Quarantine got me not knowing who I am anymore. Thanks for everyone who favourited, followed, and reviewed! I'll reply to you when I remember how to exist properly.

This chapter is a little messy so I hope it's okay. I'll go back and edit these 3 chapters one day when doing just that doesn't set me back 3 months.

Here are the facts:

Irene was just shy of six years old when Sheriff Forbes found her by the outskirts of the old dilapidated cottage.

The young girl was scared beyond her mind.

In years to come, her mom would supply the incident Irene mentally coined as "the reason why I will never go on roller coasters again" as the reason why she was so controlling. Or tried to be so controlling. In a town like Mystic Falls, there was really no way to take full authority over the world around you. Irene, even to the best of her efforts, would find herself constantly disappointed when things didn't go her way. When people didn't follow the script she wrote for them in her head to a T.

It shouldn't have been even possible. Scared was the lightest way of describing it. Six-year-old Irene's sudden appearance by the cottage on the edges of Mystic Falls marked what was to be the start of her tirade down her oncoming years of chaotic disarray. One that was filled with things that were constantly out of her control.

When Sheriff Forbes found her, Irene was frozen still in a mess of fallen and dried leaves. Her toes bare and digging into the rotten earth. The cottage, that would soon be renovated and subsequently abandoned in an even worse state, was devoid of life and any evidence of foul play. Liz had recorded it down in her file as a possible kidnapping and ditching. No one but Irene and the man who'd pick her up from the station knew what it really was.

At the time, all that was echoing through Irene's ears was the groan of steel and wind. One second, she was soaring through the air ready to be squashed like a fly on the wall while buckled into a metal contraption, and the next she was hit only by a deafening silence. Her heart had stilled in her confusion. What used to be the tops of tents and other carnival rides had transformed into the ground level of forest in her eyes, her brain could hardly catch up to where she was following the roar of metal and screeches of the other people on the ride. Irene could see the green, lush nature blanketing her feet, and feel the gentle breeze against her neck but all she could think about was the suffocating grip of the seatbelt as the rollercoaster train jettisoned itself off the tracks.

Irene didn't know what or where she was at the moment. Everything was ringing wrong in her mind as she struggled to make sense of what happened. When Sheriff Forbes leaned down to her level and tried to pat her arm to reassure her, Irene was sure she must've gone absolutely feral. The sudden physical contact, she remembered, felt like an iceberg crashing into her otherwise shipwreck of an operation. She knew that she was in the sky just seconds before this woman came to her with the most gut-wrenching expression.

There was no way she was supposed to be able to feel her fingers rubbing circles into her arm.

The gusts in her ear picked up, and the stimuli made the steel screech.

She must've died.

She had to have died.

This had to be the afterlife.

Irene felt fried to the bone and numb to the touch. She completely was out of her element and nothing Liz was saying was making sense. She remembered her breath hitching the longer those fingers rubbed into her scrawny arm, remembered moving her head down to stare and seeing only dirtied skin. No blood. No bone. Just mud and the remains of bright green grass speckled over her clothes like she'd rolled down a hill, even though it was the middle of the Fall and everything was starting to die. The leaves beneath her toes crunched and she remembered distinctly the fact that she hadn't taken her off her shoes before going on the ride. That she had worn her favorite pair of sneakers that her mom bought her on the first day of school and—

Irene clawed herself out of Liz's grip.

This was all wrong. There was something abuzz under Irene's skin but none of her senses were responding the way she knew they were supposed to. Her eyes said she was fine, but her brain screamed that no, a rollercoaster accident would leave more than just grass and mudstains. Her heart was accelerating itself into a marathon— racing a hundred miles per second, a sensation that was new to her six-year-old body. Everything screamed that it hurt but it didn't at the same time. Liz's voice, trying her best to cut through the confusion, wasn't helping any.

Irene knew that she should have had broken bones, broken legs, broken limbs, a broken neck...

Instead, she had dirt in the beds of her nails, and mud stains from her tussle in the leaves.

Irene knows that she should have died.

That she probably was dead if it weren't for the fact that when Liz touched her, she felt her. Felt her thumb rub circles on her arm, felt her breath against her cheek. Felt the warmth of her touch.

It's impossible, she'd tell herself over and over again until she eventually worked herself into a faint. Stressed out by the constant collisions of conflicting facts around her.

One second she was strapped into a roller coaster, the next her feet were dug deep into the earth.

There was no way it should've been even remotely possible.

Not unless she was dead. Then it would all make sense, right? Irene knows that she should have died. That there was no way to survive that accident. That somehow, someway, something weird happened, and now she was here.

In the afterlife. Or something close to it.

Trying her best to listen to this grown up's words but hearing only the screeching of metal and wind.

She was six years old when God decided to spare her the shock of being swatted like a fly.

(When God decided to swat her into a whole other universe)

She could still see her mom's face. Smooth lines and stretched in horror, screaming as the cart tore away from the tracks. Unable to look away as Irene and the rest of the passengers flew.

Her mom could make sense of it all.

The last words she croaked out before blacking out, Liz would tell her once she was older, was nothing but a chilling,

"I want my mom."

.

Irene is a witch or something along those lines.

"You don't have any ties to an ancestral lineage here. So technically you'd be first generation." The man who says he's her dad, but can't be her dad because she's supposed to be dead but she isn't, tells her during their first lessons together. She doesn't get long with him before he too is dead, and she is passed along to his "great" grandma. To Taaimaa.

It's long after he helps her get settled in, a year after he picked her up from the police station and becomes his ward even though the papers all say she's his daughter. Irene doesn't know what to make of it at first and decides to dutifully ignore it until it's too late to take it all back.

They establish right away that she has no control over her magic.

"Witches here funnel their spells into words." Her first attempt at Latin results in her setting the couch on fire. "Ok, that's weird. What about no incantation?" She flooded the kitchen. "Try to focus? Aim for the bullseye." She got the bullseye, but she also drilled a hole right through every tree in immediate proximity to where the two of them were standing.

Their new house that he wants her to move into after all the renovations are over is the same one that Liz had found her outside of. They still have the mansion in Mystic Falls, a grand three-story building with an indoor pool that he's in the process of taking out and a garden straight of her mom's dreams, but he tells her that maybe it's better for her to be close to the spot that she was summoned to until her magic finally settles down. That he doesn't want her to feel like, despite taking his last name, that she's chained to him.

The trees all have small circles drilled through them and there's an area further back where all the trees toppled over in a perfect circle. The workers that the man hired in charge of the renovations all take turns driving her home whenever she drops by to see the house. All of them warning her time and time again not to go into the forest alone in fear of the cultists lurking there, and all of them reprimanding the man time and time again for buying literally the worst plot of land within the area.

Even if the land was apparently "lucky", the fear of the cultists who were drilling holes into all the trees around the house like some kind of warning surely was enough to deter them from actually moving in right?

They laid off it when they accidentally walked in on one of Irene's magic mishaps.

The house was supposed to be her's but after the man dies so she can have her mom with her, she tells the workers to stop the renovations. After Elena finds herself kidnapped in the same cottage, after running all the excess manic magic in her veins dry and after Taaimaa drains what little she had left…

Irene can't find it in her to finish the house. Her mom, after she finds out about the cottage, agrees and talks to the lawyer about paying off the rest of the workers' dues.

As it turns out, she doesn't need to be close to the spot that she first appeared in Mystic Falls in in order for her magic to settle.

Despite all their disastrous attempts, the moment they finally got something working for her, the man fell backwards into the grass and cried. His magic triggering the clouds above them to thicken up as he sobbed. Irene fell to her knees, overwhelmed at the display as the full-grown man who always seemed like he knew what the next step was, broke down without a moment's warning. The cups she was told to fill with specks of fire stared back at them, lighting them up in an amber glow before being put out by the shower he summoned.

The stick she used as a conduit fell to the ground beside her.

The man stayed sobbing in the grass as he signaled her over, patting her hair when she finally did crawl over to only find herself with her head against his chest and without nothing but a small giggle when their little puppy came toddling up to them.

She doesn't know how to explain it. For months after she was finally okayed by the hospital to be allowed to go home with him and he registered her under his family name, she felt like all the wrongness of being here was going to tear her apart. That the fact that she was supposed to be dead but not was going to get her smited for real any day now.

When the man first heard this, he told her that it was all his fault. That he played with forces beyond him and she almost had to pay the price for it and now she was a vessel overfilling with magic and that they had to control it before it was too late. That she feels wrong in her own skin because of the magic and that no, Irene. You're not dead, you're here and I am so glad that you made it safely.

In between sobs, he gripped about life and vessels and powerful beings and all sort of things that didn't make sense to her at the time. Carding his callused hands through her hair and squeezing her tight whenever he choked on the words. Irene remembers Atlas sliding up between them to lick the stray tears as he held her still under the rainshower he called forth by accident.

She's young and she doesn't get it, doesn't even know how to put it into words even now, but at that moment, she feels her chest settle back into tandem with his pounding heart against her ear.

It's the first time since coming to Mystic Falls that she feels right and it's the first time the man makes her cry out of something that isn't frustration.

Later, after he shuffles them inside for a warm shower and bumbling all over her in fear that she might catch a cold after being out in the rain for so long, he finally allows her into his library. It's a huge room, filled to the brink with dusty old books that he doesn't let her touch and glass cases magicked to the nines that she never sees again after the lawyer goes through their estate.

He sits her down on a chair in the corner of the library, takes out a grimoire, and begins their first lesson on life and nature.

Irene hangs off each word like a spider to their web.

.

The third fact is that Irene Zhurong is cursed to always be alone.

The doctors all think she has "Cotart Syndrome" when Liz first sends her their way. Irene knows from the look on all of their faces that it's not a good thing that they think she has it. The look on the man who's not her dad but says he is tells her the same thing.

Except he's the only one on her side and she doesn't know how to feel about this.

Irene's not an idiot. She knows that she really did die. There was no way she didn't. This had to be the afterlife because it was unreal. The roller coaster train she was in shot off the rails. No one could survive that.

This only gets proven further in her mind when she goes digging in the man's house when she's released and did he think that she was an idiot who'd fall for his pity? Of course she wasn't actually his daughter, Irene didn't even exist in this world until Liz found her and the man claimed her as his ward and later daughter.

It's all kinds of out of sorts but Irene likes to think about it like this: Liz scans the system for missing children, the man shows up not an hour later claiming her to be his missing ward, she is released to his custody, they bond, Irene searches the house for another her and the only trace she finds is an ultrasound picture and two death certificates.

The man doesn't say much those first few months but the house is full of answers and the truth is this — Irene didn't exist until she was thrown off the tracks and into the forest outside the Falls.

This, is information that she doesn't know what to do with at first.

Even as the months go by, the memory of screeching iron still rings loudly in her ears. She still feels like she's soaring through the air, knows her vocal cords will never recover from the trauma because the reality is that she screamed herself to the grave. The man lets her keep her name because Irene was all she ever known herself to be, but asks if she can take his last name as a form of protection. From what, she doesn't quite know but from there it's all just a spiral down into insanity; in the end, Irene was young, six, flown and dead.

She overhears the doctors tell the man once during a checkup that she might manifest different explanations to cope with her trauma. Retard syndrome, is what she heard the first time and then the man corrected her when she asked, is what the doctors try to advise the man to treat her for when she finally finds the strength to comprehend everything around her into a sentence that made sense even though it didn't actually make any sense at all. She should see therapists and psychiatrists and so on... The list went on and Irene threw a fit, overwhelmed at it all in that hospital hallway.

It was early in the afternoon, people were beginning to move in and out of the hospital, and she screamed and demanded in tears for her mom to stop playing tricks on her when she overheard the doctor say that in one drug-induced tantrum, she'd asked for a "guardian that was never there in the first place".

He was wrong. They were all wrong. The man that took her was a liar because she never even had a dad. It was always just her and her mom.

Her mom that she desperately, desperately, desperately wanted because only she would understand her.

Only her mom would help her make sense of what was happening.

Screw the fact that in her screams and sobs, the man was furiously was telling the man off. Screw the fact that the man was the one who calmed her down the same way her mom would whenever it all got too much and drove her home and let her stay in her room until she was ready to come out again. Screw the fact that he never took her back again and decided to start their lessons.

Irene died and now she was alone in a place she didn't even exist in until Liz found her.

She was dead and in a world away from her mom because Irene was dead. Dead. Dead.

After the man finally settled her magic into something that wasn't manically trying to tear itself out of her skin whenever someone made the wrong move, she thought maybe she could start all over again.

And then the spell went wrong and just as she was finally becoming closer to the man, he died and she was alone in a world she didn't understand all over again.

.

The last fact that Irene is sure of is this: she is in The Vampire Diaries.

She might have not figured it out right away but that was because it was freaking insane. Even to a traumatized dead six years old. After a while and some long talks with the man, she grew used to the idea and though she might not have been doing that well in school, she remembers every detail of the series.

Her first step is to write it all out. She has 3 long journals down before she realizes that's basically all she remembers but there's a part of her that knows that there's more.

And then she burns them all. Because she's read this same exact thing before and she was not going to be the one who outs herself.

She wrote everything down from the moment Liz decided to come around with her own daughter and Caroline decided to introduce her to her own friends. She wrote everything down from meeting Caroline to meeting Elena to realizing that the name of the town she found herself in wasn't just a happy coincidence. She wrote down every lesson. Wrote down the names of everyone she met. Wrote down histories that she listened be created beforehand. Wrote down pasts that were part of her own but through the mouths of tired adults. She recorded her own life mixed with this new fictional reality and recorded the future from the moment the Gilberts' took a dive off the Wickery Bridge.

The details all mix together but in the end, she fills three giant notebooks. Her fingers have pen indents forever carved into her skin, her wrists hurt from the long nights of just writing and recording and remembering.

She pauses at the end, taps her pen against the page. Her final words trail off and Irene feels nothing but a hard plummet.

Everyone she knows in this town is surrounded by family of some kind. The man who lets her call him by his first name and nothing else is the only person she has in this small backwater town and then he's gone too and so she burns everything.

Before the roller coaster, Irene lived her life in a bustling city filled with noise and activity. She was surrounded by people almost every minute of the day thanks to her mom's work schedule and it was all company she welcomed wholeheartedly. Because she knew them and they were, in every part, her family.

And then she was summoned here by the man she wanted to start calling dad and she lost it all.

Now, all she has are relationships with people she grew up listening be storyboarded. Fictions that became more of a reality with each passing day and people she's only loosely familiar with. The day the lawyer passed the house on to her was the day she thought she could finally be comfortable with calling the Man her family but he was gone and she was left alone once again.

But by then, she was okay with it.

Irene knew where she was, what she was, and who she was and by sixteen, she made a decision.

Irene may have died when she was six, but Irene Zhurong was well and alive and a witch with a magic reservoir dying to be used.

This was her new life now.

And she was going to start her life in the very same show that her mom helped pitch by doing the impossible.

Because if she was here then who's to say that her mom couldn't be either?

Irene wanted her family too.