fic: I am not here of my own choosing

Jul 30, 2014 19:24

title: I am not here of my own choosing
fandom: the vampire diaries
characters: caroline, elena, rebekah (mentions of klaus throughout, shades of caroline/kalus)
rating: pg-13 (mentions of suicidal thoughts for Elena, brief and non-graphic, also canon death)
summary: they were all just girls in the end, who wanted what they could not have for the prompt: “the girl who does not know herself” for fluffyfrolicker's fairytale prompt-a-thon.



She’s just a girl

Elena was born into the world, just like everyone else. A bundle of joy that her parents wrapped up, held close, and promised to love forever. (Her real parents, not Isobel or John. No, Miranda and Grayson Gilbert, who kissed her goodnight and read her stories and always answered when she called.)

She grew up like everyone else, with skinned knees and trees to be climbed, and toys that her brother would break and make her cry. She painted her nails bright colors and didn't pay enough attention in history class.

She was Elena Gilbert, Mystic Falls Golden Girl, and while she did not ask for the title, she would accept it just the same. There was something nice about it after all. About the way people looked at her. Like she was something special.

(She wasn’t special at all of course.

That was the universe playing tricks on her.

Her face, her body, her blood; it belonged to someone else. Katherine, Tatia, Amara; so many she did not know.

Nothing about her was special at all.)

Elena was just a girl.

Sixteen when her parents died (when she killed them) and seventeen when she died too, Klaus’s fangs sinking into her neck and taking everything she had to give.

Elena was just a girl, seventeen and too old and too young at the same time. And when her eyes fluttered shut, the last thing she saw was Jenna’s grey body, and she remembers thinking. “I hope I don’t wake up.”

(She’s just a girl after all, only human; there is only so much pain she can take.)

She never tells anyone that part of the story.

Selfish little Elena Gilbert who just wanted it all to end (“I don’t want to be saved.”) gets pushed back into the corners of her mind, and she lives, because she has too.

Because she’s Elena Gilbert and that’s what she does.

She lives.

(Even when everyone around her dies.)

Who lost her mom too young

“Always and forever.”

It’s a promise, an oath, and a curse all in one.

It ties Rebekah to her brothers, makes her a belonging, something to be owned, makes her into something she does not want to be.

She clings to Klaus in the beginning (how foolish she was), her heart broken over the loss of her mother, her heart broken from the sword her father had pushed through it. Rebekah clings to him and lets him guide her and she falls into traps she will never get out of. Traps she doesn’t even see until it’s far too late.

Always and forever.

It’s a curse, she will learn.

They live for thousands of years, but not really, not for her, not for any of them but Niklaus. Niklaus lives all those years, lives them and gets harder and more broken and distrusting as each year passes. Rebekah will spend time with a dagger through her heart, in boxes next to the bodies of her brothers, greyed and lifeless, until he says otherwise.

Rebekah dreams in her box, something Niklaus cannot take away from her.

(She dreams of a different life. One where they were back in the village, the tragedy that had made them never happening, and there is a baby in her arms.

Her mother is there with her, over her shoulder, telling her what a beautiful baby girl she had created, how strong she would grow “just like her mother”, as her hands stroked Rebekah’s hair.

In her box, grey and weathered, her mother comforts her and gives her what Niklaus will never give her in life.

Hope.)

Niklaus tears this away from her too (like he does everything else), wakes her up and expects her to fall in line. Rinse and repeat.

The daggers always hang over her, a death sentence in the waiting. But so do the dreams.

At least she still has those.

(Until she doesn’t. Until she learns who her mother really was.

But the baby stays, as she smiles down at it, promising to love it forever, to be what her parents could never be.)

And she loves blindly and recklessly

Caroline’s mother tells her she loves to easily after one of her deputies finds her in the back of Tommy Fell’s car, her cheerleading uniform only half on, and her only defense being that she loved him.

(He’s never said it back of course, but that doesn’t matter.)

Caroline laughs. She doesn’t love too easily, she can’t anymore, not after her parents had broken her heart. But she craves loves. She craves it too much, that is what her mother should say.

She wants it too badly and will do all the wrong things to get it.

(Caroline has always wanted everything.

Everything and anything that she can get her hands on, that she can hold on to and call her own.

There’s an empty space inside her, one that can only be filled up by love.

Eventually, she’ll learn that that person she’s waiting to love her, is herself.

But that won’t happen until it’s far too late. Until after she’s dead but still living on and her mother is in the ground next to her father, and there is no way to tell them this.)

Tommy, Damon, Matt, Tyler; they were all supposed to make it better.

(They didn’t.)

Klaus crashes into her life, ruins it, and then tries to spin the tale in his favor. He leaves presents at her door, on her nightstand, at her feet.

He tells her she’s beautiful and strong and more than just Caroline Forbes. Klaus tells her everything she’s ever wanted to hear.

And sometimes she feels herself leaning in.

Caroline doesn’t fall in love too easily, but she craves it too much.

Klaus does not know this. But he uses it against her anyways.

Even if it consumes her

Klaus takes a part of Elena, a part she will never get back.

It’s not innocence. No, she had lost that long before he had arrived. But he takes something just the same.

Elena wakes up, but Jenna is gone and John is dead on the lawn; bodies are all that is left behind.

Elena wakes up but something is missing inside her.

(Hope, she thinks sometimes in the middle of the night, when the nightmares get to be too much or the insomnia sinks in.

She never says this out loud either.)

Always and forever, a curse that had cost Rebekah her whole life. A thousand years of it.

Klaus takes the oath they had once pledge and twists it, twists it and twists it, until it no longer holds the meaning it once did. Elijah is there and he plays peacemaker, but somehow he is always on Nik’s side and Rebekah is left in the cold.

Alone.

(Always and forever.

It was supposed to mean the three of them together.

It wasn’t supposed to be Rebekah alone.)

Caroline never tells Klaus she loves him. (She says that she hates him so many times it starts to lose its meaning, it starts to mean something else.)

She does not crave his attention or love. She does not want it.

Except the moments that she does.

(The moments where his lips press against her skin or his blood is in her mouth, and Caroline feels special, feels  like she might just be the most important person in the world. When he looks at her like maybe, maybe she could be everything that she ever wanted to be. Like maybe she already was.

But it’s nothing she will ever say out loud.

It’s nothing that anyone would ever admit to.

It stays hidden in the dark instead.)

c: maybe that's the problem, c: i never lived at all, look i wrote a thing, fic: i am not here of my own choosing, character: rebekah, one-shot, fanfic, character: caroline forbes, character: elena gilbert, c: i'm never the one, fandom: the vampire diaries

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