let's see how deep the bullet lies
He waits to meet her again, with his fingers resting on his lips. She couldn't help herself. [Damon/Katherine, The Vampire Diaries, PG-13]
let's see how deep the bullet lies
The moment their lips touch, he knows.
Elena is not Katherine.
And this kiss-
This kiss is too familiar to be Elena.
(He pictures a cliff. He’s looking over the edge, but his eyes are closed. He’s afraid of what he might see.)
---
Her fingers gripping the front of his jacket, her mouth open, moving against his, her hair curling around her face, his palms cupping her cheeks, her eyes-
These are the things Damon remembers.
There was something about her expression. Strangely masked confusion. Bewildered amazement. And there was-
Longing.
Like she couldn’t believe he was standing in front of her. Speaking. Pouring out his heart. Like she had so much to say to him, building up, but she just couldn’t get it out. She didn’t kiss him tentatively as if for the first time; she kissed him cautiously, as though she didn’t know how to react but she couldn’t help herself.
She couldn’t help herself.
Elena, he realizes, Elena-
Elena never would have kissed him.
(But it can’t be. It can’t be.)
---
He calls her.
“So, Elena,” he drawls, smirk in place, ignoring the lump in his throat, “About our kiss-”
What? Damon, this isn’t the time-Stefan’s here, where are you?! There’s blood all over the kitchen, John is-we don’t know what’s happened-
He can hear the blood pounding in his ears, rushing through his head, crashing against the inside of his skull. There are words - he knows she’s talking but he can’t understand - he can’t understand-
“I’ll be right there,” he says, but everything he hears sounds like white noise.
---
They compel Jenna to sleep upstairs and Jeremy’s already out so nobody bothers to wake him up - they decide he doesn’t need to see John’s severed fingers lying on the counter. Elena almost vomits and has to take a minute outside, so of course Stefan’s out there comforting her or holding her hair back or whatever the hell other appropriate boyfriend action there is to commit - and Damon’s left standing in the kitchen, the coppery stench of blood in the air, underlined by the subtle scent of-
We don’t know what’s happened, Elena had said frantically.
Well.
He does.
---
(He waits to meet her again, with his fingers resting on his lips-
It’s all he can do.)
---
He doesn’t have to wait long.
Three days later he catches her outside of the house, looking like she has no intentions of knocking or ringing the doorbell.
“Elena?” He asks, bewildered. “Aren’t you supposed to be with-”
“I know,” she answers, interrupting him, shifting to face him. “But I’m here.”
There’s something strange about the way she’s looking at him. He can’t place it. It’s like the bare craters of Earth staring oddly and longingly at the rings of Saturn.
“We can talk inside,” he tells her, opening the door. “Ladies first.”
The corners of her lips turn up, and she walks ahead of him. Her boots click against the wooden floor, and he watches her without moving; the way she carries herself, her back straight, posture perfect, hands folded in front of her body, the delicate sway of her hips-
“So, Katherine,” he says sharply, “Why are you here?”
She freezes in the middle of taking another step. Her voice seems to smolder in her throat. “You know.”
“I figured it out,” he says nonchalantly.
Katherine turns to look at him, a strand of hair falling over her eye. “It shouldn’t matter,” she says crisply. “I have something to accomplish. You’ve clearly moved on.”
“I waited for you,” he says shamelessly. “It was you. Only you. You.”
“And yet,” she counters, her tone steely, “and yet…you weren’t kissing me three days ago. You thought you were kissing Elena.”
There’s a pause. Damon’s eyes are burning into hers. She can feel his stare against her like he is on the inside of her skull, playing with matches.
“I knew it was you,” he says to her quietly.
She doesn’t breathe. It’s been too long, for him to be inches away from her face, murmuring words like shooting stars against her skin; she imagines his sentences changing the directions of ocean currents.
“How?” She asks at last.
It takes one second, and he is standing in front of her. She doesn’t even blink, but her arms drop carefully to her sides. He reaches out, his fingers curling around her hips, and then-
His lips crash against hers.
He feels her slight catch of breath, and then, her hands running through his hair, her mouth moving, open and aggressive, and he-
He pulls away.
“That’s how I knew,” he tells her, but can’t bring himself to take a step back. Her eyes open slowly, meeting his, her lips still parted. “Details are small, Katherine. And I remember all of yours.”
She blinks. She shifts her weight from her left foot to her right, her gaze sweeping across the shadows of his room. There are - there used to be an imbalance, an irregularity in power. But now…but now. This is strange, with him standing in front of her, like an equal; not a startled, terrified young man afraid of losing the only thing he loves. He seems world-weary and, up-close, exhausted.
She realizes, in that instant, that even though she turned him, she’s never faced him like this.
It’s an unnerving feeling.
“I tried,” she says finally. “But I don’t know her. I didn’t know what she would have done. So I did what I would have done.”
At this, he does move away. “So,” he replies, his voice becoming hard, “that’s all?”
“Damon,” she says softly, and he flinches at the sound of her voice wrapping itself around his name. He’s different, now; not like she remembers him. He is transitioning, though it’s somewhat nonsensical; water into wine, careless metals into priceless gold. She has things to say to him, but she doesn’t know how-
Her tongue darts out to wet her lips. His reactions are - she used to be able to predict them, understand them, quell them. But this-
“You’re different,” she says to him, smiling slightly, and he is truly reminded of Elena at that moment. This sudden shift in her demeanor disconcerts him. “You’ve changed. I should have expected this.”
“A hundred and forty-five years,” he hisses at her, though she can tell anger is not his fueling emotion. “I’ve been searching for you, trying to get you back. I’m not allowed to change?”
He turns around, his hands clenched into fists at his sides.
“After what you did,” he continues, glancing out the window. “I couldn’t blame you, either. I loved you too much to blame you.”
“So you blamed him.” She may not have been in his world for the past century and a half but she can still follow his thought patterns, the connections in his mind. It’s oddly comforting, to know, that after all this time, she can still understand him.
“I blamed him.” Damon drops his head for a split second, before turning to look at her. “I blame him.”
She inhales suddenly again, feeling a knot in her throat; her gaze lingers on the bones in his wrists, the curves of his shoulders, the slant of his neck.
“Why did you do it?”
No.
This - this is what she didn’t need. His voice, cracking, so pent-up with emotion, things he’s been holding onto his entire life, laid out in the open. She didn’t come to him to feel more guilt.
He’s still going. “It was supposed to be me, Katherine. Only me.”
Her mouth is dry, and her eyes burn when she blinks. She spots the photo of herself from eighteen sixty-four on his desk.
“I wanted you both,” she answers at last, avoiding his look. “And you loved each other.” She glares at him, abruptly angry. “You loved each other, so don’t ask me why I did it. What should I have done, Damon? Turned you to be with me for all eternity, and left him behind? You would have watched him die. Is that what you wanted? Because I didn’t. I love you. I loved Stefan too. I didn’t want to watch him die.”
He’s clearly taken aback by her answer, staring at her with an incomprehensible expression on his face. Outside, the wind howls, branches of trees scratching against the glass of the windows.
Inside, everything is silent.
“I’m sorry,” she concludes, shrugging slightly, looking unusually unsure of herself. “Maybe that wasn’t for me to decide.”
Damon’s staring at her, his face still unreadable, before his lips quirk up unexpectedly into a small smile.
“You’ve changed, too,” he informs her, somewhat subdued. “You’ve changed.”
They stand five feet apart from each other, uncertain of what to do next. His smirk slips, and he’s left looking at her in open vulnerability.
“I thought if I wasn’t around, there would be nothing for you two to hate each other over,” she confesses, her gaze once again set on the ground. “What happened between you and Stefan - I didn’t want that.”
Damon’s voice catches in his throat. “I understand,” he says after a beat.
Katherine takes a step towards him. “Where does this leave us?”
“What about Stefan?”
Katherine stops.
“What happened between Stefan and I…it wasn’t real. You know that. I had to compel him. This isn’t about Stefan,” Katherine says. “He has Elena.”
“About her-”
“I’m not going to touch her.”
Damon pauses. He furrows his eyebrows together.
“She’s…fascinating, yes,” Katherine elaborates, “but I’m not here to revisit the past, Damon. And I’m certainly not going to murder a descendent of mine for falling in love with him. I understand her feelings perfectly.”
He squints his eyes and his tongue pokes the inside of his cheek as he thinks. “Really,” he says.
Katherine smirks at him. “I came here to do one thing,” she says. “I came here to kill John. I knew what he’d done with the vampires who escaped from the tomb. And I knew you were here. I heard about Pearl - I didn’t want you to be next.”
Damon frowns. “There’s more to it than that.”
Katherine meets his eyes unwaveringly. “There is.”
He opens his mouth. Pauses. Closes it.
He reaches out, his fingers twisting around her hand.
“You’ll tell me, eventually?”
Katherine smiles at him, and he’s back in 1864, a simple Sunday afternoon holed up in her bed as he kisses her neck, and she pulls away giggling - I love you he says to her and she smiles at him, just like she’s doing now-
“One day,” she promises him, her fingers wrapping back around his. “One day soon.”