Title: Promises, Promises (they’re meant to be broken)
Author: Kagome
Series: The Vampire Diaries (television series verse)
Word Count: 786
Rating: R
Characters, Pairings: Stefan/Katherine, Stefan/Elena and past Damon/Katherine implied.
Summary: He may be a promise-breaker, but she is not.
Warnings: Spoilers if you haven’t seen up to 3x09, angst, sexual content
Notes: This was a prompt requested by
earnmysong at the TVD comment ficathon
here. Prompt was: Katherine/Stefan - We’d keep all our promises (be us against the world).
“I loved you. I loved Damon, too.” She uses the past tense, because even though the past tense is a lie wrapped in the truth, it’s easier than using terms for the here-and-now and for always. Forever has her, she doesn’t have forever.
She knows the majority of him probably doesn’t believe her-mostly believes that she cares only for herself. She also knows that some smaller part of him probably believes that the past doesn’t always stay in the past.
For now, she lets him think whatever he wants, because he’s going to do that anyway.
~*~
She knows she’s strong-she wouldn’t have survived this long if she wasn’t. There are days, though, when she feels weaker than she should, and it has nothing to do with a lack of human blood (if that were the problem, it would be an easy fix) and everything to do with the humanity that she can’t seem to ever fully rid herself of.
She checks on him, like always, because she promised herself a long time ago that she would, and she may be a liar on her best and worst days, but she is not a promise-breaker.
“What are you doing here?” he asks her, and she smiles.
“Watching you become more like yourself,” is what she says.
Keeping my promise, is what she doesn’t say.
”I’ll always love you, Stefan."
And as painfully relevant as it is to her (that always) she knows just how horribly irrelevant it is to him.
~*~
Eventually, he stops asking why she visits him. Eventually, he lets his guard down enough to talk about the doppleganger and the brother that he left behind. Eventually, he takes from her what she is more than willing to give, even though they both know that she is neither what he wants nor needs.
She could pull of a pretty damn good imitation, though, if she were to try. Both of them know this, too. However, she doesn’t stoop to such a low level-she’ll make sure that he remembers these stolen moments were with her.
“You don’t have to be gentle with me,” she purrs when he enters her, slowly and carefully, like he doesn’t want to hurt her. “I’m not like your fragile little human girlfriend. I won’t break.”
She is rewarded with his fangs sinking into her neck, and when he thrusts his hips again, he is anything but slow and gentle. He takes her hard and fast and without apology (she’ll be sore later but it doesn’t matter), and she gives just as good as she gets.
They are still for but a moment in the afterglow, and then he’s moving again, taking her again, while she makes a snide comment about how her human counterpart wouldn’t be able to handle him like this.
No, he won’t break her, not Katherine.
(She says nothing of the fragility of already-frozen vampire hearts, because there are certain times when certain things need not be said.)
~*~
He makes promises in the moonlight that she knows he’ll forget in the light of day. It isn’t that he has good intentions-he is lust-struck, not love-struck, and she has long since abandoned the idea of getting her hopes up.
“I’ll never leave again,” he breathes, hands moving from her breasts to her hips to her thighs, kneading at supple flesh and simply holding on.
“Promises, promises,” she lightly chides as she rides him slow and easy, nails raking down his chest. The marks she leaves behind fade in the span of a breath (the unnecessary one that she doesn’t have to take, but does anyway).
If their world was a perfect one, they’d always keep their promises. It would be the two of them against the rest of the world. However, their world is far from perfect; some promises are made only to be broken, and she knows better than to believe that these moments between them are spent on nothing more or less than borrowed time.
~*~
Months pass in the blink of an eye for them, and she is not at all surprised when he decides to go back to the human girl and the vampire brother who holds his heart in ways that she never has or can or will.
Goodbyes aren’t necessary and so they are not said. She just touches his face and smiles, thinking of how things could have been different-how they could have been different. She turns away from him before she lets herself think too much.
She’s used to walking away-that part’s easy. It’s the going back that’s hard.
(Because she may be a liar on her best and worst days, but she is not a promise-breaker).
~END~
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Wow, this one’s kind of depressing, isn’t it?