Linked on you 🩸
She was the youngest Gilbert - but never quite one of them.
While the rest of the town seemed to move in perfect rhythm - school events, parties, laughter that carried too loudly through the halls - she stayed just outside of it, sketchbook in hand, capturing the parts no one else noticed. The shadows between streetlights. The way people smiled without meaning it. The cracks beneath the surface.
A dreamer, they called her once.
A loner, more often.
After the accident that took her parents, the distance only grew. Grief didn't come in waves for her - it settled in her bones, quiet and constant. Conversations became shorter. Days blurred together. And the world, once full of color, dulled into something harder to hold onto.
Mystic Falls moved on.
She didn't.
Until she met him.
It wasn't supposed to mean anything - just a moment, a coincidence, the kind people forget. But there was something off about him. Something that didn't quite belong in a town like this.
And the more she tried to ignore it, the harder it became to breathe around the questions he left behind.
Because Mystic Falls had always been good at keeping secrets.
Older than the founding families.
Darker than the stories whispered after midnight.
And somehow... she was already a part of it.
The only question was -
would it consume her...
or had it been waiting for her all along?