one: did i just rewrite this whole thing for no reason and waste my time when i should have been doing work? you bet i did!
two: did i also just delete a whole bunch of my old stories because the cringe was literally going to kill me? hell yeah.
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the valiant never taste of death
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The first person she kills is herself.
The second is her family.
Katherine watches the funerals with a black, netted veil dragged over her face, expensive gloves covering the shaking of her fingers. Ethereal morning light glows over the fresh soil, casting a soft hue against the lush roses Katherine presses affectionately to her mother's grave, something in her throat. She stays until every last dark figure is gone, even the sad-eyed priest, staring at her mother's name with a desperate, ragged aching in her chest.
It's a bright day, the morning air bursting to life around her.
Quiet Bulgarian falls from her mouth as Katherine sinks to her knees, bending her head low.
Mama, I am sorry. I love you.
I wish I had saved you.
Her breaths hitch when she gets to her feet and the whisky burns down her throat.
.
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She is beautiful enough, they say, to rival Aphrodite herself.
The fate of the doomed Petrova doppelganger, Katherine discovers in the library of an old Bulgarian noble she's managed to charm her way into, surrounded by ancient text and cracking scrolls. She runs her finger down the yellowed pages, reading intently of Tatia Petrova, unable to look away from the pencilled drawing of the girl. She looks exactly like the face Katherine sees in the mirror that it brings a shiver down her spine.
The doppelgangers are all pure beauty, dark eyes and sensuous pouts to the mouth. Many a man would burn for even a taste of those lips, Katherine reads, something hot and angry burning deep inside her. Everything she reads of the Petrova line blames the obsession with them, as though a pretty face was enough to bring cities to dust.
Lord Niklaus Mikaelson wants to rip out her throat over some slab of rock because she wears the right face, she thinks. Something blistering and bitter blazes inside her, at the sheer injustice of it all. It is not her fault, she wants to scream.
And yet, Mama died anyway.
"Lady Katerina?" The Bulgarian lord blinks at her, the cloudiness still misted over his eyes.
His figure casts a shadow across her book and Katherine slams it shut, her throat thick. She lifts her head to look at him, guilt writhing deep in her stomach at the mere sight of him. He is a large man, all rippling shoulders and a face chiselled by the gods, but one look at her and he fell to pieces, ready to be remoulded by her fingers.
Is it the Petrova allure in her or the monster she became?
She does not like the thought of leading the man astray, of proving the Petrova allure true, but Mama would want her to live. Katherine knows this to be true. Her mother had clasped her fingers tight before she had been sent away, had held her all through the night, and before Papa found out, Mama used to send her letters. She was her mother's joy and her mother was her heart until Niklaus Mikaelson came along.
The reminder of the monster sets Katherine's jaw taut.
"Katherine," she corrects snappishly, her accent rough like trying to draw jagged rocks together. "It is Katherine now."
.
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The boy's breath is caught, staring at her so much he almost forgets her hand is still in his grasp. Even as Katherine seats herself in the gilded carriage, sparkling in the light of the old moon and stars, she clears her throat delicately.
A hot flush crawls from the column of his throat to his cheeks, staining them a loud red. Olivier lets go of her fingers quickly.
"I'm sorry, my lady," Olivier says in a rush.
Katherine tilts her head at him, knowing for certain now that it is the Petrova allure that has captivated him so. Something sticks in her throat at that thought and then she swallows hard, tamping down the rise of frustration that seeks to overwhelm her completely. Her chest feels hot with an irrational anger.
It is not the boy's fault he is tangled in the doppelganger allure, she tries to tell herself. Even so, Katherine thinks that she could eat him, drain him completely so that his body breaks and she fling it over into the rivers, running the waters red. The thought is fleeting, brief.
Instead, Katherine shakes her head and says, "Come, Olivier, we must away."
"Yes, my lady," Olivier mumbles, his cheeks still flushed.
Katherine ignores it, focusing on the travel papers in front of her. She smooths out the crackled pages, her heart in her mouth as she reminds herself. She must be clever and leave no marks, no trails.
Faster than Klaus, smarter than Elijah. Better than Rebekah. Her very life and soul depends upon it; she will never have her throat ripped out over some rock to make her enemy's life even stronger. Something terrible and worn blooms across her chest and Katherine wonders briefly if the journey will ever stop. Will she ever get to live the life she's dreamed of or will she spend her days running and scheming for a desperate breath?
And who will she become, then?
She already does not seem to recognise the person she has become now. Katherine's throat sticks a little as she turns her gaze towards the window, something uncomfortable burning in her chest. The sun is coming up, she realises, and calls to Olivier to make the horses ride faster. She uses a gloved hand to pull down the curtains of her carriage.
Katherine pauses to look outside for one last time.
The French Revolution is a gloried bloodbath, staining those beautifully stoned cobbled streets, flushed red in the pale light of a grey dawn. Already, her handiwork produces fast results though really, Katherine thinks, she has the humans to thank for it all. The guillotine is stained a permanent flaming scarlet; the Princess Marie's white diamond necklace shattering as it falls to the ground, stained in flecks of dirt and red.
Katherine continues pulling the curtains down.
She wonders when she started thinking of the humans as the other, something uncomfortable niggling in her stomach.
"A little faster, Olivier."
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When she dreams, she dreams of monsters with teeth sharp enough to slice her heart and the siren song of the Petrova allure.
Katherine wakes screaming, the image of her mother's bleeding throat burning in the back of her skull. She gasps for breath, a thin line of gleaming sweat lining her forehead and her heart pounding like a drum. It does not take her too long to catch herself and when she is finished, Katherine knows she cannot possibly get back to sleep again.
Instead, she pulls on her gloves and steps outside in the cold night.
A party is never far away in this city and Katherine needs the distraction. Before she knows it, she is amongst the ridiculously wealthy, their silver spoons still hanging out of their spoiled, painted lips. The ladies surround her with sugared compliments and snippets of information while the men eye her as though she's the damsel and they're just burning to sink their teeth into her.
Katherine tries to lap it all up like the smug, elegant cat she is, her heart still beating a furious staccato.
"What did the curtains do to you, pretty darling?" A deep voice drawls.
She barely flinches at the curve of the shadow, only holding herself back from rolling her eyes just in time. The man is handsome, she thinks, but there's something about him that tilts his smile a little askew. Katherine wonders what brought this man to her this time with a sort of bored frustration. Her pretty eyes that many a man could burn for, her smile that they'd insisted was too beautiful to grace for the whole world?
What will it be, this time?
"Excuse me?" Katherine mutters, her head lifted.
The man gestures to the curtains she'd been glaring at, a crooked tilt to his mouth. "You were burning a pretty good hole in them," he says, and when she looks at him properly, she thinks there is something familiar in his features.
Something about the eyes, Katherine thinks to herself and then, she stills. He looks like Elijah.
She thought there were only three of them, but it's only recently that Katherine has discovered Niklaus Mikaelson has more siblings. They say the one before her could be the worst of them all—hedonistic, intoxicating, and damning. Katherine thinks she can see it, though she still thinks Elijah the devastatingly handsome one of them all.
"I'm sorry," she says, her voice light and easy. Her heart bangs in her chest so fierce that she knows he must hear it. "I must be getting home—,"
"Not so fast, Katerina," he says and when he reaches for her wrist, the strength from his fingers snaps the bones sharply.
Katherine feels the break, winces in the same second as she straightens, breathing hard. "Finnick or Kol?"
His lips quirk. "You've been doing your reading," he says, his eyes bright and his voice pleased. "Kol Mikaelson. Pleasure."
"Charmed," Katherine grits out tightly.
For a blinding moment, she wonders if she will see her mother again.
Kol Mikaelson's smile is arresting, his gaze raking over her face in fascination. Katherine hates the way he looks at her, wanting nothing more than to break his wrist back, to run. Kol is the one who plays, she knows. The one who will pick her flesh from his teeth instead of giving her up to Niklaus, simply because he felt like it.
"You look exactly like her," he comments lazily, sounding vaguely awed. "Down to the doe-eyes. Amazing, isn't it?"
"So I've been told," Katherine says, and to her surprise, Kol lets out a bark of laughter.
"They never told me you had bite," he tells her. "Nik says you caught Elijah's eye, so I figured you had to be as boring as him. But you… look like you know how to have some fun."
She hates herself for this, but Katherine lifts her head up, fixes her eyes on his. No compulsion because Kol is not stupid, she reminds herself, the dull ache of her snapped wrist sparking up a bloom of pain. Instead, she leans forward into his space, lets her chest rise a little, and bites her lip.
"You want to play with me, then?" Katherine says throatily, her voice deep and sultry as she smiles at him.
Kol lets out a breath between his teeth. "I'm tempted, love, I really am," he says. "But I don't go for my brother's girl."
"I can admire that," she admits truthfully as Kol laughs again. "A man of integrity."
"You still think we're men?" Kol says, tilting his head.
Katherine's gaze flashes towards him. "Aren't you?" she challenges.
The way Kol chuckles low has her bristling a little, patronising and careless as though she's said something stupid. She never liked to be called stupid. How many kids had she sent crying to their mothers, had she knocked to the dirt, when she was younger in school? Mama had been displeased, but she could never stay angry with Katherine for long.
"You don't get it, do you?" Kol tells her, his voice serious. "We're not men. We're not humans. What we are, is doomed. We're cursed."
"Because we're waiting to die?"
"Because we're waiting," he corrects. "Everything else around us will die." He points to a few of the men and ladies who are dancing in the party. "They will rot in the ground and then they will rise anew. Everything will burn to ash and crumble to dust around us. Yet, we still go on. We still live. We cannot have our peace."
Katherine eyes him, but when she speaks, her voice is soft.
"What makes you think we deserve peace?"
.
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Once she realises that she is a monster, the dreams stop.
Katherine is still not sure why Kol Mikaelson let her steal away in the night, cradling her broken wrist. She has half a mind to think that he simply felt like it and sends up a breathless prayer for her mother for it even so. She had once thought that Klaus was the one guided by his whims and thoughtless desires but Kol seems to fill that spot.
Or perhaps he only wants her to think that way, she thinks and makes the driver go faster.
"My mother is a witch," the little girl insists when Katherine steps into New Orleans.
Her lips quirk. "Well, that's not very nice."
The little girl scowls at her and for a fleeting moment, Katherine lets herself think of her daughter cradled in her arms before her father snatched her away. She wonders if her baby would have given her that scowl, too, would have loved her back as deeply as Katherine would her. She's not so delirious and stupid as to think that she is worth loving, even now, a few hundred years later.
She wonders if her mother would care to know what Katherine is now.
"She is," the girl insists. "I promise!"
"Well, then," Katherine says, "can you take me to her?"
When the girl's mother sees her, Katherine's throat sticks at the obvious ripple of fear creasing the witch's face. Perhaps her beloved Mama had looked like that just before Niklaus Mikaelson had sliced her throat like the mad, rabid thing he was, she thinks, and she has to clutch the wood of the table to contain herself. If the wood cracks a little under her strength, nobody mentions it.
The witch breathes hard. "We don't entertain your kind here," she warns, and Katherine's stomach drops at that. She demands, grasping her daughter protectively. "What do you want, vampire?"
"Just a spell," Katherine tells her, both subdued and brimming with an irrational fury at the same time. When she speaks again, she has calmed herself down and the lie slips from her mouth with ease. "I don't mean you any harm."
Katherine Pierce has garnered a reputation now. She leaves a string of broken hearts and torn flesh in her footsteps, unforgiving and cold as ever. Everything she has ever done, every step she has taken is for her survival. So that she may be able to, as Kol Mikaelson so eloquently put it, live.
"I told you," the witch says, magic crackling at her fingertips, "we don't entertain vampires here."
Her face hardens, her gaze turning pointedly to the little girl's throat where the vein beats desperately.
"And I told you. I only want a spell."
.
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"You enjoy it," Rebekah Mikaelson says lazily, examining her perfectly manicured nails.
She fixes the gauzy tattered curtains blowing in the light breeze with a critical eye. The earthy scent of wild roses fills the air, fresh and youthful as the Original wants to be again. It mingles with the cold acrid smell of cooling fires and smoking guns, sickening and choking to the throat.
Katherine doesn't dare to breathe, back pressed against the soft crumbling brick, still smoking of the roaring red fires that had consumed them whole. The spell should be holding, she thinks to herself desperately. It must, it should. Rebekah cannot see her here.
But the Original continues to speak, her voice drawling. "Nik and Elijah chasing you through the centuries, dropping everything for little old you."
Jealousy, Katherine thinks, her breaths fraught. Rebekah really is a child.
"I'm loyal to Nik, you know that," Rebekah continues airily, long slim fingers pulling out a soft white cigarette. She lights the thing, curling tendrils of dove grey smoke wafting towards where Katherine hides, the sharp acrid smell almost making her choke. "But I'm also loyal to Elijah. Always and forever after all."
She inhales and blows softly, fragile wisps of silvery smoke framed in the cold morning air.
Katherine blinks amidst her confusion. Could it be—
A golden silence hangs between them, thick and heavily stifling. It breaks by the chirping of a blackbird, a trilling sound that jars the tense atmosphere and shatters it like glass.
Rebekah crushes her cigarette gracefully under one black high heeled suede boot. She turns to look at where Katherine is hiding, in the secret room in the walls of the fallen palace, where the rebels had stormed the place and turned it over, blood soaking the red bricks and glass.
For a moment she will later regret and deem silly, Katherine thinks she sees Rebekah Mikaelson.
Not the Original vampire who found out she'd taken refuge with the House of Romanov, disarming them with her mischievous smile and playful antics. Not the merciless killer who'd promptly orchestrated the fall of an entire empire just to root out the doppelganger from within an incandescent palace, outlined in the irresistible gold of a gleaming sunrise.
She sees a girl, just a girl who wants to live.
Just like her, Katherine thinks, and something sticks in her throat.
What terrible things they must do, just to live.
Rebekah cants her head up to the opulent chandelier where it swings, dangerously precarious, limned in the pale light of the rising dawn, the sky flecked with gold and light blue. She gives a little sigh.
"This is only for Elijah," Rebekah promises, her voice a harsh, cracked thing. "You have a day, doppelganger. Use it wisely."
Then the Original is gone.
She leaves nothing but the thick scent of musty smoke, mingled with the classic fragrance of wild roses and delicate violets lingering behind.
Katherine thinks desperately, a trap.
It must be, it has to be.
Yet, when she takes a tentative step out of her hiding place, the only sound she hears is the crumbling pieces of the arched golden ceiling.
Katherine seizes her opportunity and runs for her life. She flits the ballroom, just as the chandelier comes crashing to the ground in an elegant aria of cacophonous, white cut crystals and shattering clear glass, spraying the ballroom with clouds of silvery ash, framed in slants of golden dawn light.
She sends the Original a box of the finest cigars when she gets to a safe place and they never speak of it again.
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You will never have me, Katherine thinks fiercely.
She watches with dark hooded eyes, from the safety of the curling canopy of the forest, as Elena's neck is torn apart. The doppelganger's body crumples in Klaus' arms, snapped like a fragile twig, her long hair swaying in the breeze, limned in the glowing red embers of the fires. Blood so intoxicating, so strong Katherine can smell it from where she hides, drenches the old rock completely and the hybrid lets out a shattering roar. He drops the young girl carelessly.
Elena's lifeless body falls to the ground, stained rubies seeping into the dirt around her neck. Katherine's eyes linger on Elena's fallen body, the last of her kin.
She'll say she feels nothing and that would be a lie, but she is used to those, silver-tongued fox that she is. The Petrova line will end with Elena, Katherine thinks, and remembers all those years ago when she had found the book in some old Bulgarian lord's library. Tatia's perfect face pressed into the yellowed pages. The doppelgangers will no longer be doomed because they will no longer exist.
If only Elena had wanted to live just as desperately as she had, Katherine thinks, and she drinks a shot that burns through her throat for the girl who had her face and died for it.
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the end
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a/n: i hope you liked it :D