everyonelives | but oh what a year

Oh, I hear you. I hear that you thought you could just come in here and semi-flirt, semi-threaten your way into getting your brother back, and I'm telling you that that's not the game I'm playing. This isn't going to be a I look the other way and all the humans suffer kind of relationship.

[Lindsay stares him down, not scared, not even flustered. It's just a simple statement of fact.]

I have a job to do. And I'm gonna do it. So if you want to wait here until your brother's ready to talk, you're more than welcome to, but I'm not releasing him into your care. The world's not going to end if I don't.

( Okay, so this is not Matt 2.0. )

Then I guess we've got nothing but time, cause I'm not leaving here without him.

( He holds his hand out, palm upward. )

And I'd like his ring back.

[No, she's really not.

But fine. She can exist in the spirit of compromise.]

It's in evidence. I'll go get it.

[And with that, she will push away from the desk and head towards the evidence locker - she waits a beat to see if he'll follow, giving her the opportunity to text Beck without him noticing, or if he'll wait at her desk.]

( He slides that chair back out, determined to stay close. He's not letting her out of his sight. She can still text, if she'd like, but he's sticking to her like glue. )

[Yeah, she figured he might do that. She moves behind the desk, scanning through the drawers until she finds the one she locked Stefan's daylight ring in. She pulls out her keys and unlocks it, before pulling out the plastic bag with the ring in it.

She turns and heads back to Damon, holding out the plastic bag to him across the desk.]

There you go.

( Once he sees she's not going far, he does circle back around, dropping down in time for his prize. )

Thank you.

( He unzips the bag, pouring Stefan's ring into his hand. )

That's it. ( He looks up at her. ) How long's he been out?

[She glances down at her watch.]

About an hour? I had just finished getting him settled when I came up to find you here.

[She doesn't know where that fits on the timeline of where Stefan was supposed to be and this business with an intern, but she hasn't had him long.]

Thank you, much, for not staking him.

( Was it the body that would've dropped that stopped her? )

Why didn't you, anyway?

[It was at least fifty percent the body, if she's honest. But it's not the only reason.]

Well, I was trying to fly under the radar. Staking one of the most prominent vampires in town wouldn't really do that. He attacked me, so in my capacity as sheriff, I could arrest him without it being a huge deal. I had human plausible deniability.

[Kind of. That being said.]

I was also looking for information, so I was looking to interrogate him. And, as I said. You guys are weird. You have souls, even if you can sort of turn them on and off. We try not to kill people with souls unless they don't give us any other choice. With Stefan, I still had choices. So I exercised them.

And slayers. They're not human. Plural, too, I assume.

( Well, good she exercised her choices, then. But, he respects her just a little more now. )

Weird isn't the half of it, but, you made the right choice. Or, we'd be having a very different conversation. Maybe even no conversation.

We're mostly human. Actually, I think we come up human according to most supernatural tests.

[She could just throw Damon across the room if he gave her a reason to. And yes, it's plural.]

I get it. Your brother's your brother. I mean, it's not my sibling relationship, but I get that it's a thing for some people. And despite my job, I'm not completely stab happy - or stake happy, in your case.

[She thinks she could take Damon, but she's not looking to pick a fight at the moment.]

Supernatural tests. Vervain. Wolfsbane. All the anes.

( Don't throw him across the room, what fun would that be. )

Fire. Sun. Torture. Just add happy to it. Sibling troubles?

We're not close.

[This isn't sob story hour. She's not going to get into it.]

And it's not torture, exactly. The cot he's currently sitting on is very much out of the way of direct sunlight. So long as he stays where he is, he's perfectly safe.

I wasn't calling you the torturer. We all have our unavoidable extracurriculars.

( Some things are meant to be done. )

And like all siblings, Stefan and I have had our ups and our down, but it always circles back to him and me. The good, the bad, the jailed. Both of us, several times, usually being the jailer.

Sounds like a pretty vicious cycle.

[She tips her head to the side with a smirk.]

Ever considered family therapy? Might work better than locking each other up all the time.

[But on that note, perception check Damon.]

To be fair, we each deserved every time we were locked up. We needed to be. I bind you, Salvatore, ( he goes into Liz's old drawer and pulls one more glass out, setting it down next to his. ) from doing harm. Harm against other people. ( He pours some whiskey into a glass for Lindsay ) And harm against yourself. ( and then into the glass closest to herself.

He holds his glass up. Clink? )

[Sure, she'll give it a clink. Then she'll put it back down again. She's on the job, and while Slayers don't stay drunk for long, they still do feel the effects if it's strong enough. Damon's welcome to all the whiskey he wants, though.

Before she can comment on that, however, she catches the sound of movement from downstairs, as the door to the basement is open.]

Sounds like your brother's awake.

( He shrugs, pouring her glass into his and taking a healthy sip, pausing mid-way. Because. Yep. He heard him, too. He tips the rest back in one big gulp before tearing out of the chair, ready to follow Lindsay down. See what state his brother is in. )

[Stefan ... well, Stefan is not great.

He's not on the cot, he's on the floor, his back pressed against he shadows of the wall and staring into the pit of sunlight in front of him. There is the slightest hint of burned flesh in the air, and there are still-healing blisters on the back of his hand, but fortunately for Damon, Stefan isn't feeling self-flagellating enough to immolate himself on the altar of his grief.

But he's still not great.

It's one thing to gradually turn your emotions back on. But when it's the matter of a weight that had been sitting on that switch suddenly and completely releases, it's a lot to take in at once. And part of him just wants to turn it back off again, and bury his head in the sand, but he can't. Not yet.

Almost as though he doesn't want to let himself.

He looks up at the sound of footsteps, and he meets his brother's eyes across the way and he doesn't know what to say. What is there left to say?]

Sleeping Beauty's awake. Or, Snow White. I feel like all the fairy tale princesses were asleep at some point or another.

( He doesn't hesitate, even if Stefan is off the rails, to hold his ring up between two fingers to show him he has it. Reaching the bars, he crouches down and then tosses the ring past the barrier of light. )

Turns out Lindsay Miller here is a cop and a slayer, not the band. So, don't feel too bad about yourself right now. Not that you feel bad about anything, but we're going to work on that.

[The ring lands on the floor next to him, but Stefan doesn't reach for it. He doesn't even make a sign of moving, though his eyes drift past Damon to Lindsay and he manages a brief and almost brittle:]

I'm sorry. For ... about the car.

[Which may say a lot about what Stefan is or isn't feeling right now.]

Did you find Dorian?

I didn't know that word was still in your vocabulary.

( Because, it sounded sincere even. )

When we find him, what state are we going to find him in? We will need your coordinates, by the way. Poor kid might be freezing to death.

( Here's hoping. )

He took me out to the cemetery.

[His eyes glance briefly to Lindsay again.]

Not far from where you picked me up.

[Lindsay nods, before stepping back to go see what she can do about that. "I'll go make a call." And she'll call Beck, just to be on the safe side. She wants her people to get to Dorian first, before someone can try to talk him into saying something else. As much as she's playing nice with Damon right now, she still doesn't trust him.

So ring ring Beck phone while Damon can continue to figure out what's going on with his brother.]

Fitting, for what he wanted to do. Bet he dug a grave and everything.

(Needed something with impact. )

How you feeling? You seem less... combative.

[It's a long stretch of silence as he tries to figure out how exactly to answer that question. How is he feeling? He is feeling.

Eventually, he manages to wrench out:]

He let me go.

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