my old clothes don't fit me now -- for vergoldung -- elena & katherine
title: my old clothes don't fit me now
recipient: vergoldung
relationship: elena & katherine
rating: pg (though I warn for the normal talk of blood and death that tvd has and vampirism.)
word count: 2k-ish (it kind of got away from me…)
summary: Elena did not comment on the way Katherine’s perfect designer clothes conformed to her body, didn’t say anything about the way they felt like they were made for her. She didn’t say anything about the clothes that Katherine had kept from when she was pretending to be Elena that she wrapped around herself, pretending that she was still the Elena that Katherine had claimed to be. (Set S2, AU for when Katherine escapes the caves, instead of going to the Salvatores, she comes up with a new plan.)
a/n: written with these three elements in mind: distorting mirrors, motherhood (especially wrt The Petrova Bloodline), choice versus fate. I hope it’s something like what you wanted.
Elena wakes slowly to the hum of an engine.
She can feel the world moving beneath her but she does not remember why, can hear the sounds outside, the other cars passing by, people talking, and behind her eyes she can see lights.
The hum of the engine remains, constant and soothing, and she keeps her eyes closed, trying to get lost into the darkness again.
A figure appears from the shadows of a room she is not in.
A smile familiar and dangerous forming in her mind.
And then there is blood, then there is a wrist shoved to her mouth and a muffled scream, and then there is the sound of something snapping.
Elena gasps awake, her body jerking forward and she only just misses the dashboard, the seat belt keeping her in place.
To her left Katherine rolls her eyes and throws a blood bag on her lap.
(“Oh my god, oh my god, what did you do?”
She knows the answer but she wants to be wrong. She so desperately wants to be wrong.
“Oh, please, Elena. Don’t pretend you don’t remember. You remember everything now.”
Elena looks at the other woman, the one wearing her face as she pushes further past other cars, barely looking back at her.
“You killed me.”
Katherine had killed her and Elena didn’t think she even cared. She was just one amongst hundreds.
“Oh, honey, if I wanted you permanently dead, you would be.” Katherine smirks.
“Why would you do this?”
All Elena can remember is the taste of the other woman’s blood, of the sound of her neck cracking. All she can remember is her own death.
And she doesn’t understand. Doesn’t understand anything.
Katherine looks her over, studying her almost, and Elena doesn’t know what she sees other than a twisted version of herself looking back. Elena’s hair may be straighter but it had finally happened, at Katherine’s hands, Elena had become everything she didn’t want to be. She had become the vampire the universe and she had fought over whether she would ever become.
“Because I decided Klaus doesn’t get to get what he wants. Not when the rest of us don’t.” Katherine finally says, and there’s something cold in her tone. But something else too. Something Elena has never heard before.
“Now drink you blood bag like a good little vampire.”)
Elena drinks the bag.
She hates herself for it. Hates herself for wanting more and more.
But she drinks the bag and the choice is gone and she is who she is and there is no going back now.
Katherine says she’s better now, stronger, something new and shiny and that it will save her. Elena thinks that it’ll kill her.
Katherine passes the sign says leaving Virginia and takes them somewhere hidden in the dark, a daylight ring waiting for Elena, and a triumphant look on Katherine’s face.
Elena slides the ring on to her finger, no help from anyone, her choice made, and she doesn’t know who she hates more.
Katherine or herself.
(“We had a plan.” Elena yells at her, blood in the back of her throat and the weight of silver on her finger.
“You had a dead Original in your basement, that’s not the same thing.”
Elena thought maybe Katherine had this fight with herself before, ironic really considering everything, or maybe someone else who had failed her.
All she knew was that there was confidence in her doppelganger’s voice as she said the words, like she knew it would fail.
As if she had lived it all before.
Maybe she had.)
They drive and they keep driving and Elena does not ask where they’re going. Just watches the scenery passing her by, trying not to think about how different it all looks to Mystic Falls.
She fails of course.
They drive and drive and trade cars at special places and Katherine takes her into hospitals to get new blood bags because they don’t need a trail of bodies and they aren’t far enough away yet.
Katherine keeps saying that.
Elena doesn’t think they’ll ever be far enough away.
She teaches Elena how to compel the nurses to take them to the blood, to let them walk them out of hospitals with coolers full of blood that Elena will drink and Katherine will sip at as they drive.
Katherine promises, actually promises, that it’ll be different for Elena soon. That the hunger will lessen and she won’t want it all so intensely. That she’ll learn to hold it in, to keep tight to that part of herself. That it will just take time. It’ll all take time.
It almost feels a little like comfort.
(“What about Jeremy and Jenna?” Elena asks quietly, afraid to say anyone else’s name. Afraid that she’ll curse them too, for being close to her, for saying their names out loud, where somehow Klaus could hear it.
“They’ll be fine.”
“You said-”
“That he killed everyone I ever loved. He did.” Katherine does not looking away from the road, but her grip tightens, her hands turning white momentarily. And Elena almost wants to say something comforting.
Almost.
“Don’t worry, I left a note. Several actually. There’s a plan in place already, they’ll be long gone before Klaus even knows that’s where you were. If he ever finds out that you existed. I told them to leave the dagger in Elijah. And I…I took care of any other loose ends.”
“You mean killed.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Katherine says looking over her, “Petrovas always do.”
Elena thinks of Katherine, of the hundreds of years she spent running, she thinks of her mother, and the life she had chosen.
“Better you die than I.” Elena repeats the words already echoing in her head.
Katherine smiles as she turns back to the road.)
They stay in different places.
A dingy motel here, a Motel 6 there, a stranger’s home who they compel to think they know them. Old family friends.
It’s different than what Elena would have expected.
Katherine was all about style, about living a certain lifestyle, but there they were, in strangers’ bedrooms and dingy hotel rooms that need more cleaning than they will ever get and Katherine doesn’t say anything.
She accepts it all.
Katherine watches the fuzzy televisions and sleeps on the lumpy pillows and leaves Elena to the diaries that Katherine had bought her and the blood bags that will pile up on her bed.
Elena tosses and turns in her bed. She spends her nights writing words that don’t make sense to her, and her days in the car, asleep against the window, and somewhere in between thinking about all the people she had left behind. Trying to piece together the life that was to come, the plan Katherine had, because Elena kept trying to see it but she couldn’t.
All she could hear was Katherine’s words; ‘I decided Klaus doesn’t get to get what he wants. Not when the rest of us don’t.’
(“We’re going out tonight.” Katherine says, pushing the door open, her arms full of bags.
She had gone out hours ago, leaving Elena alone in the hotel room. And Elena thinks she should probably have run. That it had been her chance.
The door was unlocked and she had stayed.
Because, God, she realized she didn’t know what she would do once she was out there on her own. The basics she had of course, stealing a car, compelling her way through towns, running, hiding. But she didn’t know how to keep going. She didn’t know how to not seek out all the people she missed.
She needed Katherine for that.
“Going out where?” Elena asks looking up from her diary.
She had already filled up five with her ramblings. Talk of hunger and longing and Katherine.
“To a local bar, nothing special.” Katherine shakes her head, “But I need some fun in my life and you need to learn to be around people and not kill them. A trail of bodies is the last thing that we need.”
“I thought that was what the blood bags were for.”
“You want to be on the blood bag diet, go for it,” Katherine rolls her eyes, “But people still exist, Elena, and you still have to learn how to not eat them just because their full of tasty delicious blood.”
“Is this you helping?”
“Duh.”)
They had been living out of Katherine’s suitcases for weeks now. Maybe longer, Elena had stopped trying to keep count. It was easier that way.
She had the pajamas she had died in, but everything else belonged to Katherine.
Elena did not comment on the way Katherine’s perfect designer clothes conformed to her body, didn’t say anything about the way they felt like they were made for her. She didn’t say anything about the clothes that Katherine had kept from when she was pretending to be Elena that she wrapped around herself, pretending that she was still the Elena that Katherine had claimed to be.
The new bags of clothes had things that should belong to the Elena from Mystic Falls, though three times the cost. Jeans and boots and button down cotton shirts and other things she knew Katherine would never wear if she didn’t have a reason.
She picks a jean mini skirt and red shirt that dipped and clung, and a black leather jacket.
Katherine looks her up and down, her eyes half confused, before nodding.
It would work.
(The bar is loud with bad music and men that stare and there’s an odor that Elena never wants to know what it is.
Her nose wrinkles as they push their way in and Katherine laughs, giggles really, and it circles around them both. Elena remembers Stefan describing it to her once.
“I never said it was high scale.” Katherine says, flipping her hair back. “Just that it would work for what we need.”
“For me to learn not to eat people?”
“And for me to have fun.” Katherine reminds her, “Now come on, let’s get something to drink.”
She grabs for Elena’s hand and Elena lets her take it and its odd, the feeling of their hands interlacing. Or maybe it’s not the feeling so much as the symbolism that Elena knows is there somewhere.
They reach the bar and Katherine is already batting her eyes at the bartender.
“Me and my sister need something to drink,” She says and it comes out sounding so natural Elena thinks she would believe it if she heard it. “Something full of vodka and has those little umbrellas in it.”
“I don’t know if we have anything like that.”
“I’m sure you could find something.”
It takes Elena a minute to realize that the words had come out of her own mouth.)
Sometimes Elena watches Katherine sleeping.
It’s odd and wrong in all kinds of ways, but she learns things.
Like how she was wrong. How she had thought that Katherine slept soundly, the rest of the world not a threat to her. But how fragile that sleep really was and how easily she was shaken out of it, her fangs dropped and ready for a fight.
She also realized how Katherine was always closer to the door, how she kept herself between Elena and any unwelcome guests.
And after hotel after hotel and strangers’ homes that are compelled to never invite anyone who doesn’t look like the two of them inside, she starts to realize that this is Katherine’s life.
She realizes that this has been Katherine’s life for five hundred years. Moving and running and pretending, changing her name, and leaving everything she might dare to love behind her just as easily as she left the things trying to destroy her. And now Elena is a part of it.
Another Petrova curse, she supposes.
Nothing is permanent, nothing truly belongs to them, they can only temporarily have it. Even the things they want, that they love, they have to leave them behind. If not for themselves then for them.
Elena is a vampire now, and no matter what Elijah does or Klaus when he appears, she will still lose Jenna, lose Jeremy; even if she’s not killed, she’ll still be dead, and she’ll watch them wither away.
Everything she once had will crumble in to dust in her hands if she lives long enough. If she follows in Katherine’s footsteps.
It’s what happened to Katherine before her, Katerina Petrova disappearing into nothingness.
The Petrova curse was about more than just Originals chasing after them.
(“What was it like?” Elena asks. And she knows the risks she’s taking, a neck snapping or Katherine’s nails staining her blood across the room. Despite the fact that she’s done neither so far.
“What was what like?” Katherine said looking up from her magazine she was flipping through.
She would make comments occasionally about people’s lack of taste in the world.
“When your parents forced you to leave home, when they took your baby away…when you learned that you could never get any of it back…what did you do?”
“I made new families.” Katherine says, and there’s something in her voice, something that says this is not a lie. Elena thinks that for a woman who is nothing but a mask, she speaks the truth more often than people think.
Or maybe it was just that it was Elena she was talking to. Elena often found herself saying things she didn’t mean to, looking into brown eyes that belonged to her and didn’t at the same time.
“I moved on and put it all behind me and didn’t look back.” Katherine says, “You can’t look back either, Elena, it’ll only hurt you. But you’ll move on, and you’ll find new things to make you happy each time you do.”
“Is that what I am?” Elena asks, “Am I your new family this time?”
Katherine smirks at her, almost a smile.
“We’ve always been family, Elena. It’s just that neither of us wanted to admit it before.”)
Elena is the one to knock on the door this time, to introduce Kathy and Lena and smile as her pupils dilate until she and the woman on the other side of the door are old family friends.
Elena smiles and the words come out smoothly.
(“Our car broke down and my sister and I just really need a place to stay for the night.”
“Anything for family.” The stranger says.)
It comes out so easily she doesn’t even blink.
Just looks at Katherine, at the same face she wears, and thinks; family. Thinks maybe she’s no longer lying.
Maybe this is what they had become.
recipient: vergoldung
relationship: elena & katherine
rating: pg (though I warn for the normal talk of blood and death that tvd has and vampirism.)
word count: 2k-ish (it kind of got away from me…)
summary: Elena did not comment on the way Katherine’s perfect designer clothes conformed to her body, didn’t say anything about the way they felt like they were made for her. She didn’t say anything about the clothes that Katherine had kept from when she was pretending to be Elena that she wrapped around herself, pretending that she was still the Elena that Katherine had claimed to be. (Set S2, AU for when Katherine escapes the caves, instead of going to the Salvatores, she comes up with a new plan.)
a/n: written with these three elements in mind: distorting mirrors, motherhood (especially wrt The Petrova Bloodline), choice versus fate. I hope it’s something like what you wanted.
Elena wakes slowly to the hum of an engine.
She can feel the world moving beneath her but she does not remember why, can hear the sounds outside, the other cars passing by, people talking, and behind her eyes she can see lights.
The hum of the engine remains, constant and soothing, and she keeps her eyes closed, trying to get lost into the darkness again.
A figure appears from the shadows of a room she is not in.
A smile familiar and dangerous forming in her mind.
And then there is blood, then there is a wrist shoved to her mouth and a muffled scream, and then there is the sound of something snapping.
Elena gasps awake, her body jerking forward and she only just misses the dashboard, the seat belt keeping her in place.
To her left Katherine rolls her eyes and throws a blood bag on her lap.
(“Oh my god, oh my god, what did you do?”
She knows the answer but she wants to be wrong. She so desperately wants to be wrong.
“Oh, please, Elena. Don’t pretend you don’t remember. You remember everything now.”
Elena looks at the other woman, the one wearing her face as she pushes further past other cars, barely looking back at her.
“You killed me.”
Katherine had killed her and Elena didn’t think she even cared. She was just one amongst hundreds.
“Oh, honey, if I wanted you permanently dead, you would be.” Katherine smirks.
“Why would you do this?”
All Elena can remember is the taste of the other woman’s blood, of the sound of her neck cracking. All she can remember is her own death.
And she doesn’t understand. Doesn’t understand anything.
Katherine looks her over, studying her almost, and Elena doesn’t know what she sees other than a twisted version of herself looking back. Elena’s hair may be straighter but it had finally happened, at Katherine’s hands, Elena had become everything she didn’t want to be. She had become the vampire the universe and she had fought over whether she would ever become.
“Because I decided Klaus doesn’t get to get what he wants. Not when the rest of us don’t.” Katherine finally says, and there’s something cold in her tone. But something else too. Something Elena has never heard before.
“Now drink you blood bag like a good little vampire.”)
Elena drinks the bag.
She hates herself for it. Hates herself for wanting more and more.
But she drinks the bag and the choice is gone and she is who she is and there is no going back now.
Katherine says she’s better now, stronger, something new and shiny and that it will save her. Elena thinks that it’ll kill her.
Katherine passes the sign says leaving Virginia and takes them somewhere hidden in the dark, a daylight ring waiting for Elena, and a triumphant look on Katherine’s face.
Elena slides the ring on to her finger, no help from anyone, her choice made, and she doesn’t know who she hates more.
Katherine or herself.
(“We had a plan.” Elena yells at her, blood in the back of her throat and the weight of silver on her finger.
“You had a dead Original in your basement, that’s not the same thing.”
Elena thought maybe Katherine had this fight with herself before, ironic really considering everything, or maybe someone else who had failed her.
All she knew was that there was confidence in her doppelganger’s voice as she said the words, like she knew it would fail.
As if she had lived it all before.
Maybe she had.)
They drive and they keep driving and Elena does not ask where they’re going. Just watches the scenery passing her by, trying not to think about how different it all looks to Mystic Falls.
She fails of course.
They drive and drive and trade cars at special places and Katherine takes her into hospitals to get new blood bags because they don’t need a trail of bodies and they aren’t far enough away yet.
Katherine keeps saying that.
Elena doesn’t think they’ll ever be far enough away.
She teaches Elena how to compel the nurses to take them to the blood, to let them walk them out of hospitals with coolers full of blood that Elena will drink and Katherine will sip at as they drive.
Katherine promises, actually promises, that it’ll be different for Elena soon. That the hunger will lessen and she won’t want it all so intensely. That she’ll learn to hold it in, to keep tight to that part of herself. That it will just take time. It’ll all take time.
It almost feels a little like comfort.
(“What about Jeremy and Jenna?” Elena asks quietly, afraid to say anyone else’s name. Afraid that she’ll curse them too, for being close to her, for saying their names out loud, where somehow Klaus could hear it.
“They’ll be fine.”
“You said-”
“That he killed everyone I ever loved. He did.” Katherine does not looking away from the road, but her grip tightens, her hands turning white momentarily. And Elena almost wants to say something comforting.
Almost.
“Don’t worry, I left a note. Several actually. There’s a plan in place already, they’ll be long gone before Klaus even knows that’s where you were. If he ever finds out that you existed. I told them to leave the dagger in Elijah. And I…I took care of any other loose ends.”
“You mean killed.”
“You’ll get used to it,” Katherine says looking over her, “Petrovas always do.”
Elena thinks of Katherine, of the hundreds of years she spent running, she thinks of her mother, and the life she had chosen.
“Better you die than I.” Elena repeats the words already echoing in her head.
Katherine smiles as she turns back to the road.)
They stay in different places.
A dingy motel here, a Motel 6 there, a stranger’s home who they compel to think they know them. Old family friends.
It’s different than what Elena would have expected.
Katherine was all about style, about living a certain lifestyle, but there they were, in strangers’ bedrooms and dingy hotel rooms that need more cleaning than they will ever get and Katherine doesn’t say anything.
She accepts it all.
Katherine watches the fuzzy televisions and sleeps on the lumpy pillows and leaves Elena to the diaries that Katherine had bought her and the blood bags that will pile up on her bed.
Elena tosses and turns in her bed. She spends her nights writing words that don’t make sense to her, and her days in the car, asleep against the window, and somewhere in between thinking about all the people she had left behind. Trying to piece together the life that was to come, the plan Katherine had, because Elena kept trying to see it but she couldn’t.
All she could hear was Katherine’s words; ‘I decided Klaus doesn’t get to get what he wants. Not when the rest of us don’t.’
(“We’re going out tonight.” Katherine says, pushing the door open, her arms full of bags.
She had gone out hours ago, leaving Elena alone in the hotel room. And Elena thinks she should probably have run. That it had been her chance.
The door was unlocked and she had stayed.
Because, God, she realized she didn’t know what she would do once she was out there on her own. The basics she had of course, stealing a car, compelling her way through towns, running, hiding. But she didn’t know how to keep going. She didn’t know how to not seek out all the people she missed.
She needed Katherine for that.
“Going out where?” Elena asks looking up from her diary.
She had already filled up five with her ramblings. Talk of hunger and longing and Katherine.
“To a local bar, nothing special.” Katherine shakes her head, “But I need some fun in my life and you need to learn to be around people and not kill them. A trail of bodies is the last thing that we need.”
“I thought that was what the blood bags were for.”
“You want to be on the blood bag diet, go for it,” Katherine rolls her eyes, “But people still exist, Elena, and you still have to learn how to not eat them just because their full of tasty delicious blood.”
“Is this you helping?”
“Duh.”)
They had been living out of Katherine’s suitcases for weeks now. Maybe longer, Elena had stopped trying to keep count. It was easier that way.
She had the pajamas she had died in, but everything else belonged to Katherine.
Elena did not comment on the way Katherine’s perfect designer clothes conformed to her body, didn’t say anything about the way they felt like they were made for her. She didn’t say anything about the clothes that Katherine had kept from when she was pretending to be Elena that she wrapped around herself, pretending that she was still the Elena that Katherine had claimed to be.
The new bags of clothes had things that should belong to the Elena from Mystic Falls, though three times the cost. Jeans and boots and button down cotton shirts and other things she knew Katherine would never wear if she didn’t have a reason.
She picks a jean mini skirt and red shirt that dipped and clung, and a black leather jacket.
Katherine looks her up and down, her eyes half confused, before nodding.
It would work.
(The bar is loud with bad music and men that stare and there’s an odor that Elena never wants to know what it is.
Her nose wrinkles as they push their way in and Katherine laughs, giggles really, and it circles around them both. Elena remembers Stefan describing it to her once.
“I never said it was high scale.” Katherine says, flipping her hair back. “Just that it would work for what we need.”
“For me to learn not to eat people?”
“And for me to have fun.” Katherine reminds her, “Now come on, let’s get something to drink.”
She grabs for Elena’s hand and Elena lets her take it and its odd, the feeling of their hands interlacing. Or maybe it’s not the feeling so much as the symbolism that Elena knows is there somewhere.
They reach the bar and Katherine is already batting her eyes at the bartender.
“Me and my sister need something to drink,” She says and it comes out sounding so natural Elena thinks she would believe it if she heard it. “Something full of vodka and has those little umbrellas in it.”
“I don’t know if we have anything like that.”
“I’m sure you could find something.”
It takes Elena a minute to realize that the words had come out of her own mouth.)
Sometimes Elena watches Katherine sleeping.
It’s odd and wrong in all kinds of ways, but she learns things.
Like how she was wrong. How she had thought that Katherine slept soundly, the rest of the world not a threat to her. But how fragile that sleep really was and how easily she was shaken out of it, her fangs dropped and ready for a fight.
She also realized how Katherine was always closer to the door, how she kept herself between Elena and any unwelcome guests.
And after hotel after hotel and strangers’ homes that are compelled to never invite anyone who doesn’t look like the two of them inside, she starts to realize that this is Katherine’s life.
She realizes that this has been Katherine’s life for five hundred years. Moving and running and pretending, changing her name, and leaving everything she might dare to love behind her just as easily as she left the things trying to destroy her. And now Elena is a part of it.
Another Petrova curse, she supposes.
Nothing is permanent, nothing truly belongs to them, they can only temporarily have it. Even the things they want, that they love, they have to leave them behind. If not for themselves then for them.
Elena is a vampire now, and no matter what Elijah does or Klaus when he appears, she will still lose Jenna, lose Jeremy; even if she’s not killed, she’ll still be dead, and she’ll watch them wither away.
Everything she once had will crumble in to dust in her hands if she lives long enough. If she follows in Katherine’s footsteps.
It’s what happened to Katherine before her, Katerina Petrova disappearing into nothingness.
The Petrova curse was about more than just Originals chasing after them.
(“What was it like?” Elena asks. And she knows the risks she’s taking, a neck snapping or Katherine’s nails staining her blood across the room. Despite the fact that she’s done neither so far.
“What was what like?” Katherine said looking up from her magazine she was flipping through.
She would make comments occasionally about people’s lack of taste in the world.
“When your parents forced you to leave home, when they took your baby away…when you learned that you could never get any of it back…what did you do?”
“I made new families.” Katherine says, and there’s something in her voice, something that says this is not a lie. Elena thinks that for a woman who is nothing but a mask, she speaks the truth more often than people think.
Or maybe it was just that it was Elena she was talking to. Elena often found herself saying things she didn’t mean to, looking into brown eyes that belonged to her and didn’t at the same time.
“I moved on and put it all behind me and didn’t look back.” Katherine says, “You can’t look back either, Elena, it’ll only hurt you. But you’ll move on, and you’ll find new things to make you happy each time you do.”
“Is that what I am?” Elena asks, “Am I your new family this time?”
Katherine smirks at her, almost a smile.
“We’ve always been family, Elena. It’s just that neither of us wanted to admit it before.”)
Elena is the one to knock on the door this time, to introduce Kathy and Lena and smile as her pupils dilate until she and the woman on the other side of the door are old family friends.
Elena smiles and the words come out smoothly.
(“Our car broke down and my sister and I just really need a place to stay for the night.”
“Anything for family.” The stranger says.)
It comes out so easily she doesn’t even blink.
Just looks at Katherine, at the same face she wears, and thinks; family. Thinks maybe she’s no longer lying.
Maybe this is what they had become.