A/N: No explanation for this one. I mean, did Tyler and Katherine really ever even have any contact? IDEK. This just makes no sense, even in my head, but the words came bursting out once I heard this song on the radio. The last bit just really got to me. And I thought, hey, Tyler pretends he doesn't want Caroline even though he's in love with her, and Katherine pretends she's okay without Stefan when we know that she really does love him in her own sick little twisted demented way. They pretend together in this one, okay? Um. Still. No valid explanation. These characters definitely, in my mind, should not be together.
So. Pairings: T/K, one-sided T/C, one-sided S/K, assumed S/E, and awesome! D/C. Set sometime during Season 2, I guess.
Summary: In the end, it is always the same. / They are each other's replacements. / OR, where D/C takes a second chance and S/E are still together. T/K takes consolation in each other.
Title taken from MGMT's Time to Pretend.
In the end, it is always all the same. Because they're both selfish.
He knows her, knows every inch of her skin—and not just because he grew up with her lookalike—knows her down to the bottom of her (questionable) soul. But it will never be enough.
Her teeth scrape their way across his skin, not-too-gently tracing his firm, tanned, toned shoulder. His face is contorted in all kinds of pleasurable agony, he knows, and her face is dark and angry and evil and vampiric. She hates him, simply because she hates everything, and he doesn't know her well enough to feel anything about her but intolerable lust. It sweeps through his veins, makes his fingers tingle and his skin hurt and his sensitive whole-self react sensitively, like he has the flu. (She is his sickness.)
Limbs sprawled lazily on each others, her fingers twist and bend and pierce his skin, nails sharp and manicured. (She is never messy, even when she spills his blood. That is simply not her way.) She snarls a name into his mouth. ("Stefan.")
He whispers one back, barely even mouthing it. ("Caroline.")
They are each other's replacements.
She's killed hundreds, hell, maybe even thousands or people. She hates anything that moves. (Everything but the younger Salvatore brother, but he doesn't even know that for sure. They don't speak about that or anything else, especially not now, when their lips are far too busy doing other, more marvelous things.)
The things he's done aren't quite as bad. So, yeah, sure, he left everyone hanging as he went to Florida. And he killed a girl unintentionally. He's hurt people, physically and emotionally, and he knows (they both know) that he's felt more guilty for leaving Caroline than she's ever felt in five hundred years. (He doesn't know the guilt she feels for her family's death, and she won't tell.)
He kisses her neck (hard enough to leave bruises if she were human) and resists the temptation to bite her back. (She'd find some way to kill him even as she lay dying.) He caresses her naked waist instead, smooth, silky, creamy, her torso bending and her back arching as he touches her, and for the moment it's his.
The first time, it was like kissing Elena. Which is kind of gross to him, even now. (He's probably the only teenage male unrelated to her that isn't falling all over himself for her, which is something he laughs about a lot.) But he just ignores it now, trying not to concentrate on her face (just focusing on her lips, imagining sun-burned hair and blue eyes and a rosebud mouth and perfectly pale white skin instead) and just listening to her lack of heartbeat. (It reminds him a little of Caroline.)
She moans again into his mouth and for just one second he feels like saying I love you, but those three words are reserved for someone else. Meant for another person. Just for one second, Caroline's face, voice, everything slips from his mind as he falls in to blissful mindless ecstasy.
(Then she comes back, just like that and just like always, not even one moment later.)
Elena's doppelganger (or is it the other way around, her being Elena's ancestor by five hundred years?) hisses one last time into his mouth, finishing off with a hard kiss, a sharp, fierce battle of the tongues. She nips at his lower lip just one last time, barely drawing a drop of bright red blood. He groans, digging his fingers into her curls, through that endless sea of chocolaty softness (unlike everything else about her, which is all hard and heartless).
(Ignoring the thought of sunlight-colored wavy locks that, as expected, pops into his mind.)
She breaks off the kiss, ends the deception they both started, as always. (She always stops this—whatever this is, anyway—always, because she never needs this as much as he does, never needs him as much as he needs somebody to replace the ghost of a dream of Caroline.)
A normal girl would crawl off of this old mattress (not his bed) and away from him, (and leave this place, not his house) and pretend this never happened. (They never do this in his house. Like he'd let her back in again. Ha.)
She flashes away from the mattress (vampire speed rocks, he suspects) in a blink instead, and acknowledges their horizontal tango from a few minutes ago with, "Well, I can't say I expected your performance to be worse than usual, Lockwood, but it was. What, did Blondie fight with you again?" She says it dryly, trying to piss him off because pissing people off is exactly what she does best and most frequently.
It works, but he won't let her see, which he thinks is the reason why she keeps coming back to just him specifically now. He's a mystery, because he doesn't get mad and yell at her. He refuses to give in. Instead, he just calmly, coolly puts on an unaffected expression, as always, and lies there, silent. And alone, because she never comes back.
But this time must be somehow different, because this time she does. She stands there, sighs, and gets on her hand and knees on the edge of the torn, stained mattress. (She must see something in his expression, something sad and longing, that he didn't mean to show. Damn it, why are his feelings so easy to decipher from what he thought was a blank expression?) "You are such a needy bastard," she mutters, crawling up to him and nosing her way underneath his arm, and she simply lies there, his arm thrown over her shoulder all casuallike and limp.
("Spaghetti arms," he remembers without wanting to, knowing that Dirty Dancing is one of Caroline's all-time favorite movies "because it's Patrick Swayze, Tyler, duh.")
They stay like that for a few hours, maybe more, he can't tell. Then his eyes are fighting to stay open, and she is murmuring something in Bulgarian (probably a lullaby or something due to the lilting way she sings), and then he knows nothing more.
He awakens to the feeling of a blanket being drawn over his shoulders, and opens his eyes to his own room, his own bed, his own damn open window with fluttering curtains. He knows she carried him in here, and he just as easily figures out that she's already gone. If Katerina Petrova does not want to be found, there isn't any way he's going to find her, catch her, and keep her there.
So he settles into his cold sheets, draping his arm over an imaginary waist belonging to a blonde vampire princess (not a brunette vampire seductress, despite what his earlier actions say, because he is still in love with Caroline), and lets himself fade back into quiet, dreamless, empty sleep.
He wakes again, only this time it's to sunlight streaming past his drapes and the buzz of a text from his phone. He reaches for his cell on the nightstand, quickly scanning the text. It's from Caroline.
"Damon and I are going to the movies to make fun of the new vamp-wolf movie. Join us? –C."
It hurts him still to think of Caroline and Damon being together, but he knows they're happy this way. He knows they've gotten past the abuse he inflicted on her during her human days. He knows Damon is getting over Elena because of her, and Caroline has gotten over Matt because of the elder Salvatore brother. And he knows that they are genuinely in love with each other, in a way that few couples do manage to fall. But that doesn't mean he wants to watch.
He sends back a text after a few seconds of thought. "No, thanks. Gotta find an old friend. –T."
He'd rather search for a certain Petrova than see Forbes-Salvatore lovey-doveyness, and that's a fact any day of the week. He finds her at the entrance of the tomb, nostalgically staring into its depths. (He'd never considered her nostalgic before, but that was probably her expression, considering her shoulders were slightly slumped and her head was down.) It's only the third place he's tried and looked for her. Maybe he knows her a little too well.
"Miss it?" he teases from behind her, and she doesn't-quite-flinch.
"Never," she says coldly, and the fierceness in her tone sends a shiver racking its way up and down his spine. (It's in these moments, near her emotionless monotone and the fact that she doesn't, never does, care, that he curses his all-too-revealing humanity.) "I hated it in there. Too cold and damp and dark. Not my kinda place. I'm more the light and life of the party type."
"I noticed," he states sarcastically. "It's not for me, either. Too empty."
"What, you would prefer company?" she asks with a wry smile, incredulous and just a little bit (a lot) mocking. She turns, her dark brown curls whipping in the slight breeze. (For once, just like the so-few-times, reminding him that she's not invincible. That she was once human. That she isn't indestructible, not completely, that things do touch her. That he can touch her.)
He shakes his head, his lips quirking at the corners with a small grin. "Nope. I wouldn't go in there for anything. Witches' curses, old vamps, moonstones, death—not my kind of place, either. Don't think I'd like being in there for a long amount of time, with or without other people."
Shaking her head, still incredulous at the flippant way he's speaking to her (like she's not a cold-blooded killer, not the bad fairy in this story about beautiful princesses, not the witchy-bitchy villain in this deadly tale), she just smirks at him. "Not even for Caroline?" she teases, asking the question to end all questions.
He considers it, half-shrugs with just one shoulder. "I don't know," he admits.
Raising an eyebrow, she manages not to look surprised. (Five hundred years does wonders to your poker face, he imagines. She must win a lot in the casinos.) "Thought you'd do anything for her," she remarks, her tone calm, cool, and collected like always. She never is anything else, after all.
"She has Damon for that now," he says, just a little bit sourly, and she smirks again at the resurgence of this Tyler Lockwood, the one that she well and truly knows and remembers, the one that pines over Caroline Forbes while she dances happily in Damon Salvatore's arms. (This new one, this one that would choose to search for her instead of spending time with Vampire Barbie, scares her a little bit.)
"You know, it's insane, this little town," she says, "we're like some goddamn soap opera. I've been with your uncle, I've been with Damon, Damon's with Caroline, you want to be with Caroline, and we—" she pauses, takes a breath, tries to try again, opens her mouth, but he speaks instead.
"—have been together," he interrupts when she stops talking, and they both know he means it in the purely physical way, not emotionally, not intimately, nothing like that, never. "Yeah, it's messed up." His fingers skitter their way along her upper arm, with a mind of their own even when he (only kind of) wants them to stop. She doesn't move, doesn't shiver, doesn't act like a human girl because she's not and she doesn't ever pretend to be, just stands there and regards him with raised eyebrows and curious dark eyes. (He kind of likes it. If her eyes were blue, it would just hurt too damn much, he's sure.)
Then she is eyeing his mouth and her lips are turned up in a half-smile, half-grimace. And they are kissing and his fingers are combing through her hair as the other hand remains on her upper arm, almost at her shoulder. Her hands are at his face, cupping his jaw as she lazily kisses him, her tongue fighting his as they wrap around each other. They smack into the wall at the entrance of the tomb—careful not to go in because their words were true and it does seem creepy in there, unimaginably so—his back colliding hard with the rock. He holds back a grunt—being the human one in this equation, after all, or at least mostly human—muffling his complaints into her mouth as her nails trace his chest through his shirt, holding him with the softest but coldest of touches. Purely physical.
In another life, in another time, they could try to be together in some kind of weirdly-fashioned relationship. Stefan and Elena would probably stop talking to him, Bonnie would ignore him forever and a day no matter what, and Caroline would try to understand while Damon would just call him a stupid dick and be done with it. She would be hard and passionate and cold and she would probably win all of the arguments. They would not be normal. They would be odd, but they would almost definitely be awesome.
But she pines over Stefan silently, and he mourns over Caroline openly in her arms, so they can't and they don't and they won't.
His phone buzzes in his pocket and he's sure that it's Caroline's text describing the epic stupidity of the movie (and the cute things Damon did during it, ugh, gag) in detail, but he doesn't bother with it for the moment. He's content to kiss his doppelganger, the one he doesn't mind wanting sometimes because she knows all the just-right things to do. She knows when to contact him, when to kiss him, when to leave him alone and when to touch him just precisely the way he wants it exactly when he wants it.
She knows how to pretend to be blonde and beautiful Caroline, and he can try pretty damn well to pretend to be noble and saintly Stefan, and, baby, they were born to pretend.
A/N: Again, this is my only thing I even think resembles a crack!fic, to date. Because, um, T/K are a no go. Don't even go there. I just think they would look extra pretty together, and this was an excuse to throw D/C back into a more functioning relationship.
BTW: I'm coming up with a multichap to satisfy my need to fulfill pariswindspeed's request for a happy fic! First chapter will be up soon. :)
Review, my loves!