A/N: a short first attempt at a new fandom and new character! Concrit and feedback in general is highly appreciated.
Dancing was never his preference.
In the 1860s he was too awkward, at once too unsure of and too uncomfortable with drawing room etiquette; in the decades that crawled after, it was all too much of a pain in the ass.
Stefan, the born-again innocent, jitterbugged his way through the 1950s, slicked back hair, comb in his back pocket, attempting redemption by way of passing for normal. Him? He spent his time with beatniks, wearing the de rigueur black turtleneck, enduring the half-assed philosophy just long enough for the reefer to pacify them into convenient prey.
But disdain, ennui, the buried memories of self-consciousness barely register as he watches Elena glide down the stairs towards him. Time, all of it, in its thousand and one tarnished, feral, disappointing manifestations is dispelled as the past elides with the present.
He takes the perfect copy of the hand he hasn't held for one hundred and forty-five years and leads her in a dance that even his resistance can't help having down pat, careful to seem slightly above it all, while, underneath, down to the last, jaded, un-live cell he literally quivers with singled-minded lust for the woman she resembles all too well. He has seen this sight before; his heart has been caught before in the vision of this face, this body sheathed in silk. It's the same steps; the same gestures; the same polite parlor formality designed to obscure the sex that always happened later (because don't let the history books fool you that there was ever an age of chastity, and certainly not wherever Katherine was involved).
There are differences, though. Crucial ones. Katherine teased with her eyes, manipulated with every touch of her hand against his; this one is worrying about Stefan, going through the motions, yet with more inborn honesty than Katherine ever quite managed. Where Katherine was fearless, this one is brave. Where Katherine was careless, this one is effortless, and now the lust (and something else, something breakable) isn't quite so single-minded.
Because Elena is so not Katherine. She has a beating heart.
(The bitch of it is, like always, it belongs to someone else.)