Note: I do not own TVD or any of its affiliates.
This is just a short drabble inspired by the recent Kol appearance in TVD. I might do some more drabbles if the urge strikes me. If you have any specific requests, please leave a review! And of course tell me what you think!
"It's Good To Be Seen." – Kol Mikaelson
[Lenny Kravitz - Again]
She was nothing special. She was nothing pretty. She was nothing different.
She was just like the rest of dark figures looming about the Other Side. She hung her head in the same way, melancholy with isolation. These people, used to being alone in the darkness, have stopped bothering to look up to find the sun. The rays brought no warmth to their face and no hope to their eyes. But for this short time, he saw a glimmer.
It wasn't easy and uncomfortable at best. How had he put it to the Quarterback? That's right, it was all topsy turvy over here. That was putting it lightly, he had witnessed several other of these figures being pulled away into the darkness. For some reason, the others barely flinched or responded to their screams. How long had they been in this darkness that human agony didn't bother them? Admittedly, he was a far cry from a Saint and it secretly made him nervous he would go sooner than others, but even he had to turn a head when he heard those screams. Those desperate cries for anyone to see them, to help them.
But yet, he was just as helpless as the rest. Maybe that was reason they didn't bother looking up. They couldn't bear to face their own disappointment and failure.
They hung their heads instead, they chose to pretend they could not hear. They shuffled their feet slowly as they moved, more a sway than a waltz. There was no rush because time didn't matter anymore. He had enjoyed being immortal, but this was agony. There was no point to anything. It didn't matter if you moved quickly or slowly, no one would hear you. No one would see it. Everything ceased to matter, leaving him with nothing.
It was because of that he noticed her. When he was alive with his arrogance beating as steady as the blood in his veins and his attention moving just as quickly, he would've dismissed her. Just another non-descript, non-inspiring face of a crowd. But now, she was alone with her back pressed against the tree.
She shivered. That was what caused him to stop. It wasn't because she was cold. She had a short waist black leather jacket over her shoulders. Her arms weren't exposed, but yet she had them wrapped tightly around herself and he could see the quake in them from a distance. Her jacket was torn and stained, the faint smell of smoke lingering on it. It wasn't the type of smoke that came from cigarettes, something much more striking and chemical. His passed down from her jacket to her legs and the skirt of a dress that hung out from underneath the jacket. The stockings were torn at the knees, dirt smudged into the meshing around them.
She looked terrible and her face didn't do much to improve his assumption. His eyes moved back up. Her hair was dark in the dismal lighting of this alternate plane. However, he could imagine it under normal light, in the sun, in the warmth. It was long and wispy, the type of hair that easily got caught in the breeze. From some reason, it faintly reminded him of Maine, standing on the shore of the ocean. He didn't think about it much, his eyes were drawn to her rose lips, which were twisted with a grimace. They quivered with the tears that wouldn't fall from her face.
She looked up eventually, sensing the stranger staring at him.
He was right, she definitely reminded him of the Atlantic. Her hazel eyes had the same hue as the faint breaking of white caps in the ocean. Those moments he had spent by the ocean was breathtaking. It was so easy to be memorized by the movement of the water, but forget the power behind it. To forget how violent and dangerous it actually was. It was something very much to be afraid and weary of, like the way she was looking at him.
"Can you see me?" Her voice was a whisper, carried gently across the breeze. A broken promise.
She stared at the stranger in the brown jacket with stunning pale features. His brow line was harsh, like his glare. His hair was tousled from either aggravation or stress, it was easy to see where the hands had been wrangle from it. Like her, he was worn down. He didn't bother smirking this time. He didn't bother with an arrogant comment. Time was endless and precarious here, like the others, he was afraid.
He just gave a short nod and moved forward to approach her. He took the question as an invitation, to be seen and heard again. His hands were stuffed casually into his pockets. She continued to stare at him blankly. The quiver in her lips stopped, but her shoulders didn't.
Looking at those eyes, he changed his mind. She reminded him more of Ipswich, not Maine. The grey hue of her eyes were piercing and biting, like the salty aroma and the bitter snap gusts brought to your cheeks in Ipswich. Maine had always been more warm and wholesome to him, less jaded than her.
"Where are we?" The snap was evident in her tone, even if she wasn't accusing.
"The Other Side," The faint smirk on his lips showed more out of habit than anything else.
A frown appeared in her brow line. Her lips had once been stained with red lipstick, now they were faded and chapped. "The Other Side?" She repeated dubiously, once again looking around at her imprisonment in confusion.
"Yes," He replied to her shortly. He cocked his head at her with curiosity to gauge her reaction. It made sense then. Her skittishness, alertness to everything, and now all her confusion brought him to the conclusion she was relatively new here.
"That's…" Her voice began uncertainly, and he just waited for it the typical response. That's ridiculous, that's absurd, that's impossible – you know, the usual.
"A rather stupid name," She mumbled more to herself than him.
A noiseless snort passed through him. Maybe it was just because he was tired and strained from everything else, but he grinned down at the ground. "It isn't very original, is it?" He quipped, the grinning growing even broader at his own choice of words.
The woman just gave him a short nod, her eyebrows flickering up briefly at his reaction. Quintessential denial, he concluded.
"What are you, sweetheart?" He asked of her, thinking it was safe to cross witch off the list because of her ignorance – leaving werewolf or vampire. It wasn't that he really cared much for the small talk, but finally his voice and his screams were being heard again since the veil had been down. It made the smallest of syllables seem monumental.
The woman's face scrunched up with irritation at the pet name. He was already calling her Miss Crane in his mind. That was what she reminded him of, a distance beach in Ipswich, Massachusetts. It was picturesque on the surface, but the sand was rough and the waves would cut you against the rocks.
"I don't know what you mean, but I'm not your sweetheart," Miss Crane replied sharply.
His fingers twitched in his pockets. They itched to wrap around her throat and remind her to show a little respect where it was due.
But he remembered, she clearly didn't have the faintest idea who she was talking to. And despite his encounters with the MFG, he didn't want to strangle every person he met.
"Fair enough, darling. Do you know how you got here?" He asked into, using the conversation to distract him from the previous one he had with the quarterback and what could happen to them at any point.
Her expression fell at the gentleness of his tone. There was still a hint of irritation in her eyes that he just ignored her and went with a different pet name.
"No," She admitted frankly. She didn't understand much of what happened to her.
"I remember," She recalled the blurred night that brought her to this mess. "Going to the party with my friend, Tiffany. It was just a normal Saturday outside of campus, at a frat house. I was going to drive home afterwards, I know I shouldn't have, but you know how it goes sometimes…" She gestured vaguely to her head and the lapse of judgment alcohol typically brought.
"I was walking to my car when this man grabbed me," Miss Crane frowned deeply, staring vaguely at the ground while she spoke. It was confusing still, she remembered, but only well after it happened for some reason. "And he pushed me against the car, he ripped my dress… I thought he was going to…" Her fingers fidgeted absently with the zipper of her jacket. He had a feeling it was closed for a reason.
This stranger speaking to her remained quiet while she spoke. He didn't seem sympathetic or particularly upset, he watched her behind a cold mask of indifference only colored by curiosity. It unnerved her, but finally someone was listening to her.
"Instead, he bit me," She spat out with dumbfounded distaste. She gestured the bite motion to her neck. "It hurt so much, it really stung. He literally bit into my neck, I mean… Who does that?" Her expression morphed with disgust.
"A vampire would," He replied to her with that faint smirk. That smirk must be his thing, she thought.
His words caused her to stop and look at him with clarity again. He heard a faint snort. "Right, sure," Her tone was dry with dismissing disbelief.
He just shrugged his shoulders casually. If she didn't want to believe him, it wasn't his job to tutor her.
"Anyway," She moved on, shaking her head. "I don't know what happened to him," She admitted. One moment it seemed like she was being attack and the next she was stumbling back into the house to find Tiffany. "I found Tiffany and we decided to get out of there… I didn't tell her about the bite, because it was just gone…" She didn't understand how it could be possible, it seemed like such a vivid memory. "I just got in the car and just wanted to go home."
While he was hearing a story about a lost and frightened girl being traumatized, all he heard was the sound of a vampire snatching a drink, feeding her some blood from the sounds of it and erasing her memory.
"I was so dizzy," Miss Crane recollected the night and the glare of lights. Some were red, green, and a blinding white. "The lights… I don't know, I just – hit a tree," She didn't know what point she swerved off the road, truthfully. She didn't know that she was going much too fast. She just heard Tiffany's screams and felt the force of the impact. "I remember the sound of the wood splintering, the awful crack it made before the tree fell on top of my car."
"When I woke up," Miss Crane's voice cracked just thinking about it. The tears were so close, but they wouldn't fall. Maybe she ran out of them to shed. "Everything was red, there was so much blood," Her bottom lip quivered again. It had been on the windshield, permeating into the cracks of the glass. It was across the dashboard. It was smeared across her hands, the right side of her body, from the passenger's seat. "Tiffany's blood was everywhere."
She remembered the horror of feeling her friends blood splattered across her body, on her hands, her arms, her shoulders, even her chest and her mouth down to her chin. It wasn't nearly as nauseating as looking over and seeing her friend crumbled beneath the collapse tree trunk. Only fragments of skull bones and matted dark hair was distinguishable amongst the sticky and clotting blood.
"I called 911 and waited for them to come help me," Miss Crane continued, recovering a little bit of her composure. "The driver door had collapsed on my hip and I couldn't get out anyway," Truthfully, she felt too ill and disorientated to do anything but wait when the operator promised her they would be there soon and she wouldn't alone.
The man before her now didn't have the heart to point that she likely had the strength to get out, but she just didn't know it.
"I remember sitting there, leaning against the steering wheel – waiting for help – when the sun came up," Her voice fell to a soft whisper. The harshness of the man's expression fell as well, realization dawning like her death.
"It was so bright, so beautiful," She had never seen it so magnificent than before. It seemed like there were colors to the rays she had never seen before. "So warm," She murmured, "And then all I felt was pain." White-flashing hot pain.
He could imagine her awe, newborn with heightened senses. Right before it was filled with screams, cowing from the light. He could imagine the blisters on her skin, followed by the red, burning before she herself caught afire – to be left in ashes before the police even arrived.
It humbled him to think about it. This wasn't the first time the thought occurred to him, but it was the first time it ever had a name, a face, or became a person to him. He wondered how many ordinary people, like her, had been unexpectedly turned. How many had been abandoned from the beginning with no explanation – whether intentionally or by accident. How many had burned in the sun for sins they did not commit.
"What happened after that?" He asked of her. He didn't count how long it took him to say that. Time was different here.
He had been silent for so long, she almost forgot he was still standing there. "I woke up here," She shrugged her shoulders vaguely. "No matter how much I yelled and screamed, the police walked through me. They didn't notice me. They said I was missing," She explained, feeling the frustration of being ignored by everyone. Because of her call to 911 and the fact the police found nothing when they arrived, they thought she had been abducted.
"I couldn't hug my own father or mother when they buried me," She pressed her lips together defiantly, to keep them from quivering this time. There wasn't even a body in the casket to bury. "It didn't matter, they couldn't hear me – I just wanted someone to hear me," She didn't know how long she had been on this Other Side now. If someone could hear her, she wouldn't be alone then.
"I can hear you," The man pointed out softly.
Despite herself, a small grin tugged on her lips at that right. He was right.
Finally, at last, someone could hear her.
His lips mirrored her grin. He decided he liked that small grin on her face. She had pronounced, shapely dimples on her cheeks. Who knew? This grin suited her much more than the anguish he witnessed before.
"What's your name, darling?" He asked before he thought better of it.
However, the question caused the grin to disappear immediately. "Don't do that," She warned harshly.
The breeze of Miss Crane was bitter, refreshing and chilling.
"Do what?" He deadpanned, somewhere between confused and offended by her reaction.
"This," She waved a hand between them. "You're a face," She explained. A rather handsome, easy on the eyes face, she thought to her herself. "And a voice," His accent wasn't one that she was used to hearing, but pleasant. "But as soon as you tell me a name, then you become a person," She said. He wouldn't be a ghost, but an actual being in her mind. He would be human.
"Another person that I'll miss when you're gone." It didn't matter if she liked him or not, but she would long for simple human interaction. "And you'll miss me when I'm gone, but I'm tired of being mourned and missed." She was so exhausted from watching her loved ones cry and yearn for her. She was right beside them, but they couldn't feel her. She wanted to tell her friends that she was okay, she was fine. They didn't need to be scared.
"I don't want to be missed, I want to be seen," Miss Crane pleaded genuinely. It didn't matter by whom or what. His face and voice provided that for the first time since her entrapment, it was a simply beautiful gift. She couldn't ask for more.
He nodded numbly at her, but didn't anything. He didn't have it in him to stop her when she wrapped her arms around her frame and walked away from him. Her shoulders weren't shaking, but she was looking up – towards the sky.
She had what he did not – those who mourned and missed her. There was one thing he could agree with her though; it was good to be seen.