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Josie tucks the grimoire back into her bag. She had been needlessly practicing the words over and over the entire bus ride. She has to be ready.
Finding Hope had not been as hard as she thought. The first locator spell gives her a smiley face much like the one Cleo had received. The second attempt produces a salacious looking winky face. Josie blushes at the memory. Leave it to Hope to find a way to make her flustered hundreds of miles away.
The third time Josie had a stolen grimoire and enough dark magic to resurrect an entire graveyard. She may or may not have broken into Bonnie Bennett’s home and invoked her dark side to get it, but really what was a little black magic if it meant saving Hope’s life.
“Last stop,” the bus driver grumbles over the loudspeaker. Josie thanks him and hops the three steps to the ground, her bag clutched tightly to her chest. This was it.
She follows the map to the front step of what could only be described as a mansion. It towers over her, all marble pillars and glass ceilings. Hope has expensive taste, Josie muses.
Across the street are more modest houses, though clearly still very expensive if the gigantic pool in the back of one of them suggests anything. Josie watches for a moment as a door opens and two kids come running out. They're followed quickly by their parents. Together, they laugh and smile. They look so happy and Josie’s heart aches.
She wonders what it would be like to build a life like that. Would her children have Hope’s eyes or her own?
Her heart swells at the thought of a future with Hope. Josie’s imagined it so many times before. She remembers being twelve and writing “Josette Marshall” all over her chemistry homework, smiling shyly at every glimpse of auburn hair.
Gd, Josie looks up at the house. She thinks she’s always been in love with Hope. That’s what gave her the strength to leave— Salvatore, Finch, her dad, everything paled in comparison to the love she felt for Hope Mikaelson. It was all consuming. She thinks she would follow her to the ends of the earth. It just took her too long to realize why.
Josie steps forward and rattles the doorknob. It swings open easily.
“Hope?” She swallows hard. There’s noise coming from somewhere else in the house. Two voices. Josie’s hand instinctively rises to clutch her necklace.
She moves through the hallway as quietly as possible. Hope should already have heard her, but for some reason she hasn’t engaged. Too distracted by whoever else was in the house maybe.
Josie’s about to turn through another doorway when she stops suddenly, nearly crashing into the wall. The hairs on the back of her neck rise.
“Now who do we have here?” A British voice sings delightedly from over her shoulder.
In the next second Josie finds herself in a completely different room with a hand around her neck and black spots clouding her vision. She heaves, her chest convulsing as she struggles to breathe.
“One of your strays I presume?” The British woman laughs, violently forcing Josie’s head sideways to look as—
Hope stands from the floor, pulling a stake from her chest. She doesn’t spare Josie a single glance as she dusts her shirt off. “Taking hostages now so you don’t have to fight me?
“Are you that scared?” Hope mocks, raising a playful eyebrow. “I promise I’ll go easy on you.”
Aurora growls, her eyes flashing dangerously. “So am I to presume you don’t care about this.”
She shakes Josie a bit, Hope’s eyes follow the motion intently. “Because if you really don’t care then you wouldn’t mind if I—”
Aurora moves to snap Josie’s neck. She gets halfway there before a sudden wind blows past Josie’s face and Aurora goes flying out the nearby window. The sound of the glass cracking echoes through the room.
“Lizzie?” Josie gasps out, her eyes falling on familiar blonde hair and are those fangs?
“In the undead flesh.” Lizzie stands a few feet away. She throws Josie a grim smile, her attention turning to Hope. “That British bitch just won’t stay dead.”
“Neither will you apparently,” Hope sends her a cocky smirk and gracefully leaps out the window after Aurora. Lizzie follows with a snarl.
“Stay there Jo,” she calls over her shoulder. “I got this.”
Yeah, no way in hell was Josie “staying there.” She still had a spell to do and a beautiful auburn tribrid to help. She was also 99% sure Lizzie was trying to kill Hope which— no. There’s no way she’s letting that happen.
Josie hastily climbs to her feet and steps out the window. The sun is setting over the estate, coloring the hills a pretty orange. The only other structure she can make out is a good distance away. Some sort of crypt maybe. She turns back to the street she came from.
Why did Hope have to choose the mansion with a national park for a backyard? Josie sighs and does the only thing she can do. She starts running.
When she arrives it’s to the sound of fighting. She’s beginning to get tired of that. Josie peeks through the door just in time to watch as Hope plunges her hand into Aurora’s chest. Blood dribbles down her arm as she pulls the woman’s heart out and throws it to the side.
Josie takes that as her cue to move further into the room, observing as Lizzie drops Aurora’s body in disgust and wipes her hands along her pants. It looks like she had been holding Aurora down while Hope dealt the final blow.
They were working together? Maybe Josie had been wrong about Lizzie’s intentions after all.
“Ew,” Lizzie complains, pretending to gag as she shoves Aurora’s body away from her. “Gross.”
Hope rolls her eyes and stoops down, crouching over Aurora’s body in search of who knows what. She leans forward and carelessly pushes Aurora’s head to the side. Josie watches her with baited breath. Even after tearing someone apart, Hope somehow manages to look absolutely devastating.
Lizzie hovers mere steps away, her hand curled suspiciously behind her back. In the chaos of their fight neither of them seem to have noticed Josie’s presence.
She closes her eyes and sucks in a shaky breath. Josie knows rationally she’ll have to reveal herself sooner than later, but for a second she lets herself revel in the quiet of this moment. The silence before the storm.
Blue eyes and a soft smile flash across her vision and she’s reminded why she’s doing this— why she has no choice. Josie reopens her eyes to Lizzie with a stake in her hand and a murderous glint in her eye. She lifts her arm above Hope’s head, preparing to strike. No.
Josie jumps from her hiding spot, hands raised as a spell comes tumbling from her lips. Lizzie crumples immediately, clutching at her head.
“Jo!” She seethes in disbelief. “You’re still protecting her! She killed dad! She’s a… a monster!”
“Yeah, Jo.” Hope looks at her for the first time in what feels like forever. She stands up, quirking an intrigued eyebrow. “I’m a monster.”
Josie swallows hard under Hope’s penetrating gaze. There’s something in her eyes Josie can’t quite name. It’s almost fond.
“No, you’re not a monster.” Josie shakes her head, “you’re sad and you’re lonely and you feel like the weight of the world is on your shoulders, but Hope… you’re not alone.”
You have me. It’s on the tip of her tongue, begging to be said, but Josie can’t. She can’t do that. Not to Hope. Not with what she came here to do. It’s too cruel.
“MG, Kaleb, Cleo, Jed— your family,” she swallows the urge to shout her feelings to the sky, “they don’t care if you’re perfect, if you save the world or you screw it up.”
Hope blinks at her. Josie knows a speech won’t be enough to recover Hope’s humanity, but she needs to say something anyways, even if it’s not the confession that burns hot in her chest. She needs to say something. “You have people that love you so, so much… and they want to shoulder your burdens with you, to help you, because they care about you a whole lot.”
Tears slip down Josie’s cheeks. She needs to stop stalling. “Remember Hope, you are never alone.”
She inhales shakily and fumbles for the talisman around her neck. The familiar feeling of its weight against her heart gives her the confidence she lacks. Make quiet things heard. Make Hope listen to her humanity, listen to the people who love her. With one last tearful smile, Josie lets the spell tumble from her mouth in a soft murmur. Silence. Then—
Hope's eye lashes flutter prettily across from her. She blinks up at Josie, outstretching her arm as if to somehow stop her, but it's too late. Hope's fingers fluttering between them in a bizarre plea. Josie watches as the girl's lips part in confusion.
Staring at Hope right now, Josie knows beyond the shadow of a doubt that she made the right decision. While the rest of the world continues to turn Josette Saltzman would fall into sleep for eternity, never to wake again... but Hope… she would regain her humanity and her life in exchange and that was worth it. Hope is always worth it.
The last thing she sees is Hope’s shocked eyes begging her to stay. Josie wants to scream I love you. Instead she says, “Goodbye.”
…
Hope wakes with a splitting headache and a rapidly healing bump on the back of her head. She feels like she’s been hit by a truck.
It takes more effort than she’d care to admit to open her eyes. Hope tries to recall how she ended up this way— lying on the floor in a dusty old crypt, but she comes up mysteriously blank. What the hell happened?
She tries to lift her head. Something rough and razor sharp grazes Hope’s neck before she gets too far. It’s not a surprise to find Lizzie Saltzman standing over her, a stake aimed at Hope’s chest. The damn girl had been hunting her relentlessly for the past few weeks. She was unbearably annoying.
“Hope Andrea Mikaelson,” Lizzie’s voice shakes with every word and Hope notices for the first time that there are tears on her face. Seriously, what did she miss?
The urge to ask what’s wrong slams into her like a ton of bricks. Shit. Her humanity is on. It’s been on since she woke up.
Hope braces for more emotions, more pain. It doesn’t happen like she thought it would. She feels sadness and guilt and anger, so much anger, but there’s something else tingling at the recesses of her mind.
She pokes at it gingerly. The swell of pain that races straight for her heart is enough to get her to pull away. Hope gasps, tears welling in her eyes.
“Are you…” Lizzie chokes on her words, “is your humanity back?”
Hope nods as best she can. She feels like she’s suffocating. All the people she hurt, no killed. Alaric. Landon. The wolves. The strangers she sucked dry. Monster. She’s a monster. She feels herself scream and scream until her throat is raw with the blood she stole.
But there’s something else. Something she doesn’t know. This doesn’t feel right. It’s not right. There’s something—
“Lizzie what happened. How am I…”
She looks up at the ceiling. Hope can barely see through her tears. The crypt is dark and musty, dust settling in the air around her. Moonlight streams through cracks in the stone. She tries to remember. How did her humanity turn on? How did this happen? How did she let this happen?
Lizzie is crying a few feet away now, the stake clutched limply in her hands. She snarls through her tears, “You don’t remember?”
“No I…” Hope swallows She looks around the room, searching for a clue, for anything that would quell the rising pressure behind her eyes. “I don’t know…”
Her voice cracks, another wave of tears lingering at the edge of her vision. She hastily wipes at her face.
Something red and uncomfortably warm sticks to her eyebrow. Hope freezes. There’s blood on her hands.
Who did she hurt? What life did she take? Whose blood smells so good?
Her eyes flash gold, black veins rippling down her cheeks. The shock of her newly regained humanity must have distracted her from the tantalizing scent of blood.
“You fucking coward,” suddenly Lizzie is standing over her again, disgust boiling underneath her scowl. “You’re a fucking coward, you hear me? You’re a… you’re…”
She trails off with a strangled snarl, the stake clutched tightly in her hands, “you think you can just forget her?”
Lizzie stalks forward, venom lacing every word, “After everything she did for you!”
Her scream echoes through the crypt, haunting every corner of Hope’s mind. It awakens the hurt she had so carefully ignored seconds earlier.
Hope gasps, a pain like fire shooting through her skull. It sears every nerve with blinding heat. She feels it all like a bullet to the heart or is that too merciful? “No,” Hope chokes, struggling for air.
She crawls desperately on her hands and knees, searching. Her fingers find a slim wrist.
“No.” Hope drags herself closer, tears slipping down her cheeks. She pulls Josie into her lap, her hands shaking as she hovers above her face. Hope reaches out to touch her cheek. Her only response is the slow motion of Josie’s head as it rolls to the side.
“Wake up,” Hope sobs, tugging Josie impossibly closer. She draws her against her chest, hugging Josie as gently as possible. “Wake up.”
She untangles Josie from the hug and presses their foreheads together, both hands coming to rest on Josie’s face. “Wake up, Jo.”
Her voice cracks. “Wake up!“
She screams into Josie’s face. All she sees is the vacancy behind her eyes. The world blurs, Hope’s vision spinning in every direction. “Wake up,” she whispers as Josie slips from her grasp. “Wake up.”
Hope swallows hard, her head pounding with the incessant urge to scream. She pushes herself up on her elbows and stumbles to her feet. “Kill me.”
It slips from Hope’s mouth with surprising ease. She doesn’t allow herself time to process before she’s surging forward to grasp Lizzie’s arm, her fingers clinging desperately to her sleeve. “Kill me,” Hope gasps.
She grabs for Lizzie’s hand, clumsily pressing the stake against her heart. Hope squeezes her eyes shut, the feeling of the wood against her sternum the only thing keeping her from oblivion. “Please.”
Lizzie doesn’t move, her feet rooted to the spot. She stares Hope down, “No.”
Hope’s knees buckle. She collapses back to the floor, her heart throbbing painfully.
“She wouldn’t give up on you,” Lizzie laughs wetly. “She believed you were good. Gd knows I don’t agree with her.”
Lizzie shakes her head, “but my stupid sister gave her life for you and there is no way in hell I am letting you waste it.”
She’s right. Hope swallows the bile in her throat and stares up at the ceiling, Josie’s voice ringing through her head. You have people that love you so, so much…
Tears drip down Hope’s face. But I don’t want them, Jo. I just want you. Because a world without Josie Saltzman is no kind of world at all.