Beauty and Blood

History Repeating

November 30th, 2009

Thanksgiving passed as a solemn affair. Previous years they had celebrated the Holiday with Mum attempting to cook whilst Andy baked, only for it to end in disaster as usual and Dad having to sweep in to salvage their dinner, Elena and Jeremy setting up the table and decorations as Jenna snuck a fresh treat or two from the platter when Andy wasn't looking.

After the large meal they would spend the rest of the night playing a variety of games that Jenna was awful at and Dad was frustratingly brilliant at, everyone snacking on whatever was leftover of Andy's delicious creations before heading to bed late, bellies full and hearts bursting with newly made fond memories.

It had always held a special place in the Gilbert Family's hearts. Between Jenna's travelling, Grayson's clinic, and Miranda's council work, any occasion where they could all sit down and enjoy themselves was treasured. Especially the exceedingly rare times John dropped by, despite his frostiness with Jenna alongside Elena and Jeremy's dislike of him, at least for Andy.

She had always gotten along with him the best out of her siblings, and that was saying something seeing as even then they weren't that close. He was always attentive to her rambles and had even been the one to give her hot chocolate the first time as a child, a decision she knew he regretted from his frequent failed attempts to curb her sugar intake.

However that year, it was Andy attempting cooking as well as baking, Jenna was too busy helping Elena in setting up the too-big table to snack on her work with Jeremy on decorating duty. The meal itself was much smaller compared to previous years, seeing as there were less mouths to feed, the four of them barely filling up the long dining table. They all struggled through what they were thankful for, managing to scrape through without pointing out the glaringly obvious elephant in the room.

They didn't bother with any games, Jenna needing to work on her psychology paper and the younger siblings were preoccupied with history homework, the pair unused to Mr Hughes' teaching methods. That left Andy locking herself in her room where she began to go over the Gilbert journals she had gotten her Aunt to forage for.

John didn't even send a card.

She took her time to comb through the handwritten pages instead of pushing herself to steamroll as fast as possible, if not for her own health then to make sure she didn't miss anything. Andy was interested in the mentions of the 'Pearl' woman Walter had told her briefly about, but her main focus was the various devices he had created, such as the compass and something that seemed to resemble a music box. However, she figured both of his inventions were most likely lost to time.

But Andy could have sworn that the design of the compass was familiar to her, it simply must have been common in the era and she brushed it to the side. There was more like how George Lockwood had been the one to discover the existence of vampires and enlighten the rest of the founding families, Johnathan's defence of Emily Bennett despite knowing her witch heritage and his superstitious reluctance to guard her spell book after her death, the book itself ending up in Giuseppe Salvatore's hands. The rest of his journals over the years seemed to focus on the research he had invested into vampire and other supernatural lore.

Still, with the Thanksgiving break over, things had been more or less quiet with Damon. It seemed he had heeded her warning, Caroline was less and less under his influence by the day, though she still held a grudge against Bonnie for the whole necklace fiasco. Sheila had begun on the more practical aspect of Bonnie's training, seeing she was now aware of the present dangers her granddaughter was unknowingly surrounded by. Thankfully, the young witch was settling into her new abilities nicely if the excited babbling the twins had become accustomed to whenever she visited her Grams was anything to go by.