💔 What’s the one apology they’re still waiting for that’ll never come?
🃏 Are they the type to forgive / hold a grudge until the end of the universe?
headcanon question time / @fiadhsi
as far as floribeth is concerned, the entire hunting community - across the board - owes her an apology for never getting her out of triad industries' detention facility, whether they were aware of triad's existence or not (quite frankly, floribeth thinks they should have been, because triad is many things - subtle is not one of them).
they have all those adages about "helping those that can't help themselves" and "saving people, hunting things" and they talk a big game about being there for the people but when she really needed them - any of them - to pull through for her, they didn't. couldn't. wouldn't.
which taught her that you can't rely on anyone but yourself to keep yourself safe and that if you are "other" in any way, shape or form, you shouldn't expect help from them at all.
by now, she knows that holding onto these things is unhealthy, especially because she's never going to get that apology, no matter how long she lives, but she can't help but be resentful, still, despite the fact that she can talk the talk and walk the walk when it comes to being in the company of hunters: she can establish a rapport with them, but there is always a part of her that's going to be waiting for the other shoe to drop (because hunters - whether they were born into the life or not - can choose to lay down their weapons and get out of the game whereas she cannot stop being a vampire), and there's always a part of her that's going to be sad, and angry, and bitter about the fact that she just wasn't important enough in the grand scheme of things - not then, and certainly not now, because there are a lot of things that the hunters could jump in on (triad industries taking over for augustine; triad industries having opened portals to the dark dimension; emmanuel zetes wanting to collect powerful people as trinkets and the zetes institute as a whole; the old powers waking up again which is tantamount to the apocalypse / end of the world happening, etcetera) but, as always, they are nowhere to be found and it's all crickets.
as it stands, it would have been nice to hear: a genuine i'm so sorry we, as a collective, let you slip through the cracks. i'm so sorry that you needed us and we weren't there; we'll make it right - we'll do better in the future, we'll do better for the future.
nicer, still, would have been hunters - as a collective - upping their game and actually, actively, doing their part in making the world a better place. but alas.
(that, and most hunters are white men and women - most of whom shoot first and ask never. floribeth has run into a handful of hunters of color in her time, but most of them are white, and most of them are not thinking about the racial component, but that is very much something she thinks about - it's very much something that's on the back of her mind; not only is she a vampire, she is also a queer woman of color who's probably some flavor of neurodivergent, so she's marginalized four times over.
and yes, jeremy gilbert did find her in grove hill and brought her to the salvatore school but that was after she'd already escaped triad industries' detention facility herself.)
which is a good segue into: yes, floribeth absolutely holds grudges until the end of the universe and then some. a thousand percent. for perceived slights regarding herself, certainly, but she goes just as hard for others when it comes to holding grudges.
after all, she still hasn't forgiven the hunters - as a collective - for failing her and others like her and for continuing to fail her each and every single day they do not step up and do the work: floribeth believes that the onus is on them, as a collective, to right the wrongs they (and those who came before them) committed and to make sure what happened to her never happens again. and each day that doesn't happen just reinforces the belief that hunters only save the people that look like them and not the people that look like her.
that said, she still hasn't forgiven damon salvatore for what happened to caroline forbes and charlotte zima either (even if it probably isn't her place to hold those grudges in the first place, she still holds onto them, tends to them like little pets) because if she won't, who will? it's not like anyone else is going to hold him accountable for his actions.
