Wayward Children

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Summary: A series of unrelated drabbles/one-shots – some interconnected - centred around Dean and Elena's sometimes-more-than friendly relationship.

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#2

A Grief Never Shared

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She was in a state of numbness; her fingers trembled as they attempted to put her silver hoop earrings, the small ones her grandmother had bought her once upon a time, into her ears. Once that task was complete, her hands travelled to her small black dress, patting it down, searching for creases that weren't there.

Everybody hated funerals, but a double funeral had to be an even worse concept altogether. Watching one coffin being lowered into the ground was like a solid punch to the gut; watching two was like having the air ripped from your lungs. She remembered her grandparents' funeral, how they had gone peacefully one after the other, yet the circumstances of their deaths hadn't made the service any less painful, the sight of the twin coffins still engraved in her memory, still painful to a degree, but this was just so much worse.

Her thoughts were scattered, flicking from one morbid topic to the next, her heart swelling and deflating in equal measures to a slow, sad, aching rhythm that only be explained by a deep grief that stretches deep into your soul. Guilt and a sense of utter bereavement settled inside her, dominating her every thought, tainting every memory, and she blinked back treacherous tears, aware she was perfectly in her rights to cry but at the same time knowing if she let loose one tear, the rest would burst open the floodgates, and she'd never stop. And at the same time, she was wrestling with the knowledge that another year had gone by, and Dean wasn't here.

Maybe she was a fool to expect a man to keep to a promise, even when all evidence seemed to point to the fact this particular man was usually good at keeping that promise. And although she knew she would be surrounded by her loved ones – Caroline, Bonnie, Matt, as well as Jenna and Jeremy – there was just one more face she craved to be present at easily the worst moment of her life. She wanted to fold herself into his arms, pretend she was off on one of his adventures – and she knew there had to be more than his bullshit story about how he and his dad liked road trips a lot than he was letting on – and just forget the grief she had to look forward for the rest of her life.

And it was her fault too.

Twin trails marked her cheeks as she found herself unable to contain the emotion she'd been bottling up, and she found herself sitting down on her window ledge, looking down at the crowd of people gathered on her lawn, waiting to go off to the service together, because that was how things were done in this town; if someone died, everybody flocked around you like flies around honey, offering words you just didn't need right now in a bid to ease their minds, but at the end of the day they got to go home without really having lost anybody except another couple of standing members of the community.

Dean would've understood, she thought. He'd lost a mother very young, and although he never talked about her, she imagined he still carried the grief around with him. That's why he would've known what to say to her other than the obligatory condolences she'd come to loathe. He would've told her that it never got any easier, rather than spoon feeding her a load of bullshit about how time heals all wounds, and he would've made a mockery of the whole funeral concept just to squeeze a smile out of her.

He would've done the big brother job and much more beside.

Jeremy... well... she knew he was still coming to terms with it all. They'd shared a cursory hug, a few tears in the hospital, but after that, they'd departed into their separated corners – separate stages – of grief. He'd been a casual drug user before the accident, and she knew this already, but now it was like he needed it just to stay alive. She knew at some point she would have to pull him back from the path he was wandering down, but right now she could cut him slack.

"Hey." Jenna's voice cut across her thoughts. "How you doing over there?"

Her aunt – young, fresh faced, with red circles around her eyes to mark her own grief – wasn't that much older than her, which Jeremy had used to be delighted by, throwing jibes and teasing remarks her way whenever it was family night, and when that had stopped, it had marked the end of something.

Clad in a knee length dress, not quite black in colour but dark enough that it suited the sombre occasion just fine, Jenna wrung her hands, evidently searching for the right words to say, but they both knew there were none.

"I'm – I'm coping," was about the most honest answer Elena could give at this moment. "I thought finding out they were gone would be the hardest thing I would ever have to cope with, but this – this is much worse. I have to say goodbye, and knowing I was the reason they were out there – " She choked back more emotion, more tears she wished would just leave her be for a while. "It hurts, Jenna, and I don't know how to make it stop."

"When our parents died, I felt the same," Jenna replied sombrely. "Nobody tells you how to grieve properly, what the right reaction is. Of course, there's no right or wrong way to grieve, you just do what comes naturally to you. But I felt horrible because I couldn't shed a single tear when I wanted to. And Miranda... well, she told me that it was natural to feel absolutely nothing, because I was still in shock. She told me it would've done more damage to their memory if I'd forced out tears when I wasn't ready, rather than watching them be buried feeling absolutely nothing. And it wasn't until the morning afterwards that I fell apart." She locked eyes with Elena. "You never knew your Grandma Josephine and Grandpa Bernard, but you remind me so much of them. They would've loved you."

Elena nodded, numbly accepting this mindless chatter to distract from the real point of the day. Her dad's parents – Maggie and Samuel Gilbert – hadn't been the conventional grandparents at all, more like the fun aunt and uncle you see once a month or so, armed with a bunch of weird and sometimes inappropriate stories. Elena felt a stabbing pang of nostalgia just thinking about them.

Grandparents were never meant to stay very long in child's world anyway, but the older they get, the more you couldn't help thinking they were invincible, immortal to a degree, and when they eventually did pass away, the grief felt more like disbelief; as in how could they die when they appeared to have so much more of their life left to live?

Parents though... they were meant to stay for longer, seeing you through graduation, prom, all those high school rituals before sending you off to college with teary eyes and shaking hands. They were meant to give you away on your wedding, help guide you through parenthood yourself, and then pass away on one of those days where you think nothing in your life could possibly go wrong, peacefully and secure in the knowledge that the children they'd raised would do well in the world they'd left behind. True, they weren't meant to outlive their children, but their children weren't meant to outlive by this much either.

"Where's Jeremy?" she sniffed, managing to pull herself together.

"With your Uncle John." Jenna sniffed haughtily. "Did I mention how much that guy pisses me off?"

Elena laughed a little, reminded of what Dean's description had been of John the one occasion he'd met him.

"That meathead's your uncle? As in a relative of yours?" he'd blurted out, looking disgusted. "He looks like a scrawny weasel, and did I mention how in just one sentence alone he managed to piss me off? I thought that was a trait only Sammy possessed, but clearly not..."

There it was again; that misplaced pang that just didn't belong to this moment. She felt a flood of affection stir inside her, but it was clear Dean had forgotten all about her. Still, she would've thought he would've come to the funeral for her parents' sakes, because he'd gotten on quite well with them.

Or maybe everything she knew about him was just wrong.

"Come on." Jenna linked an arm through hers. "Only good thing about funerals is that they turn a blind eye to minors like yourself drinking some alcohol at the wake afterwards. God knows we both a drink or seven."

"Jenna!"

"Humour on inappropriate occasions is my coping method, by the way. In case it wasn't obvious," Jenna clarified, smiling even though it looked too forced, too distorted with sadness to be considered sincere, and Elena had to remember she may have lost her parents, but Jenna had lost a sister, someone she'd grown up with.

This loss wasn't just hers and Jeremy's to bear.

She realised at this point something had changed within her for good. Maybe it was that innocence Dean had loved about her evolving into this maturity which meant she had to grow up a little earlier than necessary. Maybe it was the fact she no longer trusted the world not to hurt her. Maybe it went even deeper than that, and it was in fact to do with her optimism in life changing into this cynicism that would distort every view she she'd ever had.

Elena had no idea, but the change unsettled her.

For her own peace of mind, she had to put aside everything that didn't matter – her petty concerns regarding school and the like, trivial matters like school dances (which Caroline had been harping on about since god knows when), even, to an extent, her weirdly indefinable relationship with Dean – and focus on getting herself and Jeremy through all of this, even if it took every bit of energy she possessed to do so.


A few states over, in a grimy diner that had seen better days, a figure clad in a leather jacket and a loose fitting v-neck pored over the Mystic Falls Gazette, his eyes specifically on the front headline, his fingers tracing the words carefully, a blend of sadness and resignation swirling in his eyes.

TRAGEDY ON WICKERY BRIDGE - TWO CONFIRMED DEAD

He was loosely debating whether or not to tell Sam about this, because Sam right now was in a position where he could empathise with Elena completely. His girlfriend had just been killed, in the same manner as their mother, and though he was personally indifferent to her death, he felt intensely grief-stricken for his brother having to actually witness her death, and in such a horrific and brutal manner too.

And now it seemed his sympathy had to extend all the way back to Mystic Falls, a place he'd not visited in a long, long time. How old would she be now? Sixteen? Seventeen? It was hard to keep track.

Both Miranda and Grayson had been killed though, that was the issue at hand here, in an accident of all things. Maybe he should've felt a measure of relief that that was all it seemed to have been - an accident - because he didn't want his life haunting her world; hadn't that been what he'd told himself every time he felt the urge to follow his gut and head back there? At first circumstances had kept him from going back, but then it had become harder and harder to weave himself into doing anything relatively normal, let alone attempting to make a hasty trip back to Mystic Falls, the one town he could've called home at one point.

But everything after that last visit had just taken a sharp decline. His father and Sam's relationship deteriorated to the point where Sam had headed off to college for a normal life, and he'd stuck with his father because there was no way he could've gone back to a normal life, even if he'd so desired it. Omens and signs had consistently cropped up, leading his father into a merry chase that often meant they resurfaced with deep bruises and cuts (nothing new there) and relatively low spirits, because the hunt was all they knew anymore, and John was convinced he was ever closer to finding the demon which had killed their mother, but Dean was becoming less and less sure as time went by.

God, life seemed to suck for all of them.

He debated whether or not to make a trip back to Mystic Falls, just for the funeral, but there was a chance he wouldn't make it in time, and there was just so much he and Sam had to do in the way of finding their father, who was off on what could only be described as a mad man's errand. He loved his father but sometimes he longed for the man who had smiling eyes, complemented with a loud boom of a laugh, and not the man he had instead, with dark eyes, a dark grimace of a smile, and every trace of kindness eradicated in favour of protecting his family and avenging his wife's death.

"What ya reading?" Sam asked, peering over his brother's shoulders.

Quick as a flash, Dean had rolled up the newspaper, which he'd procured from a newsstand en route that seemed to deal with selling every newspaper – local and national – imaginable, which was lucky for him, and tucked it out sight.

"Just scouting for new cases," he lied smoothly.

"But on the front page, it said there was two deaths – "

"An accident," Dean said, wondering who he was trying to convince here, Sam or himself. "Just an accident."

"Huh." Sam plonked himself opposite his brother. "Alright then."

It was anything but alright, but since Sam and Elena had only been introduced on the one occasion, and Sam had been very young at the time, he figured it was better keeping this one secret from his brother.

He just wondered how Elena was coping, what she looked like now, and whether she even remembered him.

Hold on, kiddo, he thought to himself, not a praying man by any means but mentally wishing her nothing but happiness for the future all the same, it doesn't get better, I wish I could say it did. But I'd be lying. I just hope this is the only sadness your life ever sees.

It just went to show how fucked up his own life was that he didn't believe for one second this would be the only great tragedy in her life, because terrible things tended to happen to the people he cared about, but he tried to put as much conviction and hope into his thoughts as much he could, like it would make a damn bit of difference.

Next time I visit, he promised himself, I'm gonna tell her everything.

The logic behind this crazy idea was that she wouldn't believe him on first hearing – no one ever did – and she would tell him to leave her alone – best thing for her really – but at least if the supernatural ever entered her life, no one could say he hadn't warned her.

He'd get brownie points for trying though, right?


A/n: I know the timelines of the shows don't exactly match with the points of time I'm describing, but to hell with it. This is AU. I'll keep events in chronological order – unless I'm flashbacking – but that'll be about it. So yeah, thanks for the reviews for the first chapter. Excited to take this crossover fic to some quite dark places in the future.