling it from her foot to hide it behind her back without letting it go.
‘Deep breaths, Sylvie. You’ve done this before, you can do this again. Just stay calm and wait for an opening.’
Following her own advice, she closed her eyes, slowly in- and exhaling through her nose.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Inhale.
Exhale.
With every breath, she could feel the tension in her shoulders getting a little lighter, though still far from gone.
When she opened her eyes again, she found Elena watching her, the girl’s head shaking in a barely visible notion while her lips formed the word ‘no’.
Sylvie furrowed her brows. No, what? No fighting back? Was she just supposed to let these people trade her off to the highest bidder?
Maybe the girl was just scared herself.
Sylvie swallowed, the heel’s weight heavy in her hand. Then she would just have to be brave enough for the both of them.
Elijah Mikaelson was a man that prided himself on always being prepared for every occasion. Such foreknowledge simply came with the thousand years of life experience he had the privilege—or curse, depending on who one was asking—to draw upon.
Yet when he pushed open the warped front door of the decaying farmhouse deep in the Virginian countryside, he had not the faintest inkling of what precisely would await him inside.
He had received a call from one of his contacts this morning, a discreet vampire going by the name of Santiago, that Elijah had met and turned during the height of the Spanish Inquisition. It had been one of the rare acts of mercy Elijah allowed himself throughout the centuries—a brilliant but starving young man of low birth, accused of heresy and doomed to be publicly executed.
Niklaus had mocked him for growing too tender-hearted, and perhaps there was some truth to it, but he simply could not bear to see such a brilliant mind going to waste.
Santiago repaid the kindness that was given to him tenfold in the centuries that followed, proving himself to be a valuable asset, and—at times—something almost akin to a friend. There was never any shortage of foolish young vampires eager to kiss the ground the Originals were walking on, and yet in Elijah’s eyes, not one of them was half as trustworthy as the one that had accompanied him for nearly five centuries now.
Trust was a luxury he could scarcely afford in his position, and yet Elijah took the leap where Santiago’s intel was concerned. Again and again.
It had yet to disappoint him.
This time, the call had been about a vague message Santiago had received through a chain of minor contacts originating from a vampire called Slater in Richmond, Virginia. Two fugitives Elijah hadn’t encountered in several centuries had reached out to him with an offer they apparently deemed valuable enough to take the risk of contacting him after half a millennium in hiding.
That alone would have been enough to rouse Elijah’s interest. Add to this the fact that they asked him to meet them here in this decaying farmhouse just a few hours north of Mystic Falls, and his interest was practically secured. He had called off his lecture at Duke University scheduled for this afternoon and drove all the way out here from his current base in Durham, North Carolina.
The interior of the farmhouse was not much to look at. Empty of furniture and decorative pieces, it stood abandoned to time and dust, the white wall panelling, once elegant and pristine, was smudged with dirt and decay, paint peeled off in multiple spots. The windows were all covered in cardboard or heavy curtains, barring any sunlight from entering.
It was shabby, yet likely the best two fugitive vampires could do without the benefit of a daylight ring. Far be it from him to hold such against them.
Elijah had barely lifted a foot over the threshold—noticing the lack of an invisible invitation-only-barrier barring his entrance—when a woman glided down the staircase leading into the upper floor, careful not to meet the light spilling in through the opened front door.
She looked as though painted from his memory. Her chestnut brown hair might be cut into a shorter, modern style and her clothes had adapted to the current times as well, but everything was frozen in time. She eyed him cautiously through pale green eyes, not daring to be the one to speak first. He could hear her erratic, undead heartbeat breaking through the silence between them nonetheless. His sharpened ears picked up on three more heartbeats coming from the upper level of the house, each beating faster than the other.
Elijah’s lips curled upwards, the smile so faint it was barely noticeable.
"Rose-Marie. Is there somewhere we can talk?”
The other vampire swallowed audibly before she cocked her head. “Yes, in here. You have to forgive the house.”
The smile on his lips grew more noticeable as he looked around the dusty farmhouse foyer in front of him.
“Oh no, what’s a little dirt? I completely understand.” He took another step forward and gave the front door a push, allowing it to swing close behind him as he walked past Rose, steering directly towards the closest room that just so happened to resemble a small home library. “So tell me, what gives you the courage to call me?”
He did not need to turn around to know that she was following him, her steps light like a dancer’s on the old floorboards.
“We’re tired of running. We want our freedom.” She hesitated, swallowing again. “I know you’re not Klaus, but you were close to him, back then. He listens to you.”
The corners of Elijah’s lips curved upward again as he idly strolled across the room, picking up a dusty old leatherbound tome with a barely legible title wasting away on one of the shelves.
Rose was more perceptive than others, having picked up on the familiarity between them back in England five centuries ago, but even she remained clueless to the true nature of the blood bond tying him and Niklaus together for over a millennium. He did not bother to correct her on that. At times it was easier to let people assume he was a mere foot soldier in his brother’s services. It made others more prone to lower their guard around him—a fatal mistake, as proven again and again.
“I have complete authority to grant pardon to you and your little pet—what is his name these days? Trevor—if I so see fit.”
“Katerina Petrova?”
And there it was—the name he had expected to hear ever since realizing where he had been called to. However, Elijah merely raised an eyebrow as he placed the book back into the shelf and sat down on the antique armchair close by.
“I’m listening.”
Rose continued to eye him suspiciously. “She didn’t burn in the church in 1864.”
Elijah cocked his head. “Continue.”
Rose furrowed her brows at his reaction—or rather, lack thereof. “You don’t seem surprised.”
Elijah carefully crossed his legs, leaning back into the chair. “Oh, when you called and invited me into this armpit of civilization, which is a mere three hours from the town we know as Mystic Falls, I surmised it had everything to do with Katerina.” He cocked his head. “Do you have her in your possession?”
Rose hesitated for the duration of an entire second. “No, but I have better. I have her doppelgänger."
Elijah instantly narrowed his eyes at her. “That’s impossible. Her family line ended with her. I know that for fact.”
He did not see any necessity to mention that Niklaus personally saw to that when he slaughtered her entire family in cold blood as punishment for escaping him, children and cousins all included. Whoever it was Rose believed to have in her possession, it couldn’t be a Petrova Doppelgänger. That, or Katerina was playing her usual games. He did not believe Rose had called him here for a mere ruse. She was too sensible for that.
“The facts are wrong.”
Elijah raised his eyebrows and leaned forward in his chair. Rose sounded very sure of herself, too sure. There was no faltering in her voice, no downward tilt of her gaze, no spike in her heartbeat that could have betrayed her. It would be a lie to say he wasn’t most intrigued about her captive now.
“Well, show her to me.”
It would remain to be seen if Katerina was capable enough to keep up her little ruse in his presence.
Rose hesitated again, exhaling slowly as she straightened her shoulders. “Elijah, you are a man of honor. You should be trusted, but I want to hear you say it again.”
She did not need to specify what. Elijah knew exactly what she was afraid of, what she wanted to hear. And so he gave it to her, without ceremony.
“You have my word that I will pardon you.”
At his words, Rose relaxed her shoulders a little, relief flashing across her features, though still intertwined with a healthy dose of wariness. “There is something else you should know before I take you to them.”
Elijah merely cocked his head at her, a silent signal to continue.
Rose shifted to her other foot, her heart steadily drumming in her chest. “Back then in England, you and Klaus were looking for someone. I remember the painting Klaus showed around the noble houses. Blue eyes, blonde hair, looking like an angel. We found her.”
Elijah was certain that he stopped breathing entirely for a very long second, Rose’s words reverberating inside his skull like an echo. Something inside him—something he had kept contained for almost as long as he had been wandering this earth—broke free, and before he knew what he was doing, he had already left the room and sped up the staircase to the upper floor, towards the place in the house where three hearts continued to beat like war drums.