fic: but still, like dust, i'll rise (3/3)
III. AND EVERYTHING IN BETWEEN
Klaus dies with his sister’s name at his lips.
Katherine wasn’t there, of course. She hears it from the girl with her face, twenty years later, still young and girlish but oh-so-tired, sitting in a café, the ghosts of two brothers between them.
Damon dies for Stefan, in the end.
He chooses his brother. Damon Salvatore dies with his brother’s name in his mouth and Elena Gilbert in his heart, but his eyes, his eyes-his eyes see only a crueller mutation of the doppelganger’s smile.
Damon’s fatalisms come in the form of love. This time, though, Katherine cannot quite blame him.
She wonders if she might have done the same, if any of her family remained.
Katherine survives, though. Katherine carries on.
(Over time, Elena learns to do the same.)
“I thought you loved Stefan best,” Elena Gilbert says to her, a hundred years after Klaus, after Mystic Falls, after Katherine gains her freedom.
They are in a hotel room overlooking the Grand Canal in Venice, and Katherine blows smoke rings into the dark night, heavy with human pollution, nonchalant and unmoving. Elena has her bag in her lap and her hands on her wallet.
Inside there is a picture of a boy a hundred years dead, with hair like the night and eyes like the brightest Mediterranean sea. He is clothed in Confederate grey and grins with his teeth, and she stops when her doppelganger murmurs his name. Katherine Pierce flicks her cigarette over into the dirty canal.
“I thought we’ve established that I don’t care what you think,” Katherine says lazily, her heeled boots clicking together on the balcony-her feet are never bare, even if the rest of her is. Katherine doesn’t have to run anymore, but she is always ready.
“But you came back for Stefan.” Elena says. “You loved him more than Damon. You’ve said so.”
She is such a girl still, Katherine thinks. Tell me, Saint Elena, since when have I ever told the truth?
“So did you,” Katherine says dully. It’s not her fault. Petrovas always fall for the younger brothers, the ones that don’t try to save them. Maybe that’s a curse in itself. “Did you choose him because I did, Elena? Tell me, when you told Damon it was always going to be Stefan, were you thinking of me?”
Elena Gilbert says nothing, and Katherine Pierce smiles, two reflections meeting at the wrong angles.
Silence is an art; Katherine has taught her on more than one occasion. Love has its limits.
So far, Elena Gilbert has been a better student than Damon Salvatore. It’s the Petrova in her. That is testified to by the fact that she is still alive.
Idly, she pulls another cigarette out of the carton in her jacket and lights it. “Besides,” she says, thinking of blue eyes and a quick smile and a wit to match her own. “It doesn’t matter anymore, does it?”
“You’re never going to love anyone the same again.” Elena says quietly, and Katherine isn’t sure to whom her doppelganger is speaking, isn’t sure whether she should rip out the girl’s throat or pour her a drink. Instead Katherine settles by letting out a long stream of white smoke, watching it fade into thin air. “Not like you loved him.”
She isn’t sure which him the girl is referring to, either.
The brother with the blue eyes and the easy grin or the brother with the quiet voice and the ink-stained fingers. Katherine isn’t sure, Katherine doesn’t know.
“You’ll get over it,” Katherine says. “I did.”
(She knew where you were, Damon. She didn’t care.)
This is the truth of it:
In 1987 Stefan was at a concert in Chicago, but in 1963 Damon was in a crowd in Dallas, Texas.
In 1972 Stefan was in Vietnam, but in 2001 Damon was on the streets of New York.
In 1937 Stefan was living in Austria, but in 1964 Damon was standing in a forest clearing in Mystic Falls, watching the door of a tomb.
She had been watching him. She was invisible and still and she did not so much as breathe, and was sure he could sense the scent of her hair and the curl of her body and so she had sat, silent.
Silence is an art.
He made his way to the door of the tomb, pressed his hands hard and tight against the stone, and seemed for a moment sure to press hard enough that it would crack.
Finally he stopped, and there had been a sheen of sweat on his brow, his breath trapped and ragged and desperate in his mouth, his tongue curled against his top lip, a name caught in tatters in the single space of that sigh.
Katerina Petrova almost broke there, almost stepped out.
Katherine Pierce left.