fic: but still, like dust, i'll rise (2/3)
II. THE BEAST
She changes her name when Elizabeth becomes queen.
The name is all hard lips and hard curls of the tongue, a name she can use and it no longer ends on a breath, the Katerina no longer defined by the Petrova at the end.
Katherine Pierce, she says to herself. Katherine Pierce, Katherine Pierce, Katherine Pierce.
She repeats the name to herself until it does not seem a lie anymore. Katerina Petrova becomes Katherine Pierce, a monster with a woman’s name.
(I am doing you a kindness, she wants to say, her hands falling from Damon’s face, and he looks at her like such a little boy still, such a child, those great blue eyes uncomprehending.
You should thank me, Katherine thinks, purses her lips to shatter his heart some more, but this final cruelty she cannot bring herself to perform. She cannot quite smile. I am teaching you how to survive, Damon. Don’t break. You can’t afford to break.
She is continuing her lessons from 1864 as she murmurs the words, easy, swimming in her mouth until it seems almost a truth. She is ending this hundred and forty five year old obsession of his. She will crush it like hope if she must; will crush it into dust, into ash, until it is the mere remnants of a purer time, floating in the wind-
He does not have the same eyes, that much is true. They are not dark, but instead as blue as a clear sky, but still-
He looks at her like he expects things of her, this is what she knows. He whispers her name like a chant and holds her to be what she is not, what she never had been. Katherine Pierce is a woman who cannot bear a pedestal. She cannot sit and pose for him, cannot let him paw at her feet as though she is a saint, cannot let him worship her. There is simply too much blood on her hands for her to bless him.
He wants her to love him as he loves her, that much she knows. He wants her to love him completely, unconditionally, without reserve. He has destroyed himself and crafted himself into a monster for this. She cannot bear his weight.
Cut me loose, she thinks now. Let me go.
There it is, then, the coup-de-grace-
“It was always Stefan.” She says, and makes the child a man.)
She smells death on him.
Katherine Pierce grins with her teeth and quirks an eyebrow, eyes falling indolently oh the older Salvatore lounging in Confederate grey, and that smile, oh, God, that smile-
Katherine feels her world lurch. He is the perfect culmination of the two brothers who killed her and crafted her out of blood and fire and an ancient curse. He has the honesty of Elijah’s eyes, but that smile is all Klaus, all fanged, predatory charm.
I will break you, little boy, she thinks. I will rip you apart.
Damon has scars Katherine will never have.
When she bites into his throat she can taste the battlefield inside him, bright and metal and cold and sharp. She can taste the edge of his bayonet and the bite of a bullet, the man he killed from across the field and the friend he smothered with a pillow for want of morphine. She tastes it all, and it is a burgeoning darkness whispering within his soul that she longs to set free.
Human life means nothing, is the underlying truth that she murmurs against his skin. Humanity is nothing. A skin you shall be glad to shed.
“And what is the lesson?” She asks coyly from atop him, her skirts bunched up on either side of her hips as she traces his hunting knife idly across the skin of his chest, bright beads of blood in its wake. “Careful, Mr Salvatore. Wrong answer means a penalty.”
His breath catches on a laugh. She presses the knife in deeper, but he does not flinch.
He looks up at her, those blue eyes bright and shining, brimming with youth. For a moment Katherine feels unspeakably old, unspeakably dead.
“I will not die.” He says. “Not today.”
Her hands stop, her grip light on the hilt of the knife, its cold blade pressed easy against Damon’s cheek.
I can slit your throat so easily, she thinks then. A great red smile, just for you.
There is no fear in his eyes. He stares up at her, calm, a child. A pupil at the feet of his teacher, thinking he is about to be rewarded for a good answer. Katherine’s hands still, her lip caught between her teeth. She brushes an errant curl off his face.
Herself, she does not remember what it is like to live without fear.
(She can love him so easily, that is the thing. Control is a thing she has worked three hundred years for, her narcissism is a cultured art, but that dark want-that girl who once whispered why would we want to live?-is still there, beneath the surface, waiting to pull her down and drown her in the depths.
This is a weakness she cannot allow. She will not make the same mistake twice.)
She closes up the knife easily, sliding it’s blade against the palm of her hand until her thick dark blood comes rushing through. She closes her hand into a tight fist and lets it drip drip drip into Damon’s mouth.
“No,” she murmurs softly. “You won’t.”
“I love you,” he whispers to her in the blue dark, her legs wrapped tight around him, his breath catching in the curls of her hair. “I love you, Katherine.”
Katerina, she wants to say. My name is Katerina. And you, Damon Salvatore, love a girl who doesn’t exist.
Her teeth flash in the growing shadows of the room. She bites.
I touch your skin, and I know that you’re an angel.
Katherine’s lips part.
She needs no saving in his eyes. She is an angel come down to earth, to bless him and kiss him and rescue him from the morbid grey of this world, but he expects nothing of her. He expects nothing of her and when he loves, it doesn’t hurt. He doesn’t love her with his whole soul and his whole heart and his love has its limits, and oh, God, with him Katherine can breathe, she isn’t closed in by all the limitations of a limitless love-
“You’ve surprised me, that’s all.” She says, and it is the truth. He does not have Klaus’s cut of jaw or glint of gold but he wants her within limitations and that is something Katherine has allowed herself to forget in the haze of Damon’s love. That is something she does not need to run from. Love with its limits is the only kind that does not threaten.
I have fought my own dragons, she thinks. I have won my own war.
I won’t have another boy trying to be my knight.
Later, Damon asks her:
“Is my love not enough?”
Is my brother not enough for you?
She pulls his hands from her face and tells him to leave.
(In 1864 Damon Salvatore is a boy with a crook to his grin and eyes that still shine. On the night of August the 14th, he pushes a girl to a tree with a torch in his hand and thinks, Katherine, Katherine, Miss Katherine-
It’s her. It’s her, it’s her, it’ll always be her.
“I won’t feed you,” she says to him, her lips curling and coy, and Damon remembers a line from a book, whispered aloud beneath an army blanket to the light of a flame as outside the sounds of cannons roared-
Hubris. That was it.
That’s not it at all, he thinks. It’s not pride. For Damon Salvatore, it’ll never be pride.
“If you want it,” she says, murmurs, and there is a new edge to her voice, a new kind of hardness. “Take it.”
Fatalism comes in many shades. For Damon Salvatore that shade is love.
The world hums around them and Damon thinks, an eternity, an eternity with Katherine.
He thinks, Katherine, Katherine, Katherine. He thinks, out of the crumbling South. He thinks, you, you. Always, always, you.
“I choose you, Katherine.” He says.
More than a hundred years later, he stares down at a girl with the same face, and says-
“I will always choose you.”
Damon Salvatore makes a promise this time. Damon Salvatore makes a promise to the girl with the face of her crueller, harder ancestor and this time, this time Damon Salvatore thinks, please, please.
This time Damon Salvatore thinks, I will save you.
In his mind, Katherine Pierce rolls her eyes and says, oh, please. In his mind, Katherine Pierce grins and taunts, that white knight complex will ruin you. In his mind, Katherine Pierce smiles slow and says, careful, Damon-she’s more like me than you’ll like to think.
“That’s the Petrova curse for you,” Katherine tells him once, afterwards. “You’re exactly like Stefan. You’re falling in love with me all over again.”
She purses her lips when he doesn’t reply. “I taught you not to love like this.” She says. “You didn’t learn your lesson at all.”)
When she looks at him, she isn’t sure whether she is seeing herself, or Elijah, or a long dead boy with shining eyes and a grin that spreads too wide and too earnest, too fast
“Did you want to save me, is that it?” She asks him in a lilting tone, and she isn’t sure to whom she is speaking. “Damon Salvatore-rushing to poor little Katherine’s rescue.” She laughs, circles him.
She will leave soon. Team Salvatore is floundering, like fish out of water, unsure and unplanned and untested, and by God, Katherine is not going down with them. Her love has limits, and the horizon is fast approaching.
Klaus will die. He has to. She will sell her own soul for the pleasure of looking into his eyes as he takes his last breath and wheezes his last words but no matter-she’ll sell out the Salvatores in a second for the reassuring news of it.
“My hero,” she murmurs, drawing a finger across his chest, and chuckles. “Is that what you wanted to hear, Mr Salvatore? Did you want to carry me out of the tomb yourself? Feed me some blood from the neck of some girl? And when I woke up, did you think I was going to fall into your arms and we’d ride off into the sunset?”
I love you. Is that what you wanted to hear, Elijah?
Did you want to carry me out of that ring of fire yourself?
Be the first person I’ll see after death?
And when I woke up, did you think you were going to finally be the hero of your own story?
I win my own wars, Katherine thinks. I write my own story. I may be a Petrova, but I am not your maiden.
She laughs in his face, feels his chest tighten beneath her hand. She leans in close.
“Salvatore as in saviour, right?”
In a flash he has her against the wall, the edge of the panelled bookcase pressed deep into her back, and she thinks, easy, easy, Damon. She thinks, good boy.
“Don’t for one second,” he hisses to her, soft and hard and wanting, almost like a caress, those blue eyes bright and oh, yes, she likes this Damon. It is like looking into a mirror. “Think that I won’t kill you. I will rip you limb from limb and I’ll smile to do it, Katherine. Now do us both a favour and shut the fuck up.”
She smiles, hooks her foot around his knee, and breaks his leg without so much as blinking.
“I’m older than you, boy,” she whispers to him, driving an elbow into his back, severing his spine. “I’m stronger than you. Don’t for one second think that we’re on equal footing, Damon.”
She does not finish the thought, but he knows it, just the same.
We never were.
“You learnt my lessons well.” She says to him. “Except one.”
He laughs, wheezes out a breath. “Oh?”
There is a pause. Katherine touches her tongue to her lip. “My dull-as-dishwater doppelganger is going to ruin you, Damon. She’ll destroy you.”
“Then I’ll be destroyed.” He says. “Then I’ll die.”
She turns away. “I taught you that too,” she calls over her shoulder.
Not today, Damon, or did you forget?
This is the thing that kills her about him:
He could have been brilliant. He had been the perfect student, the perfect reflection, save for that one facet.
The boy loves with his whole soul. Katherine expressly told him not to do that.
PART I