Work Text:
So, maybe she had been a bit of a bitch. Weren’t you supposed to forgive and forget when a person was dead?
Not that she was so wrapped up in the whole forgiving thing, personally. It was more the being forgiven she was interested in; after all, until recently, she hadn’t really thought she’d be around to be doing anything much.
She particularly hadn’t thought, Vicki reflected, that she’d be sitting on her own gravestone. Her perfectly tangible, undeniably real gravestone, made out of quite impressively solid granite, with her full name very definitely inscribed in its speckled surface. Its stolid presence beneath her was making it a great deal harder to pretend all of this wasn’t happening.
And she would have liked to, she thought, looking up at the shimmering beech leaves that rose over her grave. She would have really quite liked to be able to pretend that all of this wasn’t happening. Not the being-dead part: she had gotten used to that, because now that most of her vague preconceptions of the afterlife had gone through the figurative window, all it came down to was not being alive, and that sure wasn’t something she’d miss too much.
But the no-visitors aspect of it all. That was enough to get a dead girl down.
Oh, her family had been there, for the funeral and all—which she didn’t remember entirely clearly, given that she’d been little more than a self-conscious fog back then. It had taken her almost two weeks to start feeling like herself again, and by now she was mostly back to normal, or at least as normal as was possible when she still tended to walk through things.
But in that time, they hadn’t visited once. And she was alright with that, she supposed, kicking at a stone with one bare foot. She wasn’t sure, deep down, that she wanted to see her family. She certainly hadn’t when she was alive. And the biggest shock, or even letdown, about death was that it really didn’t change much of anything. Just like in life, her family was a comforting presence in the distance, offering the idea and memory of love. But she didn’t feel the need to get any closer, or to remind herself of how love hurt when you were surrounded by too much of it.
She certainly didn’t look for many visits from her school friends, because it wasn’t like she had ever gone to school, and neither had most of the people her own age she knew. None of them were likely to be visiting her here, when they were probably still busy doing exactly what she had always done, and she frankly didn’t mind very much. Vicki had had enough of druggies for a while. Specifically, she had had enough of being one, about three weeks after that might have been helpful to her.
She’d be mad to expect flowers from her boyfriend, given that Tyler probably hadn’t even noticed she was dead. He hadn’t seemed to remember she was alive most of the time.
And that left…well, pretty much no one, admittedly, who she could reasonably expect to bother coming all the way to the cemetery for her. Vicki frowned, and flipped a bit of hair out of her eyes. Hell, she wouldn’t have attended her funeral herself if she had been given any choice in the matter. But still, the lack of attention rankled.
She tapped her foot on the big rock, and watched birds. Damn fluttery things. She was fairly sure the grass had gown noticeably since she first sat down here, and amused herself for a while by trying to see it change. A very short while.
That, she thought, was exactly why no one was coming. In her not-very-lamentably shortened life, Vicki Donovan had done exactly nothing more constructive or interesting than popping pills and waiting for the grass to grow.
“Oh, fuck that,” she said, and jumped down onto the little sprouts atop her grave, taking a certain amount of pleasure in at least pretending to flatten them. She picked up her shoes, which left no mark where they had been lying, and headed crosswise towards the gate and the road that led back to Mystic Falls.