Hey all. So this was a difficult chapter to write and a very emotional one. It deals with the fallout that people face when someone they love attempts to die by suicide. I want to just say that this may be triggering for some as it mentions suicide and the effect it can have on the people around that.

I have to say that this is personal to me, what I have written here is something which I have personal experience with. I am not going to go into why or how it's not important for you to know that. The reason I am saying this is just to let you know that what I have written is not everyone's experience but it is drawn from some of my own. This is not a subject to be taken lightly. Stay safe and watch out for each other x

All Goes Wrong

In the dead of night, Niklaus Mikaelson stood by a great river. He had no idea how he had come to be here but he knew that this was where he should be. The terrible pull in his stomach the one which had plagued him for the last few weeks was finally calming.

This place reminded him of a time in his past but he could not place the memory. A thousand years created more than a thousand memories and even a vampire, an original vampire, began to lose track of them all after a while.

A sob slashed through the silence of the night and interrupted the vampire's musings. It sounded foreign in this peaceful place. Klaus frowned, he did not like for his thoughts to be interrupted, someone was going to die by his hand tonight. He followed the cry upstream for some time until he came to a bridge. It was not the bridge that made him stop but the tiny creature that stood on it.

She stood on the very edge of the bridge. Her small toes curled over the edge and one arm braced against the railing behind her the other held a phone to her ear. Niklaus did not listen to her words, he was too absorbed in her presence.

She was a tiny delicate looking creature dressed like a fat homeless man, but her disheveled appearance did not hide her from Klaus. He would have known that face anywhere. It was the face of Katerina and Tatia. She was the new doppelganger and she could lift his curse, she could make him whole again.

Before Klaus could step forward and claim his prize the clouds parted and the moonlight hit her face and Klaus's heart stopped. He would have known that face anywhere but the eyes. They were not the eyes of the doppelgangers. Black as coal and sparkling in the moonlight, there was no denying that this tiny creature was not one of the doppelgangers.

Klaus should have felt hopeless and lost, he had not found the answer to his curse but instead the original vampire felt nothing but peace. The moment he had looked into her eyes the pull in his stomach had died. Everything around him apart from the girl faded. All that existed was the two of them.

Her face held a look of profound emptiness, however, he sensed small hints of fear, possibly fear she couldn't even feel herself. She looked like a fallen angel with her bruised and battered body, sad empty eyes and the halo of moonlight that surrounded her.

It took only a split second, less than a blink of an eye. Klaus knew he should have expected it but it took him completely by surprise and knocked all the breath out of him. The girl, his tiny fallen angel took a step forward and fell, disappearing into the inky nothingness of the fast flowing river.

The original vampire tried to run to her but he couldn't and the more he tried the slower he became. It was as if he was trapped in cement. He felt heavy and slow and unless. Klaus felt human for the first time in a long time. Slowly the scene around him began to melt like snow on a spring day until eventually he was left alone in the void.

"No. Fuck." Klaus yelled as he sat up in bed covered in a cold sweat. It took the original vampire a moment to realise that he wasn't on a river bank watching a young woman fall to her death beneath the icy waters, he was in his apartment on the outskirts of Cairo, Egypt.

Klaus looked out the window and saw the river Nile, one of the largest and most beautiful in the world. It's waters glistened in the bright morning sun and filled him with dread. The pull in his stomach that had plagued him for the last few weeks was suddenly gone. Did that mean whatever it had been pulling him towards was gone too?

That dream, it had felt too real. And that girl she had seemed so important. Is that who he had been moving toward for the past week? Why was the pull gone? Had she really jumped from that bridge and was she now drowning under the freezing water?

The real question, for which Klaus had no answers was, why did the death of one girl bother him so much?

Damon Salvatore drove faster than he ever had, faster than he ever believed his poor Camaro could go. When he reached the bridge and slammed the brakes he thought the whole car might flip with the force but in that moment he would have barely noticed. He was too focused on the cracked phoned lying on the road, Evelyn's phone.

Damon felt the pit in his stomach deepen as he jumped from his car screaming his friend's name. There was no response, the night was quiet and calm. Nothing like the world around him which was falling apart.

It took Damon only moments for it all to click into place. "I'm at Wickery Bridge. Where it all began." Her words echoed in Damon's mind, filling him with dread. She had jumped, he was certain.

With his enhanced speed, it took Damon mere seconds to run to the edge of the bridge and dive headfirst into the water. It was dark underneath the surface, it looked almost like another world but this was what Damon's eyes were made for. It took him only 47 seconds to find her in the watery hell, but he feared the worst. Could he have been too late? Her face was pale, her eyes closed and her fingers and lips were turning blue. She looked so still.

Damon dragged his best friend out of the icy water and back up to the bridge. He didn't want to check her pulse, he already knew the answer it would hold, he could not hear her heartbeat. Still, he needed to check. To know for sure, maybe his ears were getting weak in his old age. But with two fingers on his best friend delicate neck, there was no way to doubt Evelyn's heart was not beating. Her lungs were not filling. She was dead.

"No. Dammit Ev you do not get to die on me! You selfish prick!" He shouted in her face all ability to be rational vanishing.

Damon bit into his wrist and pressed it against her lips, trying to force the hot blood down her throat but it did nothing. Her face was still pale, her lips still blue, her heart stayed still and her lungs would not draw breath.

"Why won't it fucking work!?" Damon yelled out into the night. "No. Shut up Damon. Time for plan B. What's plan B!?"

The vampire looked wildly around for something, anything to save his friend. What his eyes landed on was Evelyn's smashed phone lying beside them, the one which had clued him in the first place. The vampire grabbed it and almost cried when he saw it still worked. Without wasting any more time he called up the hospital.

"Hello? Hello? I...I need an ambulance to Wickery Bridge. My friend... she... she's not breathing. She jumped off the bridge. You need to get here now."

Damon dropped the phone once he had said what he needed to say. The pit in his stomach was getting deeper and deeper with every passing moment because with every passing moment Evelyn was slipping further and further away and there was less and less of a chance of her ever coming back.

For the first time in a long time, Damon Salvatore felt weak and useless. In that moment, there was nothing more that scared the vampire than his friend who looked so small and fragile lying in the road as the life drained out of her.

"Dammit Damon! Stop being a little bitch and save her." The vampire told himself firmly. This was not the first time he had faced friends on the brink of death, he had been to war. More than once. He had watched men die but he had also learned how to stop men from dying.

Damon placed his hands in the center of Evelyn's chest and began to press down, again and again pumping the blood through her body. Her skin was freezing and she was turning blue but Damon didn't stop. He was the only thing standing between this girl and death.

It seemed so strange to Damon. He had killed hundreds, probably thousands of humans throughout his lifetime and now he was fighting so hard to save this one. This annoying, grumpy and generally difficult to be around little person. They had barely known each other a month and yet Damon had never felt a kinship like this in any other person, not even his brother. She was the same as him. They were linked. She couldn't die. She was the best friend he could ever have.

Damon brought his lips to hers, as he had done so many times before, and blew all the air he could from his lungs into hers. He watched her chest rise as it filled with his air. Her lips were cold and blue but still just as soft as always. It was funny how usually when people touch lips, when they would press their lips against each other it was in moments of intense life and liveliness. Pure awareness. It seemed so alien right now that he had once kissed these lips, fought with these lips and understood these lips.

Damon shook his head clearing away these thoughts. Now was not the time to have an existential crisis, now was the time to focus. He kept pumping Evelyn's chest steadily flushing blood through her system and he continued to fill her lungs with air giving her the oxygen she could not give herself.

Damon lost touch with everything. He had no idea how long he had been attempting to resuscitate his friend. He couldn't form coherent thoughts at this point. It was like he was underwater, everything around him was muffled and dark and nothing really made sense. He couldn't even look at Evelyn's face anymore.

"Sir? Sir! We need to take it from here." Damon almost jumped, which was not something Damon did regularly, as a paramedic grasped his arm. He wanted to rip the man's hand off, he wanted to be left alone but Damon knew he could do nothing for Evelyn now, not this time, so he stepped aside and allowed the paramedics to haul his tiny friend onto a stretcher and into the ambulance. Damon followed, not quite able to comprehend the situation.

He sat silently in the corner of the ambulance and watched as the paramedics cut open Evelyn's top. Actually, it was his top. Damon didn't understand why his brain made that distinction but it seemed important. Once she was exposed they placed defibrillator pads on her. All the wires made her look smaller than before. In the sterile environment with its fluorescent lighting, her lips were such a vivid color of blue. Damon could even make out all the veins in her eyelids.

"Charge the defibrillator to 100. Clear."

Jeremy Gilbert had almost lost Evelyn twice. Once, when she had been in the car crash that killed their parents and then two months after that when she had used a razor blade to slice open her own wrists. Each time had felt surreal and this time was no different.

He sat silently in Jenna's car. He was driving. Jenna was in the passenger seat, she was shaking too hard to drive. Five minutes ago she had gotten off the phone with a doctor from the local hospital. According to him, Evelyn had been found in the river by one of her friends, she was ID'ed at the scene and was currently being rushed to the hospital.

The doctor had not said anything about the condition she was in, all he had said was that the paramedics were doing their best and that he would too. Jeremy knew what that meant. That's what the doctors had said when his parents were brought into the hospital, that they were trying their best, that they were doing everything in their power. It just meant that they were probably already dead.

He felt empty. Nothing felt real anymore. Not the phone call, nor Jenna crying, nor his own feelings. He couldn't quite comprehend any of it. It felt like he was floating from one disaster to the next with absolutely no control over any of it.

They arrived at the hospital five minutes later. The same hospital his father had worked in for almost twenty years. The same hospital both of his parents had been pronounced dead in. This place held so many barbed memories for him but right now he felt the sting of none of them.

Jeremy pulled up to the main entrance and both he and Jenna ran inside. Mystic Falls was a small town with a small town mentality. Everyone knew everyone here. The minute they ran into the place all the nurse's eyes lit up with recognition. He didn't have to say anything, one of the older nurses told him that Evelyn had just been brought in and they were working on her down in the ER right now. No one tried to stop him when he started to run off in that direction. No one had the heart to.

It took Jeramy just over a minute to reach the Emergency Room, he had been visiting this hospital since he was a child. Jenna came panting in two seconds behind him. Elena was already there. Jeremy didn't know how she got to the hospital before them, it didn't matter. The minute she saw him, Elena fell into Jeremy's arms, unable to support herself.

Jeremy held onto his sister just as much for his own sake as for hers. He needed the support as badly as she did.

"Charge again to 300. Clear."

There she was. Evelyn. His big sister. She didn't look very big right now. Her body rose off the gurney as the doctors shot another round of electricity into her body hoping that this one would start her heart.

"Push ten more of eppie. How long has this girl been down for?!"

Her heart wasn't working. She wasn't alive. Could they even bring her back at this point? Jeremy was no idiot he knew that after 3 minutes without oxygen your brain cells started to die and every minute after that you lose 10% of your brain function. His father was a doctor, all of this was drilled into him since birth, although right now he wished it wasn't. Ignorance really was bliss. Even if the doctors could revive her at this point would there be anything left of her? Would she just be an empty shell at that point?

"She's been down for almost ten minutes at this point Doctor."

"I know Doreen, but this is Grayson's little girl. We have to put up a fight for her."

The nurse nodded and continued to ventilate Evelyn. Jeremy watched them intently. It was clear most of the staff had already begun to lose hope.

"I can't watch this." Elena choked out, rushing to the door. Jeremy wished he could follow her but his feet were glued to the ground and his eyes to Evelyn. He was still waiting for all of this to seem real.

Elena and Evelyn had always been opposites since as far back as Elena could recall. They were never the type of twins that seemed to be the exact same person. You could always tell who was who the moment one of them opened their mouth. It had always united them, they may not have been very similar but their differences had complemented each other, they had balanced each other out. They had always been the perfect team.

It was after their parents died that these difference, the ones that had made them such a solid team in the past, began to tear them apart in the end. They dealt with their pain in different ways and it pulled them further apart and tore them up inside until it eventually hurt to be near one another. They would just reopen the still raw wounds.

Elena watched from her younger brother's arms as the Doctors tried, and failed, to resuscitate Evelyn. Elena couldn't even stand, the only reason she was upright at all was because of Jeremy's support. How had it come to be that Jeremy was the one protecting her? It was supposed to be the other way around she was supposed to protect him, she was the big sister.

She was Evelyn's big sister too. She should have protected her too. But how do you protect someone from themselves? From their own demons? Elena couldn't protect anyone anymore. Not even herself.

"I can't watch this." Elena heard herself choke out, her feet were already pulling her away from her sister's bedside, running in the opposite direction, running as far away as they could. Funny that was something Evelyn did. She always ran away from her problems, it's what got her here and now Elena was doing the same. After all those years of being opposites maybe it would take her twins death for Elena to realise that they could be the same on occasion. Just never when it mattered. Always when it was too late.

Guilt swam up inside Elena's chest as she ran down the fluorescent corridor, under flickering lights. She ran to the main doors and burst outside into the cold night air, gulping it down thirstily.

The cool air helped to calm her mind but her body still shook with the shock and her quivering legs could not support her weight as Elena collapsed onto the stony ground.

"Rough night?"

"Damon?" Elena gawked at the vampire who had materialised before her, bourbon bottle in one hand and a detached gaze to penetrate her very soul. "How did you have enough time to get Evelyn to the hospital and then get a drink?"

"I never leave home without it." He said trying to sound nonchalant but his voice cracked at the end and it didn't quite carry. Elena shook her head, blinking back tears.

"You want some?"

Elena, who usually tried to keep a disapproving distance from the vampires antics, could only nod and accept the half empty bottle gladly this time. The alcohol stung as it sloshed down her throat but it helped her body to calm down. She released a sigh and leaned back against the building before taking another swig.

"How's she doing? I can't bring myself to go back in there and find out." The fear in the vampire's voice was hard to catch but Elena still noticed it in the subtle tense of his jaw and the flicker behind his eyes.

She said nothing but took a longer deeper swig from the bottle. Damon didn't need to be told. As the realisation hit him, he stifled a moan and sank down onto the ground beside her taking the bottle back for a swig of his own.

"I think this is my fault." Damon finally acknowledged. His voice cracked a little with each word. "She was really messed up after what she did to Rose and then when she heard John's thoughts and she realised that he was her dad... I should have stopped her. I shouldn't have let her go off. This is my fault."

Elena watched the vampire for a few moments in silence. She couldn't see his face now as he had buried it in his hands. It was almost as if he was crying. It seemed strange to her that Damon felt such guilt. It didn't stand up to how she knew him to be. Aloof and uncaring. As much as she wanted to blame him, to have someone to blame, Elena knew the truth. No one could be blamed for this. Evelyn was sick, she was mentally ill. Jenna had pretended that she was better, hell Elena had too, they all had. But Evelyn wasn't better, she was still depressed and suicidal, she had just become better at hiding it. No one was to blame for this. It would have been so much easier if Elena could simply point a finger and apply blame to Damon, or anyone for that matter. But there was no one to blame.

"It's not your fault Damon." Elena finally acknowledged him. Her voice was steady and calm despite everything. "She was still depressed and suicidal, it's just that no one wanted to face it. You couldn't have know that she would do this. She was always going to find out about John. You did nothing wrong. This is not on you."

Damon looked up and met her eyes. His were red and raw and full of unshed tears, just like hers. The vampire reached out to the doppelganger and pulled her into his arms. Elena accepted his comfort for once, without guilt. In that moment she needed him and he needed her. They sat together on the cold tarmac of the hospital's car park, tangled up in each others arms, silently hoping that the worse would not come to pass. Both of their minds on Evelyn as the doctors fought to pull her back from the clutches of deaths hungry claws.

PSA: The way in which I described Damon doing CPR is not the correct way to administer CPR please do not take it as fact. I am a qualified lifeguard but Damon is not and I didn't think the character would know perfect CPR. Also I was more interested in getting into the emotional aspect of it. Just a little FYI if someone has suffered a drowning you begin with two breaths instead of compressions and do not fill the lungs fully, as it can damage organs. The compressions to breaths ratio should be 30:2. This is life-saving stuff and I recommend everyone do a first aid class so that you can do a better job then Damon if you ever have to.