When he finally makes it to Jeremy's room, he's calmed the troops, soothed Bonnie's worries and placated Elena. He hasn't called back his mother. He might never. He'd rather face another apocalypse that deal with her right now.

The kid is lying in the bed, staring out the window; he doesn't even glance over to the door when Alaric walks in.

"You okay kid?" Dumb question really, because everybody is always okay when they're in a hospital bed.

"Dude." The kid responds, still not turning towards him. Alaric wonders if they gave the younger man pain medication. "I see dead people."

"Yeah buddy, I know." He never could watch the whole of Sixth Sense so he doesn't know really what to say right here, if he should just pull out his best Bruce Willis impression and go with it. Instead, Jeremy turns to him, eyes bright and hands grasping tight at the metal bars of the bed, white knuckles stark and unforgiving.

"No, man, you don't understand. They're everywhere."

There's a woman who keeps screeching that she has to pick her son up from soccer practice, the blood bubbling out of her lips as she paces in front of Jere's bed making the kid wince every time he gets a look at her.

He's even paler now, in the bed.

Next door is a five year old who wanted to play with her father's tools and the one that made the brrr sound when he had assembled her doll house. She wants her doll now.

You don't want to know, man. It's bad.

In his bathroom is an 80 year old man, mumbling to himself as he tears strip of skin off his stomach.

The kid is now a constant shade of green that has nothing to do with the flu he's fighting.

Could you, like, get me out of here? Jeremy ends up asking. Alaric knows that for the kid, it's considered a true moment of weakness, that for him, now firmly a member of the supernatural club, to not be able to control his ability makes him hate himself just a little bit more. Alaric wants to comment on that, say how proud he is of Jere for holding himself together so well in a way that so few would be able; that if he was the one seeing dead bodies, mutilated bodies, he'd be in a padded room by now sobbing.

But he doesn't say that. Or anything related. He just nods, stands up, and goes in search of a doctor, a nurse, a shaman maybe, knowing this town.

They let him leave, the doctors and nurses glaring at Alaric with every hesitating step that Jeremy takes towards the waiting car. It's just this side of leaving against medical advice; something the doctor had repeated numbers of times. But it's not was Alaric's only response. It wasn't, yes. But only just. The kid can barely stand, let alone walk, and he's shaking, but Alaric knows that's mostly from his nerves being so out of focus from all the dead and dying and less from the dehydration, nausea and persistent fever.

He'll take him home, lay him on the couch and dose him with hospital strength antibiotics and glucose. Caroline has already stocked the fridge with Gatorade and Pedialyte ("and, I took the labels off, so he can't be all grumpy and say he's not a baby and not take it!" she had giddily told him) and someone assured him that laundry had been done. No word yet on how many of his work shirts have returned to their original color instead of pink. He's a teacher, not a laundress.

He'll take the kid home, and he'll be babied and fed and pampered and he'll begin to heal. Because the Scooby Gang always survives, thought at times they limp and they bleed. They're just a bunch of kids with superpowers and super stories and a lot of emotions and drama. But they're a messed up family too, and baby brother is sick.

Jeremy begins to recover. Slowly.

One day, Alaric comes home from work to find all of his kids sprawled out in the living room. They're watching some hooky horror movie that, of course, has vampires in it. He can only wonder at the discussions they've gotten into. That one time Twilight was brought home even Caroline got offended. And yet, for all its awful fake blood and costume choices, the movie they are now watching has all of their attention. The living room is silent.

Matt's face is scrunched up in tight concentration, watching the flickering images on the screen. It's as if he is trying to gain hints for the coming days and war. His blue eyes stretch over to Ric and he smiles before turning back to the movie and Ric can almost see the battle plans developing in the younger man's head.

The solider. No one would ever perceive of Matt as the solider, not with his baby blues and his blonde hair and his innocence, but that's what he is, and he's no longer such an innocent (none of them are innocent). He is strong and resilient, but scarred heavily where no one but a trusted few can see. His gaze is on the television screen but he keeps one hand tight on Caroline's thigh- not possessive though, no, not Matt. Rather, it is an anchor, a tether to keep him from drifting like so many with the blood he shares tend to do.

Alaric lets his gaze shift away from Lt. Donovan and his ever calculating, ever appraising stare and on to sweet Caroline beside him. She seems unaware, or rather, unaffected by the vice grip that Matt has on her. She knows, Ric realizes with a start, what that physical contact must mean to Matt.

"They were all babies together" whispers the haunted voice of Jenna in his ear. "They all grew up on top of each other." (he may not have Jere's power, but he still feels, sees, hears her here. Always)

Caroline knows Matt, all of him; the scar on his left palm from some half-brain summer adventure he and Tyler had once concocted and delivered; to the small burn behind his right ear from one particularly bad boyfriend of his mom's. But before, before she had only ever known those scars second hand, through Elena, as the best friend nodding dutifully on pink and flower bedspreads. Relearning them as Matt's girlfriend—retracing the raised and marred skin with heightened receptors beneath the pads on her own fingers—well she ended up hurting as well, sobbing alone in the Salvatore basement.

So Alaric knows that she'll let Matt squeeze the life out of her while they watch movies (if there was any life left to squeeze, Alaric thinks darkly, and perhaps, a little bitterly) and she'll only ever roll her eyes. She'll feign that she's scared when something frightening happens on screen, even though she's seen worse in her own backyard (in her own mother's eyes). She'll bake brownies because Jeremy is sick and she'll get upset when there are too many carbs at dinner.

But sometimes, Ric catches glances -out of the corner of his eye, or when they are alone on the front porch, a blanket draped over her shoulders more for comfort than for warmth, a cup of hot chocolate in her hand-of the exhaustion. The exhaustion that she keeps locked beneath iron doors of pom-poms, perfume and smiles. One day, he'll tell her to unlock those doors; this week, and weeks like them, he's glad he knows not of the key.

Elena had Jeremy's head in her lap, running her fingers through his hair, tracing nonsense patterns on his scalp. Ric wonders if this is what Jeremy's ghosts had done all those nights ago, when the sickness was undefined and roaring it's head with a might; he wonders if the Gilbert parents had ever done it; he wonders if he ever should.

Her finger nails are painted, and Ric takes it as a good sign. It means for just a moment, she focused on something other than Stefan and the departure that tore her apart and bring him back, please bring him back. Elena smiles up at him and gives him a thumbs up, rolling her eyes at the half cast lids of her little brother.

There's questions he wants to ask; what's the kid's temperature, did he eat today, did he sleep, are the girls (always with a connotation now, a strange distinction between the living and the dead) bothering him—but he stops himself, letting the peace lay undisturbed. Jere shifts in his half conscious slumber but other than that his presence seems noticed but unaffecting, and Alaric is happy for that.

He'll need to check on Bonnie, and how she's doing on the Calculus homework assigned this week. Jonathan, or Mr. Grant as the students should refer to him as, said she's doing better, struggling with a few concepts, but no longer in danger of failing. Small victories in an epic battle between him and the kids classes; sometimes he thinks the Tyler really just wants to see the chemistry building burn.

Things return to normal. But not really, because normal has always been four degrees west of where they are, but it returns to there. Jeremy starts not doing his homework because he's a sixteen year old with a girlfriend instead of not doing it because he's dying or in mourning. Ric makes breakfast and chastises Elena for wearing skirts that are too short but she only ever rolls her eyes because everyone "knows she's taken"- but she always changes though; to appease him or because at heart she's just a girl who needs to know someone still watches over him, he doesn't really care.

Damon still appears at the house at odd hours to grade papers with him, offsetting the bleak topics of trench warfare or nuclear bombs with tales of misbegotten post-modern poets and authors in speakeasies. His eyebrow does that thing that it does while he speaks of sparkling dresses and "want to know who really influenced Fitzgerald?" but Ric only laughs and sips at the tumbler, etching comments on to valiant half ass attempt essays with red ink that only bleeds a little.

Matt works at the grill still, but Ric watches his hours and makes sure he sleeps and eats and at least pretends to act like a teenage. Caroline helps with that.

The cringing rule of "No sex in the house ever, I don't care if it will end a curse, no sex" soon comes into effect. They don't like him for a week after that, none of them. Even Damon, who said you could never be careful when it came to counter curses. Ric is petty and puts vervain in his scotch.

Normalcy is stifling because they all wait with baited breaths for the next crisis to slither up next to one of them and snap at their ankle. Diligent and cautious is all they can be, sending out feelers trying to find Stefan, despairing when it comes apparent he does not want to be found.

Every full moon is a challenge, the young man who Ric loves to tease about his obsession with 70's rock torn to pieces by a ravaging beast within is a devastating thing to hear, let alone observe. Those are some of the nights he finds Caroline on the front porch, Matt on the roof- just looking at the stars, desperation in his stature because he can't fix everything, and hot chocolate can cure a lot, but it can't erase the agony that echoes from the woods or the whimpers with the sunrise.

But then Teen Wolf premiers on MTV and some of the biggest brightest smiles he's ever seen on Tyler begin to appear.

"Dude, they got it all wrong!"

"Well maybe you should write to them, Lassie, and tell them the real thing." Damon had responded, his drawl slow but not nearly as acidic as it could be.

Tyler had barred his teeth and looked down at the remnants of the scar still on the Salvatore's arm.

It's the only thing that really can ever shut Damon up.

If Alaric ever stopped for long enough in his day, in between teaching (wait, he had a job? A real job? One that doesn't involve crossbows but does involve showing up at 7 am?) and being a pseudo big brother/father/best friend/hunter/defender perhaps he'd be able to take a step back and realize what has happened without him meaning too. He probably would never have had realized it if it hadn't been for another one of the teachers, Mary Clarke, (Mrs. Clarke, Tyler, not "Old Lady Clark"!) after he'd stopped by to pick up Jeremy's homework one day before things had gone back to normal.

"You know Alaric," she had said, handing over the small stack of papers for the convalescing teen on the couch, trying to convince Damon to let him have some of the scotch, "I know that you're Elena and Jeremy's guardian, but we both know that's not all you are. You've become the new Gilbert, the new patriarch of this town, making sure all those kids are happy, healthy and hale."

Ric had tried to dissuade her, that he wasn't a Gilbert, he wasn't a patriarch; didn't she understand, he hadn't read any parenting books, he flunked out of Calculus in college, he drinks way too much when the girls sleep over at Bonnie's, his best friend is a vampire for Christ's sake; he's no hero, he's just the guy who loved a girl too much who ended up leaving him; he's just the man who loved a woman with his whole heart only for the word sacrifice to finally have a literally breath stealing definition in his life; he's no upstanding citizen, he has guns and tranquilizers in the trunk, a cross bow under his desk, he's pretty sure Damon has outstanding warrants in at least three states; he's just the guy who came to haunt vampires and ended up defending them; just the guy who makes breakfast and is lenient with curfew but never with grades; just the guy who is somehow glue to a fractured picture—some of the pieces don't fit exactly how they used too, but if you stand far enough away, it still looks whole.

"Whatever you say, Alaric." Mary had said, "You can't deceive yourself forever though."

Maybe he can't, but right now he doesn't have time for Old Lady Clark's ramblings. He's got dinner to make and homework to enforce. And maybe he'll stop at the book store and finally buy a parenting book. Maybe.