Chapter Text
Jess fell asleep on her couch rewatching the finale of Vampire Diaries for the fifth time. She had no idea that her heart had stopped about halfway through the night, but the next thing she knew she was being shaken awake by someone. “Hey, you can’t sleep here,” the voice said.
Jess creaked her eyes open confusedly and then much wider. “Sh-sheriff Forbes?”
“Yeah. Are you okay? Do you need any help?”
Jess looked around and easily recognized exactly where she was. Mystic Falls. And she was sleeping outside by the clock tower. She tried to think fast and just said, “Yeah. I’m okay. I’m sorry. I think I just had too much to drink. It won’t happen again.”
“See that it doesn’t,” the sheriff said amusedly. It wasn’t the first time nor would it be the last that she dealt with this situation. “Well you seem to be okay now, so why don’t you head home.” She didn’t usually make a fuss unless they were causing trouble.
“Yeah. I’ll do that. Thanks. And sorry again.” She had to find someplace private to think. Try and figure out what was going on and make a plan. She walked by the newspaper stand and checked the date on that way. That would help a lot. May fifteenth two thousand nine. First priority would be getting out of town. At least for now. Until she had a plan. She didn’t want to interact with anyone more than she had to until then. Thankfully she knew the layout of the town and surrounding area pretty well from the show so she knew that if she went up past the grill, it would lead to the quarry and forest at the edge of town.
As she walked, she tried to piece together what was happening. What were the options? This was an insane fevered dream? She pinched herself and it definitely hurt, so not a dream. Hallucination maybe? Maybe the fish she’d had for dinner was bad? Bad enough to cause this? Not likely. Especially not a hallucination that tricked all five senses. No, it was real. But how? She put that thought out of her mind as soon as it came. She would probably never know the answer to that. She’d always believed that there was more to the universe than any human could ever know and that anything was possible. Figuring out the how wasn’t that important.
What was important though was a plan. She took a moment to think of the timeline first. This was just over a week before the accident that killed Elena’s parents. Taking Elena out of the picture would make so many lives better. And save even more lives completely. Even just keeping her from ruining Damon the way she did would be worth it. But she wasn’t going to try and go against Stefan to stop him from saving her. That was stupid and blatant. Both things that she wasn’t. She was a shadow person. Behind the scenes. She would figure that out later. She had a week. But what did she want to do first?
She definitely wanted to be a vampire. That was a given. She wasn’t so tied into the human morality crap as most people. Not that she planned to go around killing anyone and everyone of course, but she could handle the occasional mistakes and definitely killing those who deserved it. And being a vampire would make so many things much easier. But only if she had a daylight ring. She was mostly a nocturnal person anyway, but that didn’t mean hiding from the sun all the time was feasible. Especially during the longer days. That meant her first stop needed to be to get the grimoire from Giuseppe Salvatore’s coffin. Which meant finding something to dig with. Which made her realize that she had nothing here. Probably. She checked her pockets and found them all empty. Just as she’d expected. She was still wearing her sweats and t-shirt that she’d fallen asleep in after all. Okay, so borrowing something would be necessary.
Neither of the vampire Salvatores should be at the boarding house yet, and avoiding Zach shouldn’t be too difficult. The toolshed was far enough from the house that it would take luck for him to catch her. She could circle around the woods from the quarry to get there. Assuming of course that the fan maps of the area were accurate, but if this world, whatever it was, had been taken from her mind they would be. It took her two hours of walking, during which time she solidified more of her plan in her mind, to reach the quarry and the woods there. Another hour to reach the boarding house and she was exhausted so she sat down for a bit of a rest. In the woods of course.
Once she’d caught her breath she snuck out to the toolshed and grabbed a shovel and a crowbar before darting back into the woods and making her way for the old Salvatore estate which was another half hour walk. She was starving too, but that was a problem for later. She had to get this first. God she hated being so heavy and out of shape. That would be fixed soon enough though. Eye on the prize. She felt like she was about to keel over with a heart attack by the time she got down to the coffin, and took a minute to catch her breath again before using the crowbar to open it. She tried to ignore the remains as she grabbed the book and just let it fall closed again.
She considered whether to rebury the coffin or just leave it. On one hand, anyone who inspected would know it had been disturbed even if she reburied it. But the animals would be able to get to it if she didn’t and that could bring people to inspect when they might have otherwise not. Reburying it was then. After a long rest. She cracked the book open to look through it, looking for one spell in particular, but seeing what else was there. She would recopy the whole thing before she handed it over to whoever she decided to hand it over to, but for now she had nothing else to do while she was resting. Once she felt like she could move again, she headed for the creek nearby. She had grabbed some water from the quarry but she needed more after all that sweating and exertion.
She got lucky enough to find some berry bushes that were ripe on the way so she got a little food on her stomach too and plenty of water from the shallow creek. By the time she got the coffin reburied it was nightfall and she could move on to step two. She returned the borrowed shovel and crowbar and headed for the nearest main road and started thumbing a ride. If she could just get as far as the next town, she could find a store to steal some necessities from. The problem was that the book was so big and rather suspicious looking. It took a little while for someone to stop and she managed to hide the nature of the book by keeping it hugged against her for the twenty minute ride into the next town. Which ended up being a city. Probably the city they’d often talked about in the show. She thanked the person for the ride and started looking around for something like a Dollar General that she had back home.
She was no stranger to shoplifting, having made something of a habit of it in her teens, so she knew the best ways to avoid attention. Even carrying a giant book like she was. It helped that she’d always been good at being unnoticed. She slipped in with the after dinner crowd and first made her way to find a bag. She chose a messenger back as the least conspicuous and avoided the camera as she pulled the tags off and threw it over her shoulder, placing the book inside and walking around as though she’d had it all along. As long as she didn’t act suspicious, no one would be suspicious. As she walked around, she tossed a couple notebooks and a pack of pens in the bag before making her way for food.
It was harder to find an unobserved spot in that section but that was okay. She would only need food for a couple days at most and it wasn’t like she was worried about being healthy or anything, so she just went for the poptarts. She pulled a box off the shelf and made it look like she was reading the information on it while she worked it open and slipped two of the four packets into her bag and put the box back. She did that two more times and then grabbed a bottle of water as well before taking a bathroom trip, like that was the main reason she’d come in and making her way nonchalantly out of the store.
Now that she had that covered she could see about finding a way to Baltimore. Her best option from here would be to find Slater. He knew everything and could connect anyone. She remembered the name of his café so getting directions once she got there shouldn’t be too hard. A look at the clock though had her deciding to wait until morning. No way was she going to try and hitchhike alone in the middle of the night. Not until she was a vampire and could eat anyone who tried something at least. And she was more than a little exhausted anyway. Maybe she could even manage to sneak on a greyhound in the morning when it was busy enough for her to go unnoticed. In the meantime, she found an out of the way alley, had a packet of poptarts, finished her water, and went to sleep.