[fic] pomegranates (3/?)
fic: pomegranates
fandom: btvs/tvd/mythology (lol) (LOL)
pairing: elena/dawn (hades/persephone); bonnie, caroline, jupiter/juno, buffy/tara
word count: 5,900
summary: Hades are born, they grow, are molded. Persephone are created, plucked from the air and then hidden away. Easy to find and easy to miss.
Elena ends and therefore begins. On the edge of the solar system, she is given a quest: to find the Persephone to her Hades and restore balance to the Underworld.
setting: university-au (ucla); everything you know about the characters is still true, with some minor canon alterations that will be made clear.
[ chapter one: on the edge of space]
[ chapter two: daisies]
((playlist))
Elena was alone in their dorm, sitting cross-legged on her bed, her hair falling over one shoulder and obscuring part of her textbook, like she cared, gnawing on the nearly empty bag of blood in her hand, when the door slammed open and Dawn fell in.
Like literally fell, back flat on the ground, one leg twisted up and caught on the doorway.
Elena looked down at the bag of blood in her hand and up at the red knee-high boot waving at eye level. She had about half a second before a normal person would start to right themselves and stand up, which meant she had less time than that to hide the blood bag and then come up with a reasonable excuse for not leaping up to help. In the half a second it took to think this out, use her vamp speed to dispose of the bag, and settle back on her bed, Dawn hadn’t moved a muscle. Elena peered over the edge of the bed down at her.
“Are you okay?”
Dawn turned her head around so that she could smile up at Elena, “I think I’m going to live down here now. The floor is nice.”
Elena’s gaze flicked to the boot in the air, down the length of Dawn’s bare thigh, to the dress that was now tangled up on her hips, “I don’t think the guys in the suite across the hall will mind if you stay there, but we might have to start charging.”
Dawn flushed, dropping her leg down to the floor and wriggling her skirt back over the top of her thighs.
After a moment’s hesitation, Elena closed her books and set them on the desk behind her before flopping down on her stomach so that her head was closer to the door, resting her chin in her folded arms, “Do you fall down like that a lot?”
“All the time, Buffy says-“ Dawn stopped and then cleared her throat. “Ah… I was just dropping off books for Bonnie.” She stood up quickly, gathered up the books and put them on Bonnie’s bed. “Let her know I stopped by?”
Elena raised herself up on her elbows, “Well she gets out of class in a few you can just wait-“
“No, um…” Dawn shuffled her feet, avoiding eye contact. “I mean, I can’t. I gotta run to… so …” She shook her head and backed towards the door, “See you…”
Elena lay there, blinking at the open door, until Bonnie came home.
“So! Miss… ah… Gilbert?”
Elena fixed her gaze steadily on the school-appointed advisor, a small, lean woman with wild flowing hair and a rather wild sort of way of moving about her cluttered office.
Dr. Halverson smiled wildly, “Earlier today I had an hour-long conference with a girl who’s file said she was a psych major, convinced her to sign up for an internship at a day camp for troubled youth, only to discover an hour later that I’d had the wrong file in front of me all the while.”
Elena looked pointedly at the clutter in the office but said nothing in response.
“That was the last slot at that camp, so let’s be sure to dot our I’s and cross our T’s?” She opened a file with a snap and leaned on her elbows. “Elena Gilbert, sophomore transfer from Whitmore College, pre-med. You had an… internship? At the hospital there, rather irregular for a first year undergrad, did you enjoy it?”
“Yes, um…”
“Letters of recommend from… a mayor, a sheriff, a… I must assume some sort of philanthropist, and a Dr. Saltzman, Early American History,” she raised her eyes to look at Elena. “Nothing from the professor in charge of your internship.”
Elena blinked, “No… she…”
“Died.” The woman smiled, “As did your parents apparently. And aunt. Your father was a surgeon? And you want to follow in his footsteps I expect.”
It wasn’t a question. Elena waited.
“And what did your mother expect, that you would be a surgeon as well?”
Elena narrowed her eyes, “How is that relevant?”
Dr. Halverson closed the file and leaned back in her chair, folding her hands in front of her like a villain in a Bond movie, “Call it professional curiosity.”
Elena ground her teeth.
“Okay, no bullshit? I’ve had hundreds of bright-eyed, busy-tailed freshman sit in that very seat and tell me all the reasons in the world why they are going to be the next greatest surgeon and every one of them had exactly one reason why they shouldn’t.”
“Their mother?”
“Their first childhood dream.” Dr. Halverson turned her chair and looked out the window. “Dreams come in phases, just like anything else. In your case, it’s easier, simpler, to ask what dream you secretly shared with your mother when you were young. That’s the dream that will come along and nip at your heels when you are studying for an exam, or a surgical intern, when you are in your first year of residency, when you finally get the job you’ve been clawing your way to the top to get.”
Elena looked down at her knees.
“You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.”
“How often do people go back, change their minds,” Elena said to her shoes.
“Ask me again sometime.” Dr. Halverson picked up a cup of coffee off her desk, took a sip, grimaced, and then put it back down. “Cold coffee is positively the most depressing thing in the world.”
“Writing,” Elena said, looking up. “My mother… writing. I was going to be a writer.”
Dr. Halverson slid forward in her chair excitedly, “Journalism, research, self-help, fiction?”
“Fiction, I suppose.”
She looked Elena up and down appraisingly, “Well now, isn’t that interesting?”
Elena moved her hands from the armrests to her lap and back again.
“Come back in three weeks, I’ll have to move some things around - but I think I have something perfect in mind for you.”
“Three weeks?”
“Just in time for Thanksgiving break,” Dr. Halverson nodded, her attention already on a pile of papers on her desk.
Elena sat for a moment, waiting. “Um? Dr. Halverson?”
“Call me Bennett, please. Dr. Halverson is my sister,” she looked up and smiled again. “Get out now.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it. Come see me again next month sometime,” Bennett said with a wave of her hand. “Now shoo!”
“So what’s on the agenda tonight?” Elena grabbed a handful of French fries from Bonnie’s tray across the table and shoved them into her mouth.
“Get your own food,” Bonnie said from behind her book, absentmindedly chewing on a carrot stick. “And eat something with vitamins in it.”
“It’s not like I need vitamins, remember?”
Bonnie peered over the top of her paperback, “I wonder about that sometimes. Like… vampires, you guys still eat but do you…”
“Hey,” Caroline plopped down on the bench next to Bonnie. “What did we say about the ‘v-word’?” She glared at them pointedly. “We are normal, ordinary sophomores, right?”
Elena twirled her phone around in her hand and tried to remember the rules, why they came to Los Angeles, what they were allowed to talk about, who they were allowed to miss, “So you and Dawn going out tonight, Care?”
“God, subtle much?” Caroline raised her eyebrows at her and Bonnie smiled, ducking further into her book to hide it. Caroline sighed, “No. Something about a research project, she canceled on me like twenty minutes ago. I’d drag you out, but the TA in your Humanities class told me there’s a pop quiz tomorrow, so you should really stay in and study.”
“Seriously Caroline, is there a TA on this campus that you haven’t seduced?”
Caroline glared at Elena, “Yeah, okay. Let’s passive aggressively attack my love life.”
Elena glared down at the cheeseburger on her plate.
“What day is it today anyway, or is it just me or is time moving really weird here?” Bonnie put her book down, spine up.
Caroline looked around the bustling cafeteria and beamed, “Maybe this is what life feels like when we’re not running for our lives or plotting a hostile takeover in between classes?”
“I can live with that,” Bonnie put her hand on top of Elena’s. “Even if it means…” She blinked tears out of her eyes and smiled her crooked smile. Elena smiled back, turning her hand to squeeze Bonnie’s. Caroline wrapped her arm around Bonnie’s shoulders and added her hand to the pile.
A host of unnamed lost drifted in the space between them.
The sound of laughter and clinking cutlery and people milling around, talking or shouting or whispering flooded over them.
“It’s Thursday,” Elena mused suddenly, breaking the silence between them. And on the horizon there was Friday, Saturday, Sunday… years of days that they could fill anyway they wished, anyway they could, without looking over their shoulder.
“Book club night,” Bonnie snatched up her book. “Shit. Book club night!” She looked up at them, eyes wild, “I’m only on chapter three! What time is it?”
Some bro with a flat-brimmed hat on sideways and pants hanging off his ass, leaned over Elena’s head, “It’s only noon, beautiful. You have plenty of time.” He winked at her before walking over to a large group of guys a few feet away, a large salad on his tray.
Bonnie stared wide-eyed at him for a moment before turning to Elena, “Did that actually just happen?”
Caroline waved her hand dismissively, “Anyway, he’s wrong. It’s actually closer to one.”
“What time is book club?” Elena asked, stealing more of Bonnie’s fries.
Bonnie hit Elena’s hand with her book, “Not until nine.”
“I didn’t know you were in a book club.”
“That’s because you never pay attention to the calendar in the room,” Caroline said exasperatedly. “Seriously Elena?”
Elena gestured at the piles of textbooks in front of her, “In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t really have time for book clubs. My advisor is trying to set me up with an internship over winter break.”
“I only joined a couple of weeks ago. Dawnie’s roommate convinced me to join hers, it’s really fun. She’s… kinda weird? But everyone else is super nice.” Bonnie stood up, “I’m stealing some of your candy stash from under the bed and holing up in the library for a few hours.”
“Hey! How’d you know about my candy stash?” Elena spluttered. She looked up into Bonnie’s amused eyes, “Oh yeah… well good luck or whatever.”
“You’re both obnoxious and impossible,” Bonnie threw over her shoulder as she skipped out of the doors that led outside.
Caroline pointed one perfectly polished fingernail at Elena, “Study for your Humanities pop quiz, and don’t forget about your midterm in Bio next week.”
“What are you going to do tonight?”
Caroline stood up and smiled, “I’m going to avoid the room as long as possible so that you can mope in peace.” She leaned over and kissed Elena on the cheek, “But I may come home early if you want the company?”
Elena glared at her textbooks, “No reason for you to wallow with me.”
Caroline stood over her for a moment, “Elena…”
“What?”
“You’ve never been so… unsure before. If you want something, you always get it.”
Elena shifted on the bench.
“Just… don’t leave too much of our old life behind that you forget who you are.”
It didn’t take long for Dawn Summer to become such an integral part of their lives that it almost felt as though they had been saving her a place at the metaphorical table that is their fucked up lives. Caroline was one small step away from adding a green section to her elaborate schedule hanging on the wall - and if it wasn’t for the fact that Dawn’s personal schedule seemed to change by the hour she probably wouldn’t have waited for permission.
Dawn flitted through their door like a leaf on the wind - arms full of books for Bonnie or ads to kitschy new boutiques for Caroline, somehow anticipating their needs before they were even aware of them.
Except, she never really seemed to bring anything for Elena, without making it painfully obvious. After their comfort and familiarity on their first of many movie nights, Dawn suddenly put up walls Elena couldn’t penetrate. Primarily because she did it in such a way that no one would notice. She smiled, she laughed, she made the same ridiculous jokes; but she didn’t catch Elena’s eye over Caroline’s head and wink knowingly, she didn’t lean into Elena’s side when she laughed, she didn’t make herself comfortable on Elena’s bed without asking. Even as she wound herself so single-mindedly into every facet of their lives, she kept more of herself back.
And every day it felt to Elena like little pieces of her self were slipping out of her hands like sand.
The cafeteria in their dorm was supposed to be the best on-campus. That’s what Caroline’s copious research suggested, anyway.
”It is important, Bonnie!” Caroline had practically growled from the backseat.
“Why can’t we just live off-campus?” Elena muttered, her hands griping the steering wheel as hard as she dared, knuckles white.
“Starting over means doing things right, means being normal,” Caroline explained for the third time that day. “We’re driving in a straight line from crazy-town with Originals and Travelers and werewolves and dopplegangers into normalcy.”
Bonnie sighed, “Care, I watched every episode of The OC with you in junior high, what makes you think you have either of us convinced that you are looking for normalcy in Los Angeles?”
Elena’s eyes flicked instinctively to the rearview mirror, a long expanse of dark, empty highway greeted her. It wasn’t a straight line they were on, twisting and turning down lonely highways, changing cars every three days, looking back despite promising each other they wouldn’t.
Tears blurred Elena’s vision, “We aren’t characters in a teen soap opera, Caroline. Living near a beach won’t suddenly make our lives more glamorous.”
Running away won’t suddenly guarantee any of us a happily ever after.
“But maybe driving to the other side of a continent will be enough to make our lives a little less fucking tragic.” Glancing up at them, Caroline chuckled, “Or at least our love lives.”
Elena and Bonnie smiled wanly at the joke that fell flat in the air between them.
Stefan.
Jeremy.
Damon.
Tyler.
Matt.
Caroline’s face sank, she leaned back against the seat and sighed.
Bonnie turned around, smile wide, the remnant of a tear already brushed away with the tips of her fingers, “So tell us about this cafeteria.”
“Well… there’s this chicken cordon bleu thing… “
Elena picked up her fork and played with her chicken, every bit as delicious as Caroline’s research had promised, swirling a bite-sized piece around with her fork. The new normal, Caroline kept saying. Except Elena had the sneaking suspicion that…
“Penny for your thoughts?” a low voice interrupted.
Elena looked up into Dawn’s smiling face, “I thought you had plans?”
Dawn raised an eyebrow as she carefully peeled the tinfoil top off her yogurt.
“I mean…” Elena cleared her throat, “Caroline mentioned that you had to raincheck on whatever plans you two had for tonight.”
Things new Elena was not: chill.
She shoved the bite of lukewarm chicken and mashed potatoes into her mouth and tried to imagine a reality in which she wasn’t a complete spaz.
“Yeah, I have some stuff I have to do tonight. How’s---?” Dawn gestured at the pile of notes under Elena’s elbow.
“Fine. Another day, another pop quiz on the horizon.”
Dawn licked her spoon, her eyes on focused on a spot somewhere over Elena’s left shoulder, “You’ll get through it. I gotta jet.” She stood up, empty yogurt in one hand and a dinner roll in the other.
“Hey wait,” Elena shot out her hand to catch Dawn’s wrist, but thought better of it about a second too late, leaving her hand flopping in the air. “Um… good luck I guess.”
Dawn’s eyes grazed over Elena’s face, seeming to search for something, “Yeah… um… thanks?”
Elena spent the rest of her evening in the library, alternatively shooting angry looks at anyone talking over a whisper and muttering to herself while flipping wildly through her notes like a crazy person.
Mildred’s grave became the one place in Elena’s life that felt like a haven and not like a trap ready to spring. She would have said that it was normal college blues, except that she didn’t really mind her classes all that much. The work was daunting, but she was taking enough general requirements (hand-picked by Caroline) that it didn’t feel that much different from high school.
Except…
Well, high school did contain more memories of blood and death and trauma than classroom time, specifically. But in the hazy recesses of her mind that remembered a time when her parents were still around and things were normal.
On the surface, maybe.
Elena scowled out the window of the bus, this time empty aside from one man in his forties with an old-fashioned suit on and a little blue carnation he twirled between his fingers. Her inner monologue had taken on a bit of a snarky edge since her meeting with Dr. Halverson’s question about her mom.
Which one? seemed to chant in her ear from the moment she gave her answer.
Her mother, Miranda, had seen a writer in her. Had nourished it, purchased her journals and notebooks from the time she was old enough to hold a stubby pencil in her small hand. It was something they shared and it was something that still felt… sacred. Almost in a way that medicine did not.
Medicine was public, it was a service, it was an act. And her father’s medicine… it had been twisted up in everything that she was now. Elena Gilbert, no matter what. Despite everything that she was now - no longer continuing a tradition of hunting the hunters, instead she ran from it all. Hiding away in the sun. Pretending that a scalpel in her hand will make her a Gilbert in all the ways she never was.
Petrova.
It rang through her blood like a signal.
Which one?
Her mother, Miranda, had seen a writer in her. But Isobel?
Elena nodded goodbye to the driver, stepping off the bus and taking a breath of air. Los Angeles felt dirty everywhere she went, except here in this little cemetery hidden back amongst a throng of houses. Not that she had visited many cemeteries in the area, or parks for that matter, but it still felt different. Elena picked her way through the headstones, so familiar with the layout that she was able to wind her way to Mildred easily.
Isobel, the brilliant and devoted researcher. Elena sat down and leaned against Mildred’s stone, closing her eyes, wrapping her arms around her legs. Isobel, the fanatic obsessive. Isobel, what would she want for her daughter?
Elena saw herself, young (forever young), in an office lined with books, shuffling through papers older than Katherine, a frown on her face. Maybe that was what Isobel had wanted, for her to study and research. Like Jemma. The scene in her mind shifted, another woman with long brown hair sat at the desk, surrounded by books.
Dawn.
Dawn was everything Isobel might have wanted in a daughter, if she had stayed human. Elena could just imagine the rousing debates around the Saltzman family table; Dawn, Isobel, and Alaric shouting out insults in a variety of tongues and quoting ancient texts at each other. Elena chuckled to herself and shook her head, opening her eyes slowly.
Dawn was everything Isobel wouldn’t have wanted in a daughter as a vampire.
But neither was Elena, probably.
Which one?
Elena opened up the journal the old woman had given her, it was almost half-full of scribblings and doodles and random half-notes, song lyrics, random bits of poetry or quotes Bonnie read aloud to them at night. Nothing at all like the steady stream-of-consciousness writing that her diaries had always so typically held before. Before… what?
Grayson, the surgeon, the doctor.
John, the vampire hunter. A researcher in his own way. A playboy - if aunt Jenna was right. And aunt Jenna was usually right.
Most of what she knew about her parents was their deaths. Each one imprinted upon her mind like a tattoo upon her skin. No matter how much distance and time passed by. Elena outlined a skull in the corner of a page with the lyrics from Running up that Hill scrawled haphazardly across it. Maybe that’s just how it always feels, to be a child with dead parents. Somehow their lives get lost in all the facts and realities of them not being there anymore, completely overshadowed by their deaths. She drew a vine twining through the skull, twisting through the eye sockets and between the crooked teeth. It wasn’t like she really knew them.
Miranda.
Grayson.
Isobel.
John.
Hell… the closest thing she ever had to an actual parent that didn’t tell her half-truths or hide from her their true selves was Jenna.
Unless you count Alaric.
She drew petals around the base of the skull.
Might as well count Alaric.
What a great track record she had. The universe gave her three sets of parents and they all died. You are death a voice rang in her ear. Another flower sprouted from her twisting vine on the page. The voice was vaguely reminiscent of a girl she knew once. Someone dead, probably. She drew another skull beside the first, in profile.
What a cliché you are, she scribbled above the skulls. Drew a line around her words. A tombstone. Tombstones only tell the truth, they can’t lie. Because there are no lies left to tell.
And that wasn’t true, either. Lies linger. They stretch out into the expanse of time and lick at the future, shaping it into something equally ugly and beautiful. Her vine twisted around the ironic tombstone, dropping more petals next to the skulls. Lies are what make reality true.
Bullshit.
One of these days she was going to wake up and the voice in her ear was going to have a name, one she wasn’t willing to say, and one that wasn’t her own. So she was full of shit. So she was a vampire sitting in a graveyard doodling flowers growing out of skulls and humming the lyrics to trashy emo punk music under her breath, so everyone is their own stereotype and she might as well embrace hers.
Which one?
A family of researchers and hunters, all bent towards the same task: to either become or destroy the thing she was. A cloud hanging over the tombstone on her page let loose a few overly large raindrops. Well she already was what she was, and she wasn’t really interested in loosing herself in a pile of crusty old books, she knew everything she never wanted to know about what she was and wasn’t. She was tired of learning new things about the monstrous things she was made up of.
Blood is thicker than water, but only sustains the darkest things.
Which one?
She shut her journal and stood up.
Elena leaned over her laptop and read over the last sentence she had just typed, mouthing along a little as she did. Keats also suggested that we should rejoice in our “negative capability”-he believed that the only way to experience true happiness, was to experience true pain. She poised her hands over the keyboard again, waiting for inspiration to strike her.
“Really glad I never knew you, I’d probably have back-handed you,” she muttered fiercely at the dingy copy of Ode to Melancholy sitting on the table next to her. She had somehow managed to snag a table outside, in the shade, during peak hours and only had another forty minutes or so before her computer insisted on being plugged in. Of course, she saw Dawn right at the moment when it seemed like the muse might actually allow her to finish her paper before that happened.
And jumped up, waving enthusiastically, “Hey Dawnie!”
Dawn stopped, looked in the opposite direction a little distractedly.
“To your right!” Elena laughed.
Dawn turned, hesitated a minute, and then smiled tightly, shifting her books in her arms as she walked over. “Hey Elena, enjoying the sunshine?”
“No,” Elena wrinkled her nose. “If I was enjoying the sunshine, I’d be at a watering hole in a bikini with a beer in one hand and a…” she coughed, blushing.
“And?” Dawn prompted.
“And a … hot dog in the other,” Elena smiled.
And a hot girl in the other.
Dawn shook her head, “Don’t trust anything called a ‘watering hole’ in California.” She held up her finger in mock admonition, “Promise me?”
“Yes ma’am,” Elena teased back.
“What are you working on?” Dawn picked up the torn up piece of paper with Melancholy printed on it. “Keats?”
Elena shrugged, “Kind of an asshole, I think.”
Dawn laughed, “Undoubtedly. But still, brilliant in that way that assholes always are.” She put down the paper and backed up a half step, “ She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die; / And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, / Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips…” She blushed and Elena’s heart plummeted to her stomach.
Elena cleared her throat awkwardly and picked up the slip of paper covered in her notes, “ His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”
“An asshole with a helleva way with words,” Dawn sighed.
“Hmm.”
“I-“ Dawn frowned and bit her lip. “I gotta jet. I’ll see ya later.”
Elena looked up, surprised, “You work too hard Dawn Summers.”
Dawn grimaced, shifting her pile of books from one arm to the other.
“Caroline wants you to come over for a movie on Thursday, you game?”
“Yeah… I’ll… I’ll txt her later? Bye, Elena. Good luck with your paper.”
Elena blinked down at her computer screen, “Fucking Keats.” Her fingers flashed against the keyboard, pounding out her conclusion at a terrifying speed. A group of freshman a few feet away glanced her way rather worriedly. She muttered along as she typed, “beauty that must die / and joy, whose hand is ever at his lips/bidding adieu, melancholy exists when you know that the rose, though beautiful, will wilt and the only way to experience the fullness of that rose is to know that it will wilt. For Keats, the unanswerability of the relationship man has with the divine, is the best part of human experience.”
Bullshit.
“For reals,” she answered herself, slamming her laptop lid closed and stomping off to the cafeteria to engage in a binge of carbs before her next class began.
“Caroline ran off to get food and Bonnie isn’t back from her study session yet, but you can hang out until they get back if you want?”
Which is sort of maybe how a bad porno starts on a website titled www-dot-naughtycoeds-dot-com, but alas is just the sort of thing that is usually said in real life right before an excruciatingly uncomfortable twenty minutes commences. Maybe in a bad lesbian porno, Elena would have been wearing nothing but a pair of lacy panties and a corset and would have needed help getting it laced and Dawn would have been surprisingly innocent, yet wearing cut-off shorts with a bikini top and stilettos. After twenty minutes of stilted conversation and awkward silences, Elena almost wished that there were a set of amateur porno directors in the room with them, because then at least there would have been something to do other than sit there awkwardly in an old pair of Jeremy’s boxers and a baggy t-shirt that may have belonged to either Matt or Stefan or even Alaric at some point, trying to count the number of Hello Kitties on Dawn’s pajama pants and acting like that’s a totally normal reaction to a person being in your dorm room.
Elena’s phone chimed, making the two of them jump.
“It’s Caroline. She got held up, on her way back - but there’s traffic so maybe another half hour?” Elena looked up at Dawn. “Sorry. She’s usually so …”
“Punctual?”
Elena smiled, “Something like that.”
Dawn shrugged from her perch up on Bonnie’s bunk, “I have some reading that I can do in the meantime.”
And then she disappeared into the upper atmosphere that was Bonnie’s domain.
Not three weeks ago, she would have been shoulder to shoulder with Elena on her bed but now… Elena chewed on her thumbnail for a minute, looking up at the bunk and running through a number of possibilities to get Dawn back down and talking to her again.
She could spill a bag of blood on the bed and start screaming for help… but that would mean calling an ambulance and having to explain all sorts of nasty things like “oh sorry Caroline, I wanted Dawn’s attention so now there’s blood on the rug” which would go over a lot better than whatever she’d have to say to the paramedics. Except maybe Dawn would ride to the hospital with her and hold her hand and tell her a funny story about the time she had stitches when she was a kid.
Dawn totally got stitches when she was a kid, every kid gets stitches, and Dawn is clumsy. It was the least far-fetched part of this plan.
She could fall on the ground and pretend to sprain her ankle, which would result in Dawn having to seek out an ice pack and hold it to Elena’s ankle and help carry/heave her back into her bed and fetch her juice because she’s feeling so weak.
Elena tried out for a play at her elementary school when she was in the fourth grade. She thought she was wonderful… until she got home and watched the video evidence. She never auditioned for anything ever again. Acting was not her forte. There’s no way she’d be able to convince Dawn that she sprained anything.
How about something simple like, “hey whatcha reading?” except Dawn had a tendency to get really wild with her explanations about medieval texts and there really wasn’t anything sexy in that, as far as Dawn could tell. Or they could watch ridiculous cat videos on YouTube!
Elena peered up at the bunk and listened to the steady sound of Dawn’s breathing, the scratch of her pencil against paper, the rustle of pages turning. Her feet suddenly popped into view, she was clearly laying on her stomach, her feet swaying above her like a flag.
Elena sighed and fell back against her pillow. “Hey excuse me I know you’re busy solving centuries-old mysteries and being a general badass of all things history, wanna watch a kitten fall over?” Lamer than lame.
Something was poking into her back, Elena felt under the pile of towels, blankets, and clothes she was lying on and pulled out her cemetery journal. Or, that’s what she called the book the old woman gave her. She sat up, leaned her back against the wall, and opened it, flipping through the pages idly until she found an empty one. She had started filling it up from the middle out and then started jumping around. There was something soothing to the way nothing was in order and nothing had a proper place, almost as comforting as her journals had been before; straight lines moving in one direction telling one story front to back.
She picked up a pen from the nightstand, neon green, and began writing about the night, about Dawn in the top bunk, about all the fantastic things she didn’t do to get Dawn’s attention. She was smiling to herself, sketching a sloppy picture of herself falling off her bed, when Dawn leaned over, “Is that a journal?”
Elena nodded without looking up, “Yeah… it’s a new one.”
Dawn watched her for a moment, not saying anything.
Elena didn’t know how good Dawn’s eyes were, but it probably was best that she move away from the page that had Dawn’s name on it twenty times, so she flipped to another blank page and started doodling interlocking spirals. She remembered Jenna used to leave little spirals on all the scrap paper in the house, envelopes and post-its, the pad by the phone. She started to put them in the margins of her notebooks at school after… it was actually really calming, the slow circles going out and out and never connecting. Laying over and under each other.
She glanced up and saw Dawn still watching her, “Have you ever kept a journal?”
Dawn hesitated, her eyes full of… something Elena couldn’t quite put her finger on: fear? doubt? “When I was a kid I had these notebooks. The Dawnster Chronicles, Cordelia called them.”
“Another sister?”
“Sure.”
“So you don’t keep one anymore?”
Dawn’s eyes turned hard, a twitch appearing in her cheek like she was grinding her teeth.
“I just…” Elena hesitated. What the hell. “I kept one all the time and then… something happened and I stopped.”
“What happened?”
“Death. Trauma. Drama.” Elena’s tone was wry and self-deprecating. Dawn looked away, embarrassed. For her? Or for herself? Elena couldn’t tell. “There was…” she looked up at Dawn’s profile and stopped herself.
Dawn turned back, her eyes a bright, emerald green against her pale face, “What? There was… what?”
“A fire…” Elena whispered it, as if she could take back the truth of it.
Dawn looked at her hard, “A fire?” There was something in her voice that almost seemed accusing, it took Elena by surprise. “So you don’t have any of your old journals anymore?”
“All gone,” Elena snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
“Mine, too.” Dawn opened her mouth, closed it again.
“The Dawnster Chronicles? They were burned?”
“I burned them,” Dawn looked down at her, like she was ready for a fight. Elena had seen that expression on people before, too many. It said, I dare you without words.
“Why?” she breathed out slowly.
Dawn shook her head, “The fire? Was it an accident?”
“No,” Elena’s lips tripped over the truth, so accustomed to the lie. In her heart, there was a crack that would never heal and in it she could see herself, face sticky with dried tears, lighting a match and walking away from an entire life like it never mattered at all. She looked up at Dawn, imagined her doing the same thing, and it filled her with an inescapable sense of loss. For what, she didn’t know; for not knowing the girl that existed before that heart-breaking moment when all that is left of the past is a need for cleansing.
She wondered, wildly, what that girl would have thought of the old-Elena, the human Elena. Would the writer of the Dawnster Chronicles have loved a girl like Elena Gilbert?
Did the destroyer of those books have a scar on her heart that matched her own?
“Did you set it?” Dawn’s voice cracked a little, but Elena ignored it.
“Yes,” Elena met her gaze with steady eyes. “Didn’t you.”
It wasn’t a question, they both knew the answer.
Dawn smiled wanly, “I haven’t written since then. Not like before.”
Elena flipped the pages with her thumb. “Not like before,” she whispered.
“Sorry I’m late, you two!” Caroline crowed from the doorway. “But I found this great Vietnamese place!”
fandom: btvs/tvd/mythology (lol) (LOL)
pairing: elena/dawn (hades/persephone); bonnie, caroline, jupiter/juno, buffy/tara
word count: 5,900
summary: Hades are born, they grow, are molded. Persephone are created, plucked from the air and then hidden away. Easy to find and easy to miss.
Elena ends and therefore begins. On the edge of the solar system, she is given a quest: to find the Persephone to her Hades and restore balance to the Underworld.
setting: university-au (ucla); everything you know about the characters is still true, with some minor canon alterations that will be made clear.
[ chapter one: on the edge of space]
[ chapter two: daisies]
((playlist))
Elena was alone in their dorm, sitting cross-legged on her bed, her hair falling over one shoulder and obscuring part of her textbook, like she cared, gnawing on the nearly empty bag of blood in her hand, when the door slammed open and Dawn fell in.
Like literally fell, back flat on the ground, one leg twisted up and caught on the doorway.
Elena looked down at the bag of blood in her hand and up at the red knee-high boot waving at eye level. She had about half a second before a normal person would start to right themselves and stand up, which meant she had less time than that to hide the blood bag and then come up with a reasonable excuse for not leaping up to help. In the half a second it took to think this out, use her vamp speed to dispose of the bag, and settle back on her bed, Dawn hadn’t moved a muscle. Elena peered over the edge of the bed down at her.
“Are you okay?”
Dawn turned her head around so that she could smile up at Elena, “I think I’m going to live down here now. The floor is nice.”
Elena’s gaze flicked to the boot in the air, down the length of Dawn’s bare thigh, to the dress that was now tangled up on her hips, “I don’t think the guys in the suite across the hall will mind if you stay there, but we might have to start charging.”
Dawn flushed, dropping her leg down to the floor and wriggling her skirt back over the top of her thighs.
After a moment’s hesitation, Elena closed her books and set them on the desk behind her before flopping down on her stomach so that her head was closer to the door, resting her chin in her folded arms, “Do you fall down like that a lot?”
“All the time, Buffy says-“ Dawn stopped and then cleared her throat. “Ah… I was just dropping off books for Bonnie.” She stood up quickly, gathered up the books and put them on Bonnie’s bed. “Let her know I stopped by?”
Elena raised herself up on her elbows, “Well she gets out of class in a few you can just wait-“
“No, um…” Dawn shuffled her feet, avoiding eye contact. “I mean, I can’t. I gotta run to… so …” She shook her head and backed towards the door, “See you…”
Elena lay there, blinking at the open door, until Bonnie came home.
“So! Miss… ah… Gilbert?”
Elena fixed her gaze steadily on the school-appointed advisor, a small, lean woman with wild flowing hair and a rather wild sort of way of moving about her cluttered office.
Dr. Halverson smiled wildly, “Earlier today I had an hour-long conference with a girl who’s file said she was a psych major, convinced her to sign up for an internship at a day camp for troubled youth, only to discover an hour later that I’d had the wrong file in front of me all the while.”
Elena looked pointedly at the clutter in the office but said nothing in response.
“That was the last slot at that camp, so let’s be sure to dot our I’s and cross our T’s?” She opened a file with a snap and leaned on her elbows. “Elena Gilbert, sophomore transfer from Whitmore College, pre-med. You had an… internship? At the hospital there, rather irregular for a first year undergrad, did you enjoy it?”
“Yes, um…”
“Letters of recommend from… a mayor, a sheriff, a… I must assume some sort of philanthropist, and a Dr. Saltzman, Early American History,” she raised her eyes to look at Elena. “Nothing from the professor in charge of your internship.”
Elena blinked, “No… she…”
“Died.” The woman smiled, “As did your parents apparently. And aunt. Your father was a surgeon? And you want to follow in his footsteps I expect.”
It wasn’t a question. Elena waited.
“And what did your mother expect, that you would be a surgeon as well?”
Elena narrowed her eyes, “How is that relevant?”
Dr. Halverson closed the file and leaned back in her chair, folding her hands in front of her like a villain in a Bond movie, “Call it professional curiosity.”
Elena ground her teeth.
“Okay, no bullshit? I’ve had hundreds of bright-eyed, busy-tailed freshman sit in that very seat and tell me all the reasons in the world why they are going to be the next greatest surgeon and every one of them had exactly one reason why they shouldn’t.”
“Their mother?”
“Their first childhood dream.” Dr. Halverson turned her chair and looked out the window. “Dreams come in phases, just like anything else. In your case, it’s easier, simpler, to ask what dream you secretly shared with your mother when you were young. That’s the dream that will come along and nip at your heels when you are studying for an exam, or a surgical intern, when you are in your first year of residency, when you finally get the job you’ve been clawing your way to the top to get.”
Elena looked down at her knees.
“You don’t have to tell me, if you don’t want to.”
“How often do people go back, change their minds,” Elena said to her shoes.
“Ask me again sometime.” Dr. Halverson picked up a cup of coffee off her desk, took a sip, grimaced, and then put it back down. “Cold coffee is positively the most depressing thing in the world.”
“Writing,” Elena said, looking up. “My mother… writing. I was going to be a writer.”
Dr. Halverson slid forward in her chair excitedly, “Journalism, research, self-help, fiction?”
“Fiction, I suppose.”
She looked Elena up and down appraisingly, “Well now, isn’t that interesting?”
Elena moved her hands from the armrests to her lap and back again.
“Come back in three weeks, I’ll have to move some things around - but I think I have something perfect in mind for you.”
“Three weeks?”
“Just in time for Thanksgiving break,” Dr. Halverson nodded, her attention already on a pile of papers on her desk.
Elena sat for a moment, waiting. “Um? Dr. Halverson?”
“Call me Bennett, please. Dr. Halverson is my sister,” she looked up and smiled again. “Get out now.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s it. Come see me again next month sometime,” Bennett said with a wave of her hand. “Now shoo!”
“So what’s on the agenda tonight?” Elena grabbed a handful of French fries from Bonnie’s tray across the table and shoved them into her mouth.
“Get your own food,” Bonnie said from behind her book, absentmindedly chewing on a carrot stick. “And eat something with vitamins in it.”
“It’s not like I need vitamins, remember?”
Bonnie peered over the top of her paperback, “I wonder about that sometimes. Like… vampires, you guys still eat but do you…”
“Hey,” Caroline plopped down on the bench next to Bonnie. “What did we say about the ‘v-word’?” She glared at them pointedly. “We are normal, ordinary sophomores, right?”
Elena twirled her phone around in her hand and tried to remember the rules, why they came to Los Angeles, what they were allowed to talk about, who they were allowed to miss, “So you and Dawn going out tonight, Care?”
“God, subtle much?” Caroline raised her eyebrows at her and Bonnie smiled, ducking further into her book to hide it. Caroline sighed, “No. Something about a research project, she canceled on me like twenty minutes ago. I’d drag you out, but the TA in your Humanities class told me there’s a pop quiz tomorrow, so you should really stay in and study.”
“Seriously Caroline, is there a TA on this campus that you haven’t seduced?”
Caroline glared at Elena, “Yeah, okay. Let’s passive aggressively attack my love life.”
Elena glared down at the cheeseburger on her plate.
“What day is it today anyway, or is it just me or is time moving really weird here?” Bonnie put her book down, spine up.
Caroline looked around the bustling cafeteria and beamed, “Maybe this is what life feels like when we’re not running for our lives or plotting a hostile takeover in between classes?”
“I can live with that,” Bonnie put her hand on top of Elena’s. “Even if it means…” She blinked tears out of her eyes and smiled her crooked smile. Elena smiled back, turning her hand to squeeze Bonnie’s. Caroline wrapped her arm around Bonnie’s shoulders and added her hand to the pile.
A host of unnamed lost drifted in the space between them.
The sound of laughter and clinking cutlery and people milling around, talking or shouting or whispering flooded over them.
“It’s Thursday,” Elena mused suddenly, breaking the silence between them. And on the horizon there was Friday, Saturday, Sunday… years of days that they could fill anyway they wished, anyway they could, without looking over their shoulder.
“Book club night,” Bonnie snatched up her book. “Shit. Book club night!” She looked up at them, eyes wild, “I’m only on chapter three! What time is it?”
Some bro with a flat-brimmed hat on sideways and pants hanging off his ass, leaned over Elena’s head, “It’s only noon, beautiful. You have plenty of time.” He winked at her before walking over to a large group of guys a few feet away, a large salad on his tray.
Bonnie stared wide-eyed at him for a moment before turning to Elena, “Did that actually just happen?”
Caroline waved her hand dismissively, “Anyway, he’s wrong. It’s actually closer to one.”
“What time is book club?” Elena asked, stealing more of Bonnie’s fries.
Bonnie hit Elena’s hand with her book, “Not until nine.”
“I didn’t know you were in a book club.”
“That’s because you never pay attention to the calendar in the room,” Caroline said exasperatedly. “Seriously Elena?”
Elena gestured at the piles of textbooks in front of her, “In case you haven’t noticed, I don’t really have time for book clubs. My advisor is trying to set me up with an internship over winter break.”
“I only joined a couple of weeks ago. Dawnie’s roommate convinced me to join hers, it’s really fun. She’s… kinda weird? But everyone else is super nice.” Bonnie stood up, “I’m stealing some of your candy stash from under the bed and holing up in the library for a few hours.”
“Hey! How’d you know about my candy stash?” Elena spluttered. She looked up into Bonnie’s amused eyes, “Oh yeah… well good luck or whatever.”
“You’re both obnoxious and impossible,” Bonnie threw over her shoulder as she skipped out of the doors that led outside.
Caroline pointed one perfectly polished fingernail at Elena, “Study for your Humanities pop quiz, and don’t forget about your midterm in Bio next week.”
“What are you going to do tonight?”
Caroline stood up and smiled, “I’m going to avoid the room as long as possible so that you can mope in peace.” She leaned over and kissed Elena on the cheek, “But I may come home early if you want the company?”
Elena glared at her textbooks, “No reason for you to wallow with me.”
Caroline stood over her for a moment, “Elena…”
“What?”
“You’ve never been so… unsure before. If you want something, you always get it.”
Elena shifted on the bench.
“Just… don’t leave too much of our old life behind that you forget who you are.”
It didn’t take long for Dawn Summer to become such an integral part of their lives that it almost felt as though they had been saving her a place at the metaphorical table that is their fucked up lives. Caroline was one small step away from adding a green section to her elaborate schedule hanging on the wall - and if it wasn’t for the fact that Dawn’s personal schedule seemed to change by the hour she probably wouldn’t have waited for permission.
Dawn flitted through their door like a leaf on the wind - arms full of books for Bonnie or ads to kitschy new boutiques for Caroline, somehow anticipating their needs before they were even aware of them.
Except, she never really seemed to bring anything for Elena, without making it painfully obvious. After their comfort and familiarity on their first of many movie nights, Dawn suddenly put up walls Elena couldn’t penetrate. Primarily because she did it in such a way that no one would notice. She smiled, she laughed, she made the same ridiculous jokes; but she didn’t catch Elena’s eye over Caroline’s head and wink knowingly, she didn’t lean into Elena’s side when she laughed, she didn’t make herself comfortable on Elena’s bed without asking. Even as she wound herself so single-mindedly into every facet of their lives, she kept more of herself back.
And every day it felt to Elena like little pieces of her self were slipping out of her hands like sand.
The cafeteria in their dorm was supposed to be the best on-campus. That’s what Caroline’s copious research suggested, anyway.
”It is important, Bonnie!” Caroline had practically growled from the backseat.
“Why can’t we just live off-campus?” Elena muttered, her hands griping the steering wheel as hard as she dared, knuckles white.
“Starting over means doing things right, means being normal,” Caroline explained for the third time that day. “We’re driving in a straight line from crazy-town with Originals and Travelers and werewolves and dopplegangers into normalcy.”
Bonnie sighed, “Care, I watched every episode of The OC with you in junior high, what makes you think you have either of us convinced that you are looking for normalcy in Los Angeles?”
Elena’s eyes flicked instinctively to the rearview mirror, a long expanse of dark, empty highway greeted her. It wasn’t a straight line they were on, twisting and turning down lonely highways, changing cars every three days, looking back despite promising each other they wouldn’t.
Tears blurred Elena’s vision, “We aren’t characters in a teen soap opera, Caroline. Living near a beach won’t suddenly make our lives more glamorous.”
Running away won’t suddenly guarantee any of us a happily ever after.
“But maybe driving to the other side of a continent will be enough to make our lives a little less fucking tragic.” Glancing up at them, Caroline chuckled, “Or at least our love lives.”
Elena and Bonnie smiled wanly at the joke that fell flat in the air between them.
Stefan.
Jeremy.
Damon.
Tyler.
Matt.
Caroline’s face sank, she leaned back against the seat and sighed.
Bonnie turned around, smile wide, the remnant of a tear already brushed away with the tips of her fingers, “So tell us about this cafeteria.”
“Well… there’s this chicken cordon bleu thing… “
Elena picked up her fork and played with her chicken, every bit as delicious as Caroline’s research had promised, swirling a bite-sized piece around with her fork. The new normal, Caroline kept saying. Except Elena had the sneaking suspicion that…
“Penny for your thoughts?” a low voice interrupted.
Elena looked up into Dawn’s smiling face, “I thought you had plans?”
Dawn raised an eyebrow as she carefully peeled the tinfoil top off her yogurt.
“I mean…” Elena cleared her throat, “Caroline mentioned that you had to raincheck on whatever plans you two had for tonight.”
Things new Elena was not: chill.
She shoved the bite of lukewarm chicken and mashed potatoes into her mouth and tried to imagine a reality in which she wasn’t a complete spaz.
“Yeah, I have some stuff I have to do tonight. How’s---?” Dawn gestured at the pile of notes under Elena’s elbow.
“Fine. Another day, another pop quiz on the horizon.”
Dawn licked her spoon, her eyes on focused on a spot somewhere over Elena’s left shoulder, “You’ll get through it. I gotta jet.” She stood up, empty yogurt in one hand and a dinner roll in the other.
“Hey wait,” Elena shot out her hand to catch Dawn’s wrist, but thought better of it about a second too late, leaving her hand flopping in the air. “Um… good luck I guess.”
Dawn’s eyes grazed over Elena’s face, seeming to search for something, “Yeah… um… thanks?”
Elena spent the rest of her evening in the library, alternatively shooting angry looks at anyone talking over a whisper and muttering to herself while flipping wildly through her notes like a crazy person.
Mildred’s grave became the one place in Elena’s life that felt like a haven and not like a trap ready to spring. She would have said that it was normal college blues, except that she didn’t really mind her classes all that much. The work was daunting, but she was taking enough general requirements (hand-picked by Caroline) that it didn’t feel that much different from high school.
Except…
Well, high school did contain more memories of blood and death and trauma than classroom time, specifically. But in the hazy recesses of her mind that remembered a time when her parents were still around and things were normal.
On the surface, maybe.
Elena scowled out the window of the bus, this time empty aside from one man in his forties with an old-fashioned suit on and a little blue carnation he twirled between his fingers. Her inner monologue had taken on a bit of a snarky edge since her meeting with Dr. Halverson’s question about her mom.
Which one? seemed to chant in her ear from the moment she gave her answer.
Her mother, Miranda, had seen a writer in her. Had nourished it, purchased her journals and notebooks from the time she was old enough to hold a stubby pencil in her small hand. It was something they shared and it was something that still felt… sacred. Almost in a way that medicine did not.
Medicine was public, it was a service, it was an act. And her father’s medicine… it had been twisted up in everything that she was now. Elena Gilbert, no matter what. Despite everything that she was now - no longer continuing a tradition of hunting the hunters, instead she ran from it all. Hiding away in the sun. Pretending that a scalpel in her hand will make her a Gilbert in all the ways she never was.
Petrova.
It rang through her blood like a signal.
Which one?
Her mother, Miranda, had seen a writer in her. But Isobel?
Elena nodded goodbye to the driver, stepping off the bus and taking a breath of air. Los Angeles felt dirty everywhere she went, except here in this little cemetery hidden back amongst a throng of houses. Not that she had visited many cemeteries in the area, or parks for that matter, but it still felt different. Elena picked her way through the headstones, so familiar with the layout that she was able to wind her way to Mildred easily.
Isobel, the brilliant and devoted researcher. Elena sat down and leaned against Mildred’s stone, closing her eyes, wrapping her arms around her legs. Isobel, the fanatic obsessive. Isobel, what would she want for her daughter?
Elena saw herself, young (forever young), in an office lined with books, shuffling through papers older than Katherine, a frown on her face. Maybe that was what Isobel had wanted, for her to study and research. Like Jemma. The scene in her mind shifted, another woman with long brown hair sat at the desk, surrounded by books.
Dawn.
Dawn was everything Isobel might have wanted in a daughter, if she had stayed human. Elena could just imagine the rousing debates around the Saltzman family table; Dawn, Isobel, and Alaric shouting out insults in a variety of tongues and quoting ancient texts at each other. Elena chuckled to herself and shook her head, opening her eyes slowly.
Dawn was everything Isobel wouldn’t have wanted in a daughter as a vampire.
But neither was Elena, probably.
Which one?
Elena opened up the journal the old woman had given her, it was almost half-full of scribblings and doodles and random half-notes, song lyrics, random bits of poetry or quotes Bonnie read aloud to them at night. Nothing at all like the steady stream-of-consciousness writing that her diaries had always so typically held before. Before… what?
Grayson, the surgeon, the doctor.
John, the vampire hunter. A researcher in his own way. A playboy - if aunt Jenna was right. And aunt Jenna was usually right.
Most of what she knew about her parents was their deaths. Each one imprinted upon her mind like a tattoo upon her skin. No matter how much distance and time passed by. Elena outlined a skull in the corner of a page with the lyrics from Running up that Hill scrawled haphazardly across it. Maybe that’s just how it always feels, to be a child with dead parents. Somehow their lives get lost in all the facts and realities of them not being there anymore, completely overshadowed by their deaths. She drew a vine twining through the skull, twisting through the eye sockets and between the crooked teeth. It wasn’t like she really knew them.
Miranda.
Grayson.
Isobel.
John.
Hell… the closest thing she ever had to an actual parent that didn’t tell her half-truths or hide from her their true selves was Jenna.
Unless you count Alaric.
She drew petals around the base of the skull.
Might as well count Alaric.
What a great track record she had. The universe gave her three sets of parents and they all died. You are death a voice rang in her ear. Another flower sprouted from her twisting vine on the page. The voice was vaguely reminiscent of a girl she knew once. Someone dead, probably. She drew another skull beside the first, in profile.
What a cliché you are, she scribbled above the skulls. Drew a line around her words. A tombstone. Tombstones only tell the truth, they can’t lie. Because there are no lies left to tell.
And that wasn’t true, either. Lies linger. They stretch out into the expanse of time and lick at the future, shaping it into something equally ugly and beautiful. Her vine twisted around the ironic tombstone, dropping more petals next to the skulls. Lies are what make reality true.
Bullshit.
One of these days she was going to wake up and the voice in her ear was going to have a name, one she wasn’t willing to say, and one that wasn’t her own. So she was full of shit. So she was a vampire sitting in a graveyard doodling flowers growing out of skulls and humming the lyrics to trashy emo punk music under her breath, so everyone is their own stereotype and she might as well embrace hers.
Which one?
A family of researchers and hunters, all bent towards the same task: to either become or destroy the thing she was. A cloud hanging over the tombstone on her page let loose a few overly large raindrops. Well she already was what she was, and she wasn’t really interested in loosing herself in a pile of crusty old books, she knew everything she never wanted to know about what she was and wasn’t. She was tired of learning new things about the monstrous things she was made up of.
Blood is thicker than water, but only sustains the darkest things.
Which one?
She shut her journal and stood up.
Elena leaned over her laptop and read over the last sentence she had just typed, mouthing along a little as she did. Keats also suggested that we should rejoice in our “negative capability”-he believed that the only way to experience true happiness, was to experience true pain. She poised her hands over the keyboard again, waiting for inspiration to strike her.
“Really glad I never knew you, I’d probably have back-handed you,” she muttered fiercely at the dingy copy of Ode to Melancholy sitting on the table next to her. She had somehow managed to snag a table outside, in the shade, during peak hours and only had another forty minutes or so before her computer insisted on being plugged in. Of course, she saw Dawn right at the moment when it seemed like the muse might actually allow her to finish her paper before that happened.
And jumped up, waving enthusiastically, “Hey Dawnie!”
Dawn stopped, looked in the opposite direction a little distractedly.
“To your right!” Elena laughed.
Dawn turned, hesitated a minute, and then smiled tightly, shifting her books in her arms as she walked over. “Hey Elena, enjoying the sunshine?”
“No,” Elena wrinkled her nose. “If I was enjoying the sunshine, I’d be at a watering hole in a bikini with a beer in one hand and a…” she coughed, blushing.
“And?” Dawn prompted.
“And a … hot dog in the other,” Elena smiled.
And a hot girl in the other.
Dawn shook her head, “Don’t trust anything called a ‘watering hole’ in California.” She held up her finger in mock admonition, “Promise me?”
“Yes ma’am,” Elena teased back.
“What are you working on?” Dawn picked up the torn up piece of paper with Melancholy printed on it. “Keats?”
Elena shrugged, “Kind of an asshole, I think.”
Dawn laughed, “Undoubtedly. But still, brilliant in that way that assholes always are.” She put down the paper and backed up a half step, “ She dwells with Beauty-Beauty that must die; / And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh, / Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips…” She blushed and Elena’s heart plummeted to her stomach.
Elena cleared her throat awkwardly and picked up the slip of paper covered in her notes, “ His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might, / And be among her cloudy trophies hung.”
“An asshole with a helleva way with words,” Dawn sighed.
“Hmm.”
“I-“ Dawn frowned and bit her lip. “I gotta jet. I’ll see ya later.”
Elena looked up, surprised, “You work too hard Dawn Summers.”
Dawn grimaced, shifting her pile of books from one arm to the other.
“Caroline wants you to come over for a movie on Thursday, you game?”
“Yeah… I’ll… I’ll txt her later? Bye, Elena. Good luck with your paper.”
Elena blinked down at her computer screen, “Fucking Keats.” Her fingers flashed against the keyboard, pounding out her conclusion at a terrifying speed. A group of freshman a few feet away glanced her way rather worriedly. She muttered along as she typed, “beauty that must die / and joy, whose hand is ever at his lips/bidding adieu, melancholy exists when you know that the rose, though beautiful, will wilt and the only way to experience the fullness of that rose is to know that it will wilt. For Keats, the unanswerability of the relationship man has with the divine, is the best part of human experience.”
Bullshit.
“For reals,” she answered herself, slamming her laptop lid closed and stomping off to the cafeteria to engage in a binge of carbs before her next class began.
“Caroline ran off to get food and Bonnie isn’t back from her study session yet, but you can hang out until they get back if you want?”
Which is sort of maybe how a bad porno starts on a website titled www-dot-naughtycoeds-dot-com, but alas is just the sort of thing that is usually said in real life right before an excruciatingly uncomfortable twenty minutes commences. Maybe in a bad lesbian porno, Elena would have been wearing nothing but a pair of lacy panties and a corset and would have needed help getting it laced and Dawn would have been surprisingly innocent, yet wearing cut-off shorts with a bikini top and stilettos. After twenty minutes of stilted conversation and awkward silences, Elena almost wished that there were a set of amateur porno directors in the room with them, because then at least there would have been something to do other than sit there awkwardly in an old pair of Jeremy’s boxers and a baggy t-shirt that may have belonged to either Matt or Stefan or even Alaric at some point, trying to count the number of Hello Kitties on Dawn’s pajama pants and acting like that’s a totally normal reaction to a person being in your dorm room.
Elena’s phone chimed, making the two of them jump.
“It’s Caroline. She got held up, on her way back - but there’s traffic so maybe another half hour?” Elena looked up at Dawn. “Sorry. She’s usually so …”
“Punctual?”
Elena smiled, “Something like that.”
Dawn shrugged from her perch up on Bonnie’s bunk, “I have some reading that I can do in the meantime.”
And then she disappeared into the upper atmosphere that was Bonnie’s domain.
Not three weeks ago, she would have been shoulder to shoulder with Elena on her bed but now… Elena chewed on her thumbnail for a minute, looking up at the bunk and running through a number of possibilities to get Dawn back down and talking to her again.
She could spill a bag of blood on the bed and start screaming for help… but that would mean calling an ambulance and having to explain all sorts of nasty things like “oh sorry Caroline, I wanted Dawn’s attention so now there’s blood on the rug” which would go over a lot better than whatever she’d have to say to the paramedics. Except maybe Dawn would ride to the hospital with her and hold her hand and tell her a funny story about the time she had stitches when she was a kid.
Dawn totally got stitches when she was a kid, every kid gets stitches, and Dawn is clumsy. It was the least far-fetched part of this plan.
She could fall on the ground and pretend to sprain her ankle, which would result in Dawn having to seek out an ice pack and hold it to Elena’s ankle and help carry/heave her back into her bed and fetch her juice because she’s feeling so weak.
Elena tried out for a play at her elementary school when she was in the fourth grade. She thought she was wonderful… until she got home and watched the video evidence. She never auditioned for anything ever again. Acting was not her forte. There’s no way she’d be able to convince Dawn that she sprained anything.
How about something simple like, “hey whatcha reading?” except Dawn had a tendency to get really wild with her explanations about medieval texts and there really wasn’t anything sexy in that, as far as Dawn could tell. Or they could watch ridiculous cat videos on YouTube!
Elena peered up at the bunk and listened to the steady sound of Dawn’s breathing, the scratch of her pencil against paper, the rustle of pages turning. Her feet suddenly popped into view, she was clearly laying on her stomach, her feet swaying above her like a flag.
Elena sighed and fell back against her pillow. “Hey excuse me I know you’re busy solving centuries-old mysteries and being a general badass of all things history, wanna watch a kitten fall over?” Lamer than lame.
Something was poking into her back, Elena felt under the pile of towels, blankets, and clothes she was lying on and pulled out her cemetery journal. Or, that’s what she called the book the old woman gave her. She sat up, leaned her back against the wall, and opened it, flipping through the pages idly until she found an empty one. She had started filling it up from the middle out and then started jumping around. There was something soothing to the way nothing was in order and nothing had a proper place, almost as comforting as her journals had been before; straight lines moving in one direction telling one story front to back.
She picked up a pen from the nightstand, neon green, and began writing about the night, about Dawn in the top bunk, about all the fantastic things she didn’t do to get Dawn’s attention. She was smiling to herself, sketching a sloppy picture of herself falling off her bed, when Dawn leaned over, “Is that a journal?”
Elena nodded without looking up, “Yeah… it’s a new one.”
Dawn watched her for a moment, not saying anything.
Elena didn’t know how good Dawn’s eyes were, but it probably was best that she move away from the page that had Dawn’s name on it twenty times, so she flipped to another blank page and started doodling interlocking spirals. She remembered Jenna used to leave little spirals on all the scrap paper in the house, envelopes and post-its, the pad by the phone. She started to put them in the margins of her notebooks at school after… it was actually really calming, the slow circles going out and out and never connecting. Laying over and under each other.
She glanced up and saw Dawn still watching her, “Have you ever kept a journal?”
Dawn hesitated, her eyes full of… something Elena couldn’t quite put her finger on: fear? doubt? “When I was a kid I had these notebooks. The Dawnster Chronicles, Cordelia called them.”
“Another sister?”
“Sure.”
“So you don’t keep one anymore?”
Dawn’s eyes turned hard, a twitch appearing in her cheek like she was grinding her teeth.
“I just…” Elena hesitated. What the hell. “I kept one all the time and then… something happened and I stopped.”
“What happened?”
“Death. Trauma. Drama.” Elena’s tone was wry and self-deprecating. Dawn looked away, embarrassed. For her? Or for herself? Elena couldn’t tell. “There was…” she looked up at Dawn’s profile and stopped herself.
Dawn turned back, her eyes a bright, emerald green against her pale face, “What? There was… what?”
“A fire…” Elena whispered it, as if she could take back the truth of it.
Dawn looked at her hard, “A fire?” There was something in her voice that almost seemed accusing, it took Elena by surprise. “So you don’t have any of your old journals anymore?”
“All gone,” Elena snapped her fingers. “Like that.”
“Mine, too.” Dawn opened her mouth, closed it again.
“The Dawnster Chronicles? They were burned?”
“I burned them,” Dawn looked down at her, like she was ready for a fight. Elena had seen that expression on people before, too many. It said, I dare you without words.
“Why?” she breathed out slowly.
Dawn shook her head, “The fire? Was it an accident?”
“No,” Elena’s lips tripped over the truth, so accustomed to the lie. In her heart, there was a crack that would never heal and in it she could see herself, face sticky with dried tears, lighting a match and walking away from an entire life like it never mattered at all. She looked up at Dawn, imagined her doing the same thing, and it filled her with an inescapable sense of loss. For what, she didn’t know; for not knowing the girl that existed before that heart-breaking moment when all that is left of the past is a need for cleansing.
She wondered, wildly, what that girl would have thought of the old-Elena, the human Elena. Would the writer of the Dawnster Chronicles have loved a girl like Elena Gilbert?
Did the destroyer of those books have a scar on her heart that matched her own?
“Did you set it?” Dawn’s voice cracked a little, but Elena ignored it.
“Yes,” Elena met her gaze with steady eyes. “Didn’t you.”
It wasn’t a question, they both knew the answer.
Dawn smiled wanly, “I haven’t written since then. Not like before.”
Elena flipped the pages with her thumb. “Not like before,” she whispered.
“Sorry I’m late, you two!” Caroline crowed from the doorway. “But I found this great Vietnamese place!”