After the veil was put back up and Kol was back on The Other Side, Myriam gathered her things and did as Kol had wanted her to do; try to move on. Just like she had told Alaric. What better way was there than to hang out with Alaric?
She drove up to McKinley after finding out where he was and even though the campus was closed for the Summer, Ric had an apartment close by. She knocked on the door and funnily enough, the door opened and revealed a very stunned looking Alaric. “Myriam? What are you doing here?”
“Following my own advice to you?”
“You didn’t give me any advice,” he said confused.
“Right, because I compelled you to leave and move on… right…” she sighed as she leaned against the door post. “Anyway, I needed to leave Mystic Falls after… everything. For all I care that entire town gets swallowed up by the Earth. I can’t join Klaus in New Orleans because… ah well. So I decided to come here.”
“And what’s your plan? Enrol in college?” Ric let out a chuckle. “Have you even been to school in the last 300 years?”
“No… but there must be something else I can do? Break legs? Make people run? Smack heads on the table? Ohhh, I could be like you! And be a teacher!”
“And what do you think you could be teaching? You said it yourself; you’ve never gone to school!”
“I run a successful business, Ric.”
“There’s already a teacher teaching economics and math.”
“Well…” she thought for a moment. “I know about demons and how they operate and how to control them as a demonologist… I know Voodoo… and I think I remember some magic from when I was a witch.”
“Not going to happen, either. I’m the Occult teacher at this college.” Ric could see that Myriam was trying hard, but she was a vampire, and the last thing he’d heard from Damon that she had been off the rails. Not quite as much as Elena, but she was unstable. “What do you truly want, Myriam?” He wasn’t going to invite her into his apartment just yet, although he believed that she wouldn’t do anything to harm him because he’d never hurt her. “What do you need?”
She looked at him then before huffing. “Forget it,” she said as she turned to walk away, but he grabbed her arm and pulled her back. “Let me go.”
“No. Tell me what you need, and I’ll help you. That’s the least that I can do for you after you saved my ass… twice.”
“I don’t need anything,” Myriam countered. “Forget it. I thought I’d… I don’t know. I’ll find it somewhere else.”
Alaric could see the defeated look on the newly Original Vampire, and that was sad, really. Pathetic, that too. “You need someone to talk to? Talk about Kol?”
“Don’t.”
“What do you want, Myriam?”
“I want a purpose!” she eventually blurted. “I want a purpose, and I want to get rid of the way that I’m feeling, like… extremely on edge and willing to kill just about anyone to make me feel better for a couple of minutes. Because everything’s been so unfair!” Myriam then started to cry. “Nobody wants me anymore apart from my husband, and I can’t go to him feeling like this!”
“Okay,” Ric said as he put an arm around her and smiled. “Come in, I’ll help you.”
How on Earth was he going to help a 300-year-old vampire who recently became an Original? Sure, he knew how to deal with grief, but the way that Myriam was expressing her sadness was completely different than he had done. She opted for the revenge route because that’s what supernatural beings did and could, he had launched himself into becoming a vampire hunter instead.
She was right, she needed a purpose. But for now, she needed a shoulder to cry on. And that’s what she did. Two days straight. And Alaric felt uncomfortable. So when Myriam had finally gone down for a nap, he called Damon.
“Ric! How’s college treating you, buddy?”
“It’s the Summer holiday, and I know I promised I’d come and help you look for Stefan but…”
“Why are you whispering?”
“I have my hands full at the moment, and I could use your help.”
“My help?”
He ran a hand through his hair and sighed. “I discovered that one of my students is a vampire. She has been for quite some time, and a couple of months ago she and her family had a run in with one of the Five.”
“Okay?”
“Her parents died, and she has been having difficulties with dealing with their grief.”
“Easy. Kill her if she’s a pain in the ass.”
“Damon, come on.”
“I don’t know! Tell her to get on with it or whatever! Grief is a part of life. Parents die. It’s life. Hey, did you know? Bonnie resurrected Jeremy.”
“Yeah, you told me. That’s great. Okay, thanks for nothing buddy, I guess I’ll try to fix her.”
“Good luck. Don’t get yourself killed. And if you want me to kill her, just let me know.”
Ric hung up and grabbed his laptop. Granted, Myriam had wanted a purpose, she had told him so herself, but what could she do? He wasn’t sure if Myriam was ready to be released into the world, roam the campus by herself. Myriam wasn’t the collected vampire that she was previous to Kol’s death and her husband’s somewhat negligence. She had done everything for Klaus for years, and now that her mission was complete, she didn’t have anything to do anymore.
It was sad to see her having given up. She was better than this, and he knew this, not because of what he had seen of her so far, but because he had felt it when she and her demons cleansed him from his dark self. He wasn’t sure if she’d been aware of it, but he certainly was. And she was a beautiful person. And she needed help.
Rules. She needed rules. Restrictions. Parenting.
But first, he needed sleep. Seeing as she was in his bed, he took the couch.
~o.O.o~
The rules were simple enough. Myriam understood that if Ric was going to help her out, she’d have to follow his rules. Which was fine. No feeding on humans. They were going to keep the apartment clean together; that included using the vacuum cleaner and doing dishes. Laundry. She wasn’t to use her vampire strength or speed, and she had to keep a journal where she’d write her thoughts and feelings in. Alaric was going to print out multiple things for her to write about in her journal every day.
And over the summer she was getting better. There was progress, but slowly and occasionally they took day trips with just the two of them. Antique book markets for books on the occult or to food truck festivals to gorge on food. Myriam ordered high-end bourbon for her and Ric to drink.
They did research to set up the curriculum for the next school year, and then Ric had a brainfart. “Why won’t you become my TA for a while?”
“Your what?”
“Teacher’s assistant. You help me set up lessons, you enforce school rules, help students with their work, or with problems they might have. You help me with keeping attendance and grading.”
“Sounds boring.”
“Or would you like me to enrol you in college as a student instead?”
Myriam opened her mouth to object before closing it again.
“You came to me for help, Myriam. I don’t want you to be alone, and I think that you’ll like the work,” Ric smiled at her. “You love helping people when they deserve it. What better way to help me teach young, impressionable people?”
“I help people. That’s how I started my business. We now help humans who were hurt by the Supernatural.”
“But you haven’t run that business for at least 100 years,” Alaric pointed out. “You haven’t actually properly interacted with humans for a long period of time other than making sure that people behaved like cattle for Klaus and breaking his curse. Most of your interaction has been with vampires. You can learn with the kids.”
“But…”
“I trust you not to do anything stupid,” Ric laughed. “Come on, it’s going to be fun!”
“Fiiine,” she sighed as she drank from her blood bag. “But if something goes wrong, it’s on you.”
“Nothing will go wrong, I trust you.”
~o.O.o~
“Myriam, wake up,” Alaric knocked on her door. During the summer Alaric and Myriam had cleaned out his spare room and created a space for Myriam with a bed and a fridge and just a place to retreat to so they wouldn’t be on each other’s lip all the time.
“What?” Myriam opened the door and looked at him as she cleaned her mouth from dripping blood.
“Were you out last night?”
“You’d know if I was but why do you ask?”
“A student got murdered during a party last night. Elena and Caroline were witnesses, and they saw that their friend was killed by a vampire.”
“And you think it’s me?” Myriam raised an eyebrow. “And here I thought you trusted me.”
“Apart from Caroline and Elena, you’re the only vampire on campus.”
“That you know of,” Myriam huffed. “It wasn’t me! And I’m not going to help you find out who it was, either. You want me to live as a human, right? I’m not going to walk head first in danger. What do the police say?”
“That it was a suicide.”
“Ah, cover-up.”
“Exactly. Are you sure you don’t want to investigate this?”
“I’m sure.”
“Okay, good, get dressed, freshen yourself up, we have class in 30 minutes.”
“What!”
“Chop chop, Myriam, can’t be late for your first class!”
The teacher’s lounge was quite something. While you had the serious and old professors, the younger ones just hung out and were on their phones or on their laptops. Alaric was happily chatting away with Dr Max Westfield. Oh, he made sure you called him doctor instead of Max because ‘all those years of med school would be wasted’ if he wasn’t called Doctor.
Such a prick. Myriam didn’t like him. Especially when she overheard Max talk to Alaric about Greyson Gilbert, Elena’s father, who apparently taught a few classes at Whitmore College back in the day. It made sense because Greyson had been a doctor, but with him being a Gilbert it likely meant bad news, so despite her not wanting to do anything outside of what Alaric wanted her to do, she wanted to do her research for this one.
Gilberts were nuisances.
Over the next few days, she managed to piece together enough information about Greyson’s time at Whitmore College and why Dr. Westfield was so in awe of him, a fanboy. Rumour was that both Westfield and Gilbert had been a member of a secret society called The Augustine Society and they used to perform experiments on vampires back in the day.
However, she wasn’t so sure that it was all ‘back in the day’, seeing as Megan was killed by a vampire and Max Westfield had signed the death certificate, ruling it a suicide. It was obvious that he was hiding something.
She went back to Mystic Falls, with Alaric, for Remembrance Day. She wanted to ring the bell for Kol. Remembering him. For Zak. But she did it in the early hours of the morning, wanting to avoid the Scoobies as she’d likely rip everyone’s throat out. Alaric stayed behind to experience the rest of the day and Myriam went back to Whitmore College.
She did surprisingly well if she had to say so herself. The knot in her stomach when thinking about Kol got less and less each day, and she tried to remember the good times she had had with him instead of the pain of his loss. When she got back to the apartment, she wrote in her daily journal to distract herself.
She had to admit that doing work for Alaric every day, every week, had appeared mind-numbing but she actually appreciated it. Myriam liked helping him prepare for classes and do the research along with him, she loved helping students out when they’d come to her for help – even though at the beginning she wanted to snap their little necks for disturbing her peace.
But what Myriam had learned, these kids were stupid, but they weren’t as stupid as most of the Mystic Falls gang. These youngsters used their brain and partied. Did stupid stuff, sure, but once and then never again.
It was the end of September when Myriam was sitting in the park near the college with her journal and a large cappuccino to enjoy when Katerina sat down next to her. Myriam knew she wasn’t Elena because she smelled like a human and she was told that Elena had shoved the cure down Katerina’s throat. “You’ve got some nerve,” Myriam mumbled as she closed her journal and looked at the former vampire. “What do you want?”
“Since becoming human, my priorities have… shifted. And Silas drained me from my blood, and I’m dying.”
“Not my problem.”
“No, I know, and I’m not here to talk about Silas,” Katerina sighed. “Believe me, I don’t want to tell you this but you’ve been through enough crap as it is, and truthfully, nobody but Alaric has been nice to you lately so… I want to make amends and be nice to you.”
Myriam blinked then, deciding to wait for what was going to happen next. “Alright,” she replied as she put her journal into her bag. “What do you want?”
“I know you’ve been digging into Greyson Gilbert and Dr Wes’ infatuation with him,” Katerina replied. “So has Elena. Little twerp nearly got herself killed to prove that she wasn’t a vampire. Thing is, Wes is a member of a secret society here on Campus. The Augustine Society.”
“I gathered that, but all campuses have a society, secret or not.”
“The reason why it’s secret is that they’re doing research into vampires. Actual scientific research. They have an Augustine Vampire who does their bidding, and right now Dr Wes has a student there who was healed by Elena and now turned into a vampire.”
“That’s sick!”
Katerina nodded and sighed. “I made a deal with Wes. He checks out my blood and sees if he can stop the deterioration of my body and I…” Katherine watched as the Augustine Vampire snapped Myriam’s neck and lifted her from her spot and hoisted her off. “I told him I’d get him a vampire.”
~o.O.o~
She came to in a cellar and Wes was standing over her with a syringe. “Wes, what are you doing?”
“I didn’t know you were a vampire, Myriam,” Wes sighed as he squatted down and injected her. It felt like vervain. “But, I suppose that’s alright, it’s been a while since we’ve had female test subjects. And I’m giving you just enough vervain to keep you sedated. Don’t worry, Katherine told me about your trick of drinking vervain every day, so you’re getting a bigger dose until that’s out of your system.”
“I’m gonna kill you,” she sighed and closed her eyes. “And her.”
“Well, then it’s a good thing that you can’t do anything in your cell,” Wes happily replied as he drew some blood from Myriam. “I’ve started something with Jesse. And I think that I’m so close to eradicating all the vampires… I think I’ll experiment on you first before giving it to our loyal vampire next door.” He pushed her hair out of her face. “And don’t worry, you’ll regain some movement in your limbs shortly.”
“You have no idea who you’re dealing with,” Myriam said weakly. “They will come for me.”
“Who?” Wes let out a chuckle. “Katherine told me you didn’t have any friends left. That you alienated them all. No one’s coming for you, Myriam, not even Alaric. But it’s a good thing you’re here. You see, Elena was taken from me as my patient, and I was about to do something spectacular to her, so I suppose you’ll take her place. Tomorrow.”
“Idiot,” she groaned as he injected her with vervain again and some very strong sedative.
The next day she found herself strapped to a table with every safety measure in place, she couldn’t free herself as she’d usually do and she was shot up with vervain. She was hooked up to some machine that was draining her of her blood, and she didn’t understand what was going on. “Stop.”
“Almost done,” Wes chirped. “I’m surprised you’re actually coming to instead of you know, passing out. Or continued to be unconscious. In the past, vampires have passed out for less,” he said as he kept looking at his notes and his machine. “You’re doing great, Myriam. You really are.”
“What you doing?”
“Hopefully I’m going to make you stronger than you are now and give you a different diet. No idea if it’s going to work, of course, but everything for science.”
She tried getting out of her bonds again. “Stop.”
“You’re in no position to make demands,” he said as he frowned. “How is it that you’re appearing to make more blood still? I can’t seem to drain you dry!”
Myriam sucked in a breath when Wes merely made a bigger opening for her blood to flow away quicker, and he even wedged something into the wound to keep it open. He gave her more sedative, and she passed out again before being awoken by the sensation of someone shaking her awake.
“Come on, love,” Klaus said as he shook her. “Wake up.”
“Klaus?” she opened her eyes and had trouble focussing for a moment, but she was indeed looking at her husband. “What are you-” she felt better. A lot better. “How?”
“Alaric called me, asking if you’d snuck off and had come home,” he helped her sit up and kissed the top of her head. “I moved heaven and earth to find you.”
“Did you kill him?”
“Kill who?”
“Wes?”
“Sadly, no,” Klaus shook his head. “He ran the moment we kicked in the door, and I’m sorry darling, but you were so close to desiccation that you were my priority. We could go after the bastard later.”
“I think he did something to me.”
“Marcel, grab everything you and your vampires can carry,” Klaus ordered him as he lifted Myriam off the table. After having fed her his blood, she seemed to be pinking up quite quickly. “Myriam’s coming home.”
“My bag. Did you find my bag?”
“Love, it’s not important.”
“My bag, Klaus,” she insisted as she managed to look at Marcel who was holding up her bag. “Yes. Thank you.”
“Alright, let’s get you home, there’s a car waiting out front.”
“Why? Ric’s apartment is close.”
“You’re not going back to Alaric’s, sweetheart,” Klaus said kindly. “He’s the one who called me after you went missing, and he also told me you’re ready to come home.”
“No!” she said as she tried to get out of Klaus’ arms. “I can’t! What about the students! I need to stay here and help them! And Ric! You can’t take me away.”
Marcel let out a chuckle. “Well, she certainly has pinked up.”
“I can’t go, Klaus. We need to stay.”
“You have no obligation to stay, love, you’re coming home with me,” Klaus said as he struggled to hold the weakened vampire. “Marcel, make sure you get the notebooks.”
Myriam briefly gave up trying to get out of Klaus’ arms. “I’m hungry.”
“Come with me to the car and let’s get you home,” he said again and finally managed to get her out of the building and into the waiting car. “You’re safe now.”
Myriam snuggled up against him as they sat down in the car and Myriam closed her eyes. “He did something to me, I feel strange.”
“You’ve been through a lot, of course, you feel strange.”
“Why me? First, your mom and now this and… will Alaric be safe?”
“He’s not a vampire, I’m sure he’s safe.”
“Because he can teach in New Orleans too. We need to keep him safe.”
Klaus toyed with her hair before kissing the top of her head. “Rest, love.”
She sighed. “I rang the bell for Kol on Remembrance Day.”
“I think he’d appreciate that.”
Her eyes shot open when Marcel entered the car with a few notebooks in his arms. “Alright, we’re done. They’ll meet us back in New Orleans, Klaus,” Marcel reported before he looked at Myriam. “I know you don’t like me, but stop looking at me like that.”
“Shut up,” Myriam growled at him as she put her arms around Klaus tighter. “I’ll rip your heart out.”
“You’ll do nothing of the sort. Alaric said you were doing better, what made you go to him?” Klaus asked to distract her. She had never told him the reason why she had gone to him in the first place. It had been an odd decision in his mind.
“Kol told me to do the same thing I told Alaric to do,” she sighed. “So I went to Alaric. And he helped me. And he’s a great friend, I don’t want to go to New Orleans yet.”
Klaus wasn’t surprised that Kol had somehow managed to give Myriam a message from the Other Side in her grief. “You’re going. You can visit Alaric in a while.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
Myriam sighed as she looked at Marcel again. Narrowing her eyes as they were driving towards New Orleans. She cocked her head, not understanding this hunger, this rage towards another vampire. It felt as if she was a young vampire drawn to human blood. “What did he do to me?”
“Well, that’s what we hope to find out in these books.”
“Start reading, Marcel,” she growled at him.
Marcel blinked as he scratched his head. “Uhh, Klaus? Not because I’m afraid of her or anything but uh, she’s never been openly hostile to me like this.”
“She’s been through a lot, Marcellus, leave her be.”
“Why are we in a car?” Myriam looked up to Klaus. “We’re going home?”
“We’re going to the airport, love,” he smiled at her. “Now rest.”
“Stop telling me to rest. I’m hungry!”
“You’ll get a stewardess on the plane,” Klaus sighed. “You’re trying my patience, love.”
“Fuck you.”
“Gladly.”
She sat up and grabbed her bag, hugging it as they drove to the airport. She could feel something itching underneath her skin, almost as if she’d taken drugs – well, it was likely that she was shot up with something a few times because she remembered being awake when her blood was pumped out of her body, but she didn’t feel right.
Myriam hurried into the waiting plane and quickly found herself a spot to write in her journal like Alaric had told her to. Whenever she was feeling off, she had to write it down to figure out what was going on. Maybe she could figure it out on her own. But wow, she was hungry. And there was so much rage that she wasn’t sure if she wasn’t going to hurt Klaus.
An hour after the plane had taken off, Myriam started to pace, clawing at her arms as she tried to calm down. “Did you find anything yet?”
“It’s all medical crap,” Marcel replied with a sigh. “We’ll have to find someone to look at it.”
“Not good enough!” Myriam shot at him.
“Easy, it’s the best we can do right now.”
Both Klaus and Marcel had left her alone during the last hour as she had looked so distraught, but right now she was acting like a caged animal trying to control herself. “Try harder!” Her vampire face briefly came to the surface, and Marcel paled.
“Uh, Klaus? When she turned into an Original, did her game face change or something?”
“Of course not.”
“Because she didn’t look right.”
“Shut up, Marcel or I swear I am going to rip your head off your shoulders and shove it up your ass,” Myriam ran towards him, smacking his head against the fuselage and couldn’t help herself while she violently bit his neck and drank from him. Any attempts from Klaus trying to pull her off of his lieutenant caused Myriam to grab Marcel tighter, and the feeding was becoming even more of a bloody frenzy.
When she was done, she dropped Marcel’s mangled and desiccated body and wiped her mouth before she realised what she had just done; she had fed on a vampire and felt satiated. “I-I didn’t mean to but… he was annoying, and I was so angry and hungry…”
Klaus was quiet for a moment to process what he had just witnessed. Ripper behaviour. Vampire on vampire. “We still have three hours to go before we land,” he said calmly, but worry etched on his face.
“I’m good, Klaus,” Myriam said as she stepped over Marcel’s body and sat down next to him. “I’m full, I’m feeling fine.”
“But for how long? I can’t have you eat all my vampires! What if you decide to take a bite out of Rebekah? Or me?”
“Well, you would live.”
Klaus rolled his eyes. “We’ll figure out what’s been done to you and we shall find a cure. I promise.”
“But I’m fine!”
“You just fed on and killed a vampire! That is not fine, and you know it!”
“I didn’t like him anyway.”
“That’s not a good enough reason,” Klaus argued.
“I couldn’t help myself, Klaus,” she shot at him. “I’m fine now. I’ll be fine. Don’t worry, I won’t take a bite out of you.”
“Sweetheart, this is serious.”
“I’m not denying that.”
“Do I have your permission to snap your neck if things get too out of hand?”
“Yeah, sure,” she sighed as she reached for the wine. “And you’re going to get a scientist or a doctor to take a look at that, right?”
“Yes. Don’t worry, love, we’ll fix this.”
“And then kill Wes?”
“Of course.”
