InsaneJournal

Characters: Katherine Pierce and Damon Salvatore
Location: Random pub
Date: Saturday, June 18th, late evening
Rating: Low
Summary: A long over-due chat
Warnings: None.



So, this was Death.

Well, no, that wasn’t quite right, Katherine figured as she slipped into a bar stool, motioning for the bartender. This was still the early stages. She was in pain, yeah, and she felt like shit, but she wasn’t dead and was only kind of crazy. She still had some time before the fun parts set in. Maybe a day. Maybe less. And she had plans, oh yes she did. She was going to find the little asshole who bit her and bite him back. Tit for tat.

Katherine ordered her drink and continued to think quietly to herself while her Screaming Multiple Orgasm on the Beach was being mixed. She was starting to look bad, really bad, but not nearly as bad as Caroline. It was coming, though. She could feel it in the sharp, spikey shots of pain radiating up her arm and into her shoulder. Death was at her doorstep, but not quite inside her house. She still had enough control for a drink or two. She could hold out the night, at the very least. And tomorrow, or maybe the day after if she lasted that long, she’d take off her ring and take off her bracelet and she’d step outside into the sun. Other than the whole ‘running for her life’ thing, Katherine lived on her own terms. She’d always lived on her own terms. She refused to die on anything less.

Damon had needed a break. It wasn’t that he wanted to get away from Caroline completely, but the whole impact of the event was almost too much for him to take especially as she started to edge into the delusional end of the infection. So he’d called Ric, told him that he needed to get away from it all for awhile, and had left Caroline in the care of two of the people in this place other than Caroline that he trusted the most. And then, he turned his attention to doing the one thing that helped him the most when anything like this happened.

He went to get absolutely shitfaced.

Alcoholism as a coping mechanism seemed to be a popular one amongst their kind, and while Damon hadn’t expected to see a familiar face when he stepped into the bar he had choosen to frequent his week, he wasn’t going to complain. Katherine offered him whole other set of issues to focus on, ones that his mind gripped onto readily as he slide in next to her at the bar and raised his hand to catch the attention of the bartender.

“So, we’ve yet to manage to have that talk you keep promising me,” Damon drawled, glancing at her sideways. “You know what they says, there’s no better time than the present.”

Katherine gave Damon a sidelong glance as she picked up her glass, holding her injured arm tightly against her stomach. The pain was increasing, but not to the point that it was unbearable yet. She could take a lot of pain before it really got to her.

She perked a brow and took a sip, grimacing before she set the glass down. “I’ve been a little busy being held captive and tortured on a daily basis,” she responded darkly. “What’s your excuse?”

Part of Katherine wanted to get up and walk away. She was dying- she didn’t want to spend what time she had left massaging Damon’s ego. But a slightly larger part of her realized she wouldn’t have another chance at this. She sighed, turning on her stool to face him. “Limited time offer, Damon. Better take advantage of it.”

A limited time offer. Damon peered at her almost expecting her to change her mind in a matter of seconds and take the offer immediately off the table because he hadn’t jumped on it ‘quickly’ enough, but when she didn’t, he allowed himself to turn over the situation in his mind. There were only so many questions he would be able to get answered. That much he knew. Katherine had always played her cards extremely close to her chest and made extremely sure to keep them all face down until she was ready to reveal them. She’d hardly give away anymore than she wanted to and no more than she thought she could get away with. As Damon contemplated the exact question that would garner him the most information, he realized that he couldn’t really put it all down in such simple words. There were too many things that he wondered, too many things that he didn’t understand, so in the end, the best way that he could ask her for what he wanted was both simple and utterly complicated.

“Why?”

The word hung in the air between them as Damon’s drink was set on the bar, and his attention shifted from Katherine back onto it. Lifting the drink to his lips, Damon took a sip of it before allowing himself to sigh heavily, “Why us? What did you gain from it?”

That was an interesting question. Why. Why had she picked them, why had she chosen Mystic Falls. Why had she done any of it. Katherine took a sip to buy herself time to consider her answer. The sad fact of the matter was that nothing she could say, nothing at all, would be acceptable to him. She could tell him the truth, and he likely wouldn’t believe her. Or she could lie, which she was sure he was expecting, and he still wouldn’t believe her. She was damned if she did and damned if she didn’t.

“Why you?” she started slowly, swirling her drink in her glass. “You were... beautiful. You both were.” Another sip, but that one was harder to swallow. It was only a matter of time until she couldn’t keep anything down at all. “And for a little while, being with you made me feel human again. Made me forget for a while about all the running and the scheming and everything else I’ve had to do over the years just to stay alive.”

As much as Damon hated it, he could understand that. He could understand that desire, the want to be human again, to feel human again, to have a connection to something, someone, anything that could possibly make the world seem like it did before instead like it did now. Taking another long drag off his drink, Damon leaned heavily against the bar and cast another sideways glance at Katherine, “Then why try and keep us?” He asked, finishing off his drink and pushing it across the bar to be refilled. “Why bother when you knew that you couldn’t? We just would have been extra baggage weighing you down. Why not just let us live our lives?” Damon asked, a heavy bitterness in his tone.

Damon might not have left much behind when he had to leave Mystic Falls. A father who had hated him buried in a crypt, a war that he had never wanted anything to do with to begin with, a town full of people who knew him either as simply a Salvatore or as the disappointment of an eldest son. He might not have left much behind, but he had also had to leave whatever chance he had had at a normal life.

And that was pretty much the only thing that he wanted now.

“That was the plan,” Katherine said, avoiding looking at him again. “More or less.” She paused then, figuring out the best way to phrase what she wanted to say. “I didn’t expect the two of you to die for me. It wasn’t part of the plan. I fully expected you to accept that I was dead and to go on with your lives. I had Emily make the rings as a reminder- and to protect you in case Klaus or Elijah tracked me to Mystic Falls. But things didn’t exactly go as planned.”

She swirled her drink around, watching how the liquid echoed her own thoughts in that moment. It was fitting. “And I tried to keep you because I loved both of you. Too much, because it clouded my thinking. For a little while, I thought I could have it all- but that’s just not in the cards. Not then and not now.”

Damon didn’t believe her, not entirely, and it took another drink for him to actually start to consider her words. After all, he had asked for this conversation. He was the one that had desired answers. It wasn’t his place to be dissatisfied with them. “You should have known better, Katherine,” Damon said, a quiet chuckling. “At the very least, you should have expected me to do something stupid. Add in Stefan doing something disgustingly noble, and it all to rolled into one giant clusterfuck,” He said with a shake of his head and another drink. “But I suppose I can’t blame you,” which was a new development, considering ‘Everything is Katherine’s fault’ had been his default setting for the last several months, and still likely not one that was going to last very long, “if all you wanted was something to hold onto for awhile.”

Damon finished off his second drink, requesting another before turning and leaning sideways against the bar as he fixed her with a serious look, “But that still doesn’t explain why you let me pine and plot for over a century without so much as a word to let me know you didn’t need to be rescued.”

“Oh, I planned for those,” Katherine said, darkly amused by the situation, despite the stomach-churning ache in her arm. “What I didn’t factor in was your father.” And she hadn’t. Giuseppe spiking Stefan’s blood, shooting both of his sons... those had been unpleasant surprises.

She forced down a swallow of her drink, closing her eyes with the effort, then turned to look at him. “Damon- You got a taste of Klaus while he was here in Alaric’s body. Ask Jenna. Ask Ric. Everything that he did here was him playing.” She shook her head, looking away finally. “I don’t know if you realize this or not, Damon- but probably not. So I will tell you... Klaus has spent the last five centuries killing everyone important to me that he could find. He started this bloodbath by slaughtering my parents and my sister, all because I didn’t have the good sense to lay down and die like he wanted me to.” She let that sink in. Katherine doubted he’d believe her and she couldn’t blame him, not really. “I wasn’t lying when I said your thinking I was dead or hopelessly trapped was safer for the both of us.”

“Father always was a bastard like that,” Damon said, taking another drink as he mulled over the past with a heavy contemplation. Of course, if Stefan hadn’t gone to him, he never wanted have suspected nor would he have laid the trap that he did. Damon was the wild one, the one prone to misbehave, the one who would break all the rules just because his heart told him so no matter what duty or family honor demanded. But to have Stefan approach him talking compromise rather than extermination... Damon took another drink to steel old angers that he had thought had passed, even if they were ones that probably never fully would, before turning back to Katherine.

“I wanted to die,” Damon said. “After all of that, everything, I couldn’t see any point to it all if I was alone,” He said with a sigh. “And Stefan wasn’t any help. He was too concerned with biting, fucking, and killing the next pretty face that he laid his eyes on, and sometimes, I don’t even think it was in that order.” All right, that was mostly the bitterness talking, but sometimes, sometimes, Damon was sure that he couldn’t have put anything past his brother in those days. “It might have been safer, Kat, but I can honestly say, back then, I would have rather died by your side than have lived the way that I did all those years.”

“Call me crazy,” Katherine said with a small, humorless chuckle, “but I’d rather have you alive and hating me than dead and loving me. At least that way, there’s a possibility you might forgive me one day. As small as that possibility is.” She took one last swallow of her drink, forcing it down when it clearly wanted to come up. She was running out of time, so she’d better say what she needed to before the opportunity passed her by.

“I don’t mind being painted a villain, Damon. And I don’t expect you to agree with my motives. But nothing is simple in this world. Nothing is black and white, right and wrong, good and evil. We’re all living in shades of grey and while I might be the villain of your story? I’m definitely the hero of mine.”

Katherine pushed her stool away from the bar and stood. She reached over to Damon and ran her hand through his hair, giving a genuine smile at the silky feel of it running between her fingers. “I like the curls better,” she said with a small amount of actual amusement coloring her words. “But it’s time for this Cinderella to leave the ball before her carriage turns back into a pumpkin.”

“I didn’t hate you until you said it had been been for Stefan,” Damon said, looking at her with a quiet confusion. He wasn’t sure now whether she had done that on purpose, if it had just been part of the game, or if she had meant it. It had been such an easy thing to forgive before that, he living him, all those years he’d searched and struggled and fought to get her back, all of it could have been washed away easily as none of it mattered any more than how he’d felt about her. But placing his brother above him, the one thing that everyone had been doing for years, had hurt far, far more than any of the rest of it possibly could have. “Until then, there was nothing that couldn’t have been forgiven.”

But before he could say any more on the subject, she was getting up and stepping away. The conversation had ended. Like Katherine always did, conclude things on her terms before they got too messy for her to deal with. She might have said her piece, but Damon most certainly had not had his out yet. While there was no violence in the action as there might once have been, Damon reached out and clasped his hand firmly around the arm that was not occupied with his hair. “Don’t go. Please.”

Katherine swallowed the wince when Damon grabbed her injured arm, his fingers pressing into the rotting, infected flesh. She didn’t want his pity, or his concern, or his anything at all- not when he was stretched so thin. “What is it with you people?” she asked, giving him a flat look. “You believe me when it’s convenient for you and declare me the world’s biggest lying bitch when it’s convenient for you.” It didn’t answer him, not really, but it was all she was going to say on the matter. Had she done it all for Stefan? No. Not even remotely. He’d simply been the bigger challenge, so she’d wanted to play with him more.

She sighed and, with an uncharacteristic gentleness, removed his hand from her arm. “I can’t stay much longer, Damon.”

Damon allowed his hand to be removed. He didn’t want to force her. He wanted her to stay. He wanted to have his piece. But he wasn’t going to hold her there and force her to listen to it. It would hardly have the sort of impact it needed to if he did. “When the words strike me as truth, I believe them. And what has always been more true than the fact that Stefan is better in every respect than I am?” The voice was tight, tense, and failed to mask the way that those words were loaded with emotion. “You knew how to hurt me, Katherine. You knew exactly how to do it, and as much as I hate you right now, something like that could have only hurt me as much as it did if I still cared. That said, you go, catch your carriage, and watch out for any wicked stepsisters that might try and ruin the rest of the evening.”

For a moment, Katherine wished there was something she could say to him. Anything would do, really, but preferably it would be about how they really didn’t change. He was still the same eager to please puppy he’d been in life, desperate for someone to value him, and she was still the same idealistic girl she’d been, desperate for the kind of love and romance that experience assured her came only in fairy tales. But there was nothing to say that wouldn’t feel cheap, even to her, so she just didn’t say anything. Instead, Katherine just leaned in and brushed her lips across Damon’s forehead. Normally, she’d go for the mouth, but that sort of move would cheapen everything that came before it, and that wasn’t what she wanted him to come away from this conversation with. This was their ‘Fare Well’, even if he didn’t realize it yet.

Her voice was thicker, huskier than normal, and it wasn’t entirely because of the pain. “Good bye, Damon.” And with that, she was out the door, never once looking back.

Goodbye? The word didn’t strike Damon as hard as it might have otherwise, but staring after Katherine’s retreating form, he couldn’t help but wonder exactly what she had meant by that. Not that there was anything he could do about it now. She was older and faster than he could ever manage to be. Even if he gave chase, she’d lose him without breaking a sweat. Turning back to the bar, Damon picked up what was left of his drink and finished it before exhaling slowly and checking his watch.

Another hour, and then he would head back. After what just happened, he needed to clear his mind even more than he already had. And he hardly wanted Jenna and Ric to feel obligated to leave earlier than they had intended, either. Another hour, and it would give all of them time to square themselves.

Hopefully Katherine as well.