Elena Gilbert's first word was love.
Unfortunately, as it was spoken in Third Period Middle Bulgarian, her modern English speaking parents thought it was simply baby babble and clapped encouragingly but ignorantly for her attempt. Miranda Gilbert carefully enunciated the word Mama, Grayson tried to insist on Papa, and Elena kept repeating любов and giggling.
She did, eventually, say Mama and then Papa and other English words, but she favored Bulgarian for expressions of affection and frustration. When she wanted Caroline Forbes to share her legos, the demand came out in ancient Norse. At six, the family cat died and Elena sobbed out broken words in a form of Greek so old there were no records left.
Other languages slipped out, from lives lived by women who shared her face and found more peace than she was destined to receive, but those three were her constant. By twelve she'd learned to hide her fluency in languages she could not explain knowing, and how to avoid trouble by swearing exclusively in everything but English.
She'd also learned to hide the magic that sparked beneath her skin. The way that sometimes her exclamations in Bulgarian weren't just words but spells, the way she had to be careful when she cursed in Greek that the words stayed empty, no vicious intent to stick and linger in the world.
No one seemed to notice the way small bruises and scrapes and other signs of childhood mischief healed with miraculous quickness for her, her brother, and her friends. Or the way her favorite stuffed moose never stopped being as silky soft as the day it was purchased. The plants in their yard bloomed and thrived, though neither Miranda nor Grayson had a green thumb, and butterflies had an odd fascination for the young girl, landing on her outstretched palms without a quiver of hesitation.
Sheila Bennett's sharp eyes had seen the truth, but the child didn't have enough power to be dangerous to anyone but herself and seemed to understand the risk of over-extending herself. She kept an eye on her, as she did on all of Bonnie's friends, but otherwise left it alone. She was not her ancestor, exerting herself and her magic for the favor of a Gilbert. Bonnie and the balance, those were her charges and to them she would be true.
From age five on, Elena drew face after face, all of them hers. Her parents dutifully hung them all up on the fridge with her little brother's scribbles, amused by their child's apparent fascination with her own looks and glad that her actions didn't reflect such narcissism. They didn't know, couldn't know, that none of those faces were Elena. That they had other names in other tongues, Katerina, Anne, Miriam, Tatia, Helen, Rhea, Amara. That she studied them all, looking for differences, remembering their stories, holding close these women who the world would lump into one being—a convenient shape for powerful blood.
An old soul, adults called her, struck by the kindness and wisdom that shone in those large, dark eyes. They didn't get to see the rage she screamed into her pillow at night, the grief that spilled out in endless sobs in the shower, the hope and resentment that filled the pages of her diaries.
Katerina, Anne, Miriam, Tatia, Helen, Rhea, Amara. Her mantra, her fear, her future. At fifteen her and Caroline and Bonnie drove three towns over, where no one knew their famous founder names, and she got them tattooed in a circle around her left ankle, easy to hide under socks and sneakers or the silver anklet Aunt Jenna got her when she turned thirteen. It was a memorial to those who came before—their lives, their choices, their personhood hers to keep and guard.
She also got a bird behind her ear, small and free, to show the other girls as she admired the flower on Caroline's collar bone and the constellation on Bonnie's wrist. Every time she tucked her hair behind her ear, her thumb brushed over the bird, a reminder, a reassurance. Her life was her choice, even if her face was not.
When not having someone else's art inked into her skin, she still drew her face, not her face, in endless sketchbooks. She drew other faces too, ones from her dreams, their memories. She never wrote names on them, and some she burned, gleaming eyes and sharp teeth that would drain her dry if they could. Others she lingered over, fond feelings for strangers curling in her chest—it was strange, to know someone you had never met, to remember the shape of their mouth as it thinned in anger or stretched in joy. Someday she might meet them, these not-strangers, and she needed to be prepared, to know which emotions were her own and which were theirs, the women who had come before. She was not them, would not be them, and she could not allow her heart to make the same mistakes.
Her and Jeremy spent hours together, quietly drawing on the front porch or in the backyard or on the dining room table while their parents shared pleased if baffled glances at this hobby their children shared. Jeremy preferred more diverse and esoteric subjects for his art, but they shared a love of fine pencils and thick paper and even if Jeremy thought his big sister's thing for drawing herself was weird, he appreciated her talent and her appreciation of his. Their parents were just happy their children had a balance for the inevitable moments of sibling friction.
Those fractious moments aside, and accounting for non-sibling related moments of human failure, it was undeniable that Elena was a good girl. A good daughter, a good student, a good friend, a dutiful founding family heir. Elena was also restless, the strength of her image—metaphorical and entirely literal, stifling her until she couldn't breathe for the weight of them. Elena wasn't just Elena, the girl Mystic Falls' parents liked to hold up as an example of model behavior, she was the latest in a line of powerful, pursued women whose blood had cost more lives than she could count.
On the days when the legacy running her veins burned the most she'd coax Bonnie and Caroline into ditching school and they'd drive until they felt like stopping, or wander through the woods outside town, drinking stolen whiskey and playing never have I ever or dare. Never truth, too boring according to Caroline and too confusing for Elena, whose truths weren't all her own.
Bonnie was the secret queen of dare, offering up the most creative and risky endeavors and always following through on her own. Caroline could talk anyone out of anything and was more useful than a fake ID for getting them into clubs and college parties. Elena was fearless, or rather, her fears were so far beyond social consequences and detention that to the others she seemed invincible. They shared secrets, squabbled over crushes and fashion choices, kissed a few times while working through whether they liked girls or boys or both or neither, and always had each others backs. They were unstoppable, as fierce in their love for each other as they were in their desire for adolescent adventure.
They were unstoppable until they weren't. Unstoppable until a night when restless rage burned through Elena, when fate felt like it was wrapping its hands around her throat, all the women who had born her face crowding in until she wanted to scream. She partied and she fought and on the drive home not her fate, not her memories, not her magic, nothing could save them from the fall, from the water, from the way everything went black.
She woke up in the hospital, pale and bruised and parentless. Jeremy was asleep in the chair next to the bed, bruises under his eyes to match the ones on her body, and grief weighing down his newly tall frame. Aunt Jenna was pacing in the hallway outside, speaking in rapid fire on her cell phone, snatches of legalese drifting through the crack in the door.
The look on her brother's face when he saw her owlish blinking told her all she needed to know and by the time Jenna made it back into the room they were collapsed into each other on the hospital bed, shaking with quiet, broken sobs.
Jenna wrapped her arms around them, trying to hold in her own tears and her terror, to be the supportive guardian they needed. The future stretched before all of them, strange and empty, and the present ached with guilt and loss.
In the darkened room next door, someone lurked, listening to their tears and thumping hearts. Elena had been seen. Elena had been recognized and everything would be different now.
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1. любов is not in Third Period Middle Bulgarian, it's modern Bulgarian, but the only reliable source I could find for Third Period Middle Bulgarian required me to buy a book and I do not care that much about accuracy.
2. Title is from Hymn by Kesha