He is running. Running fast through the woods with a glorious pounding through his lungs, fresh air pumping through his blood, the feel of life, of pure nature beneath his bare feet. He could do this forever.

Chase her forever.

"Come on, Si!" He hears her cry, joyful, exultant. He laughs, loud and free, as she races ahead, dress billowing behind her. She is just out of reach, and yet he can never, will never, stop reaching until he catches her.

He stretches out a hand, and he connects with the silky material of her dress. She slows, and he trips, falling into her. She falls to the ground, him on top of her, and they roll, still laughing.

He rolls on top of her as she giggles, smiling as he brushes back her thick hair from her face.

"Finally, I thought you'd never catch up." She grins.

"Well, with you as my prize, how could I not?" He smirks back, rolling off of her to the side.

"Maybe I let you," she says flirtatiously, moving closer into his side, snuggling against him. "Maybe I enjoy your love too much."

"Then it's a good job I enjoy giving it to you." He smiles, tangling his fingers in her hair. He couldn't help it; he would have given himself to her even if he hadn't enjoyed it.

She giggles again, and his spirit lifts purely at the sound. She jumps on top of him, sliding her hand along his chest. "Say it again."

He will never tire of saying it, so he obliges. "I love you, Katherine."

Silas jerked awake, panting in a cold sweat at the dream. A dream that should have been a nightmare. Why was he thinking about her? She was...well, she was different, and it made him like her, despite himself, but it made no sense as to how she could possibly have ended up in his dream.

She looks like Amara. He reminded himself. The dream, it was a landscape of a time long past, an experience he had already shared with another woman, the love of his life.

He breathed in deeply, and looked at his bedside clock. Six thirty, more or less. He couldn't be sure, the modern art of reading time was something he was still learning and adjusting to, but he decided to get up, the dream still lingering in his mind, preventing him from sleep. He headed into the bathroom and washed cold water onto his face, and brushed his teeth, attempting to freeze out the image, the image of the wrong girl in his head, and it almost worked.

Except for when he tried to reach out to find her mind, he was met with a blank wall. There was nothing there. Taking a deep breath to calm himself, he tried again, pushing his mental awareness out into the apartment, sweeping the rooms, when the probing tendrils reaching from his mind snapped back, jolting him into awareness.

There was nothing; he couldn't hear her thoughts. The thoughts that normally bounced around his mind in a constant stream were absent. It felt empty. He straightened up, panicked. Had she found a way out of the apartment he didn't know of? Found a loophole in his compulsion?

He bolted out of the bathroom and hurried out of his room into the next room, barging open the door, but then stopped right by the bed. She was still there, curled up with the blankets hiked up to her shoulders with her hair splayed all over the pillow and her face. He smiled despite himself. She looked...innocent. Innocent, though she was far from it, with that tiny frown on her face that somehow made her look more indignant than she was when she was awake.

She rolled over suddenly, and he blinked, snapping out of it. Had he been staring at her?

He backed slowly out of the room and turned around, practically running back into his room as though she had actually caught him. No, attachments couldn't be afforded, not at this point. The girl had made him feel something Amara never had, but Amara had made him feel loved and able to love.

And besides, he should really be focusing on the main issue:

If Katherine hadn't escaped, then why couldn't he hear her thoughts anymore?

-X-

The first thing he heard was the TV blaring.

It snapped him right out of his pondering, but not before he stormed out of his room to save his poor eardrums.

And that was how he found her, dancing in his living room to the music channel playing on his television. As creepy as it sounded, he was perfectly content just to watch her for a few moments, and pretend that he wasn't going to snatch her life away, but hey, he'd had no action in over two thousand years, so there wasn't much harm in just looking, especially if the one he was looking at shared his love's face.

"Having fun?" He asked snarkily. Katherine whipped around to face him, eyes widened innocently.

"Since when have you been up?"

"Since you decided to destroy my hearing with whatever noise you're dancing to." He reached forward and plucked the control out of her hand.

"It wasn't that loud." She complained, swatting at him for the remote control. He reached over her head and switched it off, before removing the batteries and throwing the control onto the couch.

"That's because your dull human ears can't hear half as well as I can." He retorted, pocketing the batteries.

"Oh, sorry Silas, did I wake you from your morning nap? I thought you would have had enough of those to last for eternity."

"Yeah, well, my brain needs to recharge after having a conversation with you." He bit back spitefully. She bit her lip and looked away, and immediately he regretted his harsh words, and so smiled in what he hoped was a friendly manner at her.

"Do you want any breakfast?"

She shook her head. "No, I had some toast." Her growling stomach seemed to disagree.

He laughed. "Come on, I'll make you something as a token of...my gratitude for unwillingly being my sacrifice."

"Yeah, that's really funny." She sneered as he got out milk and flour and sugar to make pancakes. "I can see where Damon gets it from."

"What can I say? I'm a charmer." He shrugged, biting back a smile as he turned the oven on.

"Are you a cooker? Because for someone out of the loop for over two millennia you sure know your way around a modern kitchen." This time her tone was less dry. She sounded almost curious.

"Hey, we Greeks were well-versed in our cooking skills, and, going to a modern cooking course in Greece over the summer may have helped." Silas smirked, mixing the batter together in the jug. He left out the part where he went to Greece for the course because he couldn't actually read in English. It wasn't that it was something he was particularly shameful of, just something he didn't want her, and the world to know about him that they didn't already.

She huffed, and he glanced at her, catching a smile curving on her lips. "Don't worry. I didn't hear a laugh just then." He poured the batter into a frying pan into several circles, and the sizzling spared the silence that followed.

"Right." He said, louder than expected, then winced inwardly. "Do you want syrup or lemon juice?"

She walked around the aisle and stood next to him, his heightened senses making him increasingly aware of her body heat, the scent of her hair, and the permanent frown line faintly etched between her eyebrows, and once again, his sudden inability to use his psychic powers. He saw her hands, the hands he remembered, small and thin, but a brutality edged them, that spoke about her actions in a way Amara's never had. Silas could see how easily those hands would have picked up a gun for the first time, aimed and fired at him, without hesitation, and something dark and unsettling pressed on his mind, just hovering out of reach.

"Lemon juice." She said, picking up the bottle and jolting him back to awareness. Silas focused back on the task at hand, remembering what he was doing and nodded, then slid the pancakes onto a plate and handed it to her, ignoring the feeling of her fingers brushing against his as she accepted it.

"Enjoy." He said, wrapping the rest of the batter in the jug in clingfilm and storing it in the fridge. He'd have some blood later. "You can finish off the rest later if you want."

She stuck her thumb up, and mumbled incoherently at him, mouth stuffed with a full pancake.

"I guess that your little cooking course paid off." She said whilst chewing. He smiled shyly at the compliment, which was odd in itself because he wasn't normally a modest person.

"I'll take that as a compliment."

"You should, I rarely give them out."

"Hmm," he smirked. "And I suppose savouring the few things left you'll have left to enjoy only makes you easier to impress."

As soon as he said it, he immediately knew he had gone too far. Pushed the tenuous boundary of their temporary truce. "I didn't mean it like that -"

"It doesn't matter!" She snapped as she dropped her fork onto her plate, jaw clenched. "Thanks for breakfast, and...whatever." She added, getting up from the table. "But I'm not in the mood to pretend anymore, where I can ignore the fact that you're holding me hostage, and that you're going to kill me in order to get what you want, no matter if that's what you want to hide behind." And then she left, heading for the bathroom. He inhaled sharply at her words, and quickly deflected, as always, away from the impact she had on him.

"Don't use my toothbrush, I still need to get you one!" He called out after her, but she slammed the door. Lovely. More mouth germs. "Or I'll just get another for myself." He muttered to himself, then left to his room to change into jeans and a shirt.

When he came back out to grab his jacket, he found that Katherine was already done in the bathroom and out in the living room, having changed into a t-shirt and blue leggings out of the random selection he had purchased for her. When she saw him, she scowled and silently plonked herself down onto the couch, and began reading some magazine from the assortment on the coffee table, and oddly enough, he missed the camaderie they had just shared over breakfast, the ability to talk to her, as though he wasn't holding her against her will, that they weren't going to be dead in the end for the same selfish cause.

His phone ringing in the room cut through the silence. He was surprised when he saw Damon's name on the screen.

"I have to say, this is a surprise. Got the wrong doppelgänger, Damon?" Katherine looked up from her magazine, eyes wide.

"Wouldn't that be telling." Damon quipped.

"Why are you calling me?"

"Because if you're still interested in your suicidal rampage, and looking for a way to do it without your psychic abilities," he paused for a beat, to let his knowledge sink in. "I have an offer for you."

As much as he loathed Damon, and his irritating superiority about his current brain fritz, Silas couldn't deny his curiosity. "What offer?"

"Meet me in the Grill in half an hour." Was all he would say, before hanging up. Silas stared at the phone, before placing it quietly on the counter, a silent rage brewing inside. The fact that Damon knew about his power loss meant that he knew who did it. And so did he.

Qetsiyah.

Lord, that bitch didn't know when to quit. Two thousands years, and still she hated him. Hated to love him. He would suffer for eternity for as long as she was there to stop him from reuniting with Amara.

That spell had had some of an effect on him though. He couldn't manipulate or read people's minds anymore, the only thing left was compulsion, and he was lucky if that even worked on two people at a time, let alone the mass scale he had been able to accomplish beforehand, which led him to believe that she had used a physical object to link and allow permanent harm to his abilities. Which didn't entirely rule out Stefan being used as that object. So, that left his only way of finding his doppelgänger being through his brother.

He sighed. Damon it was.

He turned around, looking at a wary Katherine. The compulsion set before he lost his abilities still controlled her. Unless he died, or dessicated, or took the cure, she shouldn't be able to leave the apartment, and so whilst he may not be able to read her mind, or compel her forcefully, he could still make her think he was. "You stay in this flat until I return." Again, his mind seized hers, but it was relinquishing, like a set of wires being cut one by one.

"Why, where are you going?"

"I'm going to thwart an old nemesis of mine by making a deal with what I hope is a fully competent vampire."

"What deal?"

"A deal that hopefully will eventually result in my death." She stiffened. "Yep, you heard. Today is the day, kitty kat!" He smiled. She frowned at him.

"Today is the day we both get to die."

Yeah...sorry it's so short, but the next chapter will be heavily based on 5x05, so would have taken even longer to write and have much more words.