AN: I mean, this has to wear on Elena. This can't be easy for her to do and live through. Sad ahead.
It's odd, she thinks as they look around his mind palace. They're adding last minute adjustments, but she feels like they would have normally been interrupted by now. She voices this and he pauses. They focus for any noise from the outside world, but hear nothing. They keep listening, as he adjusts paintings and little details.
"I guess we're a little off on our time." Elena says and he agrees with her judgement, hesitantly.
She counts forty eight minutes and twenty seven seconds before Elijah decides that there's no point in waiting for him to be called back to the real world. They've gone everywhere in his mind palace but her room, he can't let her in there yet. The feelings are all tangled with memories and he doesn't want her to know how he feels about her.
But, he does turn to her and asks her to name something she misses.
"Ice cream." She says and he nods with approval, taking her hand.
She closes her eyes and waits for the familiar sensation of traveling into a memory to stop.
They're in the twenty four ice cream shop near Mystic Falls. She grins and they get ice cream. She grins at him and eats her ice cream and is about to ask him to take her back to the store when she is back in the real world when she stops. He stops, and asks what's wrong.
The shop most likely won't be there by the time she gets out,so many things that she knows and loves will be gone by then. She just tells him that she misses ice cream, and carefully continues eating for a few moments. He watches carefully, and doesn't press.
She takes a deep breath when she's out of ice cream, and admits that it isn't just the ice cream. It's the fact that the shop they're in will probably be closed before she has the chance to go back again, it's the fact she won't be able to vote for a few decades, that everything will change and she will be forced to stay the same, and after a while she's sure the novelty of visiting her mind will wear off and he and Caroline will find better things to do with their time. She's scared of being alone for more than a week, she's scared of being forgotten and frozen and left behind. She's not aware that she's crying until she's pressed against him, and she moves her head into his neck. She's not okay, and it was exhausting to pretend that she was. She can't stop telling him all of it, everything that's wrong.
It's all scary, being alone so often bothers her, but there's nothing she can do. She didn't mind being alone really, but she hates being lonely. She misses everything, she even misses commercials and the feeling of grass under her feet. It seems like her list goes on for centuries and she keeps apologizing to him between things she misses as the tears keep coming.
She's so scared that Jeremy will die before she wakes up, so scared she'll miss Ric's funeral and it's all so much that he just holds her close. There's too much for him to address at one time and she doesn't stop adding to her list. He doesn't want to interrupt, but he moves them out of the memory of the ice cream shop, back into his mind palace.
He lets her talk and cry until she can't anymore, and waits a long time before speaking.