fic: but still, like dust, i'll rise (1/3)
TITLE: but still, like dust, i'll rise
FANDOM: the vampire diaries
RATING: pg-13
CHARACTERS: katherine pierce, elijah, damon salvatore, katherine/elijah, katherine/damon
WORD COUNT:
SUMMARY: she will not die. not today.
Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose.
(WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, MACBETH)
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise
(MAYA ANGELOU, STILL I RISE)
The boy loves with his whole soul, and by God, it’s going to be the death of him.
Katherine Pierce, contrary to popular belief, is capable of that mythic poetry and instigator of wars. But if it’s one thing that she has learnt over half a millennium of running and fear and blood, it’s that unconditional love should only be reserved for oneself, that epic declarations of ardour are only for martyrs.
Katherine Pierce is not a martyr. She has no desire to die.
I. THE BEAUTY
“Be brave, daughter,” her mother says to her upon her departure. “Be brave, my sweet.”
It is a cold morning. The mists cloy, thick and white and physical around her skirts, and Katerina tries her best to smile. It is a pitiful thing. She pulls her hood over her hair, and tries very hard not to cry.
“Goodbye, my love.” Her mother says, pulling her into a hug. Katerina’s mother smells of bread and milk and a good-hearted wife but Katerina, for the moment, at least, smells of sin and another man’s sweat. Perhaps that is why the villagers shy away from the soiled darling. “I love you. Remember that.”
Later, her mother fades into the white of the mists and Katerina presses her fingers, very lightly, against the glass of her window, traces the shape of her mother through the pale hush of her own breath.
Her mother fades into the distance, and there is a whisper of a death, an end, in the air.
There is a girl with her for the journey westwards, a girl named Anne with hair gold like wheat fields and eyes like cornflowers, a true English rose, orphaned for the last seven years by the war in England.
“Lord,” Anne says now, drawing the word out long, so that her red lips purse and curl at the same time, and Katerina tries again, her tongue thick in her mouth, but still she cannot master the word.
“Lord,” Anne repeats, and leans forward. Beneath them, the carriage rocks over uneven ground, and outside the dark trees shimmer with borrowed light. “Lord, Kat. You must say the word as you bow, as you demure. Lower your eyes, like this,” Anne demonstrates, her dark gold lashes brushing heavily against the rise of her rosy cheeks. “You must say the word as though you are born to it. Arch your voice. You must seem a lady.”
“Lord,” Katerina tries again, and her tongue curls too easily, curls the r in the word until it is nothing but bastardized Bulgarian. Her hands grip, knocking hard against her heavy skirts. “Lord. Lord, lord, lord.”
Her fingers dig red crescents into the palm of her hands, and her breath hitches. Her teeth knock hard against one another in her mouth, and the word comes out a hiss. “Lord Elijah. Lord Niklaus.” She slips back into Bulgarian. “Shall they take the place of my father then? Shall they beat me when they please?”
Anne shakes her head. “Patience, Kat.” She says. “No man likes a woman who answers back.”
Katerina does not say what is on her mind, does not think, Nichola liked it well enough. He used to laugh at my retorts before he looked at me like a man.
And how did it turn out for you that time?
Left on her back like a common whore, bearing a man’s bastard child. Her own father spat in her face and refused to look her in the eyes. Her mother had wept.
“Lord,” Katerina tries again, closes her eyes, and lets the word roll over her tongue like the wine her father used to allow her at the dinner table. It is just as bitter and just as old. “My Lord.”
England is a broken land.
This is what she gathers when she first sets foot upon this country she was never meant to see, this land she was never meant to touch. Her feet touch the ground and she breathes in deep, the air cold and still all around her.
There is no life here, is what she thinks when she follows her stern chaperone into the vast sprawling estates of the Lords Niklaus and Elijah. The woods all around them are oddly silent, the birds do not chirp and the insects do not hum. Katerina strains herself, and hears no hint of living beings.
“Where are they?” She asks, and her voice is impossibly loud in this circle of silence. “Where are the lords?”
“Hush, child.” Her chaperone, a mean-faced woman with stern lips and tired eyes says in Bulgarian. “Did you really expect two noble lords to greet a lowly disgraced girl such as yourself in person? You are but a charity case.”
“Attending the king, I’ve heard.” Anne whispers to her. “Both of them backed the Tudor king during the War, and were allowed to keep their estates. Even the estates of their neighbours, rumour has it.” Anne grins. “The timing was almost magical.”
Katerina turns her head up, her eyes tracing the tall spires, the thick grey walls of the manor’s exterior. There is something foreboding about the manor, more than a hundred times larger than her family’s modest estate, its windows snug with Venetian glass, and walls heavy with frost.
“My Lady!” A voice calls out, and Katerina starts. It is English, English to the bone, the words long and drawn out and thoughtless. Her own feigned accent seems pale and weak in contrast. She looks up.
The boy is tall, and grins with his teeth, his long dark hair falling around his angular face in straight layers, and Katerina braces herself. She knows the role she is meant to play. She bows.
And holds.
And remains silent, like a good woman.
The boy reaches for her hand, clumsy and young, and his fingers are strangely cold to the touch. He grins from ear to ear. “Trevor, my lady. I’m a personal servant of the Lord Elijah. I’ve been charged of settling you in before they arrive.”
His eyes are not innocent. Not as innocent as his smile, and perhaps this is what makes Katerina tilt her head, smooth and sinuous, so that he may see the curve of her long neck beneath her furs.
This will not be like the last. Katerina thinks she can use some allies, someone to trust.
She feels, more than sees, the boy’s breath catch.
The gown hugs, in all the right places, falls at all the right lengths.
She observes herself in the polished bronze looking glass-a thing that can feed her family for months, truth be told. It had been imported from Rome, her lofty maid had said with a quirk of those pale eyebrows. From Lord Niklaus’s other abode.
Far above the likes of you, the girl’s curled lips had hissed, silent.
Katerina brushes an idle hand across the line of her dress, watches the fall of her dark hair against the burgundy of the velvet, thick and lush and it is a matron’s dress-wouldn’t want the village whore to parade around in cloth-of-gold-but it is smooth against her bare legs beneath, smooth against the skin of her breasts. When she curves her lips, all she sees is sin.
“Katerina Petrova,” she says out loud, and is startled by the way the name rolls off her tongue, like fine wine, like a sigh, like so much unspokenwant. This is a woman’s name. Katerina Petrova is a girl with a woman’s name, a name to be sung in verse, a name to be whispered by lovers in the blue dark.
The name lingers in her mouth still, made entirely of caught breaths.
The door opens behind her, and Anne is there suddenly, breaking through her reverie. “It is time.” She says, the light catching on the blue of her gown.
Katerina’s lips curl, wry. “To meet my maker?”
Anne smiles. “One can only hope.”
The man stops and starts and simply just stares.
“Hello,” she intones, in the voice of an innocent, a line taught to her on many hard winter nights, draws out the sound so it is long and smooth and English.
He is handsome, the man, in the stern, cold ways of the East, eyes darker than her own and a mouth that one can easily imagine pressed close to the beads of a rosary. His voice, too, when it comes, belongs to the dark side of a confessional.
(A man who expects things of her, that is what she thinks. A man who might whisper her name like a chant and hold her to be what she is not.)
Elijah, Trevor says, and Katerina starts. He even has the name of a prophet, a name to be worshipped by other men, a name to be murmured as a blessing. She bows, and smiles, and says, “My Lord.”
Her hand in his is impossibly small, impossibly fragile in the sure grip of a man who looks a priest, and his eyes have not wavered, they have not drifted, instead he pins her down with that gaze, and holds her hand as though she will float away. “You remind me of someone.”
“Do I?” Katerina says, and feels something pull and rip within her own ribs.
This is how it starts.
Klaus is a thunderstorm. A creature of epics and verse, a man upon his very own odyssey, about to brave winds and rain and storms for a home, a patiently waiting vassal he hints of in smiles and words that do not quite make their way from his tongue. He holds his cards close to his chest, but Katerina knows men like him, knows the gamblers at the edges of her village. He will bet everything and anything upon the slightest chance, if he desired it enough.
And Klaus, oh, Klaus is a man who desires the world.
Elijah is the eye of this storm. He is calm and he is collected and there is no hunger in his eyes, but an endless wait. At odd times Katerina catches him watching her, when she is engrossed in a book in the vast library-she is teaching herself how to read, you see-and suddenly there is a prickling at the back of her neck, a shiver not entirely unpleasant, and when she looks up, he will be across the room, bottom lip caught between his teeth, watching her as if she is a phantom, as if she is altogether unreal. It makes her breath catch, that gaze. It makes her wonder if he is seeing her at all, instead of a long dead girl with an unknown name.
“Is Petrarch truly so riveting?” He asks one afternoon, the smallest smile playing on his lips. “I had no idea my brother was fostering such a scholar.”
She laughs. “Obviously not, my Lord. I have not touched your histories.”
He nears her, and without thought, Katerina sits up straighter, to be better on guard. Elijah’s eyes sweep downward, and if he sees her movement, he does not comment upon it.
“Come outside,” he says.
Elijah gives chase like a man who does not want to catch his prey. He is not a lion, not like his brother. He does not play to win, but rather to further the moment.
“If we cease to believe in love-” Katerina asks now, and it is a thing she has never voiced out loud. It is a thing that lives in her despite it all. Her voice catches-never returned, that is the thing. It was never returned.
A mistake anyone could have made, she tells herself now.
“-why would we want to live?”
Love is a thing to be conquered, by steel and an iron will, a thing to be chased over land and sea, a thing to hold close to your heart on winter nights, so that it may keep you warm. Katerina cannot fathom anyone being loved the way she wants to be loved without having first fought for it.
Elijah smiles at her, a torn broken thing, drawn from his mouth like a grimace.
(Five hundred years later, and she will still boast, no matter the untruth, that she had been the only doppelganger to make him feel.)
“What does he want from me?” Katerina asks him one night, when Klaus is on one of his regular trips into the country.
He is writing a letter, and she stares at the ink blotches on the skin of his finger where the quill presses too hard. He is so still she thinks he might have been carved from stone.
“What do you think he wants from you?”
“Elijah,” she says. “Don’t play with me.”
A silence, and she is afraid that she may have pressed too far, too fast. Elijah’s lips quirk, and he sets down his quill. There is no light in his eyes when he looks at her.
“He wants to feed you and clothe you,” he says finally, softly. “He wants to court you and treasure you.”
(He wants to beat you and cuff you. He wants to slit your throat and spill your blood over a moonstone half a millennia old.
This is the lie she does not forgive.)
She smiles, stands, and what she says next should have been nothing but a joke. It comes out quiet.
“Do you want to court me?” She asks him.
Elijah’s mouth opens on a word unspoken, and she tilts her head, watches him struggle for an answer.
“I would not dare,” he smiles, finally. “Is my brother not enough, Katerina?”
(This is the lie she does not forget.)
Afterwards, he kisses her hard, grips her tight around her shoulders until she fears she might break.
She listens to his breath hitch beside her ear, does not protest when he clutches at her like a drowning man with his nails digging into her skin.
“It is a full moon tomorrow night,” he says.
When she runs, her blood is beating quick and firm in her veins, and her heart jumps between the cage of her ribs, so hard and fast she is sure she shall burst-
I will not die, she thinks. Not today.
It beats behind her ears, fills her eyes with biting sweat, and there is something bitter rising in the back of her throat, something that shall surely rise and send her falling to her knees, and they shall catch her, they shall catch her and tear out her throat and she will die Katerina Petrova, village whore, worthless scrap of a girl, the means to an end whose face isn’t even her own-
I will not die.
Not today.
Katerina bets everything she has upon this slight chance, and begins to hold her cards close.
Here is the thing:
You can have anything you want, so long as you desire it enough.
And Katerina, oh, Katerina is a girl who desires only to live.
PART II
FANDOM: the vampire diaries
RATING: pg-13
CHARACTERS: katherine pierce, elijah, damon salvatore, katherine/elijah, katherine/damon
WORD COUNT:
SUMMARY: she will not die. not today.
Fill me from the crown to the toe top-full
Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood;
Stop up the access and passage to remorse
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose.
(WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, MACBETH)
You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise
(MAYA ANGELOU, STILL I RISE)
The boy loves with his whole soul, and by God, it’s going to be the death of him.
Katherine Pierce, contrary to popular belief, is capable of that mythic poetry and instigator of wars. But if it’s one thing that she has learnt over half a millennium of running and fear and blood, it’s that unconditional love should only be reserved for oneself, that epic declarations of ardour are only for martyrs.
Katherine Pierce is not a martyr. She has no desire to die.
I. THE BEAUTY
“Be brave, daughter,” her mother says to her upon her departure. “Be brave, my sweet.”
It is a cold morning. The mists cloy, thick and white and physical around her skirts, and Katerina tries her best to smile. It is a pitiful thing. She pulls her hood over her hair, and tries very hard not to cry.
“Goodbye, my love.” Her mother says, pulling her into a hug. Katerina’s mother smells of bread and milk and a good-hearted wife but Katerina, for the moment, at least, smells of sin and another man’s sweat. Perhaps that is why the villagers shy away from the soiled darling. “I love you. Remember that.”
Later, her mother fades into the white of the mists and Katerina presses her fingers, very lightly, against the glass of her window, traces the shape of her mother through the pale hush of her own breath.
Her mother fades into the distance, and there is a whisper of a death, an end, in the air.
There is a girl with her for the journey westwards, a girl named Anne with hair gold like wheat fields and eyes like cornflowers, a true English rose, orphaned for the last seven years by the war in England.
“Lord,” Anne says now, drawing the word out long, so that her red lips purse and curl at the same time, and Katerina tries again, her tongue thick in her mouth, but still she cannot master the word.
“Lord,” Anne repeats, and leans forward. Beneath them, the carriage rocks over uneven ground, and outside the dark trees shimmer with borrowed light. “Lord, Kat. You must say the word as you bow, as you demure. Lower your eyes, like this,” Anne demonstrates, her dark gold lashes brushing heavily against the rise of her rosy cheeks. “You must say the word as though you are born to it. Arch your voice. You must seem a lady.”
“Lord,” Katerina tries again, and her tongue curls too easily, curls the r in the word until it is nothing but bastardized Bulgarian. Her hands grip, knocking hard against her heavy skirts. “Lord. Lord, lord, lord.”
Her fingers dig red crescents into the palm of her hands, and her breath hitches. Her teeth knock hard against one another in her mouth, and the word comes out a hiss. “Lord Elijah. Lord Niklaus.” She slips back into Bulgarian. “Shall they take the place of my father then? Shall they beat me when they please?”
Anne shakes her head. “Patience, Kat.” She says. “No man likes a woman who answers back.”
Katerina does not say what is on her mind, does not think, Nichola liked it well enough. He used to laugh at my retorts before he looked at me like a man.
And how did it turn out for you that time?
Left on her back like a common whore, bearing a man’s bastard child. Her own father spat in her face and refused to look her in the eyes. Her mother had wept.
“Lord,” Katerina tries again, closes her eyes, and lets the word roll over her tongue like the wine her father used to allow her at the dinner table. It is just as bitter and just as old. “My Lord.”
England is a broken land.
This is what she gathers when she first sets foot upon this country she was never meant to see, this land she was never meant to touch. Her feet touch the ground and she breathes in deep, the air cold and still all around her.
There is no life here, is what she thinks when she follows her stern chaperone into the vast sprawling estates of the Lords Niklaus and Elijah. The woods all around them are oddly silent, the birds do not chirp and the insects do not hum. Katerina strains herself, and hears no hint of living beings.
“Where are they?” She asks, and her voice is impossibly loud in this circle of silence. “Where are the lords?”
“Hush, child.” Her chaperone, a mean-faced woman with stern lips and tired eyes says in Bulgarian. “Did you really expect two noble lords to greet a lowly disgraced girl such as yourself in person? You are but a charity case.”
“Attending the king, I’ve heard.” Anne whispers to her. “Both of them backed the Tudor king during the War, and were allowed to keep their estates. Even the estates of their neighbours, rumour has it.” Anne grins. “The timing was almost magical.”
Katerina turns her head up, her eyes tracing the tall spires, the thick grey walls of the manor’s exterior. There is something foreboding about the manor, more than a hundred times larger than her family’s modest estate, its windows snug with Venetian glass, and walls heavy with frost.
“My Lady!” A voice calls out, and Katerina starts. It is English, English to the bone, the words long and drawn out and thoughtless. Her own feigned accent seems pale and weak in contrast. She looks up.
The boy is tall, and grins with his teeth, his long dark hair falling around his angular face in straight layers, and Katerina braces herself. She knows the role she is meant to play. She bows.
And holds.
And remains silent, like a good woman.
The boy reaches for her hand, clumsy and young, and his fingers are strangely cold to the touch. He grins from ear to ear. “Trevor, my lady. I’m a personal servant of the Lord Elijah. I’ve been charged of settling you in before they arrive.”
His eyes are not innocent. Not as innocent as his smile, and perhaps this is what makes Katerina tilt her head, smooth and sinuous, so that he may see the curve of her long neck beneath her furs.
This will not be like the last. Katerina thinks she can use some allies, someone to trust.
She feels, more than sees, the boy’s breath catch.
The gown hugs, in all the right places, falls at all the right lengths.
She observes herself in the polished bronze looking glass-a thing that can feed her family for months, truth be told. It had been imported from Rome, her lofty maid had said with a quirk of those pale eyebrows. From Lord Niklaus’s other abode.
Far above the likes of you, the girl’s curled lips had hissed, silent.
Katerina brushes an idle hand across the line of her dress, watches the fall of her dark hair against the burgundy of the velvet, thick and lush and it is a matron’s dress-wouldn’t want the village whore to parade around in cloth-of-gold-but it is smooth against her bare legs beneath, smooth against the skin of her breasts. When she curves her lips, all she sees is sin.
“Katerina Petrova,” she says out loud, and is startled by the way the name rolls off her tongue, like fine wine, like a sigh, like so much unspokenwant. This is a woman’s name. Katerina Petrova is a girl with a woman’s name, a name to be sung in verse, a name to be whispered by lovers in the blue dark.
The name lingers in her mouth still, made entirely of caught breaths.
The door opens behind her, and Anne is there suddenly, breaking through her reverie. “It is time.” She says, the light catching on the blue of her gown.
Katerina’s lips curl, wry. “To meet my maker?”
Anne smiles. “One can only hope.”
The man stops and starts and simply just stares.
“Hello,” she intones, in the voice of an innocent, a line taught to her on many hard winter nights, draws out the sound so it is long and smooth and English.
He is handsome, the man, in the stern, cold ways of the East, eyes darker than her own and a mouth that one can easily imagine pressed close to the beads of a rosary. His voice, too, when it comes, belongs to the dark side of a confessional.
(A man who expects things of her, that is what she thinks. A man who might whisper her name like a chant and hold her to be what she is not.)
Elijah, Trevor says, and Katerina starts. He even has the name of a prophet, a name to be worshipped by other men, a name to be murmured as a blessing. She bows, and smiles, and says, “My Lord.”
Her hand in his is impossibly small, impossibly fragile in the sure grip of a man who looks a priest, and his eyes have not wavered, they have not drifted, instead he pins her down with that gaze, and holds her hand as though she will float away. “You remind me of someone.”
“Do I?” Katerina says, and feels something pull and rip within her own ribs.
This is how it starts.
Klaus is a thunderstorm. A creature of epics and verse, a man upon his very own odyssey, about to brave winds and rain and storms for a home, a patiently waiting vassal he hints of in smiles and words that do not quite make their way from his tongue. He holds his cards close to his chest, but Katerina knows men like him, knows the gamblers at the edges of her village. He will bet everything and anything upon the slightest chance, if he desired it enough.
And Klaus, oh, Klaus is a man who desires the world.
Elijah is the eye of this storm. He is calm and he is collected and there is no hunger in his eyes, but an endless wait. At odd times Katerina catches him watching her, when she is engrossed in a book in the vast library-she is teaching herself how to read, you see-and suddenly there is a prickling at the back of her neck, a shiver not entirely unpleasant, and when she looks up, he will be across the room, bottom lip caught between his teeth, watching her as if she is a phantom, as if she is altogether unreal. It makes her breath catch, that gaze. It makes her wonder if he is seeing her at all, instead of a long dead girl with an unknown name.
“Is Petrarch truly so riveting?” He asks one afternoon, the smallest smile playing on his lips. “I had no idea my brother was fostering such a scholar.”
She laughs. “Obviously not, my Lord. I have not touched your histories.”
He nears her, and without thought, Katerina sits up straighter, to be better on guard. Elijah’s eyes sweep downward, and if he sees her movement, he does not comment upon it.
“Come outside,” he says.
Elijah gives chase like a man who does not want to catch his prey. He is not a lion, not like his brother. He does not play to win, but rather to further the moment.
“If we cease to believe in love-” Katerina asks now, and it is a thing she has never voiced out loud. It is a thing that lives in her despite it all. Her voice catches-never returned, that is the thing. It was never returned.
A mistake anyone could have made, she tells herself now.
“-why would we want to live?”
Love is a thing to be conquered, by steel and an iron will, a thing to be chased over land and sea, a thing to hold close to your heart on winter nights, so that it may keep you warm. Katerina cannot fathom anyone being loved the way she wants to be loved without having first fought for it.
Elijah smiles at her, a torn broken thing, drawn from his mouth like a grimace.
(Five hundred years later, and she will still boast, no matter the untruth, that she had been the only doppelganger to make him feel.)
“What does he want from me?” Katerina asks him one night, when Klaus is on one of his regular trips into the country.
He is writing a letter, and she stares at the ink blotches on the skin of his finger where the quill presses too hard. He is so still she thinks he might have been carved from stone.
“What do you think he wants from you?”
“Elijah,” she says. “Don’t play with me.”
A silence, and she is afraid that she may have pressed too far, too fast. Elijah’s lips quirk, and he sets down his quill. There is no light in his eyes when he looks at her.
“He wants to feed you and clothe you,” he says finally, softly. “He wants to court you and treasure you.”
(He wants to beat you and cuff you. He wants to slit your throat and spill your blood over a moonstone half a millennia old.
This is the lie she does not forgive.)
She smiles, stands, and what she says next should have been nothing but a joke. It comes out quiet.
“Do you want to court me?” She asks him.
Elijah’s mouth opens on a word unspoken, and she tilts her head, watches him struggle for an answer.
“I would not dare,” he smiles, finally. “Is my brother not enough, Katerina?”
(This is the lie she does not forget.)
Afterwards, he kisses her hard, grips her tight around her shoulders until she fears she might break.
She listens to his breath hitch beside her ear, does not protest when he clutches at her like a drowning man with his nails digging into her skin.
“It is a full moon tomorrow night,” he says.
When she runs, her blood is beating quick and firm in her veins, and her heart jumps between the cage of her ribs, so hard and fast she is sure she shall burst-
I will not die, she thinks. Not today.
It beats behind her ears, fills her eyes with biting sweat, and there is something bitter rising in the back of her throat, something that shall surely rise and send her falling to her knees, and they shall catch her, they shall catch her and tear out her throat and she will die Katerina Petrova, village whore, worthless scrap of a girl, the means to an end whose face isn’t even her own-
I will not die.
Not today.
Katerina bets everything she has upon this slight chance, and begins to hold her cards close.
Here is the thing:
You can have anything you want, so long as you desire it enough.
And Katerina, oh, Katerina is a girl who desires only to live.
PART II