[ fic ] all these things that i've done ; elena/katherine, the vampire diaries
Written for the prompt "there is no peace that i've found so far" by aiscat93 at The Petrova Fire Comment Ficathon. Originally posted here.
all these things that i've done » the vampire diaries. elena/katherine. pg-13. 1,547 words.
They're the only ones left, the Petrova dopplegangrs. Elena learns to run too, learns to run and never look back. warnings: future-fic, violence, reference to character death, incest technically? I own nothing related to TVD, or any of the associated characters.
/ over and in, last call for sin /
She finds her at the boardinghouse; it’s fitting, even though it shouldn’t be.
Katherine’s curled up on the couch, sipping the very same Scotch that he used to drink, and she doesn’t look up. “I knew you’d come,” she says, and Elena remembers why it’s taken her so long. The nostalgia brought on by the overwhelming familiarity of the house is suffocating.
“Does it ever get easier?” Her soft voice does nothing to counter the heaviness of what she is asking.
Katherine merely laughs, and when she does look up, Elena is gone.
She hates this part of herself, the part that can charm handsome strangers while planning in her head the precise steps she will use to tear them apart.
(Once upon a time there was a girl.)
Crooked finger beckons, there’s a tilt to her lips and a promise in her eyes that tempts them to follow her outside.
(But that girl died.)
She doesn’t bother to stifle his screams when her fangs bury themselves in the delicate skin of his throat. She rips, and drinks, and she leaves.
(And now there is a monster.)
She turned it off. Turned everything off.
Otherwise, she would hurt. Otherwise, she would be overwhelmed. Otherwise, she would feel.
Now she doesn’t feel at all. She runs and runs and runs and knows that she will eventually be caught. She could stop running, she tells herself. Deep down, she knows she really can’t.
Sometimes she finds happy couples, strolling at night. She takes her time with them, breaks them down slowly and lets it all come flooding back. The girls always look like her - and she hates them for this - and the men's faces shift in her mind, back and forth and back and forth and back and forth until she doesn’t know which of them she is killing.
They all die.
Because that’s how the story went; she can never change it.
/ while everyone’s lost, the battle is won /
No matter where she runs always leads back to her. Katherine is running too, and their paths cross, intersect, intertwine, until Elena wonders if maybe they’re tracing the same pattern around the world.
“Do you even miss them?” It’s always her with the questions, and Katherine who never answers.
This time she just purses her dark lips, tilts her head, and drums her fingers on the bar-top. “What would be the point in that?”
It’s still not an answer, but Elena takes it.
They entice the two men at their right to come outside with them, and drink their blood in the alley like a scene from a horror movie.
“You don’t compel them anymore.”
Elena’s man is dead, throat torn out in all sorts of messy ways, and she shakes her head silently.
There is something like pride in Katherine’s eyes.
Green eyes, dark eyes, they all haunt her at night. Skin that turned gray and cracked. Death, death, death is what happened to her.
So she spreads it everywhere she goes.
She doesn’t look in the mirror often but figures her lips must be stained red forever now, her own morbid shade of lipstick.
She doesn’t look in the mirror often because when she does, even she can’t tell if Katherine or Elena is the one staring back.
What’s the difference?
There is a close call - but not really close - when one of his soldiers finds her and trails her back to her hotel room. She knows he is coming, snaps off the leg of the night-table - she’s been doing this since she was human, silly man - and plunges it through his heart when he bursts through the door.
She uses it to leave her message too, smears it in his blood and paints out across the wall:
You will never catch me.
Defiance is the only thing she has left; and so she keeps running.
/ you’re gonna bring yourself down /
Sometimes she remembers the screaming, refuses to believe that it’s been so long when the screaming is so fresh in her ears.
She hears so many other screams though. The ones who scream the loudest die the fastest.
But they all die. Everyone dies. Everyone died. She died.
Their turn.
Katherine finds her outside Mystic Falls one time, curled up on the ground with her knees pulled into her chest. There are two bodies a few feet away.
Her ancestor, her duplicate, every bit her self, stares down at her.
It’s a whimper when she finally speaks.
“I think I knew their grandparents.”
Once upon a time.
“It was inevitable, Elena,” Katherine tells her another time, her voice even, matter-of-fact.
She wants to shake her head; she doesn’t.
“History likes to repeat itself,” the other vampire informs her with a wink.
But it won’t ever again, Elena thinks. She did what even Katherine didn’t do - she was the end of the doppelgangr line. And she knows that Katherine both admires and hates her for this; hate because Katherine was never one to be outdone.
Or maybe Katherine hates her because she hates herself and are they not the same?
“But now it’s just you and me,” Katherine croons, plays with a curl of hair identical to her own.
Tempting, tempting, tempting, always tempting, but-
“There is no you-and-me.” It’s a lie - there is only Katherine and her - and it burns her mouth as she leaves.
/ with all these things that i’ve done /
There is one man who looks so alike her mind hardly has to pretend. He has dark hair and dark eyes and when he talks to her at the bar, his eyebrows rise and fall in perfect rhythm with his animated conversation.
He tells her his name, but she doesn’t hear it - another name is screaming through her head, painfully.
This man screams too, later in the motel room, when she lets his blood drench through the sheets, add some colour to the bland. She watches the light slowly drain from his eyes - since when were they green? - and thinks that he doesn’t look much like him after all.
The most they have in common now is that they’re both dead.
The boardinghouse is falling down, condemned, when she seeks it out again. It’s stupid to be here, stupid to be anywhere near this town when she’s still being hunted - will always be hunted - but she comes anyways, and waits.
They’re chasing the same pattern around the world, one known only to them, one that Klaus hasn’t figured out yet, and it’s simply a matter of time before Katherine finds her here.
It takes four days.
“Do you ever thinking about not running anymore?”
Katherine shrugs one shoulder delicately, perches on the arm of a dusty couch. “It would be nice, wouldn’t it?” She sips Scotch - Elena has no idea where she got it, but it’s fitting, of course. “But I like living more than I like the idea of not running,” she says darkly, bitterness creeping into her voice.
It’s the first honest answer she’s ever given in all years they’ve been running.
Elena shifts closer, wraps her fingers around Katherine’s as she takes the glass from her, takes a sip too, and lets it burn down her throat.
“You think this was inevitable?” It was another conversation, or many, long ago, but it’s also now, because their past, present, and future are all rolled up together, and she feels like they’re existing outside of time completely. It’s an odd feeling, deep in her skin.
Katherine laughs - there’s still darkness in her tone, all sharp edges and narrowed eyes.
“We’re the Petrova dopplegangrs.” As if that says everything that could need to be said - it does, in some ways. She rolls the r in Petrova, her native accent more pronounced than Elena’s heard in years. “Doomed to run and run and run and never stop... but never be caught either. It’s only ever been about us.”
It sounds so simple, but Elena knows what she’s getting at - they’re the two twisted the deepest into any of this, two versions of the same person, duplicates, the same.
She presses her mouth to Katherine’s, then, and it’s the weirdest contrast of déjà vu and finally, finally in her head. She tastes blood and doesn’t know if the taste is embedded in Katherine or herself, doesn’t know where either of them end or begin. There’s a hand in her hair, gripping tightly, and her own hand is fisted in Katherine’s curls and it’s the oddest sensation, as if she is both of them, as if she isn’t either of them, a nonentity, as if neither of them even exist.
They rush, as if they didn’t have all the time in the world, shedding clothes and exploring the skin they know so well, on each other’s bodies - this is me, this is me, this is me.
Katherine’s nails dig into her skin, and Elena bites down on the other girl’s shoulder, and their bodies arch, twist, and no, no, it doesn’t feel as if they don’t exist at all, it’s as if they exist so strongly.
More than anything else.