It hadn't been very long since they had returned from the other dimension, her hair still laden with melted snow, her fingers numb from the cold, and her palm—her palm stinging from her cut. And something else.

It hadn't been very long before it crept up on her, a thought so obtrusive, so unwelcome that she kept herself moving from place to place so that it could never truly reach her. She went from the Grill, to Whitmore, to the Salvatore mansion—retrieved the precious vial holding the cure to vampirism and even walked in on Elena and Damon being nauseatingly intimate in her efforts to gift it.

It nipped at her ears as she left Damon the vial, her fingers reaching for something to hold on to, grasping only the ripped inner lining of her worn pockets. She reached her room, her haven. She sat down in directly in front of the fire, hoping the heat would burn out this wretched feeling. When she had nowhere else to go, when she had nothing but the honest, deafening silence, it caught up with her. She knew.

She made a mistake.

It engulfed her, rose up through her entrails and into her throat, out through her tears. The look on his face. His begging. The monster she saw reflected in his eyes.

This wasn't her.

She shakily stood up, feeling now only urgency nipping at her heels. She swept through the room, grabbing her jacket, sending a text, and grasping the ascendant.

She cut her hand, lips forming Latin like a prayer to the sliver of him that she would save. The world whirled around her and her eyes strained to find him there, to find his pleading eyes and see herself reflected in them.

She'd put her blood into this.