Chapter Text
As much as it pained her to say, Hope had been avoiding her, she was sure of it. She hated it, and yet she was sure of it. As to ‘why’ Hope had been avoiding her? Well, she was still in the dark on that one.
Admittedly, Hope kept to herself, - both in years prior and in the days before Hope had entered her subconscious - and yet, Josie hadn’t seen this coming. She wasn’t exactly sure what she had been expecting, perhaps a warm welcome back, or maybe even a glance in her direction, but whatever she had pictured had not come to fruition.
Yes, they went to a school with a decently sized student body, but Hope’s room was across from hers for goodness sake. Would it have been that hard to stop by? Had Hope simply forgotten she existed? No, Josie wouldn’t accept that. She had put blood, sweat, and plenty of tears into cultivating a relationship- no, a friendship with Hope, she wasn’t going to let it go.
But Hope wasn’t exactly making it easy for her. She had made no attempt to reach out, and whenever they had been in the same room, Hope would stand up and leave. Josie had even tried calling after her, but Hope never showed the slightest sign of having heard her.
Although Josie couldn’t exactly call this intentional, it seemed far too deliberate to be coincidental. And after all that they had been through in the past few weeks, Josie had hoped for just a little more.
One fucking word.
One fucking look.
Something was all she was asking for, just something . Was that too much for Hope to manage?
Josie had gone through it all in her head and surely something was wrong. Hope would have said something by now. But then again, Hope wasn’t avoiding anybody else, she had spoken to Landon, to her father, to the new counselor, and yet she had to hear about Hope’s umpteenth breakup and inevitable reconciliation with Landon from Lizzie.
Josie was fed up with it. Perhaps she wouldn’t have said anything a year ago, but she had grown. She had a voice. A voice Hope had aided her in honing. A voice Hope wasn’t going to ignore, she would make sure of it.
She knocked on Hope's door… no response. She knocked again… no response. She knocked a third time… no response. Evidently, Hope was getting pretty good at ignoring her.
“Hope,” she started, “Can we talk?”. She waited for a second, and there was no response. Shocker.
She opted to give Hope the benefit of the doubt, perhaps she had actually left her room for once. So she waited, and she waited. She sat on the floor opposite Hope’s door until a hall monitor passed her, giving her a 5-minute ‘lights out’ warning.
Screw this , she thought. She knocked on the door once more to no avail. Either Hope was an actual bitch , or she wasn’t in her room and would be roaming the halls of Salvatore past ‘lights out’. Or both.
She put a hand to the wall on her left and siphoned, “Invisique,” she muttered under her breath. She decided on ‘cluing in’ Lizzie on her whereabouts later on, and walked right past her own room. She turned the corner and walked down the old and rickety staircase as quietly as possible.
There was no sound coming from her father’s office so she moved on, opening the door to every classroom and checking every corner. She found no one. She checked the library, walking down every aisle, checking behind every desk and every curtain, and found no one. She made her way to the gym and heard the dull thump of a fist repeatedly hitting a punching bag, over and over.
The closer Josie got, the louder the sound became, and the more worried Josie was becoming for the person's poor knuckles, which were surely bloodied and raw, even if it was a wolf - which it probably was. Neither the vampires nor the witches tended to use the gym. And never past god knows was time it was.
As she turned the corner and the figure faced away from her came into view, she could finally make out the ragged breathing of the girl standing in the dead center of the gym. She studied the girl. It was Hope, Josie could tell.
She could tell by the long auburn hair, by the way she held herself, by the way her fists were about as high on the punching bag as Josie’s knees. She could tell.
As Hope was yet to notice her, she made no move to open her mouth or to speak, she just waited, weighing up in her mind how best to approach this. She did seem very stalker-esk, she knew that. If she were in Hope’s position, she would find herself a tad creepy. And yet she would never ignore Hope for days on end. She would never have put herself in this position in the first place.
She took a step forward, not bothering to be quiet - although that didn’t seem to matter, Hope’s sole focus was on beating the crap out of her punching bag. She took another step and walked forward and around the walls of the gym until she could make out Hope’s side profile.
Her hair was up in a pony-tail, although Josie had been able to see that from behind. What she hadn’t seen, was Hope’s eyes. They were no longer their usual, piercing ocean blue, rather a deep yellow, bordering on golden.
It was then that Hope must have realized she was being watched. She took one final swing at the punching bag before making an attempt to get her breathing under control and her eyes shifted from yellow back to Blue. Hope spun around to take a look around the room. Her eyes landed on Josie within seconds.
She watched the ‘fight or flight’ response trigger in Hope’s mind. She watched as her eyes flitted to the door, as her legs stayed rooted to the ground, and yet she seemed ready to run at a moment’s notice. She watched, and all the while said nothing. Arms crossed and head held high, she took a step forward.