ICARUS ▻ the vampire diaries.

𝔦𝔦. chapter two

𝕴𝕴 : Teen Spirit.

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HERE'S WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW ABOUT ALASKA GILBERT : she couldn't stand the idea of not knowing things. She was a scavenger. She dug, clawed, and tore her way through everything to find proficiency.

She feasted on knowledge, ingesting every bit of cognizance that she could find. That was the way she survived. That was the way she could sit back, uptight, straight, and tall─ and point fingers, for prim and pretty little Alaska Gilbert knew all.

She could write Emerson's, Dickinson's, Shakespeare's poetry verbatim ; she memorized Pi nearly fifty digits out, and yet ─ Alaska Gilbert couldn't tell what to do with all the sadness around her.

She never felt much. Scratch that, Alaska Gilbert felt a lot─ deeply. She felt sadness like an ache deep inside her bones ; like all worlds losses, and griefs and sorrows rolls up and tucked under her skin.

She felt happiness ( less frequently now that they were gone, now that she was older ) like her sister's embrace, but she just didn't express it. She didn't like the thought of people seeing her for who she truly was or letting others know how she felt, opening her mouth to say, "Hello, I'm Alaska, and there's this terrible clawing feeling in my gut that feels a lot like sadness."

It was September, and in the pitch black of Alaska's bedroom at night, she was alone in bed, laying awake with the creeping consciousness that things might be like this forever. She might be forever tethered to this gnawing sadness that drained through her rather than skating over her skin. The sadness that travelled through every one of her cell to reach the ground. She might always be stuck in this never-ending cycle of trying to quell the morbid voices that threaten to leap into the dark. In everyday life, it was possible to stifle them, drown them out with the pendulum movement from task to task. There was enough external stimulation to stay distracted. But when all of them closed up and Alaska went to bed, it was just her and her mind.

Sometimes it all got too much to bear.

Alaska staunchly believed, if she could just keep that down for long enough, and get through, things would start to look up─ sooner or later. Nothing lasted forever. If she could just keep a lid on that, it would go away, eventually. The sunshine would come. She'd just have to wait.

She didn't know if there was any truth to it.

The girl had been torn from a dream. Ripe with magical memories and lost people, and beset by the haunting image of her parent's car going off the Wickery Bridge.

She could practically feel her brain's violent whirl of absurdity, trying to organise the chaos in her life. Alaska let out a sigh, thinking that the night was about to be another futile tussle of conflicting thoughts. The prospect of sleep suddenly started to seem like a joke. Every time the closed her eyes, she found herself back at the submerged car. She remembered almost everything from that incident before red blotches began to appear in her sight. In the movies drowning was loud and splashy, someone usually yelled and waved their arms, they dipped below the waves and came up in dramatic fashion while those on shore scrambled to rescue them. It was not the same in Alaska's case though. Her drowning was . . . . quiet.

Almost peaceful.

Perhaps it was because a part of her had accepted it. She was going to die as a nobody, as someone whose life never got to truly amount to something. She was letting the water beckon her to it's voracious cruelty. She could remember quite a bit before her brain started fuzzing with the onset of asphyxia. The terror as the car went through the safety barrier, the sheer desperation as her father tried to regain control. The drop of her stomach as the vehicle flew through the air, the shock and lancing pain across her ribs as they hit the water and she was thrown forward, jerking violently against the straining seatbelt. Alaska could still hear the sound of her mother's head cracking against the dash board, the sight of her unconscious sister right beside her, the last smile of farewell from her father before she let herself fall further and further into the blue darkness until it threatened to swallow her whole.