Chapter Text
Everyone looks at her like they expect the Salvatores abandoning her to destroy her.
It doesn't.
Elena's grown accustomed, over these past 18 months, to losing the ones she loves the most. To being the one who remains. The one left behind.
She keeps all of the grief inside of herself, bottled tightly, lest she fall apart completely. Caroline shoots her worried glances over Alaric's grave, and no one dares bring up the two missing from the funeral, or what part Elena may have had in driving them away.
If she feels grief for Damon or Stefan, for the place in between them that had felt like home, she doesn't let herself show it.
She would be lying if she said that Stefan and Damon leaving town doesn't simplify her life.
That doesn't mean she doesn't miss them.
Doesn't mean she's not thinking of them, always. Wondering.
Doesn't mean they haven't broken her heart.
Grief makes her tired, irritable. Sometimes her whole body feels like one steady ache. She finds herself no longer able to stomach so many foods. She's still sick often, a psychosomatic response to the trauma of the past few months that she's determined to ride out.
Life goes on. Homework, meetings with her college counselor, the bills she's suddenly completely responsible for… a million little things that keep her distracted, keep her breathing one moment to the next.
Autumn slowly dissolves into a gray, foggy winter, and Christmas lights start to pop up all over town.
She feels the turn of the season and feels the weight of her mortality.
Fifty years could pass and she could be old and gray before either of them decide to roll back into town.
One of Klaus's hybrids—a girl whose name Elena can't remember—rings the doorbell.
When Elena answers it, there's a nurse waiting to take her blood.
Slowly, Caroline and Bonnie begin talking to her again. Without any Originals to scheme against or witches to battle—without Damon and Stefan actively campaigning to push her out of their circle—her two oldest friends take her back into their confidence. Never about anything big, of course. There's nothing big going on. Just… life. Tests and boys and compulsory shopping trips and school planning committees and occasional awkward pleasantries with her hybrid sentries.
Even Matt begins to smile at her again, and Elena resumes her old habit of going to the Grill twice a week to do her homework.
During the day, everything almost feels back to normal.
And then, she comes home for the night.
Her house feels bigger and emptier than ever. It echoes with a vast, overwhelming quiet that rings in her ears.
This, she thinks, is the sound of a Klaus-free life.
She almost wishes he would come back, just for something to keep her mind off of how truly alone she is.
Wishes are dangerous things. Make them, and inevitably they'll come true, one way or another.
Tyler roars back into town like a hurricane, bringing with him a group of werewolves he met on his travels while he overcame his sire bond and a blazing ambition to save the rest of the hybrids from Klaus's control.
She notices him in the bleachers, tensely discussing something with her hybrid bodyguard of the week, one afternoon while she jogs around the school track.
After the hybrid—Jason, she thinks, or maybe Jake—has left, she catches up to Tyler before he can disappear.
"You're recruiting," she begins without preamble.
"Yeah. Obviously."
"What's the point? Klaus isn't even here anymore."
"You really think he'll stay gone forever?"
"Why not? He's got no reason to come back."
"He's left most of his hybrids here in town. Why would he do that if he weren't ever planning to come back?"
Elena stops in her tracks. "What?"
Tyler raises an eyebrow. "You didn't know?"
"No. I thought it was just the couple he'd left to watch over me."
Tyler shakes his head. "See—that's the problem. What's he doing watching over you? Like he has the right." He takes a deep breath. "Look, the way I see it is this. I was the first of Klaus's unlucky hybrids, and the first to break the sire bond. It's my job to try to save the rest. You get that, right?"
Elena stares hard at him, taking his measure. He could forget about all of this. Choose to be happy with Caroline and finish out his senior year without any of these responsibilities weighing him down. But he could never do that, any more than she could, if she were in his place.
She's being paranoid, she's sure, but she winds up at Klaus's mansion that night. Spends ten long minutes parked out front before she musters up the nerve to trespass.
And it is trespassing. She has to smash a window with a rock to break in. She's actually a bit surprised to find there's no security system—but then, it would never occur to Klaus that he would have to protect himself against anything.
Elena eases in through the window and wanders through the house, body tensed, senses straining.
She's not sure what she expects to find. Just… something. Some hint that what Tyler had said was true. That Klaus really does plan to return.
She drifts through the halls, up the stairs. Pauses in the threshold to Klaus's bedroom, caught in a reverie, before catching herself and hurrying from the room.
There's nothing here. This place is as much a mausoleum to the departed as the place where she falls to sleep each night.
She's too sick to make it to school the next day. Caroline brings her her homework, but she doesn't stay long. Too much to handle with Tyler intent on stirring up trouble.
She's sick a lot after that.
December comes around, and with it, the specter of exams merely weeks away, college applications due before the end of the month, and a potential hybrid revolution set to erupt at any moment. As though all of those things are not enough, she's finally started to wonder if it's not just anxiety making her ill after all.
It's been a few weeks, maybe longer, that she's been sick and achy, and the possibility that she's actually come down with the stomach flu or some other illness has finally become too hard to ignore. She drags herself to an urgent care center, hoping there'll be an easy solution.
"No temperature," the nurse remarks, tucking the thermometer into a drawer and confirming what Elena already knew. "How long have symptoms been occurring?"
Elena bites her lip. "A few weeks now, off and on?"
"Any change to your diet? New foods of any sort?"
She shakes her head. She's practically been living on black coffee and dry toast for weeks now. Hasn't had the appetite or the energy for anything more daunting than that.
"Any other symptoms?"
"I've been headachy, I guess. Tired."
The nurse pauses. Asks, very delicately, "Any chance you may be pregnant?"
Elena actually laughs.
The nurse waits, pen hovering expectantly over her clipboard.
Realizing she's supposed to give an answer, Elena pulls herself together and assures her, "No, no possible way."
Not when the only guys she's sleeping with have been undead since the Civil War.
"Are you sexually active?"
"Well… yeah. Or—I was."
"What birth control are you on?"
"…None."
At this, the nurse, launches into a well-rehearsed spiel on contraceptives that Elena mostly tunes out, before eventually winding back to the symptoms for which Elena came in.
"With the symptoms you're describing, I'd recommend a pregnancy test, if even only to take that possibility off the table. I can run a flu test too, just to see if you have any of the common strains going around right now."
"Just the flu test," Elena says, definitive.
It comes back negative.
Any chance you may be pregnant?
The idea of it sticks in her mind. Impossible to brush off, in the dark permeating silence of her room, with only the swooping circle of her thoughts for company.
Of course, there's absolutely zero chance that she is.
Pregnant, that is.
That would be… absurd.
Elena tosses and turns for what feels like hours before she finally gives up. Drags her laptop up off the floor and runs a google search for the symptoms.
It's like a mudslide from there. Catastrophic damage to her sense of reality as she notes the symptoms, recalls how out of sorts she's been physically. Her aversion to so many of her favorite foods, the vomiting, the aching chest she'd attributed to getting shoved by a vampire but which has never really subsided, the headaches, the exhaustion.
She snaps the laptop shut. Throws open her journal, ripping through the pages, until she finds the last note in the calendar marking the beginning of her last period, sometime in September. She's been so preoccupied she hadn't even noticed.
No no no no no.
She's being crazy.
There's only one way to prove to herself that everything is fine. That she's just having one of those neurotic middle-of-the-night anxiety attacks, that will seem completely bonkers in the morning.
Elena pulls an overcoat over her pajamas and drives over to the 24/7 CVS, where Rebekah had nearly killed her six weeks ago.
Half an hour later, locked in her bathroom, she feels like an idiot, waiting for the test result.
She snatches the test stick up off the sink the second her timer goes off. Stares in total incredulity at the false positive.
She takes the test three more times, each time expecting it to read negative.
Every single one of them trumpets the inconceivable.
Elena wanders across the town square in a daze.
She'd left the house before dawn, and had been walking ever since, trying to wrap her mind around this.
It wasn't possible for four tests to be wrong, was it?
No. Definitely not.
Except, this just isn't possible. Neither Stefan nor Damon could father children. She's positive of that. No vampire could. And they were the only possible—
She freezes, her mind skittering over that night again, before barreling over it, brushing it aside. Same problem as with Damon and Stefan.
A car blares its horn at her, startling her out of the street. She'd been so preoccupied, she'd wandered halfway across without noticing. Could so easily have been struck dead.
Regaining a sense of her surroundings, her heart hammering in her throat from the near miss, Elena looks straight up into the town's nativity display.
Tentatively, she rests her hand against her flat stomach.
Does she really believe that there's a life in there?
There's no possible father, just… these symptoms she can't explain. These symptoms, and a creeping certainty about this which she cannot suppress.
She stares hard at the nativity scene before her. At the vivid reminder of another young girl, inexplicably carrying a child with… dare she think it… supernatural origins?
That could be it. This could be supernatural. A doppelganger thing, maybe. Some mystical failsafe to carry on her bloodline, with or without a human father to contribute.
She's heard of crazier things before.
She goes back to the urgent care, where they confirm the news: She really is going to have a baby.
It's terrible timing. A huge problem in the making. It's probably going to complicate her life forever.
But, despite all of those completely rational thoughts running through her mind, Elena cannot suppress the thrill of real happiness that courses through her at the prospect of this unexpected miracle.
It seems, somehow, against all odds, that she won't be alone for much longer after all.