Disclaimer: Do not own anything you can recognize as The Vampire Diaries. Not Katherine and certainly not Elijah, sadly.

Author's Note: First shot at The Vampire Diaries. In English and posted here because I can only watch TVD in English, Klaus in German is too horrible. Any slight grammatical mistakes you can keep as a gift from me – if I have done too badly please bear with me and tell me, English is not my first language ;) By the way – I just spent an hour and a half writing this and about exactly as long trying to post it …

The first thing he felt, was the sun on his face. Then he realized that he'd woken up, because he'd heard the toilet flush.

When exactly was the last time he had ever heard a toilet flush? He did not exactly need it, neither did Rebekha.

And then it all came back to him. In an instant it did, washed over him like a wave and he felt his stomach drop out of him. In the kitchen below him he heard the door of the fridge open and close, a chair scraping across the floor, then the sound of hair being brushed out of a face. The sound of someone eating.

The faint smell of fresh coffee, milk and cereals hit him and he groaned, while he turned onto his back and put his hands over his face.

Damn it.

He'd done it again.

And there his siblings believed he were the smart one. He. So. Was. Not. She might be human, but she still was herself – Katerina. His Katerina, a faint voice whispered in his head but he told it not very kindly to shut the hell up.

"Elijah?"

He swung around and she must have seen the shock on his face, for for a split second her face lit into her brilliant but at the same time arrogant "I'm a step ahead of you, as always" smile.

"Katerina."

"I would love to say the very same, but that would so not do my former self justice so I'll just go with … why are you here?" She had smiled sweetly during the first part of her question but while spitting out the last four words her eyes had started shooting arrows at him. Venomous arrows, intended for killing. If she were still a vampire, he might have flinched, but like this he was simply a little bit intimidated. Okay, a bit more than a bit, but he didn't back away. "Doesn't Klaus miss his lapdog?", she added spitefully and he struggled to regain his ever smiling "You can't get at me" face.

When he finally succeeded he took a step towards her. It was a hot summer day and he could smell the faint scent of her sweet sweat, overpowered by some perfume but still available for his senses.

"I see you have finally settled down. For real, this time, I presume?", he said, smiling pleasantly, one of his hands where it always was when he was nervous – at his tie. He didn't even take it off for days like this, which guaranteed him some strange glances from humans everywhere he went, but he couldn't care less.

"As none of my old friends did me the favour to restore the damage that little bitch has done I do intend on staying here until I find someone to do it for them." She cocked her head to one side and her dark curls danced in the sunlight. Her brown eyes bore into his and she smiled a amiable smile. "How about you?"

He swallowed. "I cannot count the times on one hand that you have used me, Katerina. Besides, your old friends would just add me to their red list if I did and I have no intention at all of ending with a white oak stake in my heart, so no, I do not think I will be able to do what you ask."

Her smile was still there, frozen on her face, even though the next words came out like a wooden bullet aimed for his heart. "I meant what I said back then, Elijah. I really believed that there was a future for us. You destroyed every last little bit of humanity that was left in me when you turned your back on me that day. So you can imagine what kind of torture it is for me to actually be a human now, darling. I know you. And as I said this out loud now" She took a step toward him and cocked her head to the other side, while reaching up and putting her hand to his face. Without realizing he was doing so he leaned into her touch and a triumphant smile crossed her face. "you will live with the bad conscience for the rest of your, unluckily, never ending life." She dropped her voice to a whisper. "You were the only one who could have saved me, Elijah."

He hated the way she took control over him.

With a last calculating look into his face she turned around, trailing her hand behind her and adapting that walk she had practised over the last five hundred years, the one she knew made every guy stop and stare. A few meters ahead of him she turned around again.

"As you're in town anyway you could just as well come over to my place. You still owe me the story of why you are here", she said and threw him an annoyed glance. She had all the expressions at the ready – flirty, sad, betrayed, graceful, cocky, angry, annoyed. And a few dozens more.

"There is no story. I needed a break from that madness in New Orleans and happened to end up here. I was just about to move on, after spending some time at that mesmerizing church." He held one hand lazily in the direction of an old building which he had indeed been admiring – as it stood in the middle of the town square where every single Saturday-shopper had to walk by eventually.

"Of course, how could I have come to any other conclusion", Katherine said while rolling her eyes. "You do not believe any more in any higher whatever than you do in love, which you do not at all as you so charmingly broke to me twice over the last five hundred years, and you just happened to end up in a place that so happens to be the place I call home for the time being. Honestly, Elijah, there was a time when you were harder to read." She threw her hair over her shoulder and made a face. "Come on, I have a nice garden I would love to show you."

As it had turned out her place was a big old mansion, probably one of the oldest houses in town, which had been modernized recently and now was a very bright house with a lot of windows and a big flat yard with perfectly trimmed grass stretching out around it. After she opened the door with one hand while balancing her shopping bag on her hip which looked quite artistic considering her heels they stepped into an entrance room which was positively plastered by mirrors – at least at every single part in the room where there wasn't a closet at the wall. A small door led to a restroom, as he vaguely guessed, and a big glass one led to the living room. Despite himself his first glance went to the ceiling, and he was quite surprised to not see himself staring back down at him.

"I'd get sick if I would have had mirrors put at the ceiling." She shrugged. "I have developed quite a healthy sense of paranoia running from your charming brother." She seemed to remember something and turned around to him, while putting her bag down and one finger in the air. "By the way, I'll have this house signed over to someone human by tomorrow so that your brother will not be able to get in here. I know he knows I am human once again and I know that he will be after me as soon as his New Orleans business is settled. Something you are so looking forward to watching, aren't you?", she added with a sweet smile and he smiled back while raising his eyebrows.

"Why show me your place anyway if you do not trust me at all?", he asked.

She looked at him in silence for a moment, the smile still playing around her mouth. Then her face changed to spiteful again and she turned around while saying "You looked so lost standing there alone."

He heard her heels clacking on the floor and he smiled to himself while following her. Her sharp tongue was part of why he had fallen for her.

"Beer?", he heard her voice from the room behind a door left of his living room and he cocked his head to a side. Well, it couldn't hurt, could it?

~He felt her body against his, her hot lips against his, her hands in his hair, her hair playing against his naked shoulders.

And most of all, he heard her heart beating. Fast. He felt and heard her gasping for breath, realized that her vagina was getting wet. Things he had never experienced while having sex with her when she was a vampire. Actually, he had never experienced them at all before. And it turned him on. A lot.

And at the same time she felt so fragile in his arms. So breakable, so light. And he liked that, too.~

He knew that she had gotten him again. His eyes swept to her night stand, where a diary lay. Katerina Petrova writing a diary. It was tempting. She was downstairs, did not have vampire speed and hearing and maybe, just maybe, she had even written down a few things about him. But the second he developed the thought he dismissed it again.

He knew he should have walked away. He really should have. That moment he had seen her in the town square. He should have just gone, leaving her wondering whether he had been there at all. But over the millennium he had spend wandering this planet he could only remember loving two girls. Tatia and Katerina. Maybe he had even fallen for Elena a bit, the first time he had seen her. He obviously was not an inch smarter than either of the Salvatore brothers. Still, that wasn't the point.

The point was Katerina sitting down there having breakfast, after a night they had spent together. Katerina, who was asking one thing of him. She knew how to play him, obviously. As she knew how to play anybody, really.

This was the reason he tried to keep away from her. But something always drew him back to her.

He could already picture his heart being broken again. Like it always was when he realized that he had to run. Run from her, because she was ruining him. Always. Wrecking him. But he knew, that he would not run from her this time till she got what she wanted.

Because he loved her.

He groaned again and ran his hand through his hair, before he got up and dressed.

When he entered the kitchen she looked up from a glossy magazine with all kinds of half-naked men posing on the pages and a cup of coffee.

Instead of a greeting he asked "How did you even afford all this?" while sitting down across from her and watching her closely.

"I had some money put aside while I was a vampire. Once I am one again I will just compel me more, that's the way it works, isn't it?" She shrugged and took a sip of coffee. "You know what the only good side about being a human is?" She giggled and threw her hair over one shoulder. "I have so much time. And nobody's trying to kill me. At least not quite yet. Even though I can imagine Rebekha will want to have a go quite soon."

He looked down onto his hands lying interlocked on the table before saying: "And I like you better like this."

That caught her attention. "You do?", she asked and looked at him suspicious.

He raised his eyes and looked her straight in the eye. "Yes, I do", he told her, simple and straight.

"Do you love me?", she whispered, got up, leaving her coffee and her magazine be, and came around the table to where he sat. She then knelt down in front of him and cupped his face with her hand while looking him straight into the eye.

"Yes", he said again and he felt his voice break at the end. And he hated himself for it.

"You know", she whispered "exactly what I want. One thing only. Elijah, you can give that to me. You can make me happy. And keep me at your side forever. I'll go anywhere with you. I'll love you like you have never been loved before" Easy enough, he thought to himself. "and I will be with you every single day of eternity. Win-win, isn't it?"

"After you have killed Elena Gilbert, if possible Klaus and every single person who has ever displeased you, as your rage about being turned into a human is still fresh right now", he summed it up, and she didn't even try to argue.

"You love me", she just said and he knew that she was right.

With unintended force he pulled her to her feet and pushed her against a wall, looking her into the eye as he said "And after this, I will hate you", felt his teeth appear and ripped open his wrist without really thinking about it. He pressed his arm against her mouth and felt her suck at it like she would have if she were a vampire at that moment.

She gasped for breath and slid the wall down a bit as he released her, her mouth dripping with his blood and her brown eyes looking at him like she probably never had looked at anyone before – admiring.

His hands found her face and for a split second she looked scared, before he snapped her neck. And somehow, after all the love he had felt a few minutes ago, this felt even better.

Without a backward glance he left the house at vampire speed, never bothering to make her comfortable or be there once she woke up.

But he heard it on the news, an unexplained murder in a small town. Animal attack, probably. And he knew that he had put himself on the wrong side of Klaus for her once again. That he had fallen for her once again. That she had broken his heart once again.