This one you can thank Teenage-Witch94 for. She asked for Katherine in Evolution. It... changed, as you can see.
Katherine makes references to things that happen in Evolution and Changes. I suggest reading both of those first. She also makes a reference to Faith from BtVS, which I'm fairly sure you can ignore if you don't know who that is.
I still own nothing but a computer. Ask Joss Whedon about Buffy, and ask LJ Smith, Julie Plec, and Kevin Williamson about The Vampire Diaries.
Pairings: Katherine/Stefan and mentions of Damon/Elena
You listen to me. I've been alive a bit longer than you, and dead a lot longer than that. I've seen things you couldn't imagine, and done things I prefer you didn't. Don't exactly have a reputation for being a thinker. I follow my blood...which doesn't exactly rush in the direction of my brain sometimes. So I make a lot of mistakes. A lot of wrong bloody calls. A hundred-plus years, and there's only one thing I've ever been sure of. You.
-Spike, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, "Touched"
She's been a lot of things in her five hundred years.
Daughter, sister, mother, human, vampire, lover, fugitive. You name it.
She's lied and cheated and stolen and killed, tricked so many men into believing that she loved them. It's saved her skin, but she can't help thinking it's ironic that the one time that it didn't help her, it was actually true.
She's done a lot of things in her time, things she's not proud of. Letting Stefan believe that she was dead is one of them.
When Stefan tells her that he doesn't love her, has never loved her, the amount of hurt the words cause astounds her. The sheer need to curl up somewhere with a tub of ice cream and a bottle of absinthe is new to her.
She's never been the girl to have her heart broken. To let some boy get to her.
She grabs a nearby light and stabs Stefan through the stomach with it, wanting to cause him the same pain he caused her.
"You hate me, huh?" she manages to get out through teeth clenched in heartbreak, rage, hate, love. "That sounds like the beginning of a love story, Stefan, not the end of one."
And it is one, eventually. Not the fairytale romance she dreamed of when she was a child.
But she isn't a child anymore, and this one is good enough for her.
Katherine lives by two rules, one of which she laughs at when she hears a character on a TV show say it as she flicks her set on one day.
The first is simple: Live. It doesn't matter how, just live.
The one she laughs at is just as simple: Want. Take. Have.
She's well aware of the irony of that line.
A vampire in love with a human.
It sounds like something from a storybook.
Pearl would have laughed if Katherine had ever breathed a word of it to her.
But Katherine doesn't particularly care what it sounds like.
Katherine finds that her doppelgänger isn't as different from her as she appears to be.
Elena is just as selfish as Katherine herself is.
The only difference is that Elena hides it better.
"Oh, my dear mini-me," Katherine whispers to herself in the language of her childhood when she realizes what Elena is planning. "Someone's been naughty."
Damon looks at her askance when he hears the Bulgarian words, but she just smirks at him. She'll tell him that Elena wants him just as much as he wants Elena when it's time.
Until then, she can just sit back with a glass of blood and watch the fireworks.
She wonders if this is what Pearl felt like back in 1864, when she heard about Katherine and the Salvatore brothers.
It's a curious thought.
She can't deny that part of her feels sorry for Stefan when she figures out that he knows about Damon and Elena's dalliance too.
They spend a night together at the Boarding House when the other two players in their twisted love square are both at the Grill.
"How did it come to this?" Stefan sighs.
There are so many answers to that question that Katherine has difficulty choosing one. In the end, she just stays silent.
That seems to be happening more and more each time she's alone with Stefan.
Some nights Katherine finds herself ghosting into Stefan's room and curling up beside him.
She doesn't do anything (often doesn't even want to do anything) on these nights except shut her eyes and listen to his breathing until it lulls her to sleep. Half the time, she wakes up the next morning to find that Stefan has laid a blanket over her before leaving the room.
He never mentions these nights, just lets her come and go as she needs to.
She thinks that she loves him a little bit more for that.
Katherine doesn't trust easily, not after Klaus.
Beautiful Pearl and her daughter Annabelle (both young and so old at once- it confuses Katherine sometimes, how Annabelle can have eyes older than the soldiers she's seen come back from war, but still wear such a young face) are the first she's managed to since the Original had killed those she loved.
She never regrets that trust.
Leaving Pearl in that tomb, on the other hand, is something that she's never quite forgiven herself for.
"Why are you still here?" Damon asks when he finds her on the couch sipping a cupful of blood, reading.
She shrugs.
She has nowhere else to go, but she isn't going to tell Damon that. Instead she says something cleverly witty, and he acknowledges the shot with a smirk and a lift of his scotch glass in her direction before leaving.
Stefan finally snaps when he finds Elena asleep in Damon's bed one night, and they leave town the next morning.
It takes nearly a decade before Stefan (the oblivious boy) realizes that Katherine lets him decide where they go next most of the time.
Even though she curls her nose up at places like Seattle and Berlin- anywhere very cold, really- she still accepts his decisions, which isn't very Katherine at all.
She laughs when he brings this up one night in Toronto, drawing envious stares from the people surrounding them that they both ignore with practiced ease.
"Haven't you learned by now, Stefan? I don't play by the rules. Even my own."
"You don't believe in rules, Katherine," he says with a resigned smile and she laughs again, at both the truth of the statement and the tone of voice that Stefan says it in.
She's not quite surprised when he kisses her.
Nearly, yes.
But not quite.