Forever Original | Alaric Saltzman

Chapter 66

March 17, 2017

There always came a time of unrest.

The past three years had been fairly uncomplicated, though lying in a state of wait definitely put a damper on several moments throughout.

After the chaotic visit of Alaric's parents, he had started work officially, and time seemed to move incredibly fast. The months had gone on, and Hilda felt like she was being supersped through each year every moment she blinked. Though their cycle was fairly repetitive, it didn't mean it went any slower.

Hilda had remained a stay-at-home mom, often consulting Hayley, Caroline, and Bonnie for advice. She got to see only pictures of Hope as she grew, and when she wasn't alongside her daughters, she was on her laptop contacting anyone and everyone she could for information about the seven wolf packs, since Valerie Tulle had agreed to siphon Rebekah's curse off of her. At the very least, Rebekah was cured, and Hilda was working on an antidote for Freya, but they weren't close to finding a way to save Elijah and Kol. The original bloodlines were scarce, and finding a pure wolf to supply venom seemed impossible.

Yet, in the midst of yearning for her siblings, Hilda got to see her daughters grow up.

Every moment fascinated her. They began to talk and walk fairly early on in their lives. They giggled and said the silliest things to get Hilda and Alaric to pay attention to them. They were well behaved, for the most part, and their favorite time of the day was in the evening when Alaric got home and they got to eat dinner in the outer patio, under the sunset. They had conversations with each other without even talking, and it reminded Hilda of herself and Kol, when they were younger. They did everything together and perhaps the most interesting thing was that when they knew they did something wrong, they took the blame for each other even though it was clearly a team effort.

They were curious about everything. Since it was unsafe for Hilda to go out into the town, she was homeschooling them, and they were learning very quickly, which meant their progress brought along questions that sometimes, she couldn't answer right away.

Every time Caroline and Stefan stopped by, they bombarded them with inquiries about their lives. They knew about vampires and they weren't even remotely scared, they were just intrigued by the fact that they were so nice. To them, vampires were just friendly people with no heartbeats to listen to through their toy stethoscope.

They loved to call their Aunt Hayley so they could chat with Hope, who was much happier now that the twins could talk with her. Hope was fairly shy, but it was easy for a conversation to be carried out because the twins had many potential discussion topics, and it excited them more to know that Hope could do magic (though they knew they weren't supposed to tell people).

They were introduced to magic early on by Bonnie and Valerie, who were helping Hilda walk the twins through an explanation of how they would come to use their powers, because they wanted to ensure that they didn't accidentally break anything when they first started trying out their abilities.

"Like this," said Valerie, taking Hilda's hand and siphoning a bit, which made the Original wince. "What you need to note, girls, is that when you concentrate on taking magic from somewhere else, you can hurt the person you do it to. Your Aunt Bonnie and I are going to try and find a way for you to practice this without hurting your Mama, alright?"

The twins nodded, and Hilda knelt in front of them, taking their hands. "My darlings," she said gently, "we tell you this because we want you to understand that you were born with a gift. Your Aunt Valerie is going to teach you how to use it, and maybe you'll get to see her friends Nora and Mary Louise, too, when it's safe for them to come back here. We want you to learn about siphoning so that you can use your powers without hurting yourselves or others."