Chapter Text
There is a body on the Boarding House floor.
Not an uncommon occurrence. It is far from the first, doubtfully the last.
But this one is unique.
It’s a skeleton, firstly. Every bone polished clean, but unmistakably real. From the tips of skin-stripped phalanges to its exposed teeth. A full one, one set of adult human remains painstakingly laid out. The only missing piece is a section of the skull, at the temple, turning one socket into a gaping hole, cracks spidering all the way down to the nasal bone. The skeleton rests on a roll of silky fabric, a black so rich and dark that the bones nearly glow in comparison.
The other thing that makes it stand out is that it's been turned into a grotesque parody of a vase.
There are flowers stuffed into its empty eyes, its gaping mouth, clutched in its hands. Colors pop against the black, a myriad of shades and hues amongst leafy greenery. Stefan can’t name all of them, but he does recognize some. Apple blossoms and pansies growing from sightless sockets, yet more bursting from what may have been the death-wound. Hydrangea is crammed between ribs, right next to some yellow flower he can’t identify offhand. Sweet honeysuckle and ivy tangle around bony wrists, binding them so that they rest on the skeleton’s chest in mockery of peaceful rest.
Petals and leaves lie scattered around the remains. The whole thing is a study in contrasts. Life and death. Or just two different stages of decay. The rich perfume of a garden’s worth of blooms hangs heavy as the knowledge that whoever set this up took their time, staging the scene just so.
This isn’t just a body dump. It’s a message. This is something that took effort. Time. Planning. Knowing their schedules well enough to know that the house would be empty for enough time for this to be set up.
“At least it smells nice,” Stefan says, scanning the rest of the living room for anything missing, anything out of place. A fresh corpse isn’t really something he wants to have to clean up today.
There’s no other sign anyone’s been in here—other than the gothic floral arrangement.
“I guess it could be worse,” says Elena, in ostensible agreement. She smiles a little at Stefan’s sideways glance, expression pulling strangely, caught between grimace and forced levity. “But—vampires can’t get allergies, right? Because that is a lot of flowers.”
“Not to anything except vervain,” he confirms. Human as she is, they are both aware of how much vampires don’t suffer from hay fever. If she wants to play this off, then he will follow her lead. There is no vervain, amongst the plants. Which is interesting. You’d think a threat would be more… threatening.
“At least finding whoever did this will be easy.”
Stefan looks back at her, away from the skull’s empty, cracked sockets.
She says, gesturing downwards, “We just need to find a florist who got robbed.”
Stefan snorts, but commits the idea to memory. She’s not wrong. The flowers must’ve come from somewhere. They are fresh and near picture perfect. They weren’t just grabbed from the woods. “Or a gardener.”
Elena gestures to him. “Or a gardener.” She sighs, looks again at the bony display. “Do you want to stay at my house for a while?”
“Do you really think whoever left this here doesn’t know where you live?”
She makes a face at him. “Or we just beg Bonnie for a place to stay?”
Stefan tries not to bother Bonnie, when he can. There’s not a day he looks at her and doesn’t remember the things she’s suffered in the name of helping other people. “Or maybe whoever did this will come back.”
Setting up a sting operation in his own house seems like just the kind of thing to do on an otherwise quiet weekend.
“Yeah,” Elena says. “That’s kind of what I’m afraid of.”
When the door opens, they both twitch.
But it’s no intruder—or, at least, it’s one they both know.
“Stefan,” Damon greets, entering the den. More courteous: “Elena.” He pauses in the doorway. Eyes the flowers. “Am I interrupting something?”
“Just us playing Clue,” Elena says.
“In the living room. With a candlestick,” Stefan snarks. The hole in the skull very well could have been made with something like a candlestick.
“But who are we accusing?” Elena asks the room. Or perhaps she asks the bones. Either way, there is no answer.
“Should I give you my alibi?” Damon says lightly, in that way of his that is as much offer as joke. He may tell them the truth. He may not. He may feign offense they even asked and refuse to answer at all, just to see if it makes them suspect him more. It’s always a toss up, just where Damon draws the line between humor and warning. Sometimes there is no line at all.
“Do you need to?” says Stefan, just as mild.
Coming closer, Damon studies the bones, face unreadable but body language oddly relaxed given how he can get about intruders in their home. Crouching down, he runs a finger over an exposed rib, where bone juts from florals instead of flesh.
Then he carefully places one hand over the skull, right over the crumbled gap.
It is a perfect fit. His thumb lines up with the cracks over where nose had once been, even.
Once upon a time, whoever this had been, Damon had crushed their skull.
He stands. Stares down at the skeleton, at the green things stuffed into what had once been someone’s chest cavity. And smiles.
The expression is too warm for the point of fang it bears, eyeteeth the slightest bit too sharp even without the full change. He hates it when Damon does that. It’s one thing to have his brother’s face made into a monster’s. It’s another entirely to have his more human visage tainted by what lurks underneath.
“You know who did this,” Stefan says, suddenly sure.
Damon does not answer him in any way more substantial than a glance, smile smaller but no less present. He crouches down, wrinkling black fabric as he kneels besides the bones, then, with exultant savagery, tears leaf and stem and snapping bone, as if each were no more than wrapping paper and he an excited child on Christmas morning, until the bottle that had been shoved where a heart had once rested was revealed.
It’s unlabeled, the glass so dark it’s impossible to guess what’s within. Whatever it is, it doesn’t move like blood.
Damon stands once more, carnage by his feet. The smell of flowers has grown, crushed blossoms and leaves releasing the scent more strongly.
A note is pinned to the silver-edged black ribbon wrapped around the bottle’s neck.
Lover, it reads in dark brown ink, your time is almost up.
I’ve something to take care of, but don’t fret, I’ll make certain you won’t have the chance to miss me long.
I crave your heart so badly as to tear it from your chest myself.
XOXO,
E.
P. S. Enjoy your gifts.
No. That’s not ink. Stefan reads the words written in dried blood, is half sure he can pick up the phantom scent of it over the chlorophyll nightmare below.
“Damon,” says Elena, who spotted the same thing he did. “Who’s E?”
Damon unpins the note, tucking it and the ribbon into a pocket. “Old friend.”
She and Stefan look to each other, but neither can decipher the tone he speaks with. “An old friend? She kind of threatened to rip out your heart.”
Damon—pauses where he’d been inspecting the bottle. He turns to her. Cocks his head. Seemingly genuinely curious, “Do you know something I don’t know?”
Elena stares patiently back at him. “Probably. But you’d think you’d know that murder threats aren’t very friendly.”
“What’s a little murder between friends?” he asks philosophically.
“Still murder,” Stefan answers, tone flat.
Damon rolls his eyes. Then, before anyone can stop him, opens the bottle and drinks from it. Not a sip either. Tips his head back, bottle held high as he drinks deep.
Both Stefan and Elena reach out, like they can keep him from dropping from poison or vervain or god knows what. Yes, it is hard to poison a vampire, but magic exists in this world and Stefan very much doesn’t doubt that his brother has pissed off a string of witches in his life. But instead of collapsing or foaming at the mouth, Damon licks what Stefan can now identify from the smell as whiskey off his lips and pins them both in place with an arch look.
“It’s my present,” he says, as if the problem was that he hadn’t shared the mystery liquid he’d pulled out a corpse.
“And you’ll die if you want to?” Stefan asks pointedly. If he lunges, he still won’t be quick enough to yank the bottle away. And if he tries, Damon will absolutely just drink more of it, just to spite him.
As if reading his mind, Damon takes another sip.
That was the first incident.
It wasn’t the last.
The whiskey hadn’t killed Damon, or even made him sick. It had been altered somehow, though. Must’ve been. It was suspiciously strong, the bottle not even halfway finished and Damon swaying where he stood, the smile painting his face too soft to suit his face or to match the window-shaking music he’d turned on; glow of starlight through thunder-accompanied clouds. He’d asked Elena to dance, and she’d humored him for a song or two, asking a few more unanswered questions about the mysterious E, until the song had changed over to something quicker and he’d started laughing, swinging her faster and faster around the corpse, stray petals floating where they were kicked up, until Stefan had to catch her before she’d spun into the fireplace. Drunk as much on music as whiskey, Damon had kept dancing, hands placed just so, as if his new partner were a ghost.
At some point, the skeleton had been carefully boxed up, wrapped in its silken shroud. The box had disappeared somewhere. Stefan suspects his brother had either disposed of the evidence or secreted it away. The flowers, those that had remained whole, had been distributed throughout the house into vases, each carefully given water to keep them fresh as long as possible. It would have been a nice sight, maybe, little bundles of living things in a house that seldom has any, if every glimpse of them hadn’t called to mind bone shards and that skull’s flower-stuffed stare.
For the next week, gifts are sent to the house.
First is another bouquet, this one delivered by the living—a heavily compelled man from the next town over, who passed the bundle of flowers to Damon then immediately turned and drove back off.
Those had all been poison. Monkshood, deadly nightshade, foxglove and, yes, vervain. Damon had accepted it without flinching, going as far as to brush a finger over flowers themselves, wincing at the sting. He’d stuck his burned finger in his mouth, eyes on the edge of the forest—something that made Stefan turn and look, but there was nothing there. When he’d turned back, Damon had already been on his way inside. Ignoring Stefan’s increasingly probing questions, he’d taken the flowers to the kitchen, carefully putting them in a vase.
A few hours later, Stefan had wandered back downstairs to find his brother with a pile of flowers on the counter, pulled from their stems. The vase was upside down in the sink.
“What are you doing?” he had asked. The room smelled of sugar. Possibly because of the bag if it that sat next to the group of bowls on the counter. One had a flat edged paintbrush laid across it, like a snow dusted bridge.
Damon glanced at him, arched a brow, because yes it was obvious, but he couldn’t have been doing what Stefan thought he was doing because—
From the still-hot baking sheet atop the oven, Damon had popped a piece of candied belladonna into his mouth and then said, “You can have one.”