With her fingers Elena softly tapped on Jeremy's hand to the rhythm of the music coming out of her earphones. Her other hand stroked his hair, finding comfort in the repeating motions. It wasn't music Elena knew, where she had always been more into pop her little brother had always been into music with a lot of bass and guitar, but she didn't mind listening to it. The music helped keeping out the sounds of the other people in the house, their walking and endless talking. Mainly talking about her. At the start she had been listening to it for some time, but became fed up with it quickly. They were wrong. They were all wrong. She wasn't going crazy. And Jeremy surely wasn't dead.
She wasn´t sure how many hours had passed from the moment she had placed Jeremy in his bed and took her place beside him. (Something they had also done when they were children - whenever there had been a storm raging outside the house the two Gilbert children would stay together in one bed, protecting each other.) She only knew that she had heard the entire playlist for about four times now. There was no way in hell she would go to sleep though, she had to be here when Jeremy would finally wake up. And he would. He had before, so why wouldn´t he now? A softer song started playing again, Elena gave his hand a light squeeze and moved her hand up to his face to cup his stone cold cheek. "Jeremy?" Her voice was nothing more than a husky whisper, the begging in it unmistakable.
Elena snuggled her head against his chest, taking his hand again in hers. "Jer, do you remember when we were little, and we used to play hide and seek?" She looked up at his face, his eyes were closed and his face was drained of any color. "You could never find me, because I was always sitting under your piles of dirty clothing. I once jokingly told mom, and she told me tha.." Her voice broke down, and it took a few shaky breathes before she could continue talking. "She told me that you always did knew where I was, but that you just pretended you didn't. To let me win." A smile covered her lips, thinking about the memory that always managed to lighten her up. "I never told you that I knew that you pretended, because you were doing it for me and I didn't wanted to ruin that, but I want to thank you for it. I'm your big sister - and I was supposed to care for you. I promised that, but instead you were always the one to look after me. I'm so sorry."
Her words got choked up in her throat again. There was so much more she wanted to say, thousands more memories she wanted to talk about and a million more apologies she wanted to make. But Elena knew it wouldn't make a difference. Once again she had let him down, just like she had let everyone else down. Her parents, John, Isobel, Jenna, John and Alaric. She had let them down, and now they were all dead. All because of her. "I'm so sorry." She repeated herself, closing her eyes to get rid of the haunting memories. Needless to say it didn't work.
Music filled her ears again, closing her out from the world around her. The only thing keeping her right then and there was the constant coldness or Jer's hand in hers. She didn't even noticed when somebody came walking into the room. Only when a needle got pressed into her arm, piercing her skin, her eyes opened again. Her mind was already starting to blur from the vervain that got injected in her blood, darkness pulling on her soul until everything became black.
When she woke up again she knew it was over. She knew why they had done it. He wouldn't come back. Jeremy couldn't come back. And after all this time, Elena was finally broken. She had been many times before, but this time it was different. This time, there was no family left to get her back again. No family to fight for anymore, no reason for her to keep trying to get the old Elena back. Everything had changed and all the things that seemed so important before weren't anymore. After everything, the death of her adoptive and biological parents, her aunt and Ric, she had now lost the one person she had sworn to protect for his entire life.
Elena stood in the living room of the Gilbert house, in her left hand one of the pictures of Jeremy and her. It had been taken around a year and a half before the death of her parents, somewhere around Christmas. The two teenagers wore goofy smiles, still so young and innocent. Present Elena's eyes were only focused on Jeremy in the picture, she couldn't bear seeing her own face. With seeing her own face would come with seeing the face of her doppelganger, the one responsible for this all. Elena wanted to tear of her own skin, ruin her appearance, change it all so the mental image of it being herself who killed Jeremy would disappear.
With a loud blow the picture fell on the floor, the glass shattering around her. It didn't matter anymore. Nothing mattered anymore. Her brown eyes drifted down to the other object still steady in her right hand, a small smile appearing on her lips. "I deserve this." She whispered, closing her eyes for a second to imagine all the faces of the people who died because of her. "I deserve to die." And with those last words, Elena drove the wooden stake through her heart.