So, for all that I (passive-aggressively) harass authors to update frequently, it seems I'm very bad at it myself. Excuses aside, though they are fairly good, I truly do intend to finish this - all of it - before Season 2 starts. I've got a much better idea of what this whole deal will look like which means I'll procrastinate a bit less (because it's a bit less daunting). In any case, thanks for reading! Still rated T, for language.

I'm actually glad that I don't own The Vampire Diaries, because I would (still) want to do filthy things with Damon (et al) and then I would be no better than ol' Stephanie M. Zing! Don't hate, she said so herself!

~When We Become

The Gilbert house was silent when Jeremy slipped back into consciousness. Dying with his eyes closed, his first experience of the world came through a scent. Beyond the smell of his own vomit, dried across his face and sour in his mouth, he could sense – almost feel – a rusty aroma pouring over him like honey.

Without a visual anchor, he felt like he was sinking in it, drowning in it – like all those times he'd gone to bed drunk, closing his eyes and wishing that his head would stop reeling so that he could sleep.

But this intoxication – it was gentle, slow even. Like time had stagnated, letting each torture-slow moment turn his powerlessness into something exquisite.

But he had to open his eyes. There was whispering in the house, someone speaking low and quick, and he wondered absently why his house was filled with the smell of blood. He blinked to adjust to the light of his bedside lamp. It was bad enough to be dying alone; he hadn't wanted to die in the dark as well.

Stumbling to the washroom he shared with Elena, he moved his limbs experimentally and found them no different. In fact, the feeling of familiarity went deeper than his skin. He felt that ever-present weight of sorrow pulling him back into bed, back into his pill bottles and dime bags he had escaped into after his parents' death, and resisted after Vicky's. For a while there had been something more; he had to be sober to find Vicky, he had to be sober with Anna.

Once again he found himself cut loose from those people who grounded him, and he wanted so badly to drift back into old habits, to avoid, to deny, to self-medicate with anything he could get his hands on.

But he shouldn't want that. Rather, he shouldn't need that. Becoming a vampire was supposed to let him escape all of his grief and still live. It was supposed to be a way to avoid the pain of being human without letting addiction ravage and destroy what was left. It sounded too good to be true, certainly. Now it seemed that it probably was.

But Damon and Anna couldn't have lied to him about this. They had no reason to. And now Anna was dead, and he was completely alone: there was not a soul he could look to for guidance.

He splashed his face, rubbing it clean with Elena's facewash. He brushed his teeth, that familiar minty taste sealing his disappointment. He pushed Elena's door open crack, though multiple drives were telling him not to: what if I have to talk to her? What if I want to eat her?

But the room was empty, the desk lamp on. Her clock radio read three-oh-three.

Drying his face, he slipped into the hall. The whispering continued, words hanging just below his comprehension. His hearing had improved, but it was no better than before he had killed his it with concerts and iPod earbuds. But it was definitely whispering, and it was coming from Jenna's room. The air in the hall was thick with blood, and he struggled to keep his focus while he pushed through it.

He stopped just outside Jenna's room, laquered wood door reddened with age, and closed his eyes. He ignored the itching dryness building in his throat, and listened; it had a rhythm to it, a metred give-and-take, with a distinct refrain.

It wasn't Mr. Saltzman. It sounded female – it sounded almost like Elena. It was Elena's voice, but with a subtle, gravelly edge, like a smoker's.

Elena sounded level, calm, persistent, like she was speaking to a child. Jenna was listless, dreamy; half-compelled, half-resistant. She had herbal tea with Alaric after their dinners at his place, and it left enough of a shield to repel gentle compulsion.

"Jenna, look at me. Look at me, Jenna."

"He wouldn't do that. Let me up, Elena, I have to check on Jeremy."

"He did, Jenna. You're not listening. Look at me."

"Damon wouldn't do that. Why would he do that?"

"Because Damon is a bad person, Jenna. I've told you this. You need to listen."

"But he likes you. He likes all of us. He wouldn't. Let me up, Elena, I have to check on Jeremy."

"But he did, Jenna. He's a bad person."

"I saw you kissing him. He wouldn't do that to us."

"Damon killed Uncle John. Uncle John is dead in the kitchen because of Damon."

"Uncle John isn't dead. He's my age. Let me up, Elena, I have to check on Jeremy."

"I can't let you go, Jenna, not until you listen to me. Look at me."

Strictly speaking, of all the people Jeremy had to mourn over, Uncle John would never make the list of Notables. He was just another casualty – of what, he frankly didn't care to know.

"Is there someone at the door?"

Jeremy was still as death – the creaking spots on the old wood floor could not have betrayed him.

There was abrupt silence on the other side of the door. Like frightened prey, all three froze and waited for a sound. The doorknob turned, and the door opened wide enough for Elena's tiny face to show through, though it was still withdrawn and shadowed. The room behind was dark, and smelled like lilacs from the tree outside the bedroom window. The window must have been open, letting full moonlight flood in.

Too late, he realized that his feet would have obscured some of the hallway light that seeped under the door.

Elena smiled at him, then slipped into the hallway, making sure she pulled the door closed just behind her. The burnished brass latch caught with barely a snick.

"Jeremy," she said, wringing innocense and concern from her smile to wash away the suspicion of her behaviour. Because, Jeremy had to admit, it was extremely suspicious.

She took his hands into hers, and looked up at him, deeply, with a studied expression of heartfelt compassion.

"Don't fucking touch me, Elena." Without missing a beat, he shook his hands free. She let them go, and clasped hers in front of her with another studied pose; this time, one of matronly worry. A flicker of genuine confusion touched her face, but was folded into the furrowed brow of her artifice a moment later.

"Jenna's taken ill. She's been sleeping since she got home."

He returned a hard, scornful look. "Are you kidding me? You think I couldn't hear you talking to her? You're a better liar than that."

He turned on his heel, dismissing his sister and getting caught in the riptide of thirst as he worked his way towards the stairs.

Another attempt. "Jeremy, I'm so sorry. Uncle John is dead."

"No shit, Elena. I could smell the blood from my room."

He hadn't taken a step before he felt himself crushed against the wall, ribcage compressed with the persuasion of a linebacker into the matte cream walls. Katherine's limited patience had expired and another word out of that insolent boy's mouth, any word at all, would set her off.

A part of her didn't want to break character yet. It was rather nice being Elena Gilbert, after all the people she'd been. Teenage girlhood was not an unfamiliar state; even she had been one once.

It seemed like a very long time ago, now.

She'd hoped she would have more time – until dawn would have been nice. She had a very long To-Do list in Mystic Falls and many of those things could have been accomplished effortlessly as a girl everyone knew and loved; needless to say, those who truly knew Katherine did not love her. She was a very polarizing individual, and generally once she was hated it was irreversible. She would have edited "generally" out of the thought as it was actually a certainty, but didn't want to discount the possibility of flukes of the universe. She was counting on one now.

But she would worry about that later. She had enough to keep herself occupied before she had to start betting on quantum aberrations.

In another life, she might have said she was hoping for a miracle. In this life, as a rule, miracles did not work in her interest.

Katherine pulled Jeremy off the wall, pinning his body to hers, back to chest, and with an unyielding gentleness she pulled his head back so that she could bury her face in his neck.

She didn't bother to think about how inappropriate that gesture was, given that she was currently Elena, sister of Jeremy. She inhaled, deep and slow, giving her inner monster free reign. She watched his pulse, and felt the blood moving beneath her fingers on his body.

She did not react. She desperately wanted to, but she didn't. There was nothing appetizing about his blood. She spent her life suppressing the transformation that would betray her, and now? Nothing.

Jeremy was Dead.

Straining for that hook that would get her, like it always did, she nearly cried when the nearest draw was the pool of vervain-laced blood coagulating on the kitchen floor. She didn't know why she nearly cried, but the redness in her eyes, as she slammed Jeremy back into the wall and headed for the bathroom, was not a symptom of bloodlust.

Maybe she'd hoped that he'd be a bigger person than that.

"Goddamn you, Jer. Go to your room," she called back. "I'll deal with you later."

Rigid against the wall, and numb with shock, he released himself slowly and looked on, dumbfounded, as Elena vented her anger on the bathroom door. He heard the water start running, through the support walls of the house, and the sound of the shower turning on.

There was something completely un-Elena about her tone. Elena did not have a pitiless note in her voice that, even in an offhand remark, held absolute certainty that she would not be disobeyed. This Elena did not offer up her woundedness in rituals of social bonding. This Elena, Jeremy thought disturbingly, was not his equal.

A forgotten, primitive instinct directed him to his room, where he stayed, staring obediently at the only blank wall.

XXX

The police came, and in a few hours questionned, collected, and left. Katherine directed the operation, whether the police officers knew it or not; she had showered to explain her absence, her obliviousness, until the time of discovery.

Now wrapped in the blue silk robe Elena had never found occasion to wear, she draped a flannel blanket around Jeremy's shoulders as he sat at his desk chair.

That endearing, concerned smile: "He's in shock. It's best that he be left alone for now."

They left without a word of argument.

Jenna's body, smothered into unconcsciousness but still alive, was loaded into an ambulance, and Uncle John's body was taken out, just as the sky was brightening with dawn. Closing the door on the last officer, Katherine wasted no time getting back into Jeremy's room.

He sat, huddled in the dark, pale and white and sweating and clearly dying – for good this time. The blinds were closed and curtains drawn, a preternatural undead wariness of the sun driving him to hole up for the day.

But he had been a good boy, doing what he was told and telling the nice officers exactly what he was supposed to.

Industriously, she went to the window and flung the curtains wide. She raised the blinds. Jeremy shrunk into the room's only shadowy corner. Katherine pulled open a dresser drawer and threw him a hoodie.

"Clean yourself up, Jeremy. We've got some errands to run."

She left him to dress as she went again to Elena's closet. Hanging among half-outfits, skirts and pants and shirts, was a spotless white sundress, pressed and ready to wear. Bare of embroidery and adorned only with a virginal white layer of lace peeking from beneath the hem, Katherine was instantly enamoured. That dress spoke of purity, innocence, clean slates and new beginnings. It had been a long, long time since Katherine had the gall to wear white.

On second thought, she had the gall but not the desire – playing the seductress was much more fun. But the time for that was over and a new era had dawned in Katherine's life. Well, an old era, but a second run at it, and this time she wouldn't be haunted by shadows of a forewritten future.

She donned the dress, which fell just below her knees, and tied the gauzy sash. Even if she could see blood spilled down the front, soaked through from collar to hem, as easily as she could look at the endless, peerless white in the mirror, in it she felt like the person she had intended to be.

She had really always intended to be that person, the one who could wear white and mean it. Having tried and been thwarted so often, she was left morally flexible at best, bereft at worst; people would get hurt in her pursuit of redemption, but such crimes could be added to the long list of those for which she would not be forgiven.

She wasn't about to let that stop her. But first things first – she had to sort out Jeremy.

XXX

Jeremy had locked himself in the bathroom when Katherine came for him a few minutes later. They had another fifteen minutes or so before the sun came up and there was really no time to waste.

Katherine had to prod Jeremy down the stairs, quite literally, and guide him with both hands out the front door. He pulled the strings of his hood so that it closed around his face, and pulled his sleeves over his hands. He had really not planned on dying this way, and while he wasn't sure what sunlight would do to a half-turned vampire, he wanted to put off the discovery for as long as possible.

That, and he was now deeply terrified of daylight. Even the chirping of the early birds was scaring the hell out of him.

Katherine pushed him down into the passenger seat and buckled his seatbelt over his crossed arms. She was toeing a pretty blurry line, between the human Jeremy thought she was and her true vampire self; still, she decided to walk around to the driver's seat at a human pace. It couldn't hurt to play the part, just in case there was a chance in hell that Jeremy still believed she was his sister. She didn't think he was that stupid, but she didn't underestimate the truth of that old adage, seeing is believing.

The bowl on the kitchen counter had held two sets of car keys, among others, and by chance she had chosen the right ones for Jenna's car.

"You could have left me, you know," said Jeremy, voice muffled by his hood.

Katherine started the car and began pulling out.

"So you could suck the blood out of the cracks between the tiles? I don't think so," Katherine muttered. Every moment that passed with Jeremy made her glad that she was the only teenager she'd had to raise.

They drove on in tense silence for a few minutes; the silence broke into argument for the next few minutes, as nearing death put Jeremy in a foul mood.

Reaching the centre of town, Katherine slowed down. She crept along, looking for that warehouse, that parking lot; things looked so different in daylight.

Right, daylight.

She sped up. Jeremy would not thank her for dallying.

She spotted a carpark, gates swung wide, the entrance obscured by closely packed houses and foliage. Smelling smoke, she turned down the lane and parked at the door where the good townspeople had dragged their outed vampires to be killed.

Not bothering to lock the car, she helped Jeremy out – he was too weak to stand up on his own – and supported him, enshrouded in hoodie as he was, through the warehouse door. Once inside, he pushed it off his head. The space was unfamiliar to him, but it was dark. He wondered if she was going to leave him there til sundown, or until he died; if that was the case, he had a pretty good idea which would happen first.

She guided him down the stairs, supporting him as they jumped the last four that had burned away completely. The dark hallway on the floor above was bright as day next to the pitch-darkness of the basement.

Jeremy could see nothing, but Katherine, with a faint, feral yellow luminosity to her eyes, inspected the structural integrity of the room – or what was left of it.

She kneeled down and began manually investigating something on the ground. "Someone must have thought to close the door. Smothers the fire, eventually," she added for Jeremy's benefit.

He was leaning against the wall, too weak to support his own weight. He did not reply.

"I've got Anna over here, I think. Feels like her. A bit of hair left." She didn't need to mention that Anna was now a mass of crusted blackened bone. She didn't linger on her face – all a vampire truly has is her immortality, and the death of a friend was a poignant reminder that the guarantee of eternal youth and beauty was not an unqualified guarantee of eternal life.

She reached behind Anna's neck and undid the clasp that, mercifully, was undamaged. The rest of the chain had not been so fortunate; Katherine could feel the mottled, tarnished silver beneath her fingers, and the lapis lazuli that hung like a large, polished teardrop at the centre of the disfigured chain.

As an unorthodox goodbye to Anna, she thought You look much better without a mullet.

Though the eighties had been good times – their last good times, as much as Anna had blamed Katherine for her mother's incarceration – most of her memories of Anna were much older than that.

The mullet had still been the worst.

Standing, she walked over to Jeremy, who had slumped down onto the floor. She took his hand and he was too weak to refuse. She wrapped the chain around his wrist several times and closed the clasp. She admired it in the darkness.

Disfigured as it was, it looked pretty cool like that, bound around his forearm.

She picked him up effortlessly and vaulted over the burned out steps back into the bright hallway above.

Dazzling in a white sundress, she carried Jeremy to the car and hit the gas towards the forest.

Soon enough she had reached its edge, and gently shook Jeremy awake.

"Jeremy, wake up – it's time to eat." She poked her head out of the car window, sitting in park, and inhaled deeply. The forest was crawling with hikers, lovers, and petty criminals, even at this criminally early hour.

She extended her arm into the sunlight, and watched it play over her fingers; a moment later a small bird, wild and flying too low, was clasped in the cage of her fingers. As its frightened chirping turned into a frenzied shriek she crushed it slowly, slowly in her hand, until it was silent, and there was only a line of blood rolling down her harm.

She dropped the wet feathered ball on the grass and licked her hand clean. Not the main course, and no gourmand's choice, but a fitting apéritif to a morning of desecrating the Disney perfection of the forest.

Jeremy's nose pricked at the smell. He shifted in weak restlessness.

Katherine smiled as she got out of the car, sundress a pristine, searing white in the morning light.

"And the eating is good."

XXX

Though the continuation of this story does not - and will never - depend on how many reviews I get, I do dearly love them, for better and for worse. Do take a moment if you have one :) And to those of you lovely people who had already reviewed, my truly heartfelt thanks is in the final procrastination stages and should arrive shortly. So much love for you all!