Fairytale Ending
by adlyb
Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.
Summary: Klaus takes his girl and his hybrid and gets out of that one pony town.
Spoilers: Through 3x05, The Reckoning
Rating: R
Warnings: Extremely dubious consent verging on non-con/ Miscarraiage / Hostage situation/explicit violence and torture/gratuitous angst/ potential character death
Once upon a time, in a manor tucked so far away into the countryside that hardly anyone ever thought of it, there lived a beautiful young girl, quite alone. For although she loved her family, very much, events had twisted and turned so frightfully that she had been forced into an indefinite exile from them.
She was a very sad creature. Friendless and uncertain. Yet she possessed something very rare indeed: a face of incomparable beauty. Unnatural beauty. A face capable of singing down lightning and blood. A face men would die for. Did die for. And, hiding beneath the surface of those exquisite features, shy and fleeting as a minnow's shadow: Power.
It was this face (and the unspoken power simmering beneath it) that had caught the eye of the manor's lord. That had inspired his invitation to come and live with him.
The girl had had no choice but to accept.
It was a time when the girl might almost have been happy. The manor itself was sumptuous and beautiful to behold. Material luxuries beyond what she had ever dreamed of had been lavished upon her by her devilishly handsome host. Her host, who could not help but to touch her, to kiss her, to seduce her with his hot eyes and dagger-tipped smile. The girl might almost have been happy, if only her host had never revealed himself as the demon that he was, ravenous for her blood.
And yet, Elena ruminates darkly as she paces the halls of her own plush prison, Katherine had had the sense to flee. She had paid a terrible price for that flight—had lost her entire family for it—but the point remains that she had had the sense to escape as soon as she had realized who and what Klaus really was.
Contemplating Katherine's final months as a human, the ways in which their fates alternately dovetailed and split, Elena thinks she has at last found the true difference between herself and her predecessor.
Katherine had never fallen in love with Klaus. She had been smart enough to guard her heart where she, Elena, had failed.
She is paying the price for that love now.
She is determined not to pay that price forever.
That morning that she had nearly drowned herself by accident, she climbs down from the Japanese Maple with the first true spate of resolve she has felt in months burning in her breast.
She can't go on like she has. Lonely and alone, waiting forever and ever for a lover who may never return to her.
No— Who had abandoned her, tossed her aside. Forgotten her.
She could love him until her dying breath—she might, she doesn't know—her heart is still so young, even though there are days she feels as old as the grave—but she can't go on every day and every night holding herself in this ghastly suspension as she holds her breath and waits for him to appear. To set her life back in motion.
He can no longer be the rock she chooses to dash herself against, if only to give shape and definition to who she is.
(Water. She has always been water. She forgets, sometimes, when she's with him, that that is her element.)
In just the same way, she realizes with an anguishing clarity that she cannot keep hating him as she does either. To hate him is to love him, and vice versa.
The only way is forward, and she has to walk that path without him.
(It's easier than ever to lie to herself when there's no one else left to fool.)
There had been a time, early in her stay here, when she had taken to roaming the halls of this great manor home late at night, when Klaus and Stefan and Rebekah had been out in the night sewing chaos and devouring hearts and there had been no one to stop her from stealing that little smidgeon of autonomy all for herself.
As she puts the kettle on to boil and slices bread for her toast, she thinks about how she had played at queen of the castle. Remembers thinking of how she was really just the jewel stashed away in the vault, where it would never see the light of day again.
She knows herself to be both of those things in truth now. And why not?
There's no longer anyone around to stop her.
With only two restrictions on her freedom—invisible manacles round her wrists though they are—she can do nearly anything she wants. She can be a queen in this her limited kingdom in truth, even if she has turned out to be nothing more than a pretty rock in Klaus's infinite empire.
Freedom is one of those things where the scope of it becomes irrelevant after a while. Just a little can be enough, when you are used to having none at all.
The tea nearly scalds her mouth, but she drinks it down deep anyway, letting the warmth seep into her chilled flesh as she contemplates what she will do with her future.
How she will live.
She had wanted to write the words of her own history.
She has that chance now.
There's no recipe for how to build a life from scratch, when all she has are the broken pieces and snapped threads of the past with which to work.
It takes time.
Time, and patience, and a sort of ceaseless, ravenous hope for a better future that requires Elena to dig down into the deepest parts of her soul to dredge it up, bit by toilsome bit.
It's a labor that goes on forever. That she is never any closer to completing.
It's the only bit of scaffolding she has as she walks over this abyss.
The very first thing she does, that cool September morning, once the dishes are put away and the mess in the bathroom is mopped up, is to go search through Stefan's rooms. She had found them earlier in the summer, during her endless laps through the compound, but had avoided going in there almost as much as she had avoided Klaus's suite of rooms.
She would avoid them now, except that she is certain there will be something in there which she desires very much.
The pang she feels upon stepping into the darkened outer room surprises her. The closed up air still smells like him. More than that, though, there's a feeling about the space—full of books, and wooden boxes full of trinkets, of photographs and reams on reams of notes— that painfully and forcefully reminds her of his bedroom back in Mystic Falls. Of the safety and the happiness—the shelter— she had found there. Thinking back on the hours and hours they had spent together in that room, laughing, conspiring, making love, inspires a deeper sense of loss than she had expected. She had thought herself more over Stefan than this.
She's discovering there are a whole host of things she may never be over.
The memory of how they had been together, for one.
She puts those thoughts aside. Steels herself to dig through Stefan's possessions.
The process of sifting through his things takes a couple of hours. Damon had been right, of course—Stefan is a packrat, and has amassed quite a collection of 80s hair band albums, antique cameras, car parts, and dog-eared first edition Lost Generation novels, amongst other things, in just the short months he had been a resident here.
She finds his journal stashed away in a hidden drawer tucked into the underside of his desk. She's stunned that he'd neglected to take it with him. Realizes it's a completed volume, finished last January, before he'd gone with Rebekah and Klaus to New Orleans. She thumbs through the pages, absorbing the quiet comfort of Stefan's familiar lettering. Shuts the diary without reading it and tucks it back into its hiding spot.
She can't keep looking back forever.
Eventually, she finds what she had been looking for tucked into the back corner of the top shelf of the imposing armoire, behind a box of sheet music. A slim stack of blank journals, ready for Elena to fill in with her own words. With the catechism, I am here, I exist, I lived a life that was my own.
(She won't think about the blue leather diary tooled with bounding waves. That part of her life is as over and inaccessible as the one drawn out over the hundreds of pages and dozens of volumes back in Mystic Falls.)
She selects a simple brown leather volume, serviceable and yet full of thick, creamy blank pages. The luxury of a new diary swamps her as she turns it over in her hands. With it comes the sure knowledge that Stefan would want her to have this. Of everyone she has shared her life with this past year, he alone had understood what it meant for her to be Elena Gilbert and not just the next Petrova doppelganger. How very badly she needed this.
Writing in her diary, telling her own story, is the first step in taking back her life.
He would have wanted that for her.
She's astonished by how much she wants it for herself.
The diary gives her the space and opportunity to really parse her situation—the grief bottled up tight and fierce under her skin—in the way that comes most naturally to her.
She had been friendless when she first arrived. Disoriented and afraid, adrift in an endless nightmare.
The very first truly good thing that had happened to her here had been on that night when she had noticed the library door cracked open, and had dared to intrude on Klaus's solitary brooding. She had gravitated toward him as naturally and inexorably as a star careening toward a black hole.
The library had been her refuge then.
It is her salvation now.
She spends her long hours reading novels, yes.
But she does more than that.
She reads histories from places she's only half-ever heard of. Reads about events from the silenced perspectives her history textbooks back in Mystic Falls would have never dared voiced. Entire first-hand accounts of the many centuries Klaus has lived burst from the pages.
That whole first fall on her lonesome is filled up with the library. It feels like returning to her roots, like seeping down into the earth to suck at the water and the minerals she needs to sustain herself until she can turn her face into the sun and bloom again.
And in those books, all the while, she looks for answers. For inspiration.
Klaus had ordered her never to leave the property, which seems straight-forward enough, but she works over his words with the surefast knowledge that really his command is a riddle with an answer hidden within it. With the certainty that she will crack it.
She won't stay here forever languishing because of him. She won't. She has to take her destiny into her own hands.
(Especially since Klaus had thrown away with both hands the one they had shared.)
Several things occur to her in those first few weeks of brightened resolve.
The first: She doesn't actually know where the property lines are. There's an ambiguity there that Klaus must not have meant to include. For example—does the property end at the edge of the gardens? Or does it extend into the trees? Is she bound by the legal definition of the property, or by her perception of how far the grounds extend?
The second: Say the compulsion only applied to her concept of the property, rather than the literal perimeter. Could she extend how far she could slip from the house by, say, not paying attention? That had essentially been how she had circumvented the compulsion to stay alive, and nearly aspirated in her own bathtub. And for that matter, what if she got lost? Could she leave the property by accident? Would she be free once she did?
She gets up early one morning to test out these theories. At the edge of the extensive lawn, which has overgrown into a field with waist-high grass on the furthest edges, she stares into the thicket of trees. Her whole body rebels against taking another step past what she has always thought of as the border between the compound and the forest.
But that doesn't really make sense, she reasons. Of course the property must extend into the woods. Klaus would want complete seclusion to hide her away from the rest of the world. To insulate himself and his entourage from the inanities of mortality. She bets he owns this whole pocket of forest.
That thought firmly in mind, she easily steps into the shadowy space between the ancient trees.
A smile blossoms across her face.
Dead leaves rustle underfoot as she creeps deeper into the forest. Overhead, she can hear birds calling to each other. Chipmunks and lizards skitter through the underbrush, out of sight. Her breath plumes in a white mist around her face as she presses further and further in. The land rolls under her feet, and she's surprised to encounter a sheer drop into a streambed, where a deer drinks placidly from the clear water.
She and the doe stare at each other for a long time, before a branch breaks in the distance, and the deer takes off like a shot.
Elena walks for perhaps another ten minutes before her doubts begin to creep in on her.
There's no way she's not made it to the edge of the property. There's no way the private land around the compound can extend this far out. That streambed was probably the natural demarcation line.
She winds up turning around and heading back to the house without ever making the conscious decision to do so.
She repeats the experiment first thing every morning, and sometimes at night.
How far she walks before the compulsion steers her home varies by the day.
She figures out that if she's not paying attention—if she gets caught up in thoughts of home—if she wanders through the twisting corridors of her anxieties, her regrets, and her sorrows—then she can walk much further from the manor— but the very first realization that she hasn't been paying attention to her surroundings has her turning around.
She has even better results at night, when it's too dark for her to navigate.
The key, though, is that she cannot set out intending to get lost and so wander off of the property. There are more than a few nights when she sets out too purposefully and can never convince her feet to budge. When she goes out at night, she therefor always sets out trying to find the streambed, or a particular tree she had spotted during the day, or a rocky outcropping. If she looks for those things, even if she gets hopelessly turned around, then the compulsion becomes much more slippery.
Once, she even stumbles out onto a road. However, at the first sight of it, a terrible roiling pain twists in her belly and a fire erupts behind her eyes, something like horror crawling under her skin as her body jerks and twists until she finally spots the north star and, gritting her teeth through her sawing panic, figures out in which direction to sprint home. The pressure on her skull and her gut disappears as soon as she throws herself onto the cold marble floor of the foyer.
She lies panting on the floor for a long time after that.
This whole situation makes her so frustrated she could scream.
She does scream, then. Just to hear her own voice. A human voice.
What happens when she does figure out how to break this compulsion. What then?
Will she really leave?
Deep down, she doesn't know.
(The possibility that she would choose to stay of her own free will, even now, scares her too much to think about for long, so she never does.)
She keeps trying.
She still dreams about her daughter at night. Still drags herself, shaking and ill, to the tub, where she curls up against its cold sides and clutches at empty air.
She no longer dares to fill the tub up.
Lying awake at the bottom of the tub at dawn, cold and shivering, she wishes she had anyone at all to talk to. Wishes it so hard that her throat closes up and her chest burns. She squeezes her eyes shut against the danger of that desire, willing herself not to want for her brother or Bonnie or Tyler so badly.
Every day, her grief pours out from her pen onto the blank pages of her diary, but it's not enough. She has so many unsaid words inside of her, so many confessions and truths that only exist in her own head now.
Sometimes she thinks she doesn't actually exist at all. Sometimes she thinks she must have made herself up.
By mid-October, the skies have strayed toward a tendency to turn dark and damp, and the air is sharp with the first biting taste of winter. When the sun peeks through the clouds, it is so bright and the sky so clean and blue that it blinds her. Under these gray skies, the leaves of some of the smaller trees dotting the grounds have turned a rich banana yellow which Elena cannot believe she had not noticed the previous year. Her fingers itch to capture that color. To capture the vivid oranges and vibrant scarlets dappling the forest canopy at the periphery of the grounds.
The desire plants itself inside of her and will not uncurl its fingers from around her heart. She tries taking her charcoals and her inks out onto the lawn and spends hours poring over her drawings as she tries to capture the tumbling tumult of the racing autumn clouds overhead, but it's not enough. She pulls back and stares at her work—the first drawings she has made since she was abandoned here—and resigns herself to the fact that this mode of working will not be enough to quench the thirst that had sprung up inside of her so unexpectedly.
Elena climbs to her feet and rolls her shoulders back. Resolves that whatever's been left here is hers now, all of it, so she may as well take for herself anything that will spark a little happiness, since there is no one left to hand it to her.
She retraces the steps to Klaus's suite of rooms reminding herself of this all the while. Not letting herself think too hard about where she is headed.
The thing is, she hasn't been back in here since earlier in the summer, when she had gone looking for her diary. Had avoided the place altogether, lest the memory of Klaus's presence, still lingering in this room even after all these months, trigger something within herself.
At the door, she takes deep, steadying breaths. Gathers her courage.
And steps inside.
It's just as she left it. Shirts tossed into a pile on the floor, ransacked drawers thrown onto the floor, their contents strewn haphazardly about.
She picks her way through the mess over to one of the connecting rooms with a good southern exposure. Doesn't allow herself to flick through the stack of canvases leaning against the wall, instead heading over to the work table full of brushes and piled high with tubes of paint. There's more here than she's familiar with—bottles of clear liquid that make her light-headed when she sniffs them, sealed jars of a golden viscous substance that glimmers when she holds it up to the light. Rags and palette knives and a table saw and packets with neatly printed labels that read rabbit skin glue and calcium carbonate and a host of other things.
She has lived with this man for over a year. She has danced with him and slept in his bed, has lied to him a thousand times and pressed secrets back and forth with him in the dark. She's kissed him until she thought she might perish from the ecstasy of his touch, and plunged a dagger into his heart and felt him die in her arms. She's done all of these things, and yet, staring down at his muddy palette, his alchemist's table, she is keenly aware that this will be the most intimate trespass she has committed yet.
Klaus had stolen her novels from her.
She, then, will not let herself feel an ounce of guilt for stealing his paints.
She grabs a handful of brushes and selects out a variety of colors on a whim. Bundles it all out with her to the gardens, along with a few white plates she reasons she can use for mixing colors.
The sun sets the fall foliage on fire as it swiftly sinks toward the horizon. Elena breathes in the crisp fall air, enjoying the tactile feeling of the paint as she squeezes it out from each tube and carefully dips her brushes into the rich pigments.
"I am here," she whispers fiercely to herself as she carefully spreads the paint. The wind whips at her hair and a gnat hovers near her eye. She blinks against the brightness of the sun. "I am here, in this moment."
The paints are harder than she had anticipated to learn. Working in oil is nothing like the acrylics she'd used for her art elective freshman year—they're finicky and unpredictable, and simple color combinations in equal proportions rarely yield the expected shade when she tries mixing them together. Most acutely frustrating of all, she keeps reducing her paintings to runny gray messes whenever she adds any marks to her wet canvases, the interminably wet paint underneath always mixing horribly with the freshly added paint on top.
It's horrible, engrossing, joyous process, slowly coaxing her paintings to life. She doesn't kid herself that they're any good—she has no idea what she's doing, and her technical skills haven't improved that much since Tyler first taught her to draw—but the work is absorbing and rewarding and that's enough for her to love it. Perhaps her results would be stronger if she had ever taken Klaus up on his offer to teach her—but no. Those thoughts are best not examined. In fact, if anything, she loves this more because it is entirely her own.
It's in those hazy October days of dabbling with her paints in the gardens that she gets another visit from a hybrid.
She's not even surprised when she floats past the front door to spot this hybrid on her way out—leaving, without ever saying a word to her. "Wait!" she cries. She wouldn't have ever run into her at all, if she her morning attempt to bypass her compulsion hadn't been cut short by intrusive thoughts of other walks last fall under the Spanish moss strewn limbs of ancient live oaks. Luck is with her, that she'd made it back inside before this hybrid could grow suspicious of her absence.
The hybrid pauses without looking at her. Another female, sharp and beautiful as a sickle glinting in the sun.
"What's your name?"
"Jasmine."
"Jasmine. Nice to meet you. I'm Elena."
"I know." She walks out the door without ever having glanced her way, all brisk efficiency.
An idea strikes her. Elena scrambles after her. "Can I make a request? If you're going out shopping?"
Jasmine stops. Turns to glance at her over her shoulder. "I haven't been instructed otherwise."
"Great." She pauses. "Will you get me some good paper and some envelopes? For letter writing?"
"I won't send them."
"I know. They're not for sending."
Jasmine cocks her head. Studies her for a long time with keen dark eyes before she nods, slowly, and heads toward her parked car.
Elena watches her go from the front door. Settles in and waits, watching the light change from mid-morning coolness to the brightness of midday, until Jasmine returns several hours later, laden with bags.
Elena hops up. "Let me help you with those."
"There's no need. I have my orders."
"You're doing me a favor though. Helping me. Let me help you."
Again, Jasmine pins her with that long piercing look, like she can see under her skin.
It doesn't matter if this Jasmine thinks Elena is over-eager, waiting on the doorstep for her like a puppy, bounding up to help carry groceries just so she has an excuse to stay near another person. She notices that Jasmine keeps a careful distance from her, and when Elena asks her about herself, she always answers her in the brusquest way possible. Elena doesn't care. It's human—well, almost human—interaction.
After the last bag of groceries and other essentials is unpacked, Jasmine slides a package of stationary across the table. Elena toys with the edges of the package. "Do you think you'll be back next time, or do you think it'll be someone else?"
"I doubt it'll be me."
She leaves before Elena can formulate a follow-up question.
No matter.
Elena takes her package of stationary and wanders over to Rebekah's sitting room. Her sitting room, now.
Over the past few weeks, she's rearranged the room to be more to her liking. Swept up the broken vase, shoved all of the little boxes and knick-knacks belonging to Rebekah into the bottom of her armoire. Dragged in a stuffed armchair from an unused bedroom across the hall that's perfect for curling up in by the window while she writes, and swapped out the delicate end table for a sturdier writing table. It had taken some effort to switch out the furniture, and she had scratched the floors a bit, but she's quite satisfied with the outcome nonetheless. She's thinking about replacing some of the art in here as well, to something a little less over-fraught. Maybe she can request something from the next hybrid who comes along.
She takes her time carefully unpackaging her stationary and spreading it out before her, nibbling on the end of her pen as she takes stock of her new possessions. The realization that what she really wanted, more than anything, was a way to talk to her loved ones had leapt upon her the instant she saw Jasmine standing in the doorway, and it had suddenly occurred to her that she could ask for this favor. That she could ask for this lifeline, and that even though her progress for slipping through Klaus's compulsion hasn't yielded very good results yet, that she could still find a way to talk to her beloveds. To leave them a message in a bottle.
Her hands tremble as she smooths the paper on the desk and lifts her pen to write. There is so much to say. So much she yearns to tell so many people. The process of beginning—of choosing just one person to write to—feels overwhelming.
And yet.
In the end, the answer is obvious.
She writes to Tyler. Her Tyler, always. She tells him about their baby. About the miscarriage itself. The hurricane of warped feelings within her—the bewilderment and bereavement and the feeling that she has been dragged out to sea, that she is drowning but she doesn't want to, not anymore. She tells him about her days here—the slowly turning hours, her attempts to test the limits of the compulsion shackling her to this place, the simple joys she had found in reading and painting and writing in her diary when her spirit grew too tired to keep fighting. She admits that there are times when she's uncertain if she's brave enough to leave, when there's even still the tiniest chance that Klaus will come back for her. That she's sorry, for everything that happened between them, for everything she never told him before it was too late. For losing their baby. That she's so sorry. And that she loves him.
And later, she tucks the letter into a pristine cream envelope, writes Tyler's name on the front, and seals it shut.
Little by little, she makes her way through her friends and family. She writes to each of them everything she has been yearning to tell them for the past year. Everything she should have told them before her life in Mystic Falls came to such an abrupt end that she always felt they already knew but now understands she should have taken a moment to tell them anyway.
She writes to all of them, and then, as the cool gray October days slide into blustery November, she begins a different set of letters. These letters she writes to her mother, to her father, to John.
To Stefan—the old Stefan, who was her friend and her confidant and whom she had loved until her very last breath. Beyond that.
To Jenna, whom she cannot help but feel she has betrayed worse than she's betrayed anyone, because the fact that Klaus murdered her and she fell in love with him anyway no longer keeps her up at night—the only thing that keeps her awake is the guilt that she no longer feels guilty about it in the right way, and even that is fading.
The last letter she writes is for her daughter. It's the hardest one to write, because she has both too little to say and too much. The unwieldiness of this task threatens to destroy the tenuous peace she has found in her routines completely. Four months have passed since she lost her baby. Since she found out about her baby. The wound of that loss is still fresh, scabbed over so delicately that any little bump threatens to knock it loose and set it bleeding again.
She doesn't want to ever stop bleeding over this, and she's afraid that if she writes this letter, it may help her find a closure that she doesn't want but is afraid she might need if she's to go on living the way she had promised herself that she would.
It takes her weeks and weeks, but eventually, she does write the letter.
And so her life falls into a pattern as the last leaves fall from the trees and the first winter storm dusts white powder over the grounds, enveloping the manor once again in the eerie blanket of silence she remembers so well from the previous winter.
Every morning, she takes a long hike through the woods around the property, searching for a way out. There are days she can taste a change in the air as she nearly stumbles off of the property, and days where she can barely convince herself to make it ten feet before uncertainty rears its head. She never comes as far as that night she had made it onto the road, but she doesn't give up, either. She keeps this up into January, when the snow finally becomes too persistent and deep for her to keep going, and the compulsion to stay alive eats at her will so atrociously that she eventually must accept that her ventures will have to be put on pause until spring.
The rest of her day she spends in the library reading, or experimenting with Klaus's oils either out in the garden or in front of the parlor fireplace if the weather is particularly bad, although the paints give her a lousy headache if she doesn't keep all the windows open while she works with them.
(She keeps the second parlor's doors shut up tight, and never goes in there.)
She writes in her diary morning, noon, and night, and fills her spare hours jotting letters to her friends, each in turn. By January, she's three rounds of letters in for each of them.
Every two weeks or so, she takes the whole day and does nothing but dusts.
She fills her time.
She accidentally sets her canvas and the parlor's richly woven Oriental rug on fire one afternoon when she works too close to the open fire. There's a minute when the blaze kicks up that it's all she can do to stare at the engulfing flames, mesmerized, tempted, as the fire eats up the oily canvas and Rebekah's beautiful ornate rug. But then the fire leaps hungrily toward her hand, burning her, and the searing flash is enough to push her to her feet and running to the kitchen for the fire extinguisher Stefan had thoughtfully installed under the sink. Putting out the fire is the most exciting thing to happen to her all fall and winter. The first thing that gets her heart racing.
She misses the danger.
On many of those interminable winter afternoons, she's taken to wandering the house and sifting through drawers and armoires, trunks and attics. The only part of the house she has avoided ransacking to fill her listless hours are Klaus's private rooms. After she took all of the paints and brushes out, she hasn't been back since.
So far, her treasure hunting's turned up a number of interesting items: some old photographs taken of Rebekah and Stefan back in the 1920s, from what must have been their initial stint in Chicago together, the two of them glamorously beautiful and deadly and damned as they twinkle at the camera; several more journals on the topic of the occult, bound together with a bit of cord, in that same masculine hand as the set of journals she had found in Klaus's armoire back at the Abattoir; an assortment of strange objects which she suspects of being Dark Objects from the way they make the hair on the back of her neck stand up when she touches them—fine-tipped daggers and enormous needles made of bone the length of her hand, uncut stones set in filigreed silver and an intricately wrought mechanical disk that ticks when she holds it to her ear; and, glimpsed quite by accident, a survey of the property, stuffed into an old trunk in the attic and likely forgotten about for decades. Unfortunately, she studies it for several long minutes before she understands what it is, her time in the woods allowing her to pick out the familiar geography of the surrounding forest with ease. With a sinking feeling, she pinpoints exactly where the borders of the property are—past the streambed, but well before the crag of granite she usually makes it to before turning back around.
Already, she can feel the gates of the compulsion sliding shut against the bypass she had devised. There won't be any more wandering about hoping to slip off of the property through ignorance alone.
It's a frustrating setback, made even more so by the fact that she really can't test how bad her luck has run until the treacherous snows abate and she can return to her routine of morning and midnight hikes.
That's probably why, when she finds an unopened bottle of brandy stashed away inside a desk drawer later that afternoon, she decides to go ahead and indulge herself.
The brandy isn't the first liquor she's had since she's been left here all on her own, but it's the first time she gets properly drunk, sitting alone slumped against the wall in the room that had been the third flood music room before Rebekah had smashed up the piano.
There's no trace of that piano left now, Elena notes, just like one day there will be no trace of her left either. She'll be as swallowed up by this place as the broken bits of furniture and all of the discarded paraphernalia—too unimportant to pack up and take with them— that now comprises her entire world. Her bones will be nothing more than a dusty curiosity. An echo from another century.
She wonders if, years from now when she dies from old age and they find her body, Klaus will make the effort to drain her corpse of blood. Whether he'll bury her out beneath her favorite tree, or simply shut her bones up in this mausoleum, lock the great front doors, and never think on this place again.
She nurses the bottle as her thoughts writhe and snake down these dark paths, until the room gets fuzzy and her eyelids grow too heavy to keep open. Too exhausted to find her way to her bed just yet, she curls up on the hard wood floor and promises herself she'll get up in a minute.
She wakes up in an unfamiliar bed, blinking the sun out of her eyes and trying to catch her bearings.
Her stomach drops when she realizes where she is, whose bed she must have climbed into the night before in a bleary stupor.
Shaking, she jumps to the floor, only for her knees to buckle and to be saved from what would have been a nasty fall by a hand quickly darting out to clutch at the post at the foot of the bed.
She darts from the room on chilled bare feet.
If she's been purposely avoiding looking through any of Klaus's effects too closely, or thinking on him too specifically at all, who could blame her? She has no opportunity to ever find closure with him—not really. But unlike her other ghosts, so distant from her in time and place, she cannot outrun him here. Instead, she lives every day surrounded by him. With his voice, cold as iron, in her head, commanding her to live, to stay.
After the morning when she wakes up in his bed, she cannot escape the thought of him. He shadows her as she paints, as she writes in her diary. While she cooks her eggs and brushes her teeth.
She finds herself reaching for him through their bond for the first time in months. Grasping at nothing.
At night, she dreams that she is back at the edge of the lawn, where the soft grasses trickle into the woods. The air is soft and silvery, caught in that magical hour between night and dawn, when everything is possible.
Klaus lies in her lap, the golden dagger twisted into his heart, gazing up at her with dark appraising eyes. Blood seeps slow as sap from his wound, black and glittering with starlight.
Elena touches her hand to his face. Feels the ice of his skin beneath her palm, and knows him to be so distant that she will never reach him again.
"Tell me your secrets," he murmurs, his lips brushing against her palm as he speaks.
"I don't have any left to tell."
"We both know that's not true."
"I want you to stop haunting me."
"You're a liar." He leans up, and kisses her softly on the mouth. He tastes like her tears.
She wakes up alone in her cold bed, and spends a long time gazing up at the ceiling, watching the play of tree shadows, the silhouettes of bare limbs skating over the pale expanse, as the wind shakes the branches and the moon travels across the sky. Replaying that dream, over and over.
She hasn't dreamed of him like that in a long time.
The exact details grow blurrier as the sky lightens into a murky gray, what it was Klaus had said to her in her dream that had so upset, but the resolution that she has to face this solidifies within her.
She cannot run from him forever.
In the morning, she heads straight to the library, where she pulls out each item one by one. The books and drawings and scrolls and maps and tapestries, the inlaid boxes full of shells and arrow heads and beaded jewelry. She lays them all out carefully, deliberating fitting together these disparate pieces of Klaus's life—his travels and his hobbies, his history and his fixations.
She is painfully aware that the portrait this collection paints of him is woefully incomplete. A mere shard from a stained glass window. It's all she has left, though.
When she is finished in the library, she trails back to his rooms to inspect the minutiae of his life. She rummages through his private study, his desk and his cabinets and the bookshelves housed there, where she finds a smattering of old leather-bound books she's never seen before, many of them filled with his familiar handwriting, across a span of centuries and languages, with only the most recent volumes, primarily in French and English, at all legible to her eyes. She spends hours flipping through them, absorbing his observations and opinions, from the mundane to the extraordinary. There are places where the ink has run or faded so badly that she cannot make out a word, and passages from eighty years ago which are as clear as though they had been written yesterday. The frequency of Klaus's writing is inconsistent. Not a very good diarist, it would seem, but more of someone who dabbles with the hobby every fifteen or twenty years. The only entry she finds at all from the past decade is dated the 1st of May, 2010, three days after the sacrifice. Next to that date, only one word, underscored so sharply the pen had torn through the paper. Triumph.
In the desk drawers she finds notes, half-scrawled, trailing, flickering thoughts that eddy and spark over the page. Drawings, casual and intent alike, scribbles and worn-over studies.
She sees her own face again and again in those drawings, even when they are clearly portraits of her predecessors. But, occasionally, she knows it's really herself she looks upon.
She thinks of how Tyler had seen her, so keen and alive and hopeful, and compares it to the woman she sees gazing sharply back at her from the smudged charcoal beneath her fingers. Gazing at her with fire in her eyes and power— raw, electric power—radiating like a cloud around her. Tyler had seen Elena Gilbert. Klaus had seen a force of nature.
There's something true in both of those assessments. Something true, but also something incomplete.
She takes care to gather all of Klaus's drawings and tuck them neatly away, where they will be safe, but she will not have to look at them again.
In his studio, she finally looks through his paintings. There's a strange assortment—landscapes and portraits and abstract expressionist experiments on huge canvases of stretched linen. She sets the ones she likes most aside, and tucks the rest away.
In the bedroom, she flicks through his dresser drawers, his bedside table, just to be certain she doesn't miss anything. Like the library, there's a whole host of little objects that trace Klaus's complicated history through the ages. She finds a book of Neruda's poems fallen under the bed—likely dropped there earlier in the summer when she was looking for her diary. What can only be his daylight ring, a near match to Rebekah's, which she vaguely remembers flashing gold and blue against the flames the night he had murdered her. Stashed away behind a clever hidden panel in one of his dresser drawers, a small stoppered phial filled with pale ash.
When she has gone through everything, she folds his shirts back up and returns them to the armoire. Sets the room back to tidiness, and, taking the paintings she had liked the best with her, shuts the door on Klaus.
In the library, she tucks Klaus away into the trunks and drawers, and when she puts the books back on the shelves, she does so according to her own whims.
They had shared this room, once, but now it belongs solely to her.
And if, at night, she sometimes feels so lonely that she cannot sleep—if sometimes she trails into Klaus's bedroom and pulls out his torn shirt and carries it into his bed with her—Well. There is no one to judge her.
The nurse comes back in November and February, and every three months thereafter, asking Elena the same questions and taking the same vitals down for her chart before taking her blood. Elena answers her questions as perfunctorily as she had in August.
The hybrids come, too, though with less predictability. Always women, always efficient and aloof. Never the same one twice.
Elena makes a point with each of them to learn their names. To smile at them and speak warmly to them and test the boundaries of their orders to keep themselves apart from her. To fill herself up as much as possible with these simple interactions, knowing she'll have to live with her solitude for another indefinite stretch after only a few short hours in the company of another lively mind.
She grows practiced in talking to them. In feeling out how to crack each one open for her. She turns on her charm to the brightest setting, and it turns out even the strictest orders are no true competition for the full force of her Petrova allure. She discovers it's easier to draw these women out if she keeps her distance and tries to only ask them direct questions. By the mid-spring, every hybrid smiles back at her—shy smiles, secret smiles that they hide into their shoulders, fierce, wild grins because they know she's making them break the rules and they like her for it—and Elena starts to think that she can live with this.
It's never the same hybrid twice, but she begins to look forward to their visits. Begins thinking of them not quite as her friends, but as something very close.
She stops thinking of them as hybrids altogether and just starts thinking of them as women instead.
In April, her assigned visitor is a quiet girl named Ella who won't look her in the eyes. She appears younger than Elena—sixteen, maybe. The sort she always feels most sorry for.
"How old are you?" she asks her, unable to help herself.
"Eighteen now."
"How old were you when you were turned?"
"That's not important." Ella opens up the refrigerator and types out some notes on her phone. Elena has tried handing these women lists of what she needs before, but they always insist on having a look for themselves before making their purchases.
"Do you miss your parents?"
No response.
"I miss mine."
"I'm an orphan."
"I never said I wasn't."
Ella glances up at her. "We're all orphans, aren't we."
The observation strikes her hard. Her throat tightens. "That's why we all have to look out for each other, one way or another, I suppose."
"I miss that feeling of being curled up in bed on a rainy day with a good book, when the light through the windows is really low and gray. I miss feeling safe."
She takes Elena's list without another word and leaves to run the errands.
Later, when all of the bags are unpacked, Elena tells her she has something for her.
"I'm really supposed to get going," Ella protests.
"In a minute." She brings the girl up to her library. Watches in delight as the girl's eyes go big and round as she takes in the vast array of books on the shelves.
"This is amazing," Ella breathes.
"Stay awhile and read."
"I can't."
"You can. I'll stay away. You weren't told you had to be brief, right? I won't bother you."
It's only a small act of kindness—all of the little things she thinks of to repay the women who come to check in on her are—but those acts nourish and sustain her.
She bakes cookies for a woman whose eyes she notices lingering over the chocolate chips and confectioner's sugar in the pantry. She swaps leather jackets with another girl, and ends up swapping the same jacket again with a different woman the next spring. Several of them stop to play the piano before leaving, their fingers trailing reverently over the keys.
"I've only ever played on my grandma's old upright," one of the women, Cody, confesses as she taps out a few thin, discordant notes. "Oof, that's awful. Do you know how to tune one of these?"
"No, but we have the tools upstairs."
"Good. I'll show you."
Another time, she takes a woman named Marina up into her library so Marina can look through her collection of first editions. "Do you realize your sofa's broken?"
Elena shrugs. "I can't really move it by myself."
Marina shakes her head. "How many of my kind have you let flit through this house without asking for help?" She picks one of the broken halves of the enormous leather sofa up like it's made of styrofoam and hoists it over her shoulder. "Where can I take this?"
"There's an unused parlor downstairs. I'll show you." She lets Marina bring the broken halves of the sofa to the second parlor, always locked now. She picks out a couple of sofas and tables from other rooms in the house, and Marina hauls them upstairs for her and helps her set them in place.
She asks them for favors sometimes—little things that will be easy for them to bring her back—certain foods she misses, new converse sneakers, a crockpot for the kitchen. Stacks of novels and guidebooks on home gardening and cooking and yoga, the newspaper and glossy magazines from the grocery store. Tulip bulbs and packs of tomato and pepper seeds to grow out back and a push lawnmower to replace the broken one she found in one of the basement rooms filled with outdoor equipment. A new stack of stationary with letters, and a stack of legal pads and pack of ballpoint pens.
The winter melts into an early spring. The rising daffodils remind her painfully of how happy she had been last spring, playing happy as a child in the sunshine, so unaware that all of that fragile joy was about to shatter irreparably. Yet she tends them as best as she can, only losing a few to the heat and her inattention. By mid-May, the gardens are choked with orange and yellow daylilies, while the trees bloom bright sprays of white and pale pink flowers that shower the ground in luxurious sprays of whisper soft petals.
Elena cannot help the way her heart speeds when she looks out over the rolling grasses, almost unreal in its soft spring greenness, its damp cool color and dripping life. She takes a special pleasure in tending the yard, trimming the grass and watering the flower beds and weeding the unused vegetable garden near the kitchen and preparing the ground to nurture new life.
She resumes her morning walks as soon as the last of the ice melts off, trudging through acres of mud and leaf-rot and breathing in the fresh clean air as she experiments with the limits of Klaus's control on her. She had been all too right, unfortunately—direct knowledge of the property lines wrecks her earlier successes, and even night-walks prove less successful than they had been. She finds herself overly preoccupied with trying to discern the features of the land at night, to make out whether a certain shadow is actually a granite boulder or just a tree, with whether or not she can hear the streambed behind her, which surely must mean she's gone too far.
The setback is frustrating, and she spends long angry hours ripping through the books in her library and scribbling on her legal pads, trying to attack the issue from a new angle.
At sunrise and twilight, she likes to climb the Japanese Maple and watch the sky change color. She grows reckless and strong, leaving the maple behind when it grows too easy and searching out more challenging perches to ascend.
May passes into June, and she tries hard not to notice that an entire year has passed already.
June, to July.
Twenty years old and what does she have to show for it?
She still writes letters home. A line in a novel will make her laugh, and she'll have to write to Jeremy about it right away. The sky will blaze this brilliant kaleidoscope of violet and pink and orange and blue for a few minutes right before the sun disappears behind the trees, and it will be so otherworldly that she will nearly fall out of the tree (she does fall, once, but manages to catch herself on a lower branch before she can do herself irreversible harm), and she must tell Damon all about it, because his secretly romantic heart appreciates these ephemeral beauties as much as she does.
She had been right when she'd suspected that putting her feelings for her daughter to paper would help her to heal. She misses the clarity of her grief in those months after the miscarriage. Misses how close it had made her feel to that little life, as though the weight of that grief had been an anchor to keep her daughter near. She doesn't know how to feel a year later after that terrible day when she had lost her baby. The sadness is still there, tucked away inside of her, but she carries it more easily every day. It's never less. She's just more.
The sun bakes her skin brown as she paints and reads outside. Her tomatoes and her peppers sprout, by late August she savors the crisp simplicity of the harvest on her tongue. She offers a basket of tomatoes to the woman who comes to restock her pantry that month, and she finds a packet of peas for her garden tucked in amongst her groceries.
Like the garden, the manor itself metamorphoses over time into a place that is her own.
After she finishes sorting through Klaus's belongings, she swaps out the paintings she finds most aesthetically offensive for the ones she'd taken from his rooms. Goes hunting through the house for artwork in disused rooms, whipping off white dust cloths to reveal flaking oil paintings and framed etchings and faded silk tapestries. She hangs a fauvist painting in her favorite sitting room off Rebekah's old bedroom, and drags what looks like a Miró down into the parlor. Rolls up the hall runner Rebekah had put down nearly two years ago and bundles it up with the scorched parlor rug in the 2nd parlor, which has become, for lack of a better option, her junk room. The place she puts things to forget about them.
She gets new art for her bedroom, and starts filling it with odd objects from around the house which appeal to her.
When the weather starts turning too cold to spend quite so much time outside, she puts in a request for some house paint. She probably goes a bit overboard—she paints murals on the walls of the front foyer and entrance wall, climbing vines twisted through with flowers, all down the length of the room. She hauls the ladder up from the basement and paints the ceiling a deep blue, flecked with metallic silver stars. She drips paint onto the fine crystal chandelier and shrugs it off. Next, she repaints the parlor all in scarlet, the dining room in a bright jade green, her bedroom the pale, insubstantial color of morning.
The house loses its pristine glow, and so becomes a home. She accidentally leaves a ring of paint on the dining room table that never quite comes out of the wood, no matter how hard she scrubs at it. There are scratches in the hardwood floors and unfortunately across some of the black and white checked marble floors downstairs from where she has dragged heavy furniture from one room to another, rearranging the space to suit her tastes as best as she can.
She stops bothering to keep her possessions in her room alone, instead scattering her shoes and jackets, her books and notebooks and jewelry and games of solitaire all over the house. She picks arranges flowers from the gardens and lights up the rooms with them. The house is so large that sometimes she forgets about her arrangements, and leaves them moldering in their vases for several weeks before she thinks to go into a certain room again.
She raids the wine cellar nightly, tasting rare and expensive wines and peeling the labels off of her favorites, collecting them all in a drawer in the kitchen so she can request more on the next supply run. She cooks herself sumptuous meals—coq au vin and boeuf bourguignon, veal piccata and Spanish omelet. On Thanksgiving she even manages to roast a small turkey.
Entire rooms transform in purpose. The parlor becomes her studio and work space. The former third floor music room her yoga studio. After a while, she forgets that Rebekah's sitting room had ever been Rebekah's, walking blindly through the bedroom to reach her writing table with the good view, where her best and clearest thoughts always bubble up. If she ever stops to notice, she really only sleeps in her bedroom about half the time.
The only room that doesn't change in her mind is the library, which remains her special place above all others. Yet even that is indisputably hers, and hers alone.
None of this changes the loneliness that howls inside of her whenever she lets herself get too quiet. The desire for more.
When she touches herself, she tries not to think of anything at all except for the fluttery touch of her own hands.
(She can never come just like that. It's only when she lets her mind roam, memory lapping against her, that she can find any release at all.)
Throughout her explorations of her home, she has not found a single locked door. What would be the point, when a vampire could break through anything and she had been compelled not to open any closed doors?
All of the doors are as easy to open as turning a doorknob. All except one.
When she first stumbles across the locked door, tucked away on the second floor in a gloomy wing of the manor she almost never bothers to frequent because the rooms are all spidery with dust and the gloom of forgotten things, like herself, she's certain that the hinges must just be stuck. However, yank as hard as she can on the door, she cannot budge it even the barest inch. Frustrated, she drops down onto her knees, and peers through the keyhole.
Light filters into the room in hazy sheets that catch the dust-motes floating in the air and set them glimmering. There's something large and dark inside the room, but she can't for the life of her figure out what.
The question of what lies behind that door obsesses her.
That winter, when she takes her daily walks through the frosty grounds, she circles around to the far side of the property, and tries to figure out which window leads into that room. She hovers just underneath it, craning her neck up at the unwashed windows and brooding over what could be inside.
She's grown used to this place offering up its secrets to her. Grown used to feeling in control here. At home.
The thought of that room festers in the back of her mind.
It's during that second winter—her third since she came here—that she finally gets around to reading the journals she had found during the previous winter. Honestly, she had forgotten all about them, so caught up in the unfortunate discovery of the survey, and it's not until she's flicking through her library collection looking for a specific volume she had read before with a section on barrier spells which she thinks might help her break into that locked room (which, it's clearly to her now is magically sealed) that she spots the set and curiosity sparks within her.
Carefully untying the leather cord from around the books, she opens up the first journal and scans through the page. The entry—mercifully in English—is written in small, neat letters, with the same precision and spirit of scientific investigation as the volumes back at the Abattoir.
As she flips through the various journals, dating between the late 18th century to the beginning of the 20th, a whole host of topics are covered in astounding technical detail—theories behind complex forms of esoteric dark magicks, alchemy, blood rites, rituals of transformation and binding, death and resurrection. Descriptions on the mechanisms for the magic worked by witches versus the magic of vampires, namely compulsion and the transformative resurrection magic of a turning. Sire bonds and how they might be broken.
It's an exhaustive list of topics, ranging from philosophical musings to descriptions of laboratory-like experiments and their results. Hypotheses and explanations and extrapolations. Raw ingredients for spells, and the reasons for choosing them.
It's a staggering collection of knowledge, complex and meticulously organized with notes and cross-references across the volumes.
She realizes after some hours of reading that she doesn't have the complete set. There are evidently some earlier volumes that are perhaps lost to time, or scattered throughout other properties, and of course, several key volumes left behind in New Orleans.
Remotely, she wonders whose work this is. A vampire's, obviously, given the period of time the research is drawn out over. One of Klaus's brothers, perhaps? He'd mentioned one of them by name to her, once. A brother who had desired to overthrow him. Who'd developed the theory behind the gold dagger, and reasoned out the ingredients and the spellwork necessary to create it. She wishes she could remember what name Klaus had called him by, because she suspects she has him to thank for all of this.
That winter becomes the winter of research. The set of journals open up new ideas and modes of thinking about magic and about her role in all of it. About her own power, and what she is capable of accomplishing.
If nothing else, she has access here to a vast repository of knowledge. To an auto-didactic education. One of the benefits to Klaus's millennia-old obsession with her is the collection he had built up on topics relevant to her in particular.
She pulls and rereads books housed in her library, comparing the theories within them with the notes in the journals. Goes back to Klaus's rooms and takes from his private bookshelves anything at all that looks pertinent to her research topics. References her old notes, stuffed untouched into her library desk drawer for nearly a year.
Years removed from the immediate trauma of it all, she reflects that of course her blood isto blame for her short-lived, impossible pregnancy. She is a creature of inversion. Of mirrors and warped reflections. Mortal, with the latent power to rewrite the laws of nature and replace them with her own. To smash the most fundamental barriers between life and death, magical and mundane. With the power to create life with a dead man.
She wonders, fleetingly, if all the hybrids are potent because each of them had been raised with her blood, but shoves that line of thought aside. She won't find any answers to those questions, isolated as she is, so they're not worth asking.
The fact that it was her blood used to transition each and every single one of the hybrids launches her on a different line of inquiry all together.
She spends the winter arming herself with this knowledge. Striving to understand herself and her place in this world as deeply as she can.
The things she reasons are wild, fevered and ecstatic. Impossible, except that nothing is impossible if she wills it.
Winter passes into spring.
Every now and then, she hits upon an idea sourced from those old tomes that she thinks could help her break into that locked room. She's no witch, so a great deal of it is impossible for her to accomplish—anything more than the most basic ritual is beyond her capabilities.
She reads about various meditation rituals that can result in a trance-like state which would allow the initiate to see the residue of any spellwork lingering about. Compiles a list of ingredient she would need and thinks about how she can ask for them in the least suspicious way possible. She's pretty sure she can just include a lot of the herbs with the groceries list, but how to ask for a live raven? She can just imagine herself having to explain that she plans to cut its heart out. Maybe there's a recipe that calls for that in Mastering the Art of French Cooking that she can use as her cover?
It's because she's on this topic of meditation rituals that the stray line about compulsions even catches her attention. Buried as it is in lengthy descriptions of the meditation practices themselves, she had totally missed the connection between meditation and overcoming the ability to be compelled. She reads in stunned silence as the writer describes the process of freeing oneself from susceptibility to the vampire's will.
Klaus's words from years earlier swim hazily back to her.
It's possible to build an immunity to compulsion, after a fashion, it's true.
Elena puts down the book. Rests her forehead against the cool wood grain of her desk.
It's the answer she's needed all of this time. A way to make herself invulnerable to anyone else's will. A way to permanently guarantee her own autonomy. To possess herself completely.
That spring, as Elena returns to her gardens, as she takes her walks in the woods and writes in her diary, the fourth since the blue one, she incorporates into her day a strict practice of meditation designed to clear her mind and focus the strength of her will.
There's nothing in any of her books whether these methods can help to break apart a compulsion already in place, but even if that's not possible, she knows that building these defenses could give her an edge at some distant, unforeseen point in the future.
Impossible to say whether or not she really makes any strides toward learning how to beat compulsion. There're no vampires around whom she trusts to practice this with, and she doesn't quite dare ask any of the hybrid women who come to check on her whether or not they will help.
The meditation does ground her, though, in a way she realizes she has probably needed for a very long time. There is a peace inside of her she had not realized existed until she took the time to be silent and to listen for it.
Elena turns twenty-one on a sticky day in June, and celebrates with a bottle of Dom Perignon.
She looks at herself in the mirror and wonders when exactly she had left her girlhood behind.
There's a day, lying back in the high soft grasses and listening to the wind rustle through the branches of her maple tree overhead that an idea for a new novel falls into her head like rain falling from a clear blue sky.
She sits up slowly. It's been years since she's written a novel. There were times when she had really believed that her heart had been so badly broken that first summer here alone that she would never write again.
She wanders back into the house in a dream. Settles behind her writing desk in her sitting room with the good view and pulls out a legal pad and ballpoint pen. Her hand hovers for just a moment over the lined paper, as she asks herself if she dares.
She writes.
Writing is like resurrection. Like that first fiery breath after death had swept through her, taking everything and leaving nothing. Like the glowing heat of the new blood that had flooded her body in that first instant when she had cast off death's cloak and opened her eyes to the newly risen sun.
Elena finishes her novel, only to realize that she has room inside of herself for another. Another.
In the fall, she hands over a finished manuscript—neatly and painstakingly hand-written—to the woman assigned to her this time. Several hours have passed since this one—Rafaela— had arrived, and Elena's coaxed her into ready smiles.
"What's this?" Rafaela asks her.
"My book. I was hoping you could take it."
Rafaela frowns at the neat stack of paper binder-clipped together. "What am I supposed to do with this?"
"I just want it out in the world. Please. I just—if it stays here, then no one will ever read it."
Rafaela pins her with a knowing, pitying look. Elena doesn't need her pity, really, and she's about to tell her so, when Rafaela takes the manuscript from her. "I'll read your book," she says, solemn as an oath.
The Japanese Maple blazes.
She succeeds in the trance ritual with the raven heart. Sees a web of what looks to her eyes like Celtic knots around the border of the door, intricate and impenetrable, throbbing faintly crimson.
She takes pains to draw it all in her diary, in as much detail as she possibly can, hoping she can find something in her collection to help her solve this.
The letter she writes to Bonnie that night is particularly self-satisfied.
When she gets particularly lonely, she finds herself reading the diaries of her former companions, abandoned when they disappeared in such haste.
Stefan's diary, retrieved from that hiding spot under his desk, always provides a particular sort of comfort. His observations and recollections of that first fall they had all spent in this house together feel distant and miraculous as a mirage. Bloody and horrifying as those months had been, she still finds herself remembering them fondly. Long dinners and lazy evenings in front of the piano. Winding walks in the misty, dreaming gardens and secret smiles more precious to her than her own life.
Rebekah's diaries always make her laugh, which surprises her a little, at first, because she doesn't remember Rebekah as having been very funny at all. Even when she finds Rebekah's most recent diary, which includes sometimes disturbing details about what she wishes she could do to put her, Elena, in her place, her commentary still brings tears of hilarity to Elena's eyes. Whenever she feels particularly down, she likes to read from Rebekah's diaries to cheer herself up.
Even Klaus's diaries—sporadic and poorly detailed as they are—provide distraction on dull winter days when the snow is too high for her to venture out and her various creative projects have exhausted her.
It seems surreal to Elena that she had ever known these people. That she had loved them and hated them so fiercely. They feel sometimes more like characters from a beloved novel than anything real.
The only thing that feels real anymore is herself, and this place.
Elena writes two more novels that winter, and a third one in the spring.
She's out in the garden when she hears the sound of wheels crunching over the gravel drive. It's mid-June, and the flowers are blooming riotously, to rapturous effect.
Good, she thinks as she heads inside to meet this latest hybrid. She's been meaning to ask for some new gardening gloves.
She goes back inside to greet her visitor, only to freeze in her tracks.
Standing in the glow from the front door, the bright summer morning light setting her silvery blonde hair aglow, is Rebekah.
A/N: Thanks so much for reading! If you're really really really missing Klaus right now… do not fear. Rebekah is going to have some news on that front.
This chapter really surprised me by how long it ended up being (the longest one yet? how?) —the first version of this chapter was a mere 1800 words, but as I kept working on it, it really started to breathe and become about the time in Elena's life where she is really forced to dig deep and figure out how to live for herself. This story is, after all, about Elena first- her journey from as she climbs out of the bottom of the abyss. I'm so excited to share it with all of you all.
Please send me a comment and let me know your thoughts on this fic. I'm planning to whip the next chapter out super soon!