DISCLAIMER: I do not own the vampire diaries or any of it's characters.
Once upon a time, that was how fairytales were supposed to start, four small words that led an eager captive audience into the thrill of the unknown. Beauty, adventure, and love. The perfect genetic makeup for a happily ever after. Or so one would think.
You see, once upon a time, there'd been a girl named Tatia. Like any modern day heroine she'd been both intelligent and beautiful, and every man had wanted her. Some had been dashing, some strong, but none had been quite as memorizing as the Mikaelsen boys, Elijah and Niklaus. Each had easily drawn her in, neither being like the other. Elijah was quaint, sophisticated, kind. Niklaus on the other hand was rash, destructive, and vulnerable, and both hopelessly in love.
As if entirely unaware of each other, or the blood that ran between them, both boys vied for her affections in a way that had stirred conflict into the very heart of their family. Threats had been ushered, punishments delivered, until the Original witch could see no other solution but one, death. And this is where the story alters drastically, as vividly and macabre as any Grimm novel. From her bed Esther had snatched her, dragging her by her hair into the forest where she'd cut, and hacked, and sacrificed for her children, and there she'd left the girl raggedy and dying as she calmly walked bowls of her blood back to her transitioning children.
Esther could have never suspected that Tatia would have survived, nor that her own spell would have cast itself not only over her children, but the village in itself. What a surprise she would have suffered had she known, but who could have ever? Since it was a quickly waning spell, no one else was effected so long as they lived through the night - only Tatia didn't, and therefore she became as much a victim to Esther and Mikael's plotting as the rest of them. Falling beneath the pain of her wounds, Tatia died, unknowingly, for her loves, and woke hours later to a burning in her throat only a passing forest animal could sate.
Days had become weeks, weeks had become months, and then before long centuries had dredged past. Not quite the happily ever after she'd been set up for. Restricted to the waning hours of day and the darkness that followed, Tatia travelled for hundreds of years without purpose - that was, at least, until a little bird perched on her shoulder and whispered of a creature named Elena.
Unfortunately for Tatia, she'd missed Katherine's episode entirely, caught up in Russia at the time. However ,as soon as she heard of this doppleganger she fled from her current whereabouts in Washington and made for the city of Mystic Falls, where she was greeted by the presence of too many supernatural beings and a council set on killing them all, including Niklaus. That's how it had come to this. She was poised over a body against a wall, long legs keeping her hovered above a body who's chest cavity was split by a knife. Her curls fell over her shoulders effortlessly, framing the gentle angles of her face as she stared down at him, the vampire hunter. Alaric. He was still breathing, but each intake was shallower than the last, and she wondered how many seconds would tick away before the blood had clogged his throat past the point where he could no longer breathe.
"The power must be out." Her head snapped up as a boy's voice resonated through the house, drawing her out of her trance. That's when she heard her voice, her voice - but it came from somebody else, and a part of her longed to rush down and snap the neck of who had taken her own identity from her. Only she couldn't, no, that would interrupt things, and Tatia was nothing if not precise in her calculations and planning. Katherine had no doubted inherited her unique gift of survival from her. No, she'd wait, until the opportunity announced itself. Until then she'd let them fumble about in the dark, unknowingly searching for something, someone, they didn't even know to exist.
As they stomped up the stairs, their footsteps leaden and so undeniably human, the Petrova original slipped back into the shadows she'd become so accustomed too, before seeming to vanish entirely.
SO, chapter one, not quite as long as I wanted it to be - but I just wanted to give a brief intro into everything before I actually set into the story, at which point I'll be looking to add more in-depth flashbacks and the like. Please review (: