Dear Diary, last night, I had a terrifying dream. Everything was as it had been just a few short hours before. I was back in the Vitale Society's underground chamber, and Ethan was holding me captive, his knife cold and steady at my throat. Stefan and Damon watched us, their faces wary, bodies tensed, waiting for the moment when one of them would be able to dash in and save me. But I knew they would be to late. I knew that, despite their supernatural speed, Ethan would cut my throat and I would die.
There was so much pain in Stefan's eyes. It broke me heart to know how much my death would hurt him. I hated the idea of dying without Stefan knowing that I had chosen him, only him ~ that all my indecision was behind us.
Ethan pulled me even closer, his arm as tight and unyielding as a band of steel across my chest. I felt the cold edge of the knife ire into my flesh.
Then without warning Ethan fell, and Meredith was standing there, her hair streaming behind her, her face as wild and determined as a vengeful goddess's, her stave still raised from the from the killing blow and she'd put it through his heart.
It should of been a moment of joy and relief. In real life, it was: the moment when I knew I was going to live, when I was about to find myself safe in Stefan's arms.
But in the dream, Meredith's face was blotted out by a flash of pure white light. I felt myself growing colder and colder, my body freezing, my emotions muffled into a chilly calm. My humanity was slipping away, and something hard and inflexible and...other... was taking it's place.
I woke up terrified.
Elena Gilbert paused and lifted the pen from the page of her journal, reluctant to write any more. Putting what she was most afraid of into words would make it feel more real.
She glanced around her dorm room, her new home. Bonnie and Meredith had come and gone while Elena slept. Bonnie's covers were flung back, and her laptop was gone from her desk. Meredith's side of the room, usually painstakingly organised, showed evidence of how exhausted Meredith must have been: the bloodstained clothes she had worn to fight Ethan and his vampire followers had been left on the floor. Her weapons were strewn across the bed, mostly shoved to one side, as if the young vampire hunter had curled up among them to sleep.
Elena sighed. Maybe Meredith would understand how Elena felt. She knew what it was like to have a destiny decided for you, to discover that your own hopes and dreams me nothing in the end.
But Meredith had embraced her fate. There was nothing more important to her now, or that she loved more, than being a hunter of monsters and keeping the innocent safe.
Elena didn't think she could find the same kind of joy in her new destiny.
TO BE CONTINUED. XXX
