She's Come Undone

Chapter 1

"Just find that one thing inside of you that makes you strong. It's in there, just latch on to it, channel everything you're feeling into that one emotion. Find the thing inside of you that makes you want to live, Elena," she heard Stefan saying somewhere past the screaming, howling avalanche of her returning humanity. "And then, let it in."

She wanted to rip his throat out.

Instead, she clutched at her own, choking, still trying to swallow back all the horror and grief and - oh god, Jeremy was dead - and guilt at the waitress she had killed, the humans she'd terrorized, Caroline's hurt eyes. She'd tried to kill her, she'd tried to kill Bonnie. She couldn't, couldn't... please...

Damon's hands were around her and-

The gut-clenching feeling of aversion to the memory of Damon's touch when all she'd been capable of had been pleasing him, she felt like she wanted to claw her own skin off. She'd loved him. Hadn't she? Had she even had a choice in that? He'd compelled her to fall in love with his version of love since before she'd first thought she'd met him. So how real were even the feelings that she'd felt before she'd been enslaved by being turned with his blood?

For a moment, before the next emotion overcame it, all Elena could feel was the overpowering urge to throw up Matt's blood.

He was fine, Matt was fine. Nothing else was, but at least Matt wasn't dead too. She could still hear his neck crack under Damon's fingers, the sound of it echoing through her very bones.

He'd made her turn it off. How could he, how could he?

A flash of Katherine's pleased eyes. Katherine torturing her because they'd asked. Jeremy, dead because of her. The Salvatores in her life at all because of her.

The feeling of Elijah's lips on hers, the shock of it to her system, the muted, ugly nothing because he thought she was someone else, because of course there wasn't a single thing that Katherine hadn't left her touch on. His letter burning. Her house, her whole life, Jeremy burning.

The sun, igniting her skin and burning her alive as Damon and Stefan watched, her ring in their hands.

One thing, one thing. Just one thing, so that she could take another breath and not have it scorch her lungs to ash.

It was like trying to build a sandcastle during high tide. She didn't have anything to use that wouldn't wash her away spinning into the next wave of awful flashbacks.

Nothing. Nothing except-

She'd been free. Freed from a conscience she couldn't afford to give up again. Free from the grief she'd never actually wanted to abandon, not until the choice was taken from her. But also free from the two brothers that had been taking choices away from her from the moment they'd come to town.

And she didn't want to give that freedom up. She wouldn't. Not ever again.

She gasped in a deep, cleansing breath free of pain, - just one moment of utter clarity - and moved before either Stefan or Damon expected it. One of them too intent on coaching her through her returning humanity, the other with his arms holding her in place and his head within easy reach, neither of them saw her coming before it was too late and they'd already joined her first boyfriend on the ground with their necks in the same state as his.

Then she staggered in place. Feeling the starvation that had been inflicted on her these past few weeks as the Salvatore brothers tried to get their Elena back.

Her eyes strayed toward Damon again without her consent and she felt a moment of reignited terror at the tug within her, the encroaching pull to not hurt him. She could still feel it. Weaker than she remembered, frayed copper wire instead of hard steel cuffs, but still there. The sire bond wasn't gone. Not entirely.

"No," she choked out and after only a momentary stop to take back her ring, was running toward the one place that might hold the information that could sever that last piece of chain. Because she couldn't live with it in place, she'd rather go back to burning alive.

---

Once Rebekah returned back home she was met by utter chaos.

It looked like Elena had been thrashing the library, there were more books thrown abandoned on the floor than there were those still left on the shelves. And Elena Gilbert sitting in the middle of the room, flipping through pages of text like her life depended on it.

"Have you lost your mind?" she felt her temper fraying at the edges and the only reason Elena wasn't already getting slammed against the nearest wall was that Rebekah just couldn't quite comprehend the sight.

"I need to find something to break it."

"Break what?"

"The sire bond, I can still... I can still feel it, it's still there. It's weaker, but it's still-" and then Elena sobbed and turned her eyes to Rebekah and she couldn't fight the feeling of reluctant sympathy that it brought. Because she'd started to almost like Elena, the one without humanity anyway, and this was clearly no longer that same Elena but she couldn't quite remove the memory of her trying to help Rebekah get the cure.

Still undecided, Rebekah opted to get more information "So where are your two shadows?"

"If they haven't healed yet then still on the side of the road near the Salvatore Estate," Elena said, her hands visibly clenching and eyes flashing with rage and something that might be fear and might be guilt. It was hard to tell because she was still clearly volatile, mercurial. With her humanity so freshly returned her every emotion was painted across her face but it was also slipping from one into another faster than Rebekah could read them. "Rebekah, please."

Rebekah let out a frustrated breath and squeezed her eyes shut. She couldn't believe the Dopplebitch was actually managing to make her consider helping her with this.

But she wanted to be better. Matt seemed to believe she was capable of being better and for once she wanted to prove to herself that she could be.

"Fine, fine, just- how weak exactly are we talking about?"

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A/N so this is the first chapter tell me how do you like it and I need honest opinion.