Tyler Lockwood (firstsuccess) wrote in valarlogs, @ 2017-03-06 19:55:00 |
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Entry tags: | !complete, katherine pierce, tyler lockwood |
Who: Tyler and Katherine
What: Katherine catches Tyler at a bad time
When: February's full moon
Where: A bar someplace
Rating/Warning: Fairly low
Status: Complete
It hadn’t yet been a year since Tyler had first turned into a werewolf, but he had been hoping that it would get easier with time. Unfortunately, the only thing that seemed to get easier was the routine. He knew when he had to leave to get to the cave where he transformed, and since Bonnie had placed the spell on he no longer had to get there early to chain himself up.
The sun was already beginning to set before he squared up his bar tab and started to head out of the bar, not drunk but tipsy enough that he wasn’t as scared of his upcoming transformation. But as he was leaving, he caught sight of a familiar face. They’d never really been what someone would call friends, though he’d spent time some time with her in high school when he and Caroline had been hooking up. They hadn’t even really talked since they graduated high school and Tyler went off to study at Duke. But he and Elena were friends in the dreams, and he wouldn’t mind becoming friends here too.
“Hey, Elena,” Tyler said, stepping up to the brunette. “You back from abroad, or are you just visiting?”
Oh, god.
Katherine rolled her eyes for what seemed like the millionth time - she’d been doing that a lot since she stepped back into home territory, moreso when someone sauntered up to her and mistaking her for the twat twin. Katherine liked to think that people could at least tell them apart by, oh, say, their fashion for one thing - because Elena bought things at a discount bin in a Class C mall, and Katherine…
Didn’t.
Because she had a thing called taste.
Money, too. College was skipped to nosedive right into a career of fame, catty comments, making other females cry and eating disorders, which meant she’d do nothing but thrive.
“Wrong, Little Lockwood,” she groused, stirring the ice in her margarita with the bitty black straw. They weren’t strangers - if someone knew Elena during her high school years, chances are they knew of naughty sister with the identical face, and Tyler would probably remember her on the fact alone that she maybe-sorta-totally nailed his Uncle Mason at some point.
What could she say? Mason was young, and attractive, and they hit it off so marvelously before she went off to the next one. “It’s the other one. You’re favorite. Long time no see.”
There was a wink too.
Tyler’s expression clouded when he realized his mistake. He definitely remembered Katherine banging his uncle, but even more clearly than that, he remembered Katherine in the dreams. He hadn’t been particularly fond of her before, but now…
“Oh,” he said. “My bad. Why are you here? I thought you were off clawing other women’s eyes out or something.”
Katherine’s smile was coy, plump lashes batting at him in such a bullshit innocence that was absolutely and positively transparent. “I’m taking a break,” she answered with a high shrug of her shoulders and nursed her cocktail for a second before continuing. “I’m doing this thing where I try not to be a completely awful older sister, especially since I found out Jeremy’s been having dreams that have gotten him shot, which meaaans…”
Knees crossed and she spun in her stool, clearly tipsy and not giving a damn. “I’m here. For awhile. How’s Mason? Been awhile since I spoke to that hunk of meat.” And those eyes, mmmm.
Tyler snorted. “Good luck with that.” He had recently dreamed of Katherine straight up killing Jeremey not long ago, but he had to force himself to remember that Katherine wasn’t the 500-year-old psychobitch she was in the dreams. She was just a catty twenty-something year old who was apparently to make things better. “Seriously,” he added, a little more gently. “He hasn’t exactly had an easy time of it lately.”
He frowned at the mention of Mason. The last thing he wanted to think about was Katherine and his uncle bumping uglies. “Mason’s fine, probably. Last I heard he was surfing in South Africa or something.” He regretted that he and his uncle weren’t closer, but it wasn’t like Mason was exactly reliable or easy to get ahold of.
Boo, sad. If he’d been in the area Katherine would have tried hitting him up, in an attempt to smooth things over from their last interaction - and also get a little tumble in the bedsheets out of it. Truth be told, she was someone who became easily infatuated, but was also someone who didn’t let it take over. They were all fleeting affairs, meant to be quick, and she always pulled out before she sunk too deep.
Hah. Pulling out. That’s something she should have suggested to her first in this life and the last. Funny how these jokes came rolling in after the fourth margarita in, hm?
Anyway, inappropriate suggestions about his relative aside (she was capable of kindness, you know), she patted the vacant stool next to her as an invite. “C’mon. Sit.” Katherine didn’t bite - at least, not yet. “Have a drink with me. I won’t leave you with my tab.”
Tyler took another glance at his phone to check the time, and then hesitantly sat down in the proffered seat. This was beyond weird. The most he’d ever interacted with Katherine was in the dreams, where the last thing he had to worry about from her was her saddling him with a bar tab. Once he sat, a server quickly came to the table and her ordered a scotch. “If anything, you should be buying me drinks with all that modelling money of yours. How’s that going, anyway?”
“Weren’t you born with a silver spoon in your mouth, Lockwood?” Katherine smirked, elbow on the table with her chin in her palm. “I think one of us actually worked for the money, all you had to do was be the right sperm that reached the egg whenever your parents did all…that.”
Maybe she didn’t need a fifth drink but she got one anyway, after the previous glass was made barren. One that was freshly made came to the table soon enough, and she wiped a bit of salt off the rim to lick off her finger. “But it’s swell, if you must know. All the best clothes, shoes, cosmetics - and it makes me wonder why I came here of all places when this is a looney bin. Or a therapist’s wet dream.”
Tyler blanched at the thought of his parents doing that. “Gross, Katherine,” he groaned, and with a gulp drank about half the alcohol in his glass. “But I’m making my own way in the world these days.” When he’d come home from Duke he realized that he couldn’t live in that house with his parents anymore. They, in turn, told him that they wouldn’t support him in anything other than school expenses if he left the house, and that was exactly how he prefered it.
“Sounds nice. I always wished I could have all the make-up I could want,” he joked. “But yeah, I’ve got to question your wisdom in coming back here too. So Jeremy’s filled you in on the dreams then?” He wondered just how much of the dreams that Jeremy had told her about. He doubted Jeremey mentioned what a psycho Katherine was, that she’d killed her not-actual-brother, and then had eventually died an old woman while everyone drank to her death. He wondered if it would be better if she were kept in the dark about all of that, or if she should have time to prepare for it. He still kind of wished that someone had filled him in on the whole werewolf thing ahead of time.
Katherine’s chuckle was mirthless, tongue in cheek, and both of those flawlessly shaped brows briefly flared. “Jeremy didn’t break the news,” she informed, her tone taking a more somber turn. “Everyone else did, and I received the news with skepticism. Up until I had my own, with some curious side effects…”
If those aches and pains from bearing a child didn’t haunt her bones she would have brushed it off as an awkwardly vivid dream, but she wasn’t one to be swim in the waters of denial. Now she wished she would have ordered the tequila without the rest of the ingredients. “What I wish someone would have warned was how each life mirrored each other, is the thing.”
Tyler stared at Katherine for a moment, wondering what exactly she had dreamed. Was she in Mystic Falls with Mason already? Or did she start five-hundred years ago when she had turned into a vampire? “You’ve had your own?” he asked, trying, and not quite accomplishing, nonchalance. “Yeah, they tend to be eerily close to real life sometimes. Dreaming of the people you went to highschool with and all that. What kind of side-effects have you dealt with so far?”
Her eyes honed in on him like she was ready for murder, but contrary to his own suspicions it was nothing about what he thought. Yet. Elijah had uttered the ‘v’ word already during their reunion brunch together, but she didn’t know how that fit in - all little Katerina knew was that he and his fabulously groomed brother, Klaus, were dashing lords.
“Nothing you’d know about unless you were able to magically conceive, then get your dick ripped apart by contractions,” she cheerfully (but not) quipped, smiling before scowling, and then swallowing the rest of the margarita like a shot. Her own high school pregnancy wasn’t a secret - everyone knew, and those who had something to say about it would get chunks of their skin underneath her perfectly manicured nails. “My hips hurt for a couple days. Anyway. Got kicked out of Bulgaria, learned English, and I’m making kissing faces to two brothers in England.”
Boring. “What about you, hm? I bet you’ve got some interesting stories.”
Tyler’s dreams weren’t exactly for the faint of heart. He’d seen far too many people die bloody deaths before his eyes. Once a month, every bone in his body broke and reshaped themselves into those of a wolf. He’d even had his own neck snapped. And yet the imagery that Katherine put in his head was still enough to make him feel squeamish. “You really have a way with words, Katherine,” he said. But if she had just given birth, that meant that she was still pretty far in the past. It would be a long time before she dreamed of Mystic Falls in the 2000s.
“Interesting’s one word for it,” he said. “Jeremy and I actually have the same dreams. I mean, mostly. He has his dreams and I have mine, but we dream of each other.”
No more drinks for this one, not if Tyler wanted her to eloquently word things without a drop of shame. Chin back to her palm, then, and she watched him warily. Bringing up her little brother had her react like that most of the time.
“He told me he sees dead people.” How sixth sense-y. Katherine frowned. “I dreamt of a family but there was no twin, no baby brother, so you can say I’m a smidge jealous of you. How bad did it get for you two meatheads?”
No, she wouldn’t have had a twin sister or a little brother in the dreams. Elena and Jeremy had come much later, and technically Elena wasn’t Katherine’s sister in them so much as some distant ancestor. He opened his mouth to say something, and then he closed it. It wasn’t his place to tell her that. Let Jeremy or someone who actually liked her in the dreams tell her about it. If someone like that actually existed, which she doubted. Stefan, maybe.
“I wouldn’t be jealous of I was you.” After all, she’d get there eventually. Though from the other side, where she actively made all of their lives miserable. “It gets pretty bad. A lot of people die, among other things.”
Mmm, ominous. Katherine sensed there was something being withheld, and strawberry-red lips smirked like she was in on the secret too. “People dying, what a surprise. That’s a necessary plot device to make Jeremy’s sixth sense thing relevant. What did you get out of this? Jere can apparently see our dead parents sometimes, and wakes up shot.”
God. Why was she sticking around again? Instinct told her to run, but, oh, right - sibling obligations kept her grounded on OC territory until further notice.
Tyler blinked. He’d known that Jeremy could talk to ghosts in his dreams, and part of him had assumed that he could likely do the same here. But he hadn’t thought about the fact that he might be able tos ee their parents. In his dream world, Jeremey could only talk to people on the Other Side, and his parents were most decidedly human. It hadn’t occurred to him that there maybe wasn’t an Other Side over here, and maybe even regular humans could become ghosts.
Which then brought up Katherine’s other question. Half surprised, he pulled his phone out of his pocket and looked at the time. “Oh shit,” he swore. He had less time than he thought he might have to get safely to the mountains. Much less time. “I need to get going.”
That smile turned into a cutesy pout, and then that cutesy pout turned into an authentic scowl. “Look at you, having a social life,” Katherine mumbled, holding her empty glass up like she was gesturing to a point. If that was the case she’d have to shut the tab and go home because drinking by yourself, that was something depressing. “Congrats. Is this a booty call summon?”
Social life. If only it was something like that. “No,” he said. “It’s a dream thing, actually.” He frowned sharply, debating whether or not he should tell her about the werewolf thing, and then decided that even if he did have some desire to confide in Katherine, which he most certainly did not, he didn’t have time to go into the whole thing right now. “I’ll see you around,” he said. He slammed back the rest of his drink, laced a couple of dollar bills on the table for it, and then turned to rush out of the bar.
Excuse him?
Katherine had never been ditched with that much urgency before, and when the words ‘it’s a dream thing’ came before that sudden departure, there was enough tequila mixed with sweet n’ sour to want to know what the hell all that was about.
Cash from her purse was put underneath her own glass to cover this and the rest and despite the stilettos - worn with jeans, because she mixed casual with high fashion footwear plenty of times - the speed in which she followed his frantic ass was impressive. Beauty was pain and enduring it was part of the job but, god, she hoped he wouldn’t start running.
She did not run in heels.
“Lockwood!” she called out, carefully click-clacking down those cement steps in front of the bar. “What’s your problem?”
Tyler was nearly at the tree line when he heard Katherine’s voice behind him, and he turned around, a sheen of sweat already appearing on his forehead. “Katherine, what are you doing?” he growled at her. “Don’t follow me. It’s dangerous!”
Oh, don’t say it isn’t so! Dangerous. Look at her shiver in her pretentiously expensive heels - except not, and she looked unamused crossing her arms and cocking her hips to the side, all attitude and devilish sass. “You do know that if you need to barf, there’s a perfectly good private bathroom inside to hide your shame?”
Katherine assumed that’s what it was, anyway, with the whole perspiration thing he had going on. He didn’t look too good, and she wasn’t heartless enough to leave him by himself in a dry-heaving pile.
She owed it to Mason to not let his nephew die from alcohol poisoning.
“I don’t need to-” Tyler’s exasperated sentence was cut off by an agonized grunt that he managed to keep from turning into a scream. He could hear the sound of his ribs snapping like it was a gunshot, and a distant part of him wondered if the sound would carry all the way to Katherine.
The transformation was happening sooner than he had expected it to, and he wondered if he hadn’t gotten the time of the moon’s cresting wrong. There wasn’t anything for it. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out the vial of wolfsbane potion that Lily had made for him. “Katherine, get out of here,” he growled at her, his eyes flashing yellow.
Katherine heard something, cracking maybe - but it didn’t register as bones, it’s not what her thoughts would ever even go to, and then she caught the change of his eyes. An involuntary shudder ripped through her spine. That sure as hell was unnatural, even supernatural, and if he was warning her to get the hell away?
Those heels took a step back. “Dream thing,” she deadpanned, fear hidden from her voice, but maybe he could at least smell it on her. “Right.” Keys were in her purse, and she fished those out hurriedly as she took more steps back, up until she hit the body of her Jaguar and the car beeped, blinked, and unlocked at the press of a button.
What the hell is - “Sorry to jet, Lockwood, but if you’ve got your murderface on then I’m not going to stick around for it,” she said, right before sliding into her car and quickly shutting the door behind her. He knew best, after all.
She just hoped he wouldn’t do something dramatic, run off, and die somewhere.
Katherine’s voice barely penetrated through the haze of pain that Tyler was experiencing, but he lifted his eyes and saw that Katherine was getting into her truck, and he was filled with relief. The pain eased long enough for him to pour the wolfsbane potion into his mouth, and it slid down his throat like battery acid. He dry heaved, once, twice, and then, with one last glance spared for Katherine, he ran into the woods, hoping that the potion really would keep him from attacking someone.