AN: I still own nothing. No real episodic setting.
She pretends.
This isn't shopping in the traditional sense, where a couple of girls would move from store to store and choose clothes, trying them on.
Elena sits curled up on the couch and seems uncomfortable, and she wishes she knew how to be a friend and put the girl at ease. Threatening to bite the girl modelling the dress probably isn't the best way to inspire confidence and friendliness in the human, but she's found that fear is a good enough tactic for intimidating and getting her way.
This is a shadow of what it's like to have a friend and be a normal human girl.
Elena picks a dress and she smiles back, tries it on.
The dress is hung up, later to be pressed and smoothed out and made perfect. She's never had a high school dance where she can be with friends and have fun – society balls and expensive cocktails in a complicated network of ballrooms and restaurants have worn tedious.
She's hungry, so she drinks from a blood bag Elijah keeps in the fridge. It seems like the kind of action Elena and her vampire friends would prefer, and maybe she'll become a friend.
Elena is not like Katherine. She's heard tales of how Klaus came to bring the girl to her death and she went willingly, stark counter to Katherine's turning to avoid death. She's heard how the girl plunged a knife into her abdomen to get a deal that would protect her friends. She's heard of how the girl rejected vampirism when it was offered, struggled through the death of her father and remained human for it.
It's this last detail that makes her respect Elena. Elijah has told her how Elena's birth mother chose to become a vampire, leaving her daughter behind, and she hates the woman for it despite never once meeting her. Elena is smart, smart enough to reject immortality for the human life she herself cannot have.
She envies her for having that choice.
Alone later, she watches movies about high school and decides to sign up for the cheerleading squad. Elena and Caroline and Bonnie are all there, and none of them are very welcoming. Still, there's a group of other girls around her, and they're all her age – technically, anyway.
They're there together and she makes a concerted effort to laugh when the other girls do, compliments a girl she doesn't know on tacky nail polish. She's done her research, after all, and it seems a compliment is the way to start making friends. If nothing else it breaks the ice, and she resists the urge to compel the girl into being her friend. She knows enough about the vervained water supply to know her compulsion wouldn't work. And even if it did, she would rather have someone be her friend for real, not because of mind control.
The cheerleading coach sits them all down and talks them through plans and moves, and it occurs to her that maybe she could call Elena a friend. Elena is kind, she would not outright reject Rebekah, but she also knows that Elena would probably not call her unless under duress.
No – she decides – it is not worth the inevitable rejection for when she slips up and reveals her monstrous self and Elena changes her mind about calling her a friend. Elena is an acquaintance.
Later tonight her brother will threaten her with the dagger again and she'll drink a wineglass of blood alone in her room, pretend it is red wine so she can be human for a few minutes. She holds up the dress to herself, hangs it carefully in a garment bag to protect it, and browses online for jewellery to go with it.
This action leaves her wistful and sad. She's seen dozens of girls her age and younger roaming shopping centres and boutiques alike, trying things on together and considering their purchases with friends, not sulky brothers who are indulging her as if she is a child given to tantrums. The girls chatter and giggle, perfume swirling around them and leaving traces of themselves wherever they go. Some of them behave so closely that she thinks they're sisters and not just friends, and she wonders what that would be like.
(Later, the dress is ruined. There's a gaping hole from the knife and her blood stains half the bodice. Dry cleaning proves to be worthless; the stain is already too old, the blood too heavy for the delicate fabric, and so she pays and compels the drycleaner to forget her. She decides against trying to repair it to its former state.
Instead, she bundles it into a protective bag and pushes it to the very back of her wardrobe. It's a souvenir of the first time she had a friend.)