fic: a catalog of non-definitive acts (tvd, elena/elijah)
title: a catalog of non-definitive acts
characters: elena/elijah; ensemble appearances
rating: t
summary: over the decades, they trade letters. sometimes they say little, sometimes they say too much. they all add up.
author's note: this was started a long time ago with a prompt from ladygawain, and I am just now finishing it. fic where there's woo'ing through letter writing. or also fic where elena lives out her life. alternative S3, goes off after 3.15 and diverges a lot from canon of S4.
[ I ]
Elena doesn't respond to his first letter. The one he wrote and left in her room for her to find and read against her window sill; sometimes, later, years later, she will wonder how he wrote it, whether he penned it at a desk or was it hastily written on a table before being put in its envelope, was it before he'd decided to leave or after, how long did he take the write it, did he struggle with the words, and so much more.
She doesn't write back. She's got no answer for his barely there apology, no forgiveness in her at the time, and hadn't known if he would even return. As for the parting and promise at the bottom, what could she possibly respond with even if she wanted to? It didn’t fix anything, what he’d said.
No, she leaves it in her vanity with a vague sense of understanding as to his meaning. In the second drawer, tucked underneath a photo of her and Caroline and Bonnie at a middle school dance, protected by its envelope, she leaves it to rest.
She doesn't take it out to reread.
(She knows it by memory anyway.)
always and forever
[ II ]
The second letter comes a month after she completes the transition. She dies in the same place where she should have nearly two years ago. It seems fitting somehow, that the creek be her grave each time. She comes back with the silty water in her lungs and thinks she’s not deserving of the rest she wants. It's waiting for her in the kitchen when she comes in from being out with Jeremy; they've been trying to do more together since her death, an effort on Jeremy's part to protect her and on her's to keep the only family member she has left alive.
She freezes on her way to the fridge, listening to Jeremy climb the stairs to his bedroom. He must have grabbed the mail this morning or something. That's their address and it's definitely her name on the front. There's no return address though, but the stamp mark bears a 'Seattle' on it in smeared pale pink ink. Her brow furrows as she forgets about her initial target of the bloodbag in the fridge in favor of flipping the envelope over. She's careful when running her fingernail under the seam to open it; adjusting to her new strength level's something she's still working on as just last week she'd ripped the doorknob off their front door.
The paper's of fine stock. She can tell because once, when she'd first started her writing, she'd begged her mom to buy her fancy paper like this for her short stories. The letter inside is tri-folded, only one page, nothing on the back.
Elena recognizes the handwriting without needing to read past the first line:
It's the same slightly looped, slightly curved lettering print as the letter buried upstairs in her vanity's drawer.
She stands in the kitchen, reading it once, twice, a third time, running her fingers over the indentions on the stock paper from where his pen had pressed under the weight of his hand.
Her mind is a jumble as she tries to process his words.
"Elena, shower's yours."
Jeremy breaks her thoughts with his shout from upstairs.
She's nearly relieved.
it is to my regret that news of your death has reached my ears
[ III ]
Months pass till she responds.
When the second letter had come, it's not like she'd thought she'd be writing him back. She hadn't. No, she'd stored it away along with the other one, the odd apology, in the drawer. Words don't come for a reply then. What exactly had there been for her to say? 'No, no, it's okay your sister killed me, all is forgiven'. Right. And it's not like he'd written her again either. She'd had a few more things to concentrate on lately.
Elena does write him back though.
Late one night when she can't sleep, when she's already gone through all the motions of trying -bribing herself with a blood bag to settle her nerves, then a highball of whiskey, taken from behind the blankets in the laundry room where Alaric had stashed his bottles thinking they wouldn’t find them, to see if that would settle whatever was wrong, and even trying to see if a hot shower would do- but none of it had worked. Giving up, she sits on her window seat. She tries to shut her brain off from thinking about all the things going on. It's useless. Everything swirls around in a jumbled mess, like a gordian knot or a ball of twine that she can’t unravel no matter how hard she picks at it.
She's moving before she can process the thought that's just come through clear. Her journal has dust on it, so long since she'd last written in it. It seems too old now, the journal, too foreign to use; the pages in it don’t hold what she wants, it’s all of a girl who’s dead and is never coming or going back to that life. That's not what she gets out. She leaves the journal on her night stand, instead reaching for her stationary. It's got a blue border around the edge, not as nice as she'd like, but it'll have to do.
Jenna had told her once that writing things down as if she was talking to someone helped her process things that were bothering her. It took the edge off to have an imaginary person listening or reading. There's a small pang there at the memory of her; a little dig to that space behind her ribcage that beats so slow as to be undetectable to a human, a reminder that she can still feel grief.
Elena puts her pen to the paper. The words come then, and she tells him everything that's happened while she listens to the snores of Jeremy on the other side of the connecting bathroom.
you'll be happy to hear that your sister is running for prom queen. Caroline's not thrilled
[ IV ]
Rebekah thrusts the envelope into her face one morning in late March, the bracelets on her wrist jangling against the open locker door. "Here," she says, giving it a little wiggle, her tone of voice conveying her annoyance at even talking to her.
Elena warily eyes it before recognizing the handwriting and taking it slowly. Best not to provoke her with a sudden movement lest she lose a hand or finger. True, Rebekah and she had more or less agreed to ignore one another after her initial anger at being killed by her -what else were they supposed to do when neither was going to budge on leaving town, because Rebekah insisted that this was her home, and well Elena wasn't ready to leave nor would she leave the town to the whims of the Originals- but there was nothing against being cautious.
When Elena had set down to respond to Elijah's letter, she hadn't thought of how she was going to give it to him. No return address existed on the envelopes. She had no way of knowing where he was. Pondering over it, frustrated, she'd come to the only conclusion: she'd have to ask one of his siblings. Rebekah had been the safest bet.
As a peace offering, Elena had given the silver locket back to its rightful owner after asking Jeremy to retrieve it from beyond the barrier in the cave, of course. She had no claim to it anymore, had no need of it, and really it was better this way. At the time, she'd had no idea if Rebekah would even want the necklace that held ties to the mother who'd wanted her dead. The naked look on Rebekah's face though had almost made her turn away, not from fear but from the intimacy she had no right to witness.
Rebekah's face had hardened again, as if she'd been aware how open and vulnerable she'd left herself. "Fine," she'd snapped. "I'll send your silly little letter."
Now at her locker, unable to keep the small smile from her face, Elena says, "Thank you, Rebekah."
The other girl sniffs, an exhale through her nose, and departs, the glossy shine of her blonde curls swinging around her shoulders. "Don't get used to it."
She puts the envelope and its contents on top of her calculus book. This isn't the place or time to read it.
if Rebekah desires to win something as silly as a plastic crown, then it would be in the interest of everyone to let her be
[ V ]
Of course they’re not safe in Mystic Falls. There’s always something that happens, something new that pops up, they wouldn’t be allowed to just live their lives without it. To no one’s surprise Klaus is at the head of the problem. To Elena’s complete not surprise, it’s her again that’s the cause for it all. Her blood, needed as always. She lets it spill wet and sticky over the rocks near the base of the quarry, listens to the chant of the witch that Klaus had bought off or more likely blackmailed and forced to do his bidding, listens to the ground as it cracks and shakes from the power of the dead-thing that will rise up because no one had believed that there wouldn’t be consequences. Magic always came with a price, that’s what Bonnie had said.
And it’s Bonnie that sets the area ablaze with fire, her teeth bared in a snarl as she comes barging in. She grabs for Elena’s hand and those fingers close tight around her own. They do what they’d tried to do months ago, only this time there’s no body jump; she never knows where Damon puts the body.
And it’s Bonnie’s hand she holds a few days later while they sit on her front porch. They stare at the road, stare at the trees that are just now starting to bud again for the spring, stare as one of her neighbors gets their mail. They stare at the streets of the town that’s the only home they’ve ever had, the place where they’ve both spilt their blood to protect it, where both have offered up far more than they should ever have had to.
She feels tired and ashamed and guilty as she holds her best friend’s hand.
“I’m gonna go,” is what she says.
Bonnie squeezes her hand in reflex as she turns to her. Her eyebrows pinch in confusion.
“After graduation.” It’s less than a month away now, and she gives her a little smile. “I think it would be best for everyone. The break would be good. Jeremy’s going to live with Matt in the house.”
Bonnie doesn’t argue with her. She doesn’t tell her it’s not her fault. She doesn’t tell her to stay. She doesn’t offer up her room that’s waiting at Duke for her after graduation, even though she knows she could show up and be invited in. She just squeezes her hand and holds on tighter.
Elena gives a letter to Rebekah the day after graduation, her car already packed up. She feels free almost. Her goodbyes are been bittersweet in a nostalgic way. A part of her she’ll leave behind here in the two boys that will never grow older despite that she’s already older than them in all the ways that count. Her eyes are completely dry as she passes the ‘Leaving Mystic Falls’ sign. She’s free.
i’m sure Rebekah’s told you now what happened to Klaus. I won’t lie and say I’m sorry. I’m leaving town
[ VI ]
She ends up in New York City.
And she ends up with Caroline.
She gets a job at a little publishing house down from where she has part-time classes at Columbia; a little compulsion and money goes a long way, she learns. She takes afternoon classes where she immerses herself in classes on short story fiction and French literature. She takes one on Southern mythology and laughs at how incorrect they are, sending texts to Bonnie during the time. At work, they let her sift through the manuscripts and put them together with little synopsis. It’s tedious, and others would complain, but she likes the hours she can lose reading through them. It’s nice to relearn and enjoy things she once had time to love.
Caroline finds her one day after the leaves have all dropped from the trees, bounces through the door and to her little desk. No hello, but, “Here’s the key to our apartment!”
She’s unable to do anything but laugh and let her friend lead her out from the building, the wind whipping at both their cheeks and hair.
Elena comes home one day after New Year’s Eve, there’s still tinsel all over the carpet, and Caroline hands her a tiny brown flap folder. It’s not any bigger than her hand, rests easy in her palm, and the thin paper lets her see the outline of a small metal key that’s inside. She looks up at her and receives a shrug.
Caroline’s lips purse. “I don’t know. Someone dropped it off today. Knocked on the door, said it was specifically for you.”
The address inside turns out to be a private building on the other side of the city. The key fits into a lockbox.
When her hand pulls out the envelope she gets it. Again, she doesn’t even need to second guess the scrawling script on the outside. Compulsion to make the man deliver it to her address, a key to a lockbox with no set address on the other side. She knows if she leaves a letter inside someone will check it, maybe even the compelled man who’d come to their door.
She smiles as she opens it.
I must congratulate you on accomplishing what I could not. It may be for the better this way.
[ VII ]
New York City gets old after a decade, and she goes to Bonnie while Caroline departs to travel; if Caroline calls and tells her that she runs into Katherine or that she climbs the Pyrenees with Stefan, Elena only shrugs. Their names no longer wound her.
Elena gets the added bonus that she gets to see Jeremy too. They’re not together, her brother and Bonnie, but they’re something. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t really need to know. Bonnie lives in a little house in North Carolina not far from where she’d gone to college, close to where she can keep ties to her Grams’s research and everything she needs. It’s a little place with a huge flower garden and regular garden in the front and back. With her magic, Bonnie barely looks older than a college student.
She’s thirty-one, and it’s on Bonnie’s birthday that she kills someone. She hasn’t done it in years. Caroline taught her control, taught her how to drink from bloodbags and if she had to feed from people, how to do it the best way to leave them alive and healthy and okay. But even so, she should have realized she wouldn’t be able to escape from what she is. She’s gotten so used to living her life, she’d gone lax maybe. Or gotten lazy, or been weak, or just stopped thinking of the predator she actually is.
Whatever it is, she completely misses the birthday celebration. They’d been drinking earlier to start off the night. The others are still inside while she steps out for smoke-free air for a second.
“Oh shit,” she breathes out into the night air when the smell of blood invades her nostrils. She already knows what it is, where it is, before she even turns her head to see the guy with the skinned knee in the alley between the bar and the next building over. He’s drunk and so is she. Too many shots, too much high shelf liquor, and she hadn’t fed enough today.
She doesn’t come too till after she’s torn a gash in his neck and drained him empty.
In Bonnie’s bathroom, in secret, she washes blood down the drain and tastes salt on her lips that’s not from the man’s body. It’s shame that makes her do it while no one else is in the house. It’ll be clarity that makes her call Caroline tomorrow to confess and ask what she should do.
Days later she’ll still be sad, and while Bonnie pulls down grimoires to show her a new spell she’d made, unknowing, she’ll ask for a piece of paper and a pen.
They don’t exchange letters that are full of personal things. No, that’s not it. It’s that the letters always hold an air of simplicity to them, a frankness. It’s been two decades now that they’d been doing this, sometimes they came quick, sometimes there would be months between. The things she writes now, the dark hidden parts of her that had cried over the fact that she’d enjoyed drinking the warm whiskey tinged blood, they’re anything but simplistic.
i don’t know if I’ll ever get used to being this thing that craves blood and doesn’t care how to get it
[ VIII ]
When she’s forty-six, Elena spends the year out with Damon and Katherine in a little place outside of Seattle. Why the two had settled on the Pacific Coast, she has no idea, nor does she even ask. She listens to stories of how Caroline had talked Katherine into visiting Paris for a month, laughs when they tell her how they’d nearly died in a bar in New Mexico because Damon couldn’t not run his mouth at the pair of werewolves that had walked in.
It’s fun, she realizes, as they sit out on the porch. Elena rocks herself with one foot on the deck, her body a horizontal line in the swing chair. She gets it then.
She’s forty-six, but looks no older than twenty-five on a day where she does her hair up and lines her eyes and lips. She’ll forever be eighteen, and in another five decades or so there will be no one in Mystic Falls who remembers her if she were to come back into town. Time is slow. But she has others in her life, people she once hated, people she once loved, and it’s twisted that they’re all some weird knit family that breaks apart and drifts together, but when had anything ever been simple for them.
“Tell me again how Damon got a chair shoved in his leg?” She pushes off on the swing again.
“Oh fuck you.”
Katherine’s smile is wicked.
There’s never any getting “used to it”, as you said. There is only existing and knowing what you are. Only then can you be what you want, Elena.
[ IX ]
She goes back to New York City.
Only this time, she’s got shorter hair that curls around her neck and lives in a penthouse suite with Rebekah. Rebekah is the one who finds her, and while she’s at school all day, getting a degree in medieval history -she did live through it, she tells Elena, that practically makes me an expert already- Elena works in a small magazine’s business, with a small column. It’s another job she’d once imagined herself having back when she’d been human. Something her father had joked about, saying he’d cut out all her clippings and put them up to display. It’s small and quaint and a tiny space that she squeezes many words as she can into, but it’s got her name on it.
Rebekah is surprisingly a good roommate and fun to have around.
“You still write those letters to my brother?” She asks one night while applying gloss to her lips and fluffing out the golden curls that she’d streaked with purple in the fashion of the decade.
“Yes,” Elena answers, already dressed and sitting on the bathroom’s counter. She thinks about the cedar box she keeps in her desk.
Rebekah laughs, wiping underneath the bottom of her lip to ensure there’s no stray bit on her skin. “You two are still pathetic.”
Rebekah’s been fun to have around. She tells me you’ve
[ X ]
One morning when she’s sitting at the table, her knife stills over the toast she’s spreading butter over; she likes to hold onto the pretenses of human life, the reason why there’s always flowers in a vase or the pictures in the living room or the little figurines she picks up sometimes in second hand shops. She looks up and realizes that she’s never traveled outside of the United States. She’s in her fifth decade of being alive. She realizes too who she wants with her.
Elena looks up to Rebekah in the kitchen. Stefan and Caroline are with them too, but neither have surfaced yet for the day. “Rebekah,” she says, the idea coming to her mind, and she grabs onto it before it floats away or leaves her. “Where’s your brother?”
“Finally,” Rebekah answers, sniffing her nose in the air as she sets her tea mug in the sink with a loud clack. “This was beginning to get too pathetic even for you.”
She writes one more letter and packs her bags. It’s short, the letter, with only a few lines. She doesn’t put an address. The cedar box, overflowing and unable to shut, she leaves in the desk. She won’t need them.
I’ve decided to take a trip. I’m the only one who’s never traveled yet. Not properly. I’m thinking of starting in Florence.
[ 0 ]
Florence is nice this time of year, she learns. What Caroline had told her about it rings true. She takes a seat outside the Giubbe Rosse on her fifth day in the city, scribbling away in her notebook along with the others. Her ears take in the sounds of the tourists and true Italians alike, parsing out the syllables and consonants and trying to guess at what they’re talking about. Observing is something she’s grown good at.
She’s on her second cup when a shadows falls over her notebook. At first she merely thinks it’s the sun disappearing and causing a blight on the tan awning above her. But when she looks up she’s not really surprised to find it’s not that at all.
He doesn’t look all that different. His hair’s a little longer, more like the first time they’d met decades ago. The suit he wears is a fine gray color, different from the normal black, but finely cut and tailored to the current style. She thinks later she’ll tell him how much she likes his hair better this way. She won’t ask him how he found her; there’s no need, especially when she remembers the lockbox and how he’d always known where to send the letters.
Elena smiles. “Hello there.”
characters: elena/elijah; ensemble appearances
rating: t
summary: over the decades, they trade letters. sometimes they say little, sometimes they say too much. they all add up.
author's note: this was started a long time ago with a prompt from ladygawain, and I am just now finishing it. fic where there's woo'ing through letter writing. or also fic where elena lives out her life. alternative S3, goes off after 3.15 and diverges a lot from canon of S4.
[ I ]
Elena doesn't respond to his first letter. The one he wrote and left in her room for her to find and read against her window sill; sometimes, later, years later, she will wonder how he wrote it, whether he penned it at a desk or was it hastily written on a table before being put in its envelope, was it before he'd decided to leave or after, how long did he take the write it, did he struggle with the words, and so much more.
She doesn't write back. She's got no answer for his barely there apology, no forgiveness in her at the time, and hadn't known if he would even return. As for the parting and promise at the bottom, what could she possibly respond with even if she wanted to? It didn’t fix anything, what he’d said.
No, she leaves it in her vanity with a vague sense of understanding as to his meaning. In the second drawer, tucked underneath a photo of her and Caroline and Bonnie at a middle school dance, protected by its envelope, she leaves it to rest.
She doesn't take it out to reread.
(She knows it by memory anyway.)
always and forever
[ II ]
The second letter comes a month after she completes the transition. She dies in the same place where she should have nearly two years ago. It seems fitting somehow, that the creek be her grave each time. She comes back with the silty water in her lungs and thinks she’s not deserving of the rest she wants. It's waiting for her in the kitchen when she comes in from being out with Jeremy; they've been trying to do more together since her death, an effort on Jeremy's part to protect her and on her's to keep the only family member she has left alive.
She freezes on her way to the fridge, listening to Jeremy climb the stairs to his bedroom. He must have grabbed the mail this morning or something. That's their address and it's definitely her name on the front. There's no return address though, but the stamp mark bears a 'Seattle' on it in smeared pale pink ink. Her brow furrows as she forgets about her initial target of the bloodbag in the fridge in favor of flipping the envelope over. She's careful when running her fingernail under the seam to open it; adjusting to her new strength level's something she's still working on as just last week she'd ripped the doorknob off their front door.
The paper's of fine stock. She can tell because once, when she'd first started her writing, she'd begged her mom to buy her fancy paper like this for her short stories. The letter inside is tri-folded, only one page, nothing on the back.
Elena recognizes the handwriting without needing to read past the first line:
It's the same slightly looped, slightly curved lettering print as the letter buried upstairs in her vanity's drawer.
She stands in the kitchen, reading it once, twice, a third time, running her fingers over the indentions on the stock paper from where his pen had pressed under the weight of his hand.
Her mind is a jumble as she tries to process his words.
"Elena, shower's yours."
Jeremy breaks her thoughts with his shout from upstairs.
She's nearly relieved.
it is to my regret that news of your death has reached my ears
[ III ]
Months pass till she responds.
When the second letter had come, it's not like she'd thought she'd be writing him back. She hadn't. No, she'd stored it away along with the other one, the odd apology, in the drawer. Words don't come for a reply then. What exactly had there been for her to say? 'No, no, it's okay your sister killed me, all is forgiven'. Right. And it's not like he'd written her again either. She'd had a few more things to concentrate on lately.
Elena does write him back though.
Late one night when she can't sleep, when she's already gone through all the motions of trying -bribing herself with a blood bag to settle her nerves, then a highball of whiskey, taken from behind the blankets in the laundry room where Alaric had stashed his bottles thinking they wouldn’t find them, to see if that would settle whatever was wrong, and even trying to see if a hot shower would do- but none of it had worked. Giving up, she sits on her window seat. She tries to shut her brain off from thinking about all the things going on. It's useless. Everything swirls around in a jumbled mess, like a gordian knot or a ball of twine that she can’t unravel no matter how hard she picks at it.
She's moving before she can process the thought that's just come through clear. Her journal has dust on it, so long since she'd last written in it. It seems too old now, the journal, too foreign to use; the pages in it don’t hold what she wants, it’s all of a girl who’s dead and is never coming or going back to that life. That's not what she gets out. She leaves the journal on her night stand, instead reaching for her stationary. It's got a blue border around the edge, not as nice as she'd like, but it'll have to do.
Jenna had told her once that writing things down as if she was talking to someone helped her process things that were bothering her. It took the edge off to have an imaginary person listening or reading. There's a small pang there at the memory of her; a little dig to that space behind her ribcage that beats so slow as to be undetectable to a human, a reminder that she can still feel grief.
Elena puts her pen to the paper. The words come then, and she tells him everything that's happened while she listens to the snores of Jeremy on the other side of the connecting bathroom.
you'll be happy to hear that your sister is running for prom queen. Caroline's not thrilled
[ IV ]
Rebekah thrusts the envelope into her face one morning in late March, the bracelets on her wrist jangling against the open locker door. "Here," she says, giving it a little wiggle, her tone of voice conveying her annoyance at even talking to her.
Elena warily eyes it before recognizing the handwriting and taking it slowly. Best not to provoke her with a sudden movement lest she lose a hand or finger. True, Rebekah and she had more or less agreed to ignore one another after her initial anger at being killed by her -what else were they supposed to do when neither was going to budge on leaving town, because Rebekah insisted that this was her home, and well Elena wasn't ready to leave nor would she leave the town to the whims of the Originals- but there was nothing against being cautious.
When Elena had set down to respond to Elijah's letter, she hadn't thought of how she was going to give it to him. No return address existed on the envelopes. She had no way of knowing where he was. Pondering over it, frustrated, she'd come to the only conclusion: she'd have to ask one of his siblings. Rebekah had been the safest bet.
As a peace offering, Elena had given the silver locket back to its rightful owner after asking Jeremy to retrieve it from beyond the barrier in the cave, of course. She had no claim to it anymore, had no need of it, and really it was better this way. At the time, she'd had no idea if Rebekah would even want the necklace that held ties to the mother who'd wanted her dead. The naked look on Rebekah's face though had almost made her turn away, not from fear but from the intimacy she had no right to witness.
Rebekah's face had hardened again, as if she'd been aware how open and vulnerable she'd left herself. "Fine," she'd snapped. "I'll send your silly little letter."
Now at her locker, unable to keep the small smile from her face, Elena says, "Thank you, Rebekah."
The other girl sniffs, an exhale through her nose, and departs, the glossy shine of her blonde curls swinging around her shoulders. "Don't get used to it."
She puts the envelope and its contents on top of her calculus book. This isn't the place or time to read it.
if Rebekah desires to win something as silly as a plastic crown, then it would be in the interest of everyone to let her be
[ V ]
Of course they’re not safe in Mystic Falls. There’s always something that happens, something new that pops up, they wouldn’t be allowed to just live their lives without it. To no one’s surprise Klaus is at the head of the problem. To Elena’s complete not surprise, it’s her again that’s the cause for it all. Her blood, needed as always. She lets it spill wet and sticky over the rocks near the base of the quarry, listens to the chant of the witch that Klaus had bought off or more likely blackmailed and forced to do his bidding, listens to the ground as it cracks and shakes from the power of the dead-thing that will rise up because no one had believed that there wouldn’t be consequences. Magic always came with a price, that’s what Bonnie had said.
And it’s Bonnie that sets the area ablaze with fire, her teeth bared in a snarl as she comes barging in. She grabs for Elena’s hand and those fingers close tight around her own. They do what they’d tried to do months ago, only this time there’s no body jump; she never knows where Damon puts the body.
And it’s Bonnie’s hand she holds a few days later while they sit on her front porch. They stare at the road, stare at the trees that are just now starting to bud again for the spring, stare as one of her neighbors gets their mail. They stare at the streets of the town that’s the only home they’ve ever had, the place where they’ve both spilt their blood to protect it, where both have offered up far more than they should ever have had to.
She feels tired and ashamed and guilty as she holds her best friend’s hand.
“I’m gonna go,” is what she says.
Bonnie squeezes her hand in reflex as she turns to her. Her eyebrows pinch in confusion.
“After graduation.” It’s less than a month away now, and she gives her a little smile. “I think it would be best for everyone. The break would be good. Jeremy’s going to live with Matt in the house.”
Bonnie doesn’t argue with her. She doesn’t tell her it’s not her fault. She doesn’t tell her to stay. She doesn’t offer up her room that’s waiting at Duke for her after graduation, even though she knows she could show up and be invited in. She just squeezes her hand and holds on tighter.
Elena gives a letter to Rebekah the day after graduation, her car already packed up. She feels free almost. Her goodbyes are been bittersweet in a nostalgic way. A part of her she’ll leave behind here in the two boys that will never grow older despite that she’s already older than them in all the ways that count. Her eyes are completely dry as she passes the ‘Leaving Mystic Falls’ sign. She’s free.
i’m sure Rebekah’s told you now what happened to Klaus. I won’t lie and say I’m sorry. I’m leaving town
[ VI ]
She ends up in New York City.
And she ends up with Caroline.
She gets a job at a little publishing house down from where she has part-time classes at Columbia; a little compulsion and money goes a long way, she learns. She takes afternoon classes where she immerses herself in classes on short story fiction and French literature. She takes one on Southern mythology and laughs at how incorrect they are, sending texts to Bonnie during the time. At work, they let her sift through the manuscripts and put them together with little synopsis. It’s tedious, and others would complain, but she likes the hours she can lose reading through them. It’s nice to relearn and enjoy things she once had time to love.
Caroline finds her one day after the leaves have all dropped from the trees, bounces through the door and to her little desk. No hello, but, “Here’s the key to our apartment!”
She’s unable to do anything but laugh and let her friend lead her out from the building, the wind whipping at both their cheeks and hair.
Elena comes home one day after New Year’s Eve, there’s still tinsel all over the carpet, and Caroline hands her a tiny brown flap folder. It’s not any bigger than her hand, rests easy in her palm, and the thin paper lets her see the outline of a small metal key that’s inside. She looks up at her and receives a shrug.
Caroline’s lips purse. “I don’t know. Someone dropped it off today. Knocked on the door, said it was specifically for you.”
The address inside turns out to be a private building on the other side of the city. The key fits into a lockbox.
When her hand pulls out the envelope she gets it. Again, she doesn’t even need to second guess the scrawling script on the outside. Compulsion to make the man deliver it to her address, a key to a lockbox with no set address on the other side. She knows if she leaves a letter inside someone will check it, maybe even the compelled man who’d come to their door.
She smiles as she opens it.
I must congratulate you on accomplishing what I could not. It may be for the better this way.
[ VII ]
New York City gets old after a decade, and she goes to Bonnie while Caroline departs to travel; if Caroline calls and tells her that she runs into Katherine or that she climbs the Pyrenees with Stefan, Elena only shrugs. Their names no longer wound her.
Elena gets the added bonus that she gets to see Jeremy too. They’re not together, her brother and Bonnie, but they’re something. She doesn’t ask. She doesn’t really need to know. Bonnie lives in a little house in North Carolina not far from where she’d gone to college, close to where she can keep ties to her Grams’s research and everything she needs. It’s a little place with a huge flower garden and regular garden in the front and back. With her magic, Bonnie barely looks older than a college student.
She’s thirty-one, and it’s on Bonnie’s birthday that she kills someone. She hasn’t done it in years. Caroline taught her control, taught her how to drink from bloodbags and if she had to feed from people, how to do it the best way to leave them alive and healthy and okay. But even so, she should have realized she wouldn’t be able to escape from what she is. She’s gotten so used to living her life, she’d gone lax maybe. Or gotten lazy, or been weak, or just stopped thinking of the predator she actually is.
Whatever it is, she completely misses the birthday celebration. They’d been drinking earlier to start off the night. The others are still inside while she steps out for smoke-free air for a second.
“Oh shit,” she breathes out into the night air when the smell of blood invades her nostrils. She already knows what it is, where it is, before she even turns her head to see the guy with the skinned knee in the alley between the bar and the next building over. He’s drunk and so is she. Too many shots, too much high shelf liquor, and she hadn’t fed enough today.
She doesn’t come too till after she’s torn a gash in his neck and drained him empty.
In Bonnie’s bathroom, in secret, she washes blood down the drain and tastes salt on her lips that’s not from the man’s body. It’s shame that makes her do it while no one else is in the house. It’ll be clarity that makes her call Caroline tomorrow to confess and ask what she should do.
Days later she’ll still be sad, and while Bonnie pulls down grimoires to show her a new spell she’d made, unknowing, she’ll ask for a piece of paper and a pen.
They don’t exchange letters that are full of personal things. No, that’s not it. It’s that the letters always hold an air of simplicity to them, a frankness. It’s been two decades now that they’d been doing this, sometimes they came quick, sometimes there would be months between. The things she writes now, the dark hidden parts of her that had cried over the fact that she’d enjoyed drinking the warm whiskey tinged blood, they’re anything but simplistic.
i don’t know if I’ll ever get used to being this thing that craves blood and doesn’t care how to get it
[ VIII ]
When she’s forty-six, Elena spends the year out with Damon and Katherine in a little place outside of Seattle. Why the two had settled on the Pacific Coast, she has no idea, nor does she even ask. She listens to stories of how Caroline had talked Katherine into visiting Paris for a month, laughs when they tell her how they’d nearly died in a bar in New Mexico because Damon couldn’t not run his mouth at the pair of werewolves that had walked in.
It’s fun, she realizes, as they sit out on the porch. Elena rocks herself with one foot on the deck, her body a horizontal line in the swing chair. She gets it then.
She’s forty-six, but looks no older than twenty-five on a day where she does her hair up and lines her eyes and lips. She’ll forever be eighteen, and in another five decades or so there will be no one in Mystic Falls who remembers her if she were to come back into town. Time is slow. But she has others in her life, people she once hated, people she once loved, and it’s twisted that they’re all some weird knit family that breaks apart and drifts together, but when had anything ever been simple for them.
“Tell me again how Damon got a chair shoved in his leg?” She pushes off on the swing again.
“Oh fuck you.”
Katherine’s smile is wicked.
There’s never any getting “used to it”, as you said. There is only existing and knowing what you are. Only then can you be what you want, Elena.
[ IX ]
She goes back to New York City.
Only this time, she’s got shorter hair that curls around her neck and lives in a penthouse suite with Rebekah. Rebekah is the one who finds her, and while she’s at school all day, getting a degree in medieval history -she did live through it, she tells Elena, that practically makes me an expert already- Elena works in a small magazine’s business, with a small column. It’s another job she’d once imagined herself having back when she’d been human. Something her father had joked about, saying he’d cut out all her clippings and put them up to display. It’s small and quaint and a tiny space that she squeezes many words as she can into, but it’s got her name on it.
Rebekah is surprisingly a good roommate and fun to have around.
“You still write those letters to my brother?” She asks one night while applying gloss to her lips and fluffing out the golden curls that she’d streaked with purple in the fashion of the decade.
“Yes,” Elena answers, already dressed and sitting on the bathroom’s counter. She thinks about the cedar box she keeps in her desk.
Rebekah laughs, wiping underneath the bottom of her lip to ensure there’s no stray bit on her skin. “You two are still pathetic.”
Rebekah’s been fun to have around. She tells me you’ve
[ X ]
One morning when she’s sitting at the table, her knife stills over the toast she’s spreading butter over; she likes to hold onto the pretenses of human life, the reason why there’s always flowers in a vase or the pictures in the living room or the little figurines she picks up sometimes in second hand shops. She looks up and realizes that she’s never traveled outside of the United States. She’s in her fifth decade of being alive. She realizes too who she wants with her.
Elena looks up to Rebekah in the kitchen. Stefan and Caroline are with them too, but neither have surfaced yet for the day. “Rebekah,” she says, the idea coming to her mind, and she grabs onto it before it floats away or leaves her. “Where’s your brother?”
“Finally,” Rebekah answers, sniffing her nose in the air as she sets her tea mug in the sink with a loud clack. “This was beginning to get too pathetic even for you.”
She writes one more letter and packs her bags. It’s short, the letter, with only a few lines. She doesn’t put an address. The cedar box, overflowing and unable to shut, she leaves in the desk. She won’t need them.
I’ve decided to take a trip. I’m the only one who’s never traveled yet. Not properly. I’m thinking of starting in Florence.
[ 0 ]
Florence is nice this time of year, she learns. What Caroline had told her about it rings true. She takes a seat outside the Giubbe Rosse on her fifth day in the city, scribbling away in her notebook along with the others. Her ears take in the sounds of the tourists and true Italians alike, parsing out the syllables and consonants and trying to guess at what they’re talking about. Observing is something she’s grown good at.
She’s on her second cup when a shadows falls over her notebook. At first she merely thinks it’s the sun disappearing and causing a blight on the tan awning above her. But when she looks up she’s not really surprised to find it’s not that at all.
He doesn’t look all that different. His hair’s a little longer, more like the first time they’d met decades ago. The suit he wears is a fine gray color, different from the normal black, but finely cut and tailored to the current style. She thinks later she’ll tell him how much she likes his hair better this way. She won’t ask him how he found her; there’s no need, especially when she remembers the lockbox and how he’d always known where to send the letters.
Elena smiles. “Hello there.”