No one else ever talks about the fact that to take Mikael down, Abby not only lost access to her magic but she had to stop a human heart to stop his (it’s what she tells Bonnie she had to do to take down Klaus in the same way!) It’s my headcanon that her magic “stopped” because of her guilt over this— but it wasn’t enough for her to not save Elena anyway. On one hand, I’d love to say she used Grayson and brought him back. On the other— Grayson’s sacrifice of giving himself up to save Elena in the lake was very poignant and I like that as his first & final sacrifice. So the other option is that they had to kill someone else, and they took it to their graves.
This is what I’ve been screaming about!!!!! I’ve always assumed that whatever they did to stop Mikael was so fundamentally awful that Abigail walked away believing she didn’t deserve either her magic or her daughter. And that’s why—while I make jokes about her lesbianing so hard with Miranda that she abandoned Bonnie and became a deadbeat mom—I actually think Abby probably had a real reason she felt like she had to leave.
We know how far Grayson is willing to go for strangers. His torture of Enzo is partly about using vampiric blood to heal patients under his care. (Side note: I’ve always wondered if Meredith learned what he was doing either as a resident under him, or through something he wrote. At my hospital, our medical librarian keeps a collection of provider journals that other staff can read for insight into hospital culture or research.) So if Grayson is capable of that for people he barely knows… what would he be willing to do for his daughter? A lot, I imagine.
I don’t buy that “stopping Grayson’s heart and bringing him back” alone would be the thing that sent Abby running. Why would it? Grayson would see that as a worthy sacrifice even if he didn’t come back… I think there’s a pretty constant theme in TVD that the previous generation tends to handle problems in the most painful way possible. But I also don’t think Abby and Grayson necessarily recognized that there was a work around—bringing them back—that would still work. Abby doesn’t really strike me as the kind of out-of-the-box thinker that Bonnie was forced to become. If the cost for Nature to put an Original down is that a human dies… well, it wouldn’t be balance if you brought them back. (That’s where they differ from their kids—Abby wasn’t forced to adapt like Bonnie was and Grayson is crueler than Elena could ever dream of being.)
And I don’t believe there’s any spell written down anywhere that says, like, “you can put down an Original by stopping someone’s heart.” What Abby is describing feels less like a codified spell and more like improvised, desperate magic. And it can’t be public knowledge. Because if “kill a random person to put down an Original” and a tiny bloodlink and some minor human sacrifice was all it took, you’re telling me the New Orleans witches wouldn’t have done it a thousand times over? They’d be dropping Originals and Marcel like it was a community service project.
Honestly, I don’t think the key is “a heart stopped.” I think the key is whose heart it was.
I have a very messy headcanon about this—about why Sheila never speaks about Abby, why Abby (all things considered) seems to understand the kind of choice that gets made when mortality is on the line, and why Lucy (despite being related to Sheila) is never mentioned by her and never comes back to Mystic Falls.
Sacrificial magic (the truly powerful kind) in TVD doesn’t just run on blood. It runs on love—on that horrible nexus of devotion and desperation. Papa Tunde draws power from his sons. Emily’s ability to circumvent death in the two Gilbert rings was borne from her love for Johnathan. The entire Gemini coven death cult. Whatever devil Qetsiyah probably sold her soul to be able to create the Other Side on Amara’s back to keep Silas from ever escaping her. Esther’s vampire spell is partly propelled forward by the fact that she does love her children, even if she’s also the architect of their suffering.
Bonnie stops Jeremy’s heart to do it—and I think it would be so delicious if it was about killing someone you loved as much as you hated the vampire you were trying to put down.
So whatever Abby did had to be personal. It had to be a love-driven betrayal. It had to be the kind of magic that stains you permanently—something so terrible she couldn’t crawl back from it, something that made the dead Bennetts look at her and go: you don’t get to call yourself one of us anymore.
I think they might’ve killed another Bennett (probably someone from Lucy’s line) to make it happen.
