#but then elena's parents died and caroline couldn't execute a friendship pivot quite as quickly as bonnie was able to

[averseunhinged]

💌 send this to the twelve nicest people you know or who seem to have a good heart and if you get five back you must be pretty awesome. 💌 :)

ilu, ella! you're cool and nice and you should probs know that i've prev screenshotted your translated class notes for my own further investigation. you're like a history stuff influencer.

here is a thing from further on in i never said i had the answer i thought you might enjoy! it's v rough and idk what the final form of it will be b/c there's a giant chunk of s4, plus boring new orleans supernatural politics, left to go before this, but it involves my favorite pet theories about the elena + caroline + bonnie friendship.

“You got into Yale?” Elena questioned with a little laugh, dripping in disbelief.

“I had the highest GPA in our graduating class,” Caroline scoffed and crossed her arms, leaning her weight back on one hip. “I got a 2130 on my SATs in one try. Yeah. I got into Yale.”

“Because you’re organized and you obsess over stuff. Not because—”

“Whoa, Elena,” Bonnie protested off to the side.

“Not because I’m intelligent or hardworking? Or because I dedicated myself to cheerleading and student council and spent most of my spare time doing civic activities and community service, because I wanted to be the most attractive candidate to every school I applied to?”

“That’s not what I meant,” Elena insisted, squeezing her hands into fists and pressing them into her stomach, like she always had when she argued with Caroline before turning sucked out her personality and replaced it with Damon’s.

“Of course, that’s what you meant. Because I’m just bitchy, bimbo Caroline, right? Nothing else to see here, right?”

A petite, delicate hand inserted itself between their faces. “Absolutely not,” Bonnie demanded. “You are not doing this to me. I refuse to relive the freshman year fights.”

“Freshman year fights?” Stefan asked, heroically latching onto the attempt to defuse the two women.

“Caroline makes varsity cheer squad freshman year, so Elena goes on a date with Caroline’s crush. Caroline embarrasses Elena in front of said crush and he doesn’t ask her out again. Elena tells the sheriff about the college guy hitting on Caroline, so she gets grounded.” Bonnie flopped onto the sofa next to Stefan. “Why does Elena look better in low rise jeans than I do? Why is Caroline’s hair always shinier than mine? I love you both very much, but I swear I’ll figure out a way to dagger you like Mikaelsons if the alternative is living with that for the rest of my life.”

The room was quiet for a moment, until Damon loudly slurped Liz’s Maker’s Mark. Caroline rattled a disgusted noise deep in her throat when he responded to her disapproving glare with a toasting glass and a show of settling more comfortably into his chair, like he was ready to be entertained.

“I thought we were all going to Whitmore together,” Elena finally said.

Caroline took a steadying breath and tried to shake off her defensiveness. Forced herself to uncross her arms and roll the tension out of her shoulders. She explained, “We were! Yale was just a last minute whim, because they have this specific interdisciplinary Classics program, and I didn’t know when I applied, but the head of the department is a vampire, so when I said I wanted to minor in finance, too, it raised some flags,” she paused and then burst out in a quick rush of justification, “and I might have used a passage I translated out of an old journal in Grams’ collection as an example of the work I was interested in doing. I didn’t think it had anything obviously witchy, but it rang more bells.”

“Jesus, Barbie,” Damon groaned.

“Well, I know it was dangerous, now,” Caroline stopped and thought, frowning. “Mostly because they recognized my last name and universities have problems with hunters infiltrating the student population with their kids. They waitlisted me while they investigated, but I really am a vampire. So, they didn’t have to kill me and everyone I know. Crisis averted. Everything’s fine.”