When You Thought I Was Sleeping

Chapter 1 - The Telltale Signs

Consciousness returned to her body between one moment and another like the sudden burst of air that returned to her lungs, expanding almost to full capacity and contracting with almost painful relief: Elena Gilbert was brimming with life. For the first time in whoever knows how long, she was aware of her surroundings. She was surrounded on all sides by something close in proximity to her, closing her in. Her breaths, before frozen in time now in endless supply, kept coming quickly and she struggled to keep up with herself. With only a limited amount of air to breathe, she knew she had to stay calm. She was trapped somewhere and she needed time to get herself out.

Opening her eyes gave her no clearer picture of what was going on and only mirrored the same darkness that hid behind her closed eyelids. Somehow Elena felt that she had woken up in the middle of a story like a major character introduced after the plot had already been established or in the middle of a dream where she missed the story's introduction. Her return was some mistake that she couldn't quite grasp yet. She willed herself to remember how she got here.

She remembered her name and her phone number and her address. Or... at least the address of her childhood home, the one she had burnt to ashes with the body of her dead brother inside. Formerly dead brother. Jeremy and their parents, the car crash, her aunt Jenna coming to live with them. Her biological father being Uncle John. The sacrifice. The cure. Elena had driven off a bridge and turned into a vampire and Jeremy died while looking for the cure. She remembered turning off her humanity when she couldn't deal with the weight of his loss, all of their losses really and the burden of eternal life. Just make it stop, please make it stop, it hurts.

And then she remembered Damon. I'm Damon. Damon. Of course. I'm Elena. He was the one who told her to turn off her emotions. She's not going to survive this. But then made her feel like turning them back on would be worth it. Well then I'm not sorry either. The promise of a love that would last forever. I promise. His death. Please come back to me. Erasing her memories. Who is Damon Salvatore? He's a monster.

And Stefan destroyed by the loss of his brother. He should be here. Destroyed by Klaus' compulsion. What did you do? I fixed him. Destroyed by Elena choosing Damon. I can't do this anymore, Elena. And Caroline, Caroline bringing the, both back to life. I do know this: if Caroline Forbes was here right now, we would both be laughing.

Back to life. So that one day when I wake up I can read all about my best friends' lives and feel like I was there. Bonnie.

And that's when all of the pieces fit together like a puzzle in her head comprised of words and images making up the last 20 or so years of Elena's life. Kai. She shouldn't be here. The sleeping curse. Her connection to Bonnie. If she was here, that meant Bonnie...

In a panic, Elena reached up and pushed hard against the darkness, feeling it give way to light. In the dim light she sat up and found herself sitting in the velvet lined coffin in the open air of the Salvatore crypt.

She knew exactly where she was after having spent months here that last summer waiting for Damon to come back to life. She had practically memorized every square inch of its floor plan: the stained glass window with the light of a dying day outside shining through the room that she might have broken once or twice; the names of the Salvatore family etched into the walls; the wooden table in the centre of the room, the stone pillars and ancient stone floor. The echoes of past lives lived emanated from the walls giving the feeling that you were never really alone. However, she noticed there was a different air about the place and realized for the first time that she really wasn't alone.

Still seated, Elena turned around in her coffin and was faced with the figures of three women, all dressed in black that stood near the entrance to the crypt with their eyes glued to her. They didn't seem like kids who accidentally stumbled into a crypt they thought vacant. No, like the air in the room, they felt ancient; magical. They were not human. But she wasn't really sure what they were.