(if we cease to believe in love, why would we want to live?)

She was Katerina Petrova, and her face was damned.

She was the one who suffered—the one condemned to live on the run for eternity. She had been an innocent before she had been dragged into the whole mess. Before she knew of the horrors the world contained. Before she knew what she was, and what she was doomed to become.

She had been a child back then, but she was old enough to know what she was doing. Oh, but he was a lovely boy, and he flattered Katerina with his endearments and his praise. She had her little court of boys—those foolish little boys—but none had compared to him. He was the one who made her feel special. Well, when she became of no more use to him, she was left behind like an old dress, and he moved onto the next girl. She was left with his child growing in her belly, and the shameful eyes of her village following her wherever she went. Her father snatched her daughter away from her the moment the child was born, and Katerina heard of the babe no more after that day.

Banished from her country, Katerina headed to England, a land which held many promises for the disowned girl. There she was brought into the company of Lord Niklaus Mikaelson and his brother Lord Elijah. Oh and how they swept her away.

Her heart yearned for the older brother, Elijah and his charming, steadfast, ways, but Lord Niklaus was so…enchanting. He wanted her, and she found it hard to resist his advances, while at the same time she felt more than just carnal attraction for Elijah. It was so complex, and then it all went to hell. She discovered what her purpose for being in the Lord Mikaelsons' company was, and she was devastated. To learn that she was to be used as part of a pagan sacrifice—it set fire on her heels, and she ran for the hills. She ran far and fast, before turning herself into a demon of the night (just like them) as the ultimate protection method.

All that got her was an insatiable desire for blood, her family slaughtered, and an eternity doomed to running.

Fast forward a few hundred years or so, and Katerina Petrova, now renamed Katherine Pierce, appears in Mystic Falls, Virginia. It was a small town, and she was looking for a hiding place. What she had never expected appeared in the form of the Salvatore brothers.

By now, Katherine had logged three hundred and seventy years running from Klaus. He held onto a grudge for much longer than she had ever anticipated, and his people were constantly tracking her down. She had a bounty on her head—her, the little Bulgarian girl who ran—and if things kept going the way they had, that price would be there for a very long time.

Her cover story was simple. She was an orphan who lost her family in the Atlanta fires, and was coming to stay in a quiet and secluded town to grieve. She was to stay with the ever-benevolent Giuseppe Salvatore, and his son Stefan. It was to be clean-cut and entirely doable. If she kept her head low, she could manage to stay for a few years and get comfortable. Her lack of aging would not be noticed in such a short time span, before she "discovered" a distant relative who lived in Alabama with his family. She would "join" them, and leave with none the wiser. It was to be so easy.

Then she fell for the sweet and boyish Stefan. He was so innocent—only seventeen—and she took pleasure in corrupting him, in showing him the dark side. She had to take away his fear whenever she fed on him of course, but he loved her and she loved him, and she was happy.

It was when Damon Salvatore deserted the Confederate Army and moved back home, that things got complicated. Damon was… Damon was passion personified. He was like those foolish boys who had fallen for her as a child, always one step behind her, but at the same time he was so much more than that. He loved her dark side—that part she had to hide from sweet Stefan—and he desired her with all that she had. Oh, it was easy to control him. She simply had to flash him a quick smile over her shoulder, and she knew where he would be that night. But she never truly loved him.

It was Stefan. If given the choice between the two brothers, it would always be Stefan. He brought out her humanity, and he made her happy. He made her feel human again, something that she missed dearly. Her choice was Stefan. She just never made her choice known.

Things fell apart when the Founders of Mystic Falls caught on to the vampires in the town. Katherine barely escaped with her life, faking her death in exchange for the moonstone that was part of Klaus's sacrifice ritual. She left Mystic Falls and the newly-turned Salvatore brothers behind, setting Stefan on a course of desire and violence, and Damon on an endless search for the dark-eyed doppelganger that he believed had loved him.

So now she was running from two men: Klaus and Damon. Damon would never find her, the baby vampire that he was, and she had become proficient in avoiding Klaus. It was another two centuries spent on the move, forging allies along the way, and creating safe houses around the world that could be used at the drop of a hat. They were the quietest centuries of her undead life.

Along the way, she discovered the existence of another like her—the next in the Petrova doppelganger line. Another girl that was damned. Oh, and of course this little mortal girl had her leftovers. Yes, the lovely child possessed the affections of both of the Salvatore brothers. How history repeats itself.

Katherine had spent the previous two centuries traveling the world and familiarizing herself with everything out there. The world was literally at her fingertips. She got dangerously close to the Mikaelson family on more than one occasion; she almost ran into Elijah in England in the 1950's—oh, how she wanted to both speak with him and run far, far, away (she chose the latter)—and there was a time in the 1920's where she was dogging the footsteps of Klaus, Rebekah, and Stefan. How her sweet Stefan had ended up with those two, she would never know, but the little boy she left behind in Mystic Falls was no more, and there was a different one in his place. This was not the Stefan that she had fallen in love with in 1864. This Stefan was cruel and domineering and sadistic. He had changed much more than she had believed he ever could.

She had kept tabs on her family over the centuries, tracking down descendants and checking to see if there was another cursed girl born or not. When she discovered that Isobel Flemming had had a child—the first doppelganger in five hundred years—with one John Gilbert, Katherine laughed. The irony of the situation was ridiculous. The Gilberts were a long-standing family of vampire hunters that had devoted their lives to keeping the vampires out of Mystic Falls. Isobel was from the Petrova line, the line that started the race of vampires in the first place. Karma was a bitch, and it hit the Gilberts in the form of a young girl.

Oh, Katherine enjoyed messing with her doppelganger. She enjoyed screwing with the heads of everyone that came in contact with the girl. It was revenge—revenge that her doppelganger had the affections of what Katherine had practically given her. It was revenge for the life Katherine had never gotten. Her doppelganger had friends, family, and she was loved. That was something that Katherine was not sure that she had ever received.

She had to compel Stefan into loving her fully. Damon never truly loved her. He might have thought that he did, but he didn't. And Elijah… She would never know. Five hundred years later, she was not sure whether or not he had actually loved her back in 1492, or if he had just been playing her like Klaus. It was unsettling. Elijah was the only man that she thought she might have actually loved as a human. He had such a heart on him, but he was willing to lay down his own happiness in order to keep his family happy. It both broke her heart, and made her love him even more in the process. And then she turned—well, it was safe to say that Katherine Pierce was a bundle of emotions then, and she had blocked out all idea of love. Then she had found her family dead, and she shut it off, and kept it off for three hundred and seventy years.

So yes, Katherine was jealous of her little doppelganger. Who wouldn't be? But then the doppelganger turned, and all of a sudden, a fight for a magical cure for vampirism appeared. This simply brought more attention to Katherine's little issue of still not being free from Klaus. Klaus wanted the cure so that he could turn her little doppelganger human again, and have his living blood bag back. Katherine wanted her freedom. All she had to do was get the bloody thing, set up a meeting with Klaus where she wasn't going to end up staked, beheaded, or have her heart on the floor, and trade it for her freedom. It was a simple process.

The problem was in the actual arranging-of-the-meetings. Katherine needed a go-between. It would have to be someone she could trust—she was literally putting her life in their hands. If they betrayed her, she would die. It also would have to be someone that was in good favor with Klaus. Unfortunately, the bad guys don't often make good with people who are on good terms with their enemies, so Katherine's short list was exactly that. At the top of her list was a man that she had seen only a year before, and he wasn't someone she was all too eager to see again—Elijah Mikaelson.

The last time they had met was the first since her flight in 1492. She was locked in a tomb, Stefan was released, and she was compelled to stay in by the one she once thought she could have loved. It was that eternally awkward moment where her ex met her other ex and the former was also her mortal enemy's older brother. Yeah, that could certainly make Thanksgiving uncomfortable. But in that moment, Elijah acted like he had never even known her, and for some reason, it made her want to cry. It was a pathetic human emotion, yes, but underneath all the layers of Katherine Pierce, Katerina Petrova still resided, and Katherine was scared of that. She hated that simple eye contact with someone whom she hadn't seen in over four hundred years could still make her stomach flutter, even when his glare was cold, his tone like steel, and she was dressed like a common tramp.

At one point during her stay in the lovely tomb, her doppelganger had done the one thing that Katherine had never expected her to do—she came to learn about the Petrova Family. Apparently the girl had found a list of the family in a book, and brought it to her ancestor wanting to know more. It was…refreshing, to tell the tale of her family. And besides, the girl was likely going to die soon anyways. The doppelganger might as well have knowledge of her real heritage before she was sacrificed to give Klaus immortality. It was one of the few times that Katherine and her double would ever actually get along, and it was one of the only times where she let her inner Katerina shine through for just a bit.

Yes, when Katherine originally sought out Elijah in hopes of acquiring a meeting with Klaus, she had an ulterior motive. She didn't simply show up at his door for nothing, and she made that perfectly clear. But as she spent time with him—she thought of her departed mother at times when she would glimpse a certain antique vase in his home; the woman would have shaken her head at her oldest (unmarried!) daughter spending time alone with a man—she slowly began to feel for him once more. And it was obvious that he felt the same way.

He made a point of calling her Katerina, simply because he knew it got under her skin. She wasn't the naïve little girl from England anymore. Katerina had died. But still, whenever she asked him to call her Katherine, he would brush her off. He could be so passive-aggressive, and it was extremely annoying. She was an upfront kind of girl, and she preferred it when others were the same way with her. But with him… Elijah would everything he could to annoy her, just because he could. He loved to tease her in that way. She stayed with him for three weeks, until she caught wind that the doppelganger and friends were heading to Nova Scotia, and the cure was there.

Katherine and Elijah were not the type to fight, but when they did, it was over something big. After she snagged the cure from right under the doppelganger's friends' noses (and killed the doppelganger's brother in the process, though she left that part out of her retelling), Katherine dashed off to one of her many safehouses, which was located in a tiny town called Willoughby, Pennsylvania. It was a charming little place, in which she had gone around and compelled the entire town to keep her secret. The process was a tricky piece of work that involved hunting down every single person in the area, and some carefully worded compelling. It took her ages, but Katherine got free food at any time, and people liked her. Sure, the reason they were her friends was fake, but that was a moot point. They acted like they liked her, and that was what mattered. The cure was safely stashed away in a…friend's house, and there were multiple fake cures hidden in her house and around town. No one was going to find that bloody thing without her help, and she was not going to be giving that location out anytime soon.

Then Elijah's darling headache of a sister showed up in town with her new best friend the switched-off doppelganger, and the Salvatore brothers dogging their footsteps. What a party. Oh, and of course it would be the very same day that Elijah was coming to visit. In hindsight, she should have just staked herself that morning, and saved herself the trouble that the rest of the day would bring. Of course, she wouldn't be that lucky. She was Katherine Pierce, after all.

It had been a perfectly ordinary day. She had just gone to check her mail at the post office, when she found her doppelganger asking around for her. And what a surprise she had gotten when she realized that the girl had flipped the switch.

The little doppelganger was now more like her ancestor than she had ever been before, now that she had abandoned her sadness. Then again, Katherine wasn't all that surprised. She had picked up little signals over time that clued her into the fact that the girl's sad and boring demeanor was a recent thing. The girl hadn't always been the emo child that she was before she turned it off. The Petrovas had a reputation for being similar beyond mere looks, after all.

When Elijah's lovely sister, Rebekah, showed up, Katherine couldn't have been happier. Oh wait, she definitely could have gone about her day without dealing with Barbie Klaus and the Doppelganger. All she got out of talking to them was a fork in her hand, and her jewelry stolen. The doppelganger never gave back those bloody earrings, and Katherine was quite fond of them. Bitch. When the doppelganger went to go meet Elijah… Well, Katherine was quite sure that the Salvatore brothers would be carting back a body to Mystic Falls that evening.

The reaction to her and Elijah's relationship was a priceless moment. Katherine Pierce lived for the "wow factor" that she embodied, and announcing to two men who had loved her, and the man in question's sister that they were Special Friends, was a moment that she would forever cherish. It was almost worth keeping the fork in her hand for a few more minutes, just to see their faces contort in horror.

Sadly, when she finally managed to get to where her dear Elijah was, the doppelganger and her manipulative ways had gotten to his mind. Bitch. He didn't believe her—he thought that she was actually playing him. As if. He was always able to see right through her walls. He could always see his Katerina beneath her Katherine façade. She was never able to actually fool him. But the doppelganger had gotten to him, and he was unsure. Yet another reason why the girl was on her kill list.

One of her many fake cures—in reality it was just a concentrated shot of vervain, and would render any vampire "dead" for a few minutes—came into good use that afternoon. She managed to fool both the Salvatore brothers and little Beks Mikaelson with the useless thing. And they thought that it would actually be that easy to get from her. As if. No, the cure was stashed away at her friend's house, and that is where Katherine retrieved it from.

She managed to catch him before he left town, and when she did, she threw her heart on the line for him. Elijah was leaving, truly leaving, and when she saw him walking down the streets of Willoughby, she had never seen him look so defeated. He looked beaten for the first time, and it made her want to cry in way that she hadn't before, because this was all of her own making. She had said those stupid, stupid, words about needing to make a deal with Klaus—right after confessing her love for him, of course—and now he didn't believe her anymore. Her mother was right. She was still the stupid little girl from 1491. But she had to fix this. Katherine gave Elijah the cure—that ridiculous vial that held the only chance any of them stood at becoming human—and she gave it to him. He probably would just give to one of his siblings in the end, but he knew what it meant to her. He knew that the cure was her freedom, and that she had just placed everything she had in his hands. She gave him her life, and it was now his to control. Now if he could only believe that she was sincere in her love for him.

He would never know how much she actually loved him. He made her feel like none had ever before. He lit her on fire, and she burned for him. Her emotions and feelings were torrential around him; when he was near her, she would never be able to switch it off. She absolutely hated it. Katherine hated feeling dependant—like she needed someone. She had made it five hundred years on her own. She didn't want to need his love. Oh, but how she did, and how it all got thrown back in her face.

In hindsight, she should have known it was coming. She had written that bloody letter, after all. She was the one who told Klaus that the witches were conspiring against him in New Orleans. And Elijah would always stick with his family. How dare she ever believe that she might actually mean more to him than his siblings. "Always and Forever" was the Mikaelson family motto. Elijah upheld that saying with every fiber of his being. The thought that Katherine would come with him was unthinkable—Klaus would kill her on sight. No matter what his brother asked, it would not matter. For her to go to New Orleans with Elijah would be signing her own death sentence. Therefore, when she pleaded for him to stay, and he simply kissed her forehead and slipped away, she was not surprised. It still broke her heart.

She would not show that she was hurting, of course. That would mean she was displaying weakness, and that was forbidden. But she still hurt all the same. She had to accept it—she and Elijah were not meant to be. They were ruined five hundred years ago, and they were ruined today. They were the show that flopped. It wasn't fair.

Her doppelganger had everything. She had a man who loved her, and was able to be with him. She had friends. People would die for her, no question. Everything revolved around keeping her alive, or curing her, or who she loved! It was ridiculous and utterly unfair. Katherine was the one that came first. The girl was just a pale copy of her ancestor. She could never measure up. She was pathetic. But the little doppelganger was the one that everyone loved in the end, and it was terribly and absolutely unfair.

If the Bennett witch hadn't failed her, she would have been immortal, and she could have gone to be with Elijah with no fear of Klaus killing her. But she was Katherine Pierce, and her world had been going wrong since 1490, and nothing ever worked out the way she wished. It was nothing new. No, instead of becoming immortal and powerful, she got into a fight with the switched-on doppelganger that was hell-bent for revenge; her battle cry was her brother's name on her lips. Instead of becoming the most powerful being to walk the earth, Katherine got the cure shoved down her throat. Instead of gaining true eternity, she gained numbered days. She was now weak.

When she woke up in that bloody school, Katherine Pierce—the girl was once called Katerina Petrova—became the oldest living human to ever walk the earth.

Let the misery of her human life begin.

AN: So here's installment two of ITSoYH! This was personally my favorite part to write. I really enjoy Katherine Pierce as a character, and writing out her internal musings was so much fun. Anyways, I hope that you enjoyed reading about Katherine near as much as I did writing her. And if so, or if you didn't, I'd love to hear about it!

Love and Hate,

Inky