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⌠ 𝘾𝙃𝘼𝙋𝙏𝙀𝙍 𝙉𝙄𝙉𝙀 ⌡ ───── ⋆✩⋆ ─────
Rory still feels the ghost of the cane tapping against the back of her thigh, straightening her posture. Music reverberates through the walls of the dance studio, filling her ears. It's classical, meant to soothe, but it does little for the anxiety she feels in her stomach. Her fingers curve around smooth wood for support as she stretches out her feet, tucked neatly into a pair of pointe shoes.
Rory had never wanted to be a ballerina, but her parents did. They sent her to ballet classes at the miniature age of five years old, wanting to start her early. There's a litany of medals won by the aforementioned Gilbert lining the walls of her household, but she can't really gaze at them with pride. She didn't like what she did—she did it because her parents told her to.
She quit ballet at the age of 14, her parents died at 15, and she started dancing again the same year. She doesn't know if it's the weight of the guilt against her heart that causes her to continue to dance in her parents' name, or if it was just the small moment of freedom that she experiences from doing it. Despite loathing ballet when she first started, finding practices tedious and painful, she grew to love it.
She grows to love the things she hates, and she thinks that's what makes her such a good liar.
She slips into her clueless façade like her feet slide into her pointe shoes, dancing around the fabricated stories that she tells Elena when she asks if Rory is okay. Rory isn't okay, not really. She's traumatised, she hasn't slept, and her medication makes her feel sluggish. But anything is better than having your memories erased without your consent.
It's even worse that Rory can't talk to either Caroline or Bonnie in this situation because she doesn't know who to trust. Caroline had no qualms with calling her crazy despite her accusations being true, and according to Katherine, Bonnie was as every bit involved as Elena was. Jeremy? She couldn't put the burden on her brother—who even knows that Jeremy has a clue on what's going on?
And so, a week passes after Trevor's horrific murder and Elijah's death, and Rory barely spends her time at home. She sometimes sleeps in the dance studio because she knows the owner who gives her a key before he leaves to lock up, but she never does—because she's always there. Her definition of sleep is piss poor, and she ends up waking up in the middle of the night curled into herself.
Trevor's decapitated head at her feet haunts her, and in her nightmares, his eyes slip open and they stare straight into her own.
The song finishes and she ends up falling, missing a step, and she still hears the venomous insults that leave her old coach's lips. The old crone has long stopped teaching her, but her presence still haunts Rory to this day. Every time her arms are a little too bent or her feet are a little too far apart, she gets beat right into place. Quite literally. The cane her coach used to use was thin, creating red welts every time it snapped against her skin.
