The Vampire Diaries

In The Awakening, Elena Gilbert starts her senior year of school at Fell’s Church with her friends, Meredith Sulez, Bonnie McCullough, Caroline Forbes, and Matt Honeycutt. Caroline promptly becomes competition with Elena for the position of most popular girl. An attractive new boy, Stefan Salvatore, also enrolls. All the girls want his attention, but he brushes them off. This shocks Elena, who has never been brushed off by a boy before. Stefan joins the high school football team with Matt. Through flashbacks, we learn that Stefan is a vampire who was born in Renaissance Florence. There he fell in love with a German girl, Katherine von Swartzschild, who had been changed into a vampire by another vampire, Klaus, when she was ill and dying. Although Stefan hoped to marry Katherine, their romance was complicated when Stefan’s seductive older brother, Damon Salvatore, appeared. Although Katherine told Stefan that she loved him, she also seemed romantically interested in Damon. Katherine was almost an exact double of Elena. Vampires survive in sunlight when they wear lapis lazuli. Katherine has a ring of lapis lazuli and gold. Meanwhile, a number of mysterious and frightening events occur in Fell’s Church. A large crow exhibits un-birdlike behavior. Elena and her friends feel a threatening force that causes them to flee from the town’s old cemetery, and Elena loses her hair ribbon in the flight. A homeless man is attacked and partially drained of blood.
Stefan experiences fugue states and fears that he has been attacking people during them, even though he has no memory of doing so when he awakes. Elena devises various schemes to pursue Stefan, but Stefan avoids her. She reminds him of Katherine, and he is tempted to drink her blood. Elena finally corners Stefan at the Homecoming Dance. She believes he will be unable to refuse her invitation to dance with her, the Homecoming Queen. However, Stefan’s date for the evening is Caroline, who foils Elena’s plan. To show she is not hurt, Elena leaves the dance with Tyler Smallwood and Dick Carter, two boys who are on the football team and who have shown themselves to be hostile to Stefan in the past. Another girl, Vickie Bennett, goes with them. The four go to the cemetery to deface the funerary statues of Honoria Fell and Thomas Fell. Elena perceives one statue moving and revealing an empty space beneath, but no one else shares her vision. A drunken Tyler sexually assaults Elena. Stefan appears and rescues Elena by beating up Tyler. Stefan takes her to his room at the boarding house so that she can clean up before he drives her home.

Elena confronts Stefan to ask why he’s been avoiding her. His responses are evasive, but they lock hands and then kiss, at which point Elena is certain that she’s found her romantic destiny. When Stefan drives Elena home, she learns that Vickie has been found wandering on the road, scratched and raving about having been attacked by some supernatural force. To Elena's confusion, Stefan then seems to draw away from her emotionally. The next day Stefan tries to break up with Elena, but she refuses to let him do so. Without his knowing, she opens a small casket on Stefan’s dresser and finds the hair ribbon she lost when fleeing from the cemetery the first week of school. This convinces her that he has secretly loved her from that time. She writes about the hair ribbon and the romance in her diary, also noting that Stefan still seems to be hiding something from her. Elena, Bonnie, and Meredith plan the school’s Haunted House for Halloween. The lights go off and a seductive college-aged boy enters. He nearly persuades Elena to kiss him despite her love for Stefan. When she refuses, he says he may finally have found the girl he’s been looking for.

Then he disappears. Elena brings her diary to a slumber party with Meredith and Bonnie. They hold a dumb supper at which Elena invites her future husband to enter Bonnie’s house. She does not see Stefan, but the seductive college-aged boy appears. He quotes love poetry and tries to kiss Elena. Elena’s head swims and she nearly succumbs, but she manages to resist. The boy reacts with anger but leaves when Elena asks him to do so. Elena then learns that Bonnie’s dog has unexpectedly died during the dumb supper and that her diary has been stolen. Over the next few weeks, Elena becomes more concerned at how Stefan seems to be drawing subtly away from her and keeping secrets. For example, he is wearing an object on a chain around his neck, hidden underneath his clothing, and he refuses to talk about it. He appears haunted and sad. Elena is determined to bring them back together and persuade Stefan to trust her completely. Because Stefan confronted their European History teacher, Mr. Tanner, on the first day of school and corrected him about how teenagers behaved during the Renaissance, Elena plans to wear a Renaissance ball gown as her Halloween costume. She believes this will overcome Stefan’s resistance to her. Much to her distress, however, Stefan’s reaction to seeing her in the dress is shock.

During the Haunted House, Mr. Tanner is given the role of Bloody Corpse. This requires him to be covered with fake blood with a knife lying nearby; he is supposed to sit up unexpectedly to frighten visitors. When Bonnie leads visitors to see the Bloody Corpse, however, she finds that Mr. Tanner actually is dead and covered with blood. A panic results. Tyler tells everyone that the murderer is probably Stefan Salvatore because the strange violence in Fell’s Church began at the time that Stefan arrived in town. This spurious logic turns the crowd into a mob. Elena passes a warning to Stefan through Matt, and Stefan flees back to the boarding house to prepare to leave Fell’s Church. Elena follows him and finds Stefan on the roof of the boarding house with blood smeared on his lips, his fangs extended, and dead birds at his feet. In her shock, she falls off the roof, but Stefan leaps after her and catches her in mid-descent. Elena is unhurt. Elena demands explanations at last. Stefan tells her he became a vampire when he and Damon both pressed Katherine to marry them. Katherine told them that she would make her choice between them, and that night she came to Stefan’s bed and turned him into a vampire. Stefan believed he had been chosen.

The next day, however, she told Stefan and Damon that she had gone to both their beds and turned them both into vampires. She gave each a ring and told them she expected they would all live happily ever after as a threesome. Stefan and Damon rejected Katherine’s plan and demanded that she choose between them. Katherine fled in tears. The next day, they found her empty dress in the garden and ashes in the dress. A note nearby told them that she had taken off her lapis lazuli ring to commit suicide and thereby bring the brothers back together. Distraught and blaming one another, Stefan and Damon then dueled with swords. Damon stabbed Stefan through the heart. When Stefan fell and Damon bent over him, Stefan stabbed Damon fatally. Both brothers were thereby locked permanently into their vampiric state. Stefan was buried with Katherine’s ring and beside Damon. When both woke, they separated in fear and confusion. Stefan lived on animal blood in the streets of Florence until Damon, who had become a powerful mercenary soldier, returned and threatened to kill him unless he left. They saw one another intermittently since that time, with Damon invariably threatening to kill Stefan.

Stefan also explains to Elena that vampires have Powers that include the ability to influence and read minds, the ability to turn into animals, and the ability to influence the weather. Damon drinks human blood and so is more Powerful than Stefan, who tries to lead a moral existence by drinking only animal blood. Lapis lazuli protects vampires from sunlight. The mysterious object Stefan wears on a chain around his neck is revealed to be Katherine’s ring. Elena assures a guilt-ridden Stefan that he is not responsible for Katherine’s death or Damon’s. She also persuades Stefan that he is not responsible for the violence in Fell’s Church as he had feared. She now is able to identify Damon as the seductive college-aged boy who nearly persuaded her to kiss him. Since Damon is in Fell’s Church and is evil, Elena concludes Damon must be responsible for the violence. He has not shown himself because he has been trying to make Stefan blame himself. Stefan finds Elena’s argument convincing.

Over Stefan’s objections, Elena then persuades Stefan to drink her blood in order to erase the last boundary between them. After returning Elena to her home, Stefan goes to the woods and uses his Power to call Damon, who appears. Damon admits to killing Mr. Tanner and tells Stefan that he must abandon Elena to Damon, who wants her for himself. Stefan refuses. Damon attacks Stefan and drinks his blood against his will, a process that is extremely painful. When Damon releases Stefan, Stefan attempts to stagger back to his car but is attacked again from behind, after which he falls unconscious. The next day Elena finds Stefan has disappeared. Furious and certain as to who should be blamed, she goes to the cemetery and shouts Damon’s name to summon him.

The Struggle begins with Elena Gilbert standing in the cemetery shouting for Damon Salvatore to answer her. When he appears, she accuses him of being responsible for the disappearance of his brother, Stefan Salvatore. Damon urges her to forget Stefan and uses his Powers to try to persuade her to become his. When he fails, he promises Elena that she’ll be his before winter and leaves. As a parting shot, he tells her that he killed Stefan the night before. Unconvinced that Stefan is dead, Elena sets out to find him. She nearly freezes in the snowstorm that Damon has called up with his Powers, but she is rescued by Bonnie McCullough and Meredith Sulez. Bonnie uses her psychic powers to determine that Stefan is alive but in a place that is always dark and wet. Having guessed that this location is a well on the abandoned Old Francher place, Matt Honeycutt and the girls set out to rescue Stefan. They succeed, but Stefan is near death from his ordeal. While the other three set out to find medical help, Elena insists Stefan drink her blood to restore him. Elena’s blood loss causes her to be unusually tired, but she recovers soon. Stefan can’t remember who attacked him, but Elena is sure it was Damon.
When Elena returns to school, the replacement European History teacher is Alaric Saltzman, whose first act is to encourage all the students to talk about their recent terrifying experiences to get their feelings out. Stefan is suspicious of this un-teacherly behavior. Alaric invites all the students to a get-together at his house in the evening. Elena and Stefan show up, but when Elena leaves Stefan to find food, she runs into Damon, who is there in the guise of “Damon Smith,” a college student on vacation who is a friend of Sue Carson, one of Elena’s fellow students. Stefan and Damon have a confrontation that Elena interrupts when she fears that Damon’s goal is simply to make Stefan seem irrationally violent (and therefore Mr. Tanner’s murderer). In leaving the house, however, Elena finds a slip of violet paper in her purse with a line from her stolen diary.

Elena warns Bonnie and Meredith that “Damon Smith” is the murderer, although she won’t tell them why she believes this. Meanwhile, Vickie Bennett has returned to school, but she behaves irrationally by undressing in the cafeteria and then accusing Elena of being evil. Stefan and Matt have disappeared to hunt for vervain, a plant that interferes with a vampire’s ability to control others’ minds. Elena spends a night at Bonnie’s house where she dreams pleasurably about dancing with Damon. She wakes abruptly to find a crow in the room and vampire marks on her neck, and she realizes that she invited Damon into Bonnie’s house during the dumb supper. When she returns home, Stefan is there with the vervain that will protect her—a few hours too late. She does not tell Stefan about her experience with Damon because she wants to avoid a confrontation between Stefan and Damon that she is sure Stefan, with his weaker Powers, will lose.

Elena and the other girls set out to find the diary thief. Despite Elena’s initial inclination to blame Damon, they identify Caroline Forbes as the culprit. Elena follows Caroline at lunch into a deserted schoolroom where she overhears Caroline and Tyler Smallwood discuss how to use the diary against Stefan and Elena. Their plan is to wait until Elena is chosen to play “The Spirit of Fell’s Church” during the annual Founder’s Day ceremony. Caroline will also be chosen to play a role. At that time, she will walk onstage and read Elena’s diary aloud to the crowd. Caroline and Tyler believe that Elena’s statement in her diary that Stefan took her ribbon from the cemetery on the day the homeless man was attacked will suffice to prove to the police that Stefan is the murderer.

Elena, Meredith, and Bonnie decide to burgle Caroline’s house to retrieve the diary before she can use it on Founder’s Day. When Caroline and her family return home, they are forced to flee without having found anything more than Caroline’s diary. Elena, however, is unable to reach the door in time and ends up on a second-floor balcony. Damon, who has been lurking on the roof, pulls her up to avoid detection. Once again, he suggests to Elena that she’d be better off with him than with Stefan. Once again, she rejects him. This time, the vervain defeats Damon’s attempt to influence her with his Powers. Damon tells Elena that if she’d give him some of her blood, he’d get the diary back. Elena jumps off the roof to show Damon that she’d rather be dead than endure his presence. Damon rescues her before she falls to her death. He then jumps with her to the ground. After telling her that he’s done a favor and will collect the next time he sees her, he shifts to crow form and flies away. Elena’s Aunt Judith prepares a mock Thanksgiving dinner a week before the real Thanksgiving to ensure nothing goes wrong. Elena invites Matt and Bonnie as her guests.

Aunt Judith’s fiancé, Robert Maxwell, also appears and brings “Damon Smith” as his guest. When Elena’s little sister Margaret Gilbert appears with her new white kitten, Elena seizes the kitten and sticks it into Damon’s face, knowing that animals often sense a vampire’s nature and become hostile. The kitten hisses and spits before fleeing the room, leaving everyone to wonder why Elena is thrusting cats into guests’ faces. After dinner, Damon leaves, but Elena knows that he has now gained an invitation to her house and can return whenever he pleases. She is about to ask Stefan for help despite her fear that he will confront Damon and lose the fight when she realizes that her house was actually built in two parts: a first part before the Civil War and a second part afterwards. Although Damon was invited into one part, her bedroom is in the other. Damon shows up as Elena expected, but when he is unable to enter her room, he threatens to enter Margaret’s room instead. Elena leaves her room to protect her little sister.

Elena wakes up the next morning in her bedroom. She is surprised that Damon has not turned her into a vampire, but she is weak and dizzy from blood loss. When she sees Stefan later, she confesses to him that Caroline plans to use her diary against Stefan. Stefan, who’s been wondering why Elena has been so worried, is relieved that she’s not rejecting him because of his vampire nature. He refuses to leave town and says that he and Elena will face the situation together. He then drinks her blood again. Afterwards, he proposes to Elena and offers her Katherine’s ring. She accepts but says that the engagement must be kept secret because she is still seventeen and Aunt Judith thinks that Stefan has been a bad influence on Elena. Elena has now lost quite a bit of blood and, on several occasions, drunk the blood of Stefan or Damon in exchange. As a result, she is somewhat dazed during the Founder’s Day ceremony. The latest plan is that Elena’s friends will steal the diary back from Caroline because she will not be able to carry it in her nineteenth-century costume, but Caroline foils them by obtaining her reticule early and bringing the diary with her.

When Caroline pulls out the diary to read onstage, though, she finds she brought her own diary and not Elena’s. Elena spots Damon in the audience and realizes that he has saved her and Stefan by substituting the diaries. She goes to ask him his motive and refuses to believe him when he says “for my own purposes.” Aunt Judith arrives and encourages Elena and Damon to spend more time together. Believing that Damon is influencing Aunt Judith, Elena becomes angry. She tells Damon she’s marrying Stefan and shows him Katherine’s ring on her finger, at which point he becomes angry and leaves. Aunt Judith forbids Elena to marry Stefan, and Elena takes Matt’s car to the boarding house to find Stefan. She returns when she cannot find him, but she feels the presence of evil in the brewing storm, and she spots a large white owl chasing her. She screams at Damon to leave her alone, but she drives off Wickery Bridge while speeding to safety. She then drowns.

Meanwhile, Stefan is confronting Tyler, Caroline, and several of Tyler’s bulky friends in a Quonset hut. When Bonnie and Meredith find him, Bonnie abruptly has a psychic realization that Elena is drowning. She, Meredith, and Stefan race to save her but are too late. Stefan sends Bonnie and Meredith to find the police and then sets out to commit suicide. First, he returns to the Quonset hut and drains all the boys to the point of unconsciousness. Stefan then uses his new Powers to turn into a falcon and find Damon. Stating that Damon made a mistake in not killing him and Elena together, Stefan attacks. The fight is interrupted, however, when Elena wakes up in a state of great confusion and arrives to save the brother she’s now sure she loves: Damon.

Basically Elena is now a vampire and in love with Damon, wanting nothing more to protect him.