Shattered
Category: Drabbles

Elena had convinced herself that she could actually be happy. How wrong she had been. She had allowed herself to be lulled into a false sense of security only to be played for a fool. She had known better than to allow herself to think that this was more than an illusion. That’s all it had ever been. She was dumb to think that someone she cared about would actually stick around. They never did, whether it be by them being killed or other means, she knew that the only person she could truly count on was herself.

She scoffed at the idea of happy endings. When would everyone open their eyes and see the world for what it really was? A place where the majority of living beings, human and non human alike, had self serving motives and cared little if any for others. She had sacrificed so much of herself for others. It was to the point that she was suffering as a result of. She didn’t care about it before, but recently realized that it wasn’t healthy to allow others to use her in such a manner. She too deserved happiness and presently this was rare and fleeting. 

Days were spent distracting herself and nights were spent drinking and sitting in an empty house. It had gotten to the point that she had rescinded all invitations she had extended to any vampires close to her so they could no longer enter her home. She didn’t want them waltzing in and just making themselves at home. She even stopped going to the Salvatore Boarding House as well, unless it was to grab another bottle of booze. Nobody had bothered coming by lately because they knew they would be met with an air of not being welcome. 

This behavior was anything but typical for Elena, but she had reached a point where she needed solitude. She needed to be away from the things that would remind her of the pain she felt deep within. The pain she had tried to ignore. It had only become a deep wound that began to fester more as the time dragged on. It had become a pain so great that it was utterly impossible to ignore any longer. It was like a splinter that had been left to become infected. She had to remove the irritant before any sort of healing could begin. 

Elena had been just a shell of what she usually was over the past several weeks. Try as she might to hide it, her struggle began to show. The facade of being perfectly fine and happy was beginning to crack, leaking the toxic inner turmoil as though sulfuric gas from a crack in the earth’s crust. The pain was flowing through her veins like molten lava, burning and searing as it reached every part of her body. The anger surged through her once more as she thought of the situation she was currently in. She then let out a frustrated growling grunt before throwing the glass she had in her hand. There was a loud crash as it hit the wall with such force that it shattered. 

Elena was the farthest thing from cruel and vengeful, but she was human. All of the emotions that came with this were completely intact, including rage.  She dared not utter a word of this to a certain vampire whose solution to these issues would be to rip the offender’s beating heart from their chest. That was not how she desired it to be handled. She needed time to recover after removing the splinter. 

Elena was resilient, with everything she had been through, she was still standing somehow. She was a fighter and would never just lie down and give up. She would also not allow herself to just wither away to nothing. If anything, she would bounce back stronger than ever. She always did, it’s what made Elena a formidable force in the world. Despite everything she had been through, she still cared about others. She wanted them to never feel the pain that had been deeply imbedded within her for so many years. 

Elena’s heart had been shattered over and over throughout the years. This had left tiny shards of glass that never fit quite right even with her best efforts to repair herself. With every breath she took, she could feel the shards stabbing and stinging. Some days were better, and some were worse. Lately the latter outweighed the former. Where there had been light, she could see only darkness. No light permeated the shroud that consumed her. Despite the efforts of her friends early on, nothing had worked. She now took solace in the solitude, the darkness growing ever powerful with each passing moment. She wanted it to end. The heartache, the pain, all of it. 

Having shattered her glass, she resigned herself to drinking right from the bottle, it didn’t matter anyway. It was only her drinking. With each drink, she felt herself slipping beneath the black water of the darkness that had become her home. Closing her eyes, she decided to surrender herself to the depths and just let go for now. To not feeling, to just existing in the vast abyss of nothingness.