ℍ𝔸𝕌ℕ𝕋𝔼𝔻 - ᴛʜᴇ ᴍɪᴋᴀᴇʟꜱᴏɴꜱ

𝖈𝖍𝖆𝖕𝖙𝖊𝖗 𝖙𝖜𝖊𝖓𝖙𝖞 𝖙𝖍𝖗𝖊𝖊

❧ the universe is very  unfair ❧

≪•◦ ❈ ◦•≫

Summer had never been a time of ease for Amalie, but this one had been relentless even by her standards. The days had blurred into a strange, sunlit haze of exhaustion, each one weighted with the kind of problems that didn't resolve themselves, and nights were no better—filled with the voices of the dead that she could never put to rest. Peace wasn't a luxury her life afforded, and deep down, she'd stopped expecting it years ago. But even so, the last few months had been like a storm rolling in from every direction. Every time she thought she could steal a moment to breathe, another crisis reared its head, another carefully buried secret came clawing to the surface, and another soul demanded saving.

And at the center of the chaos was Jeremy Gilbert.

It was strange, the way he had carved a place in her life. Against all odds, they had become...friends. Or something like that. The label didn't quite fit, not neatly, anyway. Their connection was more like a knot—twisted and uneven, full of frayed edges, camaraderie threaded through with mistrust. She liked him more than she wanted to admit, though his tendency to leap before looking drove her mad. He was reckless in the way only someone who had already faced death could be, and she sometimes found herself snapping at him with a sharpness she later regretted. It had started months ago when Ana had let it slip—quite casually—that Jeremy could see her. The revelation was a thunderclap, splitting Amalie's life wide open and letting more complications pour in.

At first, she'd kept Jeremy at arms' length. Trust didn't come easy to her; it never had. She couldn't afford to be careless, especially with someone like Jeremy, who had one foot planted firmly in the mortal world and the other dangling precariously in the supernatural. Still, he was insistent, curious, eager in a way that grated on her nerves. And so, reluctantly, she had taken it upon herself to teach him—if only to stop him from stumbling headlong into a disaster neither of them could fix.

Teaching Jeremy wasn't easy. There was no manual for the kind of life she led, no convenient list of dos and don'ts for navigating a world populated by the restless dead. She had to start from the beginning, unraveling pieces of her own story she'd long since locked away. She told him about the Everhart curse, though not without hesitating over every word. She explained how her ghostly companions had been tethered to her since she was eight years old, how they whispered in her mind, their voices sometimes soft and pleading, other times jagged and angry, like knives scraping against stone. She didn't tell him everything—not how one of them had nearly killed her when she was fifteen, or how she'd learned the hard way that ghosts could manipulate. But she told him enough. Enough to see the worry flicker across his face, a reminder that this wasn't some story he could walk away from when it got too heavy.

"You can't tell anyone," she'd said firmly, her gaze sharp enough to cut. They'd been sitting on the front porch of the Gilbert house, the humid air thick with the smell of freshly cut grass. "Not Elena, not Bonnie, not anyone. You breathe a word of it, and I'll make you regret it. Seriously, Jeremy, don't test me."

He'd blinked at her, and for a second, she thought he might laugh. "Okay, okay. I get it. No telling."

She hadn't smiled back. "Good. Because if you do, I swear I'll drag you to Virginia Beach and shove you off the pier myself."