[Fic] Three times a Wife, Never a Bride
Title: Three Times a Wife, Never a Bride
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Word Count: ~1750
Rating: pg
Prompt: Anything Elena Gilbert-centric (For the December Meme of Doom)
Recipient: ever_neutral
Characters: Elena(/Damon/Stefan)
Summary: Three Times Elena is a literary wife: the selkie, Bluebeard, and the madwoman in the attic
A/N: I didn’t forget! I’m dedicating this to you, darling! And I hope to actually complete this damn meme!!! (Also - forgive me, I’m not really sure what this is, but I am disgustingly proud of it.)
[Plus a special extra bit of Elena-love]
There seemed, in the corner of her mind - right there hidden in that shadow or under that chair or tucked in the cupboard along with the guest towels - to be a skin waiting for her.
It lurked in her consciousness, begging her to come out and play. She sometimes felt it brush by her ankles when she stood in the kitchen over a hot stove and everything was too warm and his breath hot on her neck, but there around her ankles a tickling, cool breeze asking for attention. And sometimes she yearned to throw the shadow-skin over her shoulders and run out into the cool night.
She was content.
She yearned in the ancient way women have always yearned for these things.
She was straight and tame.
She was wild and untamed.
Her hair swirling around her hips with a mind of its own, her fingers tapping out stories of ancient castles in the sky, her toes itching to dance and twirl, her mouth fighting back a laughter that all women know in their bones but have not heard in centuries.
When he was not there - when his cold, dead body was not pressed against hers, filling her with a stifling heat - still she sat so straight, with her chin so high. And she would smile at that shadow lurking below, but could not embrace it. Still she washed the dishes and combed her wild hair straight and down and only smiled half smiles and still her skin felt bare.
She must be forgiven. She is only a child, really. She was not taught about her skin. She was a motherless woman child, drowning in a world without her own self wrapped tight around her.
So she must forgive the world, for that little death in a pond.
For that second death.
When she breathed cleanly just once and her skin settled on her finally and her hair flew wildly around her face the way it always wished to (the way the world had once teased her it could) and she became whole.
In that pond, in the darkness, with her skin wrapping her up, she felt so cool and so clean - as if for the very first time since she took her first step. Her wildness clinging to her with that pure and reckless affection only wild things know.
If only it could be enough - her limbs stretched out there in the water and yearned to twirl and cavort like in the old days. If only her thin, neglected skin had been enough to keep her underwater. If only she wasn’t so young, if only she hadn’t lost her mother, if only there had been another there to guide her through. Still her skin yearns for the crisp cool freedom of the pond. There, where she stretched into herself for the first time. There, where a death meant rebirth. There, where the ancient tales could have been made true again.
Wrong story.
Time to yearn for something known. Time to take this ancient skin onto land and learn a new way of being.
Now watch her learn to walk again, upright but still wrapped in her true skin.
Now watch her learn to laugh again, her hair loose and wild.
Now watch her learn to breath again, her skin cool and tight around her body the way it always ought to be.
Now watch her learn to be wild - to be woman and wild and clean and shadow and warrior and maiden.
Now watch her wear her shadow like a regal gown upon her narrow shoulders.
Now watch her stretch into her own skin.
… she tried two or three times to wipe it off, but the blood would not come out; in vain did she wash it, and even rub it with soap and sand; the blood still remained; for the key was magical and she could never make it quite clean; when the blood was gone off from one side, it came again on the other…
She sometimes would wake with the scent of blood tickling her senses. She sometimes brushed her neck as though there - just there below her chin - a stream of blood trickled down from the corner of her mouth. She sometimes stared down at her hands and saw red, but there is nothing there at all.
They tell her she is just hungry.
So she eats.
She takes pleasure in eating - in licking the blood from her fingers, swaying to an inner melody as she revels in the sensation of life coursing down her throat. Twirling her fingers through the hair of young girls, smelling of the innocence she once was
The others sometimes find her reckless. They toss their barbed words in her direction like stones and she takes no notice. Just brushes away the phantom blood that forever trickles down her chin and smiles.
She is dragged laughing and sobbing from a crowded theatre full of people she’s quite sure don’t understand the perfect madness of a woman crying about a spot of blood. There in the gutter, she spills blood and says to passerby, “See?” with her lips and chin stained a monstrous, brilliant red.
And still she laughs.
In her closet she keeps pressed and clean an old dress from days gone by. Some nights, filled with the weight of that ever-present phantom blood sticky between her fingers, she puts it on and stares at herself in the mirror.
It is old. Yet it is always new. It always fits (wouldn’t it?) just as it did the one day she wore it. As if like yesterday. It is no longer in style (it is sometimes in style). She never wears it out, keeps it neat and pressed in the back of her closet, the bottom of her traveling trunk, always near at hand.
Once he sees her in it, standing in a pool of light in the bathroom, clutching at the counter. He pads in silently, she doesn’t move. He traces the stain with one fingertip, she watches it trace a story across her body. (Which “he” - it no longer matters, she no longer cares, their faces blur together across time and in her mind they are the same.)
A kiss on her temple and then the creak of a mattress far away.
She stands, alone in the mirror, caked in the dried blood of the past.
Maybe he asks her once, maybe she answers.
“It is the key.”
“What key?”
And she is so solemn he pulls her to him, kissing her fiercely when she says: “The key that always bleeds.”
Because he understands. Or he doesn’t understand. One of them always does. One of them never remembers. Or maybe that’s not really true and they both understand and they both forget. So she repeats the line like an echo again and again through the centuries.
But her eyes meet her own in the mirror, though he tugs at her face and her lips with his hunger, and she whispers to herself, “To the room full of dead brides.”
In the gutter, surrounded by the dead and the blood and her own glorious mess that she is so very proud of, she smiles. She is not the conniving bride of a Scottish Thane, lamenting a phantom spot of blood.
She is the wife of Bluebeard.
She swims in his legacy, the blood spills forever all around her.
In a New York loft, he hands her a mug full to the brim with warm, fresh blood. She can hear the hoarse rasp of the victim somewhere below (how far she cannot say, her cocoon is so tightly wrapped space has become less important). His hands are gloved. They do not tremble. Not a drop is spilled as he holds the brim to her lips. Her long, slim fingers wrap around his and bring the vessel closer. She drinks like the damned.
There are holes in the leather from her fingernails.
She peers down at the skyline and smiles, blood smeared across her face.
In an underground Parisian apartment, she leans back into her rocking chair and smiles, her rhythm keeping pace with the sound of lovemaking far above her. A maid, a personal assistant, it didn’t matter - she had listened to him woo the girl for weeks. When he arrives with a sleeping girl in his arms, she croons with wordless appreciation. She leans over the girl, prone on the bed, caressing her cheeks and smoothing her hair, before sucking her dry with a smile.
He slings the girl over his shoulder and stands in the doorway.
She lays on the blood-soaked bed, only her hair shielding him from her nakedness.
In an old Victorian resting on a foggy moor in England, he plays a forgotten game. There is a moment with a horse and he knows all his lines. There is a child (how she found the child he’ll never ask) and a charming housekeeper with laugh lines around her simple, brown eyes. There are lace curtains at all the windows. There is a neighbor’s daughter who covets him with her eyes. There is a governess and he’ll never know how she managed that. It is their longest game, he throws himself into the part. He is brooding and rude (that’s not terribly hard), he hides his charm, his sardonic smile. He woos her like they are actors on a stage. (She watches from behind lace curtains, clad all in black, her hair wild about her waist; his silent audience of one.) He falls to his knees in a garden, he is the perfect groomsman. It takes him so much longer - he draws it out for her eyes alone.
In the light of the fire, with blood dripping from her wild hair, he watches her smile. The child clings to his arm.
“Are we done, now?”
He asks every time. He is never sure of her answer. He is never sure what answer he seeks.
“With the game?” she turns to him and his eyes linger at the smear of blood near her right temple.
When he nods silently, she chuckles and pulls him toward her by the neck, kissing him roughly and tasting of blood and youth and ashes.
He follows her away from the flames with a child in his arms. Turning their backs on this, her longest game.
“For now.”
And her giggle strikes a chord in his heart.