"Meet Me on the Other Side"

Mystic25

Summary: Damon Salvatore was dragged for a project he thought had been dismantled 50 years ago, a project that catches not just Stefan's attention as he tried to find him, but also the attention of Hunters. Vampire Diaries/Supernatural Crossover.

Rating: M for blood, language, and violence

Disclaimer: Neither "Supernatural" nor "The Vampire Diaries" are owned by me, all their representations and characters belong to their respective people. I'm playing with them; I'm woman enough to admit it.

A/N: Okay, so this started out as a soley TVD fic, then the little cogs in my brain wouldn't stop turning, and it's now the Vampire Diaries/Supernatural crossover I've been dying for. Hope I did it justice.

This was written before both shows had their season finales, right after "Dead Man's Campus" for TVD and "Road Trip" for Supernatural. So it will be AU city.

A/N #2: I recommend a working knowledge of both shows if you wish to read this. And lastly, sorry for abandoning you guys for so long, I was working on this. Six months of my blood and sweat. Enjoy, and here's a rag…

xxxxxXxxxx

CHAPTER ONE

"The true nature of evil is that it is so very casual."

James St. James

xxxxxXxxxx

Damon felt his hand along the stone wall in the groves made by his own scratching done way back in the 1950's. It smelled just as it did then, and he hurt just as much as he did then too.

Repeatedly being dragged out of his cell by a at least five other vampires all hopped up on the blood of Augustine, the Big Bad that never showed his face. Just liked to watch the torture covered in shadow like it was just a puppet show like the kind Damon used to watch with Stefan at the local fair when they were kids.

For some reason the memory of puppets and Stefan made Damon smirk in amusement. It was probably due to all the blood loss being shot out of his system and replaced with Augustine's blood, it gave him a head rush he hadn't felt since he went postal on a small town back in the 1940's.

His number was scratched in the wall above his initials: 'DS 210151.' The initials for the name 'Salvatore' scratched in the cell was such a clash of modernism and old world it felt like two things fighting for existence in the same plane.

The last time he was here he had taken to scratching tick marks in the stone to mark the days, then he discovered the tick marks were too numerous to mark every day individually, so he began marking the ticks in weeks, then months. Then the months started becoming too numerous so he started marking time years, 5 of them to be exact, all lined up like soldiers, nice and neat, marking his imprisonment.

It wasn't all torture, he was allowed a day of recuperation, scant amounts of blood to keep him alive, they couldn't have their subjects dying before the completion of their research. But it wasn't Club Med either. So far he'd been here five days this time, five for tick marks added to the stone. His daylight ring had been snatched on the first day, and the halogen bulbs that lit the place it made it almost as painful as the sun. Which was a great tactic to prevent the Vampires from escaping this hole if Damon wasn't one of the ones having it used on.

The door opened with a squeak, turning his eyes away from the scratchings he placed above the old ones.

Two Vampires dressed in expensive looking leather stared at him, each brandishing a heavy iron chain.

"Let me guess," Damon's voice had long since slurred, the last round of bloodletting was a bitch, half his volume gone to be replaced by the Augustine blood. "Kinky dance off?"

The leather clad Vampire on the right didn't seem to find this amusing and lashed out the chain until it wound its way three times around Damon's neck like a choke collar on a dog. He squeezed the chain hard, until the vertebra in Damon's neck snapped and he dropped. The vampire dragged him out of his cell down the dark dirt filled hallway that smelled like old blood.

xxxxxXxxxx

It had gotten better, ever since Katherine had talked him down in Mystic Grill, Stefan felt more in control. The visions had stopped being all consuming, and had started to feel more like chronic pain after a traumatic injury. The daily drowning had stopped.

But then five days ago Elena had come through the door in a frenzy of hysteria. Damon had disappeared from the Dr. Maxfield's lab after Jessie had been killed by Elena when Jesse tried to attack Damon. Caroline and the others had gone to bury Jessie's body and hadn't seen Damon leave Whitmore Campus. At first Stefan chalked it up to Damon doing something outside of the box, he wasn't exactly shy of such things, especially since they now had cannibalistic vampires on their hands. But Elena had called Damon numerous times, only to be met with nothing but voicemail requests. Stefan had tried to call only to be met with the same response as Elena, until the second day that he tried and was met with a 'this line is no longer in service' recording, and the first pebble of 'wrongness' in it started to drop in Stefan's brain. Even if Damon was avoiding everyone for a solo scouting mission, including Elena, which Stefan found unlikely as his brother professing his love for Klaus, Damon wouldn't remove the service from his phone.

Elena called Caroline, and Bonnie, freaked out and worried, and planning had happened, and Elena had taken a leave off from school to search for him, and Caroline had agreed to help because Elena was her friend. All three girls now claimed residency in the Salvatore house, absent off all but one Salvatore now.

And just like that Stefan's visions had returned, only this time the visions had been hijacked into a whole other territory. The safe walls would blur and morph into something more like stone, an odd assortment of scratching like fingernails on the surface.

"Stefan?"

Stefan jerked, eyes jerking open with him, nearly falling off the narrow surface he was on. It took a moment of disorientation to remember why he was on the sofa, he'd given Caroline and Bonnie the use his bed even though there were six other bedrooms in the house. Stefan did it in part to be cavalier; but more so because he barely slept anymore.

"Stefan?"

Caroline's face hovered in with platnium blonde curls, "Hey," her hazel brown eyes a myriad of worry. "Are you okay?"

Stefan took stock of the parlor, the fire still lit in the fireplace, the blanket trailing on the ground like a snake, one that he hadn't gone to sleep in, so one of the girl's must have thrown it over him in the night.

"Yeah," Stefan's answer was so automatic he had to process if it was correct in his mind after he'd said it. He picked up the blanket, wrapping it end over end like a muff and dropped the bundle beside him.

He looked over at the grandfather clock. "It's three in the morning," Stefan turned to the blonde in a white silk robe opened to a sheer night gown underneath "why are you up?"

"Why are you?" Caroline asked right back. "I could hear your breathing and thrashing all the way upstairs," She sat back in a black leather cushioned chair, with deep scratch marks on the arms. "I wanted to make sure you were alright."

"I'm okay," he reassured her, "I just had a really weird dream," Caroline's concerned look didn't disparate after his words. "Look it's late, we called it a night because no one was really functioning anymore, so why don't you go back to bed?" Stefan had started to take on a protective roll with Elena, Bonnie, and Caroline ever since they had come to stay with him last week. He tried to keep everyone reigned in, including himself.

"It's been nearly a week Stefan and we haven't heard anything!" Caroline insisted. "I'm not the biggest fan of Damon, but you didn't see what Jessie looked like when he attacked me! If Damon has been with whoever did that to Jessie, then I don't see how he's not some vampire eating psychopath or de-" Caroline stopped like she had slammed on the brakes of a car seconds before it reached the cliff.

She closed her mouth like she could suck those words back in. "Stefan," Caroline stood up from the chair sat and on one of the arms' of the sofa. "I'm so sorry, I didn't mean it," She took his hands and squeezed them, his bulky daylight ring pressing into the underside of her fingers. "Damon and I have bad history, but he's your brother-we'll get him back."

"Caroline it's okay," Stefan grasped one of her wrists. "You have every right to feel the way you do about Damon. But I also know in spite of how you feel you're going to help bring him back, and that counts more than the hate."

Caroline looked like she wanted to swallow a fish, not knowing what to say, but knowing that Stefan was right.

"Ugh, look if you two want to be all flirty and playful can you do it upstairs? People are trying to sleep."

The snark that had gone in Damon's absence had reemerged in the form of a female. One in a gray jersey shirt that was too short to hide a pair of long toned legs because the woman who wore them wore only the shirt and obviously noticeable black lace lingerie.

Katherine descended the stairs slowly in bare feet and wet hair, Caroline shot her a death glare with each foot fall. Despite all that Caroline had learned about Katherine lately, the Vampire still could push her buttons. "Remind me why we didn't just throw you out on the street to beg for scraps?"

"Because Stefan invited me," Katherine put more of a saunter in her step as she said Stefan's name. "History has a way of repeating itself, doesn't it Mr. Salvatore?" She drew out Stefan's last name in the lazy Georgia Accent she had used when she had first stepped out of the carriage back in 1864. She plucked at the shirt she was wearing, a jersey for the New Jersey Devils hockey team. "Thanks for the shirt by the way," she inhaled the fabric deeply and came up with a lecherous smile. "Smells just like you." She dropped beside Stefan on the couch, drawing her legs up under her body.

Stefan shifted away from where Katherine planted herself, watching her run a hand through her damp curls to work out the snags. "You know, giving you a place to sleep for a night doesn't entitle you to steal my clothes."

"You never used to complain," Katherine deadpanned, shooting him a coy look, then glanced over at Caroline who looked both affronted and disgusted. "I'm sorry Caroline," she cocked her head to the woman she had turned into a Vampire. "Does it bother you that Stefan and I used to get under each other's clothes before your great grandparents were even alive?"

"Okay, eww!-" Caroline stood up from the sofa, and hurled a throw pillow at Katherine's face. She stood up as Katherine dropped the pillow with an audible 'ow'. Ever since she had downed the Cure and became human, Katherine complained about it every moment that she got. "You're human now, so I'm going to go back upstairs before do something irreversible like rip your throat out." Caroline turned in the shadow of the fire, stomping out of the parlor in bare feet.

Katherine adapted an innocent look in her face. "Someone's a little testy."

"I didn't let you stay in this house so you could insult everyone in it." Stefan informed to now-human Katherine. He'd known her as a Vampire for 145 having her, not like that – it was like seeing a porcelain cat come to life.

"Which begs the question, why did you let me stay here tonight?" Katherine turned to Stefan, dark eyes on him in the light of fire. "It's not like I'm not a Silas bargaining tool, or any other kind of poker chip for Mystic Fall's latest supernatural problem anymore."

"You tried to jump off of a building a few nights ago, you mindset isn't exactly stable." Stefan returned. "And after you helped me I figured I owed you from destroying yourself."

"So this is all just a tit for tat?" Katherine drew a knee up to her chest, exposing more of her bare legs. "It has nothing to do with repressed feelings emerging in that extremely chiseled chest of yours after you saved me from my intended fate?"

Stefan blew out a dry kind of laugh, looking down, then up at Katherine. "You know me better than that Katherine."

"And yet I still can't figure out what you're currently thinking," Katherine insisted, dropping her feet into his lap one at a time in a slow maneuver. "I may be withering away to a husk, but I'm not senile yet, so stop being a tease Stefan, and enlighten me."

Stefan gritted his teeth, staring at this woman who had been the bane of his very long existence, and answered her honestly. "Out of everyone in Mystic Falls, you're the only one who knows Damon almost as well as I do and I need you to help me find him."

Katherine assessed Stefan like she used to do with every potential meal source she had looked over back in her Vampire heyday. "See, that wasn't so hard was it?" she leaned over, her damp curls falling forward to frame her face. "The second phase for PTSD recovery Stefan is to admit to your emotions as they're being felt, otherwise they fester and bubble like a raging infection and explode into a nasty mess."

Stefan pushed Katherine out of his personal space and stood up, leaving her legs to fall onto the sofa cushions.

"Where are you going?" Katherine followed him up with her dark eyes.

"Your attempt at psychoanalysis isn't exactly a calming affect for sleep," Stefan answered her. "I'm going to grab a shower."

"Do you need some help?" Katherine's voice was slow and syrupy sounding, her eyes roamed over parts of him her photographic memory could recall in amazing detail. "Or Elena's upstairs in Damon's room if you prefer your women in the broken Vampire variety."

Stefan didn't buy into her baiting, he picked up the discarded blanket and dropped it over her exposed legs. "Goodnight Katherine." He turned and walked out of the room, and up the stairs, leaving Katherine Pierce to watch him in his wake.

xxxxXxxxx

8:00 AM

The Next Day

Elena walked down the stairs to the sight of Katherine dressed for the day in all black, winding a thick green silk scarf around her neck. "Where are you going?"

"Out to find food," Katherine worked the scarf around her like she'd never handled that particular accessory before. She unwound it, shook it out, and threw it once loosely around her neck, tying it into one giant knot. "The bad thing about staying in a house of all Vampires, is the lack of anything kind of sustenance except for blood and bourbon."

"I can make you something to eat," Elena said, not believing that she was saying this to her doppelganger double who had made her life a living hell for years because she could. But ever since Katherine had become human, there was something, almost pathetic about her. "Jeremy has a stash of stuff in the cabinets in the kitchen."

"Yeah no offense, but I'm not eating the stale Doritos and Pepsi Next your little brother calls breakfast, I need something else besides cardboard poison."

"Fine," Elena returned watching Katherine add a cream colored pea coat over top of her outfit. "Hey, are thosemy clothes?"

"In case you haven't noticed Elena, its 45 degrees outside, not exactly ideal weather for those of us who don't have Vampire endurance against the elements anymore," Katherine cinched the coat's sash around her waist. "I can borrow Stefan's shirts to sleep in, but he's a little too tall for the outerwear." Before Elena could even comment on the double entendre remark Katherine came back with: "Or I could just try and find something in Damon's closet."

Elena felt like Katherine had stabbed her with a fistful of jagged glass, she stepped towards her doppelgänger. "You know you could at least act like you care about what happened to Damon!"

Katherine glared murderously at her over smoky painted eyelids. "Let's get one thing straight, just because I'm not weeping in Damon's volleyball team sized bed every night, doesn't mean I don't care. Not everyone enjoys being a martyr for the cause as much as you do."

The sound of footsteps on the stairs turned both women up towards the sight of Stefan descending the stairs dressed in jeans and a black hooded pullover.

"Just as Stefan," Katherine said, watching Stefan walk down each step.

Stefan reached the bottom of the stairs. "Ask Stefan what?"

"Elena will fill you in," Katherine used that as her parting words and walked out the front door with a hard click of black ankle boots.

Stefan turned to Elena. "What was that about?"

"Nothing," Elena brushed it off like Katherine hadn't affected her as much as she really had.

Stefan didn't buy it. Just because he wasn't dating her anymore didn't mean he still couldn't read her. "Look I know that you two don't exactly have the best history, but given all that she went through, she deserves a little slack."

Elena wanted to argue, for just a moment, despite everything that Katherine had gone through recently (what Stefan had recanted to Elena anyway): downing the Cure, aging, finding her daughter after 500 years, she still couldn't loosen the anger she had for the woman. But she forced it today, because it was Stefan who was asking. True they weren't dating anymore, but he was still her friend and she cared about him.

"You're right, I'm sorry." she sighed to block out the other things she wanted to say, and changed the subject. "How'd you sleep?"

"Uh, I didn't," Stefan admitted, dry laughing. "Bad dreams."

Elena's face fell at that proclamation. "I thought Katherine was supposed to be helping you deal with the flashbacks." She said the last part like she was trying to chew a piece of barbed wire.

"She is," Stefan returned. "But it's a process, I had control over them for a while, but after Damon disappeared, they got more intense, different- I'm seeing things I don't know how I'm able to see-"

"Stefan," Elena reached out and grabbed his wrist, what he said didn't make any sense, but she couldn't miss the scratched, broken sound in the undercurrent of Stefan's voice. "We're going to find him, I have to believe that, and so do you-" She reached out her other hand to brush the side of his face.

"Hey, sorry." the sound of Bonnie's voice turned Stefan and Elena towards the little used kitchen doorway. "I know it's still early, but Caroline went a little OCD and made breakfast." She thumbed her finger back towards the room behind her.

"Yeah sure," Stefan answered for him and Elena and they both walked past the staircase, made a left and stepped down the split level to the large kitchen that no one ever used. The appliances dated back to the 1950's, when the house was used as a Boys Home. The walls were eggshell white mosaic tiles, a butcher block island sat in the middle of the floor next to a five burner gas range. Next to an open window that over looked the back lawn was a long unpainted wooden farm house type of table covered in multiple plates of scrambled eggs, bacon, buttered toast, melon balls, and a little mini cooler that Stefan guessed was full of blood bags.

"Hey you two," Caroline commanded. She was dressed in a low cut pink V-neck sweater and jeans, pouring coffee into two glass Irish coffee mugs which she held out to Stefan and Elena a moment later. "Sit down, I know it's early and most of us are Vampires, but supplement with blood and choke the rest down anyway. I went to the market for something to do because just sitting around doing nothing was driving me crazy-"

"No Caroline," Elena interrupted, taking the coffee from her, "This looks great, better than the bagel bites in the mini fridge in our dorm room."

"She's right Care," Bonnie agreed to her friend, Caroline was a bit eccentric, but she had good intentions behind everything she did. She took a seat on the long wooden bench seat. "It looks amazing."

Caroline smiled, grateful that her gesture was received so well. "Where's Katherine?" Caroline choked on the name.

"She went out foraging for scraps," Elena took a seat beside Bonnie, drinking from the coffee mug Caroline had just handed to her.

Caroline looked offended for just a second before her expression became more of relief; she fixed her gaze on Stefan, "I know she's your new Zen Master Stefan, but I'm glad she's not here; ever since she became human she's been on one long whinny rant."

"Hey, what's all this?" Jeremy emerged from a side door into the kitchen dressed in black basketball shorts and a gray hoodie. He walked over to the table and surveyed the all the food.

"Caroline made breakfast," Bonnie said, turning up to look at him, and added in a quieter voice: "Just eat it and smile."

"Are you kidding?" Jeremey leant over her and snatched a piece of bacon from a serving plate. "I'm not going to turn down eating something that isn't stale and hermetically sealed." He leant down more and stole a kiss from Bonnie. "Hey."

"Hey," Bonnie returned the kiss, but pressed her lips together at the end of it because she was sitting next to Elena. "Sorry."

"Bonnie it's fine," Elena insisted, she had given her 'blessing' a while ago, and she was genuinely happy that they were together. "It's actually pretty amazing." Her smile made Bonnie smile.

"Defiantly," Caroline agreed, spearing a melon ball with a copper fork. "At least one of us deserves a functional relationship-" her words were a laugh, but ended abruptly. "I'm sorry," Her fork hit the plate with a clatter. "Elena, I didn't mean anything by it-"

"Don't worry about it," Elena returned, but her words sounded a bit forced. "I know you didn't, just like the last time at Whitmore, you didn't mean anything by that either-"

"Alright, hey," Stefan cut into their conversation before it could escalate. "Now's not the time for this okay? Things are tense enough without you two turning on each other." His words were more forced than Elena's. With Damon gone, and with the exception of Katherine, he was the oldest out of all of them. It wasn't a position that he wanted, he'd never been the oldest anything concerning Damon. It was like when was ten and had tried on Damon's first riding jacket that didn't fit him by a good extra yard of fabric when he thought he'd been tall enough to wear it.

Caroline looked like she wanted to say something else, but her face fell away at the look on Stefan's face, and the look on Elena's. Despite how she had major issues with Elena dating Damon, it didn't mean she wished Damon any serious harm. "You're right Stefan," She turned to Elena." I'm sorry-"

A knock on the door turned Elena away from the remark she would have said and the coffee she pretended that she was drinking to fill the crushing silence in the absence of Damon's sarcasm. The knock in itself was strange because most people tended to use the bell pull or just walked in.

"I'll get it," she stood up, setting her coffee cup down on the table.

The entryway to the boarding house was long and massive, arched in solid birch wood overlaid in cement, like the apse of a church.

Elena pulled the stained wooden door open slowly, to a woman in a gray uniform, Caroline's mother.

"Sherriff Forbes," Elena addressed Liz Forbes formally, partly because she was her best friend's mother that she's known since birth, but more so because Liz Forbes wasn't alone. Standing beside her were two tall, very tall men dressed in dark suits. Elena took in the sight of the way the men carried themselves, officially, both had serious set eyes and equally serious stares radiated from them. She looked to Liz. "What's going on?"

"Elena," Liz Forbes addressed her just as formally, glancing at the two men beside her like she wasn't sure what they might do. "Is Stefan here?"

"Yeah he's inside," Elena gestured back towards the kitchen where Stefan had emerged partway, knowing full well that he was listening in on what they were saying. "Is there something wrong?"

Liz hadn't addressed either of the two men the entire time she had been standing there, but she now did it in her sideways glance at them. "These gentlemen are with the FBI, they have some questions for him- about his missing brother."

Elena's gaze suddenly widened, feeling like someone had dropped a rock on her foot.