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Elena Gilbert dies.
Elena Gilbert lives.
Elena Gilbert wears a black dress, and goes to a funeral. It's never her own.
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She's there: in the graveyard, tear-streaked, trembling, holding a rose in her hand hard enough that the thorns break her skin; her brother's by her side – sometimes, not always, once his body's the one being buried – and neither of them say much of anything.
There are monsters in the dark, lurking in the woods, and they learn quickly that it's dangerous to speak where they can be over-heard.
Lie.
She learns quickly.
Her brother has a ring that brings him back when tempers flare and life's cut short. He doesn't need to watch his words. He stands, taller than the devil, and spits in his eye with half-a-smile twisted across his lips. She will forever be haunted by the sound of his neck breaking, that first time, when neither of them knew he would come back.
There they stand, hand in hand: the girl death regrets, and the boy death forgets.
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“Katherine?” They ask, those men who encountered her doppelganger across the centuries. There's hate, and love, and something like reverence in their eyes when – one after the other – they realize she's a new link on the chain; a new girl wearing a familiar face. Her tentative smile turns into a bitter smirk after the first few times, and she takes to saying, “close but no cigar,” before disappearing in a flurry of curls and cloth.
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Elena Gilbert's the golden girl of Mystic Falls.
Lie.
There's another:
Pretty Caroline, with curls like sunlight, and eyes that glitter like chipped emeralds, who always as a porcelain smile on display.
Broken Caroline, who tries, tries, tries.
Sweet Caroline, who fails; who comes in second place, and wears the silver crown like its made of diamonds – like she didn't work herself bloody to be picked first just once.
Elena Gilbert's the girl queen of Mystic Falls.
She never works for it.
(She doesn't have to.)
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“You want to know a secret?” She announces once, laid spread-eagle on the stone where she was sacrificed – where her aunt was sacrificed – where a thousand year old curse finally shattered. There's no one to answer her. She prefers it that way. The solitude means she's safe, at least for a little while. There's only one other creature alive to which this site matters; who thinks of it with something like reverence. “I wish I never woke up.”
The tell-tale whistle of a vampire fleeing in the distance makes her grin.
Coward, she thinks, and it tastes like expensive wine; like a broken vow.
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There's charcoal on her brother's cheek, and chalk dust under his nails, and it catches the attention of the last person she expects.
Klaus. Her hunter. Her murderer.
He slides into the booth next to her, as she's sipping ice cold coke through a straw, and the sudden presence makes her choke. His splayed hand between her shoulder blades is warm, blisteringly so, but she doesn't coil away from it: a snake poised to bite. No. She leans into the hold, same as she did that night, when he broke his curse and gave her a taste of the there-after.
His arm settles across her shoulders, like there's room for tenderness between them, and without thinking she rests against him.
Jenna's absence lingers in the air.
Elena pretends she can't sense it.
Truth.
She's tired of clinging to hatred. All it does is make the bodies pile up further. Jeremy knows it, more than once his body's been one of the those thrown on the heap; he knows that she hates the sound of his neck snapping, or his heart being torn out, or his lungs filling with blood. He's learning to bite his tongue.
“You should try oil paints,” Klaus says, like he's just some guy, a friend even, perhaps another student in an art program her brother signed up for – one she took a shine to and welcomed home with a kiss.
By the pool table Stefan's seething.
She huffs and reaches for her coke.
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“You confound me,” he will say, someday, in the future, and she will throw her head back and laugh till she's breathless. Lips curled over sharp teeth, arms settled on his shoulders, she's got no interest in those around them – how the bar's gone quiet from the sound. She'll lean close, and brush her nose against his, brown eyes gleaming with mischief as she says “I must be doing something right then.”
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She used to keep a journal.
She filled it with her darkest desires – those wanton imaginings that made her gasp a off-limits name into her pillows as her hand dipped beneath the waistband of her sleep shorts. She bled into each page, each word etching more of her soul into discernible loops and lines.
Here's what she admitted:
The monsters are real.
I love one of them.
I love myself more.
My brother's half-mad.
He flirts with death.
I let him.
I understand.
It's not a thing I fear.
Damon steals her secrets from her - this is after she dies the second time – and reads aloud the things she never wanted to admit to anyone. He stumbles over some parts; by the end the vicious glee in his eyes has dulled, like metal eaten through by rust, falling to pieces in the breeze.
She snatches her journal back, and leaves him to brood on what he's discovered.
She burns the book in her yard.
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Lesson learnt.
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She picks up a paint brush one day, between betrayals, after one deal, before another; she's two deaths down and five guardians gone. She's in Klaus's studio. He's stood at her back, crowding her, silent as he watches her work. It should be terrifying. It shouldn't even be happening. She should be plotting his demise with the others. But her brother's friendly with his, and the blood donations stopped a while ago, and she's never been any good at hating someone.
She is done with pretending otherwise.
She leans back, keeps her eyes forward.
When all he does is recommend another colour – a pretty red to darken the rose she's been trying to bring to life – she smiles. In her chest her heart's steadily pounding: a war drum being put to new use. Neither of them are surprised when she turns around and pulls him in for a kiss, after the last streak of paint has been added to the canvas. Both their hands are stained crimson. Out damn spot, out, she thinks to herself; only, he laughs, so she must have spoken aloud.
She is too distracted to care... much.
He's warm, always has been: a fire set to burn for the rest of eternity.
She's starting to get used to it.
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Elena Gilbert wears a face that's seen history.
Her eyes have seen history.
She's seen history.
Elena Gilbert isn't Tatia, isn't Katherine.
But a small part – enough - of her is.
They're all The Doppelganger after all.
And there's only been one of those.
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Elena Gilbert dies.
Lie.
Truth.
Half of both.
Elena Gilbert dies.
But It never sticks.
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“I'm not her, not either of them, at least not in the way you think,” she says, one day, after Jeremy's left on a road-trip with the Kol, after Caroline and Bonnie have started college, after she knows her loved ones are happy. He hums, amused, and lays a feather-light kiss over the scarred bite he left on her throat once. His teeth graze the mark, and she shudders, breath hitching in her breast. Then, hissed in her ear, low and serpentine, his voice wraps around words that almost make her weep; “they never even came close, love.”
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Elena Gilbert dies.
Turns out that's only the beginning.
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