InsaneJournal

Characters: Katherine Pierce and Tyler Lockwood
Location: Random alley
Date: Sunday, June 19th, evening.
Rating: Medium.
Summary: Katherine corners Tyler about biting her and hallucinates all over him.
Warnings: Strong language and some blood.



After getting back to their apartment and the awkwardness of what they had done had settled in, Tyler and Jules, by unspoken agreement, began to avoid each other. Whether it was a conscious decision was debatable, but they hadn’t stayed in the same room for more than a few seconds at a time since they had gotten back. For the first day, Tyler had tried to avoid the network, just wanting to get a grip on himself and the powerful urge to go to Jules room and fix things or make them much more worse. But then his conscience had won out and the need to know if he had hurt anyone overwhelmed him.

What he had learned made him wish he hadn’t come out of the woods.

Three days had passed while they had been werewolves. And not only had he bit someone. It had been Katherine, which was bad enough because she was dangerous. But on top of that, he knew he just lost any hope he had of her being able to do anything about Mason. And then there was Jules and Caroline. People came back all the time, they said, and he had witnessed that with the recent thing with that hellgoddess. But she was suffering and dying and it was Jules who had done that to her. Yeah, she had no control over her actions. But that didn’t make a sticky situation any less made of suck.

And now, three days after finding all that out, he knew he was probably going to die as he was cornered by Katherine in an alley two streets away from his apartment.

“Gonna kill me, huh?” He said, chin tilted up defiantly, though his eyes betrayed exactly how scared he was.

“I’ve thought about it,” Katherine said as she stared Tyler down, her voice raspy and eyes hazy with pain. For more than five hundred years she’d stayed ahead of the vampires hunting her, had successfully avoided the Salvatores and all of their many acquaintances despite being just inside their periphery, and had lived one hell of a life. Never had she ever even considered that just maybe her end would come at the hands of one of the Lockwood werewolves. Not after what she’d done for that family. It was naive of her to think it, especially when you took into account what she’d done to them as well, but the situation was what it was.

She looked terrible. Pale and visibly ill. The pain was incredible, radiating out from the bite on her arm in such intense waves that she was keeping it close to her body, cradled against her torso as if the protection she was giving it would actually make a difference. It wouldn’t. The end was coming, and it was coming soon.

“I’ve thought about it quite a lot, actually,” Katherine continued, stalking forward. Each step was unsteady, as if she’d suddenly forgotten how to walk. “Haven’t quite made up my mind yet.”

Her eyes narrowed and she closed the distance between them in a heartbeat, forcing the young werewolf back against a brick wall. She easily held him in place with one hand while all but shoving the affected arm in his face. “You bit me, you fucking asshole,” she hissed. “Me! We had a fucking deal.”

It was a struggle to breathe as she held him by the neck, her fingers tightening like iron around his neck. She could easily break his neck like it was nothing and he was just wondering what was stopping her. His hands came up to try and pry the fingers away, but he knew he wasn’t going anywhere unless she felt like letting him go.

“I didn’t mean to,” he wheezed, turning a worrying shade of red. Gathering his strength, he kicked out at her, trying to get her to loosen her grip long enough for him to get away from her, even for a few seconds. “I wasn’t in control!”

Tyler’s foot connected, but it didn’t phase her. Not right then. The pain from her arm blocked out everything else, made the world around her alternate from crystal clarity to greyed out and hazy, like everything was out of focus.

She leaned in close to him, her eyes darkening along with the veins around them as her fangs slowly dropped into place. “I never got a free pass because I wasn’t in control,” she hissed. “Not once. I don’t see how you’re any different.”

Katherine pulled back so he could see her, could know the face of his death because, in that moment, she was absolutely determined to kill him. But then she saw it. Something in the shape of his face, the set of his brows stopped her. The hand on his neck slackened, not quite releasing her grip on him, but allowing him to breathe again while memories flooded her fevered brain. “Mason-”

He couldn’t breathe or throw out reasons why he wasn’t like her, not when it came to killing people or making mistakes. Even as he slowly turned blue in the face, the irrational need to argue almost overtook him. If she had allowed him to speak, he would have shouted and argued, and told her exactly why she was considered the real monster in his eyes.

But he couldn’t and there were black spots in his eyes as he struggled to stay conscious. But something in her face abruptly changed as she looked at him and she loosened her hold on him. Immediately, he took the chance to take in huge lungfuls of air. Gasping, he gathered his strength and took the chance to break her grip while she was distracted.

Pushing her away from him, he belatedly responded to what she had said, “What? What did you call me?”

Katherine’s face crumbled as she stumbled back, sagging against the wall. The hallucinations had set in and instead of Tyler, Mason Lockwood was standing before her, that devilish smile flashing at her and those gorgeous eyes of his. Only, instead of being whole, he was there with the hole in his chest from Damon ripping his heart out.

“Baby, look at what he did to you!” she said, advancing on Tyler again, eyes filling with tears. “I told you not to get close to them. I told you to stay away. Just get the rock and go.”

He didn’t catch on to what she was talking about until she mentioned the rock. He didn’t know what to think and that showed in his face, even if she wasn’t seeing him right then. Tyler had never seen the effects of a bite before, but it wasn’t surprising to find Katherine hallucinating. He put more space between them and before he could realize how truly stupid it could be to do what he was about to do, he said, “Hey, it’s not Mason. I’m not Mason.” And he didn’t even know what to think about how she was tearing up.

That threw the hallucinating vampire for a loop. Katherine blinked once, twice, then rubbed her eyes as if that would help clear what she was seeing before her. As if it would wipe away the memory of Mason as she’d found him, once Damon had finished with him.

“No,” she said slowly, wrestling herself into something resembling control for the moment. “No... No you’re not Mason. You’re Tyler.”

Beads of sweat dotted her brow as she finally pulled her hand away. The words that came forth then were practically a plea. “Get out of here, Tyler. Leave. Now. Before I kill you.”

“But,” he said, taking another step closer and ignoring all the warning bells going off in his head. Logically, he knew he was in danger, but something made him think that maybe, just maybe, it would be okay. He should have walked away, but it was hard to, knowing he was the cause of someone else’s suffering like this. Despite his temper, despite the fights he had gotten into Jeremy Gilbert over and over again, he didn’t like seeing people suffer and even if he hated Katherine, it was hard to not feel sorry for her right then.

It was likely she was playing a game with him, trying to get him to let his guard down by using his uncle’s name like this, but it was just so damn hard to walk away from someone in that much pain, especially when they looked like Elena. “Can I do something for you?”

Do something for her? Katherine just stared for a moment, trying to figure out what exactly he meant by that. It wasn’t as if she had errands that needed running, or a dog to be walked or plants to be watered.

Then it hit her- she must really be looking bad if Tyler was asking if there was something he could do.

Katherine shook her head, wiping her brow with the back of her hand. “No. There’s nothing to be done.” She gave him a tired, wan smile. “Good news is- you won’t have to deal with me for very much longer.”

“I don’t...I didn’t mean for this to happen,” Tyler said lamely, running his hand over his too long hair. He couldn’t help but think he needed to cut it. There were so many thoughts and feelings running through him. There were so many things out of his control right then, like he couldn’t do much about Katherine or Caroline, but his hair he could. And he would cut it, if he lived through this. That was something.

Looking at the ground, which was a momentously stupid idea, he said, “I might hate you, but you don’t deserve to suffer like this. No one does.”

That enraged Katherine for a reason even she couldn’t completely understand- the pity in his voice, the way he couldn’t look at her. It made her angry in a way she hadn’t been in a very, very long time.

Practically roaring with rage, she rushed him, catching Tyler up by the front of his shirt. The material easily ripped in her grip and when it failed, her nails dug into his skin. “Don’t you dare think this is going to be what kills me, pup,” she growled, spitting the words into his ear. She pushed him, hard, into the wall at his back. The mortar and cinder block buckled from the force. “I am going out on my terms. Mine. No one else’s.”

Katherine was dangerously close to killing the boy with her bare hands, and she knew it, so she made the conscious decision to stop right where she was. Slamming him into the building once more, she dropped Tyler like a rag doll. “Stay away from me. Next time I might not be able to stop.”

The wounds from her fingernails were already closing up as he scrambled to his feet. For a second he considered saying something to her, but then he turned and ran. He didn’t need to be told twice. For some reason she wasn’t ready to kill him, but he was going to count his blessings instead of questioning it. His conscience wasn’t settled, but he was finding out that not everything would be okay no matter how much he tried. His preference to being alive made sure of that.