AN: So these are my entries for the Elena Gilbert Challenge Week on tumblr, they're all posted on my tumblr, but I thought you folks might like to read them too:)


Day 1: Elena + Death

With Ice Cold Hands

Elena learns about death the hard way. When she's sixteen years old she sits in a car at the bottom of a lake and contemplates the end. She reaches out for her daddy's hand, and lets herself slip into oblivion. She's sixteen, and she's ready to die. But instead she wakes up in a hospital bed, and she's never felt more alone in her life.

There's a gnawing pit in her stomach that whispers to her every second of every day. Every time she inhales, every time she exhales. When she blinks, when she moves, when she stands in front of her bedroom mirror and runs a brush through her hair. This is your fault, you should be dead, why are you here, you should've died with them, you were supposed to die, why are you here, just lie down and die already, die. You can do it, just die.

She carries the pit around with her, and it keeps getting bigger. She adds guilt like adding bricks to a half finished brick wall, one at a time, and carefully, so it sticks. Sometimes she's happy, but that only makes her feel guiltier, she's losing everything she has to death and the pit in her stomach. She's losing everything she is, and everyone she loves.

When she's seventeen years old she stands in a ring of fire, staring down a man with vicious blue eyes and she accepts the end, but she doesn't go down without a fight. She doesn't have her father's hand to hold, she only has Jenna's desiccated corpse, so she levels him with a glare full of hatred and fire. "Go to hell," she spits. But she still lets him wrap her arms around her, lets him move her hair from her neck, and sink his teeth into her flesh. She will be the sacrifice. She's seventeen, and she's ready to die. But instead she wakes up on a dusty old couch, and she can only be glad she's still human.

The pit grows wider and hungrier, John is dead. Her unc-her father, is dead. She killed him. She killed him and she killed Jenna. She develops a compulsive habit of washing her hands, she knows they're not covered in blood, but that doesn't erase the sensation of sticky half-dried blood on her palms. You kill everyone you love. You kill everything you touch, you shouldn't be alive. You should be dead, why aren't you dead, why are you here, go away, go to them, go to all the ones you've killed, you shouldn't be here. Why are you here? Die. Just crawl into the water and drink until you die. Inhale your parents' death. Feed your blood to the earth. Go away, and don't come back.

She feeds the pit with her sympathy and fear, she feels bad for every death, because she knows it is her fault. It's hers. It really is. She is the grim reaper, the bringer of death, just like Katherine, she only brings destruction, even if it was never her intention.

When she is eighteen years old she sits in Matt's truck at the bottom of that same lake, and fights for his survival. If she is going to die at last, she will not take anyone with her. She fights Stefan with every molecule in her, refusing to feed the pit. He surrenders and the pit seems to vanish. She can finally go. Death is hers. She lets herself sink into oblivion, hands outstretched to meet death as a friend. She is eighteen years old, and she is dead. But then she wakes up in the morgue and realizes that it could never be that easy, not for her.

The pit is back and it's gnawing off chunks of her lungs and her heart, devouring her kidneys, slinking up her spine to sip at her brain. She can't carry it anymore, it carries her. You can't even die properly. What's one life compared to all the others you have taken. Why aren't you dead yet? Why won't you just go? Don't touch the blood, let your veins dry out, succumb to your fate. You belong to death. You are death. So die.

She has too much fight in her to die this time. So despite the insidious words of her pit, she shoves herself through the bars and contorts and twists her arm to drag two trembling fingers through dusty, dirty, tainted blood. A single tear falls, because she wants to die, but she doesn't want to leave them, and then the fouled blood is on her tongue and she swallows. Death can't have her yet.

So instead it takes Jeremy. It takes the one thing she really was living for. It rips him from her grasp and drops him at her feet. And Elena learns the truth. Death will always win in the end.


Review if you please!