Flora's Fanfics ✴︎ Fandom - The Vampire Diaries ✴︎ Word Count - 3.8k ✴︎ You've Been Haunting Me for Forty Days and Forty Nights
"Kol," she cuts him off.
"What?" he pouts. "You asked. I answered. Did you like him more?"
"No," she says finally and because she is perverse, she adds, "But I liked him well enough—he was... he was a wonderful experience. Sweet and gentle. Sometimes I forget that I enjoy softness."
He makes the face that means he is annoyed. "Name."
...
Nearly a century after their last separation, Katherine still wears her wedding ring.
You've Been Haunting Me for Forty Days and Forty Nights [Kol/Katherine]
[Wattpad] • [AO3]
Welcome to Day One of my "one oneshot per day" October challenge. Realistically I'll probably miss some days, but I'll try my best! I will be mixing prompts from Kinktober, Angstober, Whumptober, and Flufftober throughout these works.
[My October Prompt List]
[My Promptober Fic Tag] • [My Promptober Planning Tag]
...
Today's prompts are:
Flufftober (alt 14) – "You kept this?"
Flufftober (alt 23) – "I hate you" "I love you too"
Story title from "Outta My Mind" by Monsune. [x]
Warnings/Triggers: Threat of violence. (Not towards Katherine or Kol.)
Tags: Established relationship.
Word Count: 3.8k
...
Summary:
"Kol," she cuts him off.
"What?" he pouts. "You asked. I answered. Did you like him more?"
"No," she says finally and because she is perverse, she adds, "But I liked him well enough—he was… he was a wonderful experience. Sweet and gentle. Sometimes I forget that I enjoy softness."
He makes the face that means he is annoyed. "Name."
…
Nearly a century after their last separation, Katherine still wears her wedding ring.
Or: Katerina crossed paths with her forever centuries ago.
...
The coffin was heavier than it looked. Stefan braces his shoulder against the edge, dragging it across the floor of the witch house.
Katherine leans in the shadows, her lips curled in a smirk that was equal parts satisfaction and secret. She'd convinced him to take the coffins, convinced him it was the only way to hurt Klaus back. He had let her voice push past the ringing of hurtpainanger ringing in his head until it became the only reasonable option left.
He didn't trust her—he never had, not of his own free will—but he needed her.
When he bends to lift the sealed coffin, he feels her move behind him. A flicker of movement, the sound of a coffin being ripped open—
By the time Stefan turns, her hands are on the boy in the vest. One palm tracing the line of his cheek, thumb brushing over the grey veins marring his still face as though they weren't grotesque but familiar. She touches him carefully—softer and sweeter than he ever thought it was possible for Katherine to act.
Her eyes softens—sharp Katherine, who mocked and maneuvered and never let herself linger—now looking at him as if he were something important. Someone she already knew and cared for deeply.
"Katherine—"
But she is gone before he can finish the word, vanishing with the boy cradled in her arms as if neither of them had been there at all.
For a heartbeat, Stefan considers going after her—tearing through the dark until he dragged both her and Klaus's brother back—but the thought dissolves almost as quickly. He cannot afford to. Klaus is a storm at his back and chasing Katherine would mean abandoning the game he'd already set in motion.
He lets her go.
Still, his mind catches on the smallest detail.
Katherine never wore a daylight ring—she liked her necklace better. Tonight he'd seen it glint against her throat, the gold band she had kept looped beside the pendant since the day they met. The ring was unique enough that he could recognize it at a glance—a narrow circlet shaped to resemble interwoven vines.
He had always thought to ask about it, but never had.
And the boy in the vest she had stolen from Klaus's collection—he had worn the same style on his left hand.
Stefan stands among the coffins, the dust rising in quiet clouds around his shoes, and looks down at his phone.
He dials Klaus's number, listening to the line click and hum as it connected.
It is simply one of those unknowable things, he thinks as he listened to each ring. Another piece of Katherine that would never fit into the puzzle, never make sense no matter how long he stared. She had turned him, ruined him, saved him—sometimes all in the same breath. And now she had stolen an Original for reasons he could only guess at.
He exhales, steadying himself for Klaus's voice on the other end of the line.
...
Kol wakes with the taste of wood still lodged in the back of his throat, phantom splinters in his ribs. He sucks in a breath and lets it out as a laugh—ragged, sharp, delirious with relief.
The room is unfamiliar.
Too clean, too bright, every surface humming with the wrong sort of energy. The walls are an ugly half-gloss color, the carpet synthetic, the air conditioner rattling with an artificial chill that makes his skin crawl.
There is a girl perched stiffly on the edge of the bed—eyes wide but glassy, hands folded in her lap.
A little compelled gift left behind by whoever undaggered him—how considerate.
Kol tilts his head, bares his teeth.
He lunges, fangs tearing, throat working greedily as her blood floods him—sweet, shallow, full of cheap liquor and perfume. It does nothing to truly blunt the ache gnawing through his body, but it quiets the screaming hunger, dulls the edge of the madness that always comes after the dagger. He drinks until she's limp, until he's satisfied enough to fling her aside. She collapses to the carpet like a broken doll.
Kol wipes his mouth with the back of his hand and finally looks around.
Everything here is strange.
The furniture is the same shape, but wrong. The lamps don't hiss with gaslight, they buzz faintly with some kind of captured fire. There's a box on the wall with buttons and lights that he has no frame of reference to understand, and a box that contains glowing number counting up on the bedside table.
He frowns.
How long has it been this time?
The last thing he remembers is being held down by Elijah as their brother shoved several inches of metal into his heart. Then silence and nothing.
And now—this.
Kol flexes his fingers, feeling the weight of his wedding band against his middle knuckle. His thumb rolls over the lines of it, a habit he hasn't lost even after centuries of living and repeated slumbers.
"Where have you gone, love?" he murmurs to himself.
There—on the dresser—is a slip of paper written in a hand he knows better than his own. Sharp, looping script. He plucks it up, hungry for it.
Two words.
Find me.
Kol grins, slow and dangerous. "Oh, you wicked minx."
...
Katherine smooths a hand down the skirt she stole and pretends the ugly fake LED candles are something real.
The place isn't by any stretch of the imagination fine dining—not to a woman who has dined under the gilt of Versailles and watched monarchies toast to their own endings—but there are white tablecloths, heavy cutlery, and a certain try-hard gloss she can appreciate.
The staff all smell amazing—so do the patrons. That helps.
She stumbled on the restaurant an hour ago. A word here, a glance there, and now the room is paused at a low simmer of usefulness: the hostess is texting her mother to say she'll be late (and will continue to be late until dismissed), the bartender is polishing the same glass in an endless loop, the line cooks are waiting silently for her next order, and the manager has decided they will not be taking any more diners tonight, not until the lady in the corner with the pretty mouth says so.
Everyone stays. No one leaves.
It is a menu disguised as a dining room.
Kol had always liked a spread—an array of options for appetizer, entrée, dessert... and a few more if he was feeling peckish. And Katherine had always liked to indulge him.
She's waiting—yearning—for him. She tries not to be obvious about her excitement, about her horribly transparent longing. It's unbecoming in a woman like her to seem as if she can't help herself.
Still—she is here, desperate and pining, and she is ridiculous, and the ring is in her hand.
Not on her finger—but looped on a thin gold chain, warm from her palm. She hasn't worn it nearly a century, not after Kol refused to run when she asked him to. A century and a hundred small changes later, she isn't sure she wants to put it on again.
She feeds the chain through her fingers and lets the ring swing.
It catches the cheap light and looks expensive anyway. It has weathered worse—firelight, salt spray, that year they slept only in train cars, the year after when they remarried in a church after slaughtering the congregation and forcing the priest to help them renew their vows.
She'd kissed Kol before the altar as the last few parishioners sobbed and bled into nothingness on the floor, and Kol had laughed into her mouth and said, mildly, I do hope you like your wedding nights brisk, my darling, because I've gone and offended quite a lot of Catholics.
"Found you, sweetheart," Kol says behind her.
The chain goes slack.
She turns and there he is, not even pretending to be anyone but himself—hands in his pockets, shoulders leaned like the entrance is his personal theater, his hair a little askew, a grin wicked enough to be an apology if you squint. He smells like someone else's blood and dust. There's a smear at the corner of his mouth that he hadn't bothered to wipe away. His wedding band throws a mean little flash from his middle finger.
He looks at her the way he always does at the start of nights like this—like he's the villain and the luckiest man in the room.
"You're late," Katherine says.
Kol ignores the quip and slides into the booth next to her. He looks around the room, obviously judging the tacky interior. A server drifts by with an empty tray and a vacant smile. The bartender keeps polishing.
Kol picks up the fake candle and makes a face.
If they wanted to, Katherine thinks as she watches her husband catalogue everything, they could kill everyone here and no one would notice for hours. It sits between them as easily as a joke.
He tips his head, studying her. "What did you get up to while I was in the box?"
Katherine shrugs. "Survived. Dodged your siblings. Picked fights I could win."
"Mm," he says. "And?"
She meets his eyes, unblinking. "I found myself a new love."
Jealousy is not an emotion so much as a temperature change in him—the air sharpens. His mouth curves, but the look behind it goes angry and old.
"Did you?" Kol says lightly, which is how he likes to pretend at sincerity when he doesn't trust himself to not lash out. "Did you like him more than me?"
"And if I did?"
"I'd have to murder him," Kol says dryly. "Brutally, I'm afraid. I'd start politely, I'm sure, but then lose my temper. I'd take his hands for touching what isn't his. I'd pull out his tongue for murmuring a name that does not belong in his mouth. I'd use his skin to make you a gown. I'd bury his bones in our garden and then I'd plant a tree above them, so that those who wander the ground we once walked wonder why the air feels so haunted—"
"Kol," she cuts him off.
"What?" he pouts. "You asked. I answered. Did you like him more?"
"No," she says finally and because she is perverse, she adds, "But I liked him well enough—he was... he was a wonderful experience. Sweet and gentle. Sometimes I forget that I enjoy softness."
He makes the face that means he is annoyed. "Name."
"No."
"Height, then."
"Tall."
"Taller than me?"
"No."
"Was he handsome?"
"Yes," Katherine says. "Very handsome—" and because she can see him building up into a proper fit, she adds, "—though he did not have all the charms you do."
"Hair?"
"Too much."
"Was he more interesting than me?"
"He once spent a year the best of friends with your brother and sister, and then the following decades feeding almost exclusively on rabbits."
"Ah," he says, going grave. "We hate him then."
She laughs despite herself—and her husband leans into the sound, steals and pockets it, like he always has.
"You've missed me," he says, and it isn't a question.
Katherine tilts her face up like she's considering the ceiling. "Don't get greedy. I missed being amused."
"Sweetheart, I am a walking carnival." He reaches forward and runs his thumb over the line of her jaw.
"Maybe I am tired of carnivals," she says. "Maybe I prefer my lover's quiet now. He did not feel the need to perform."
"Quiet is for widows," he says. "Despite my best efforts, I have never managed to make you that."
He reaches forward and tucks a curl behind her ear.
"Tell me, darling," Kol says, tone going soft with that infuriating coaxing tenor that makes her want to lean down and sink her fangs into the meat of his hand. "Did he take care of you?"
She considers lying.
"Sometimes," she says. "Sometimes I took care of myself."
Kol hums. "Then he was not better than me." He leans an elbow on the table—he leaves his other hand where it is on her face.
"You know, Katerina, that I have never objected to your dalliances," he lies, breezily. "But I do object to poor taste." He ticks them off lazily. "The poet in Vienna who wrote terrible sonnets about your ankles. The acrobat. The priest. That chess player who cheated at checkers."
"That priest was extremely—"
"—flexible," Kol says, his eye twitching. "Yes, you've mentioned it. But this one? 'Tall but not as tall as my wonderful, dashing husband? Also, he had too much hair? And could not keep up me and chose to turn to, what was it? Oh, yes, rabbits.' Darling, you really should develop a type that flatters you."
"You're jealous," she says, pleased.
"I am hungry," he says primly, then ruins the illusion by smiling. "And offended on behalf of my very lovely wife—tell me, Katerina, if he was so soft and gentle and good for you, where is he?"
Katherine rolls her eyes and pretends that the words do not make her want to wince.
"Say please," he says, because he cannot help himself.
And because she cannot help herself either, she asks, "For what?"
"For mercy," he says, and when she arches an eyebrow he adds, "For your boy."
"Please leave my lover alone, Kol."
He frowns.
"I did not like that," he says. "Do it again—but don't call him your lover this time. Otherwise, I will have to find him and make him eat his own fingernails after I rip them out."
She snorts, involuntary and delighted. "I hate you."
"I love you too," Kol says instantly, the way he always has, like a call-and-response they invented after centuries full of worse ideas.
She covers the hand he has left on her jaw with her own. She turns her face and kisses his palm—and Kol makes a quiet, pleased sound. It lands low in her spine.
"Please, Kol, leave the boy alone," she says.
She leans towards him as if the room itself were tilting her forward and he reads the shift before her weight commits. He moves with the kind of immediate obedience that looks like instinct and is really years of practice.
They close the short air between them and meet in a kiss that feels less like collision and more like a door being opened from both sides at once.
He has the courtesy not to gloat until his fingers are already sunk deep in her hair, until the simple act of holding becomes the argument he is making with his whole body.
He kisses like a man who knows where he's going and has no interest in sightseeing. When he breaks off, he laughs quietly against her cheek and murmurs, “God, I missed that sound.”
"What sound?"
He kisses her again and it slips out from Katherine's throat, that tiny involuntary thing, and he hums, delighted. "That one."
She hates him. She loves him.
She is doomed.
"What if I said," she says, purposefully casual though she desires nothing more than to dig a hole inside his chest and climb inside, "that I have been unspeakably lonely these past few decades waiting for you."
"Then I would say," Kol answers, "that I am sorry."
She ghosts her knuckles along his jaw like she is checking the apology for cracks. A small sound slips out of her, a huff that tries to be a laugh and lands closer to hurt. She lets her hand settle and smooths her thumb in a slow, steady caress, as if the touch could teach the moment how to be gentler.
"You're unbearable," she says.
"You've married me twenty-six times, darling," he says. "Unbearable comes baked in."
"Whose fault is that?"
"Oh, yours," he says, cheerful and bright. "It is entirely yours, Katerina."
She bites her lip.
He goes very still—he has always been an absolute fool for the way she looks when she does that.
Before she can retort, he yanks her towards his lap.
She swings a leg and then the other, a shin on either side of his thighs, and settles with the easy muscle memory of a habit she never learned to break. Her knees bracket his hips and her palms find his shoulders because they always have.
The ring chain kisses her collarbone—it feels heavy and warm.
He leans forward and catches her lips into something slow and sweet, something lazy with delight. His hands map her sides and find the place just under her ribs where she keeps her panic and her laughter and her painful loneliness, his thumbs run over the fabric of her dress, soothing her until the pain of the last century begins to forget itself.
The tiny sound he missed slips out of her again, and he smiles into it, shameless.
The kiss turns greedy at the edges. She rocks into him and feels the answering press of his hands at her hips. The room keeps humming its obedient little song. The speaker sighs through a saxophone line that sounds achingly familiar to her. Somewhere behind the bar a glass taps another glass and does not fall.
When they finally pull apart it feels like a door opening in a house she forgot was hers. He is right there and then he is right there again, following on a rough breath and a laugh that gets lost against her throat.
He stays wrapped around her and keeps her in his lap.
His arms stay where they are—one at her waist and the other along her spine. His forehead leans into hers until their noses almost bump. They breathe the same air. In and out. Slow. Shared. The kind of quiet that fills up instead of empties out.
"I've missed you," he says on a whisper, foolish and perfect.
She breathes him in and lets her mouth tilt. "Then remind me why," she says. "Tell me a good memory."
"The year was 1577," Kol says at once, reflexively wicked, "and we came across that parish in France—"
Katherine huffs and he laughs.
"A sweet one, Kol."
"A sweet memory? Fine, my darling girl," he pretends to think long and hard, but Katherine can see his eyes dancing. " It is 1689. We are in our kitchen in Odessa. You are wearing my shirt. I am wearing nothing, which is exactly how you like me—and do not pretend that you don't. You are trying to convince me that it is time to visit the beaches of Naples once more."
She hums, pleased. "I am very convincing."
"You are everything," he breaths.
"Do not say that lightly," she murmurs—almost laughing, but not quiet able to draw up the sound. She draws back just enough to see his face. "It costs me to hear you say such things."
Kol looks confused.
"Let me tell you a memory of my own, Kol," she says. "1910. New Orleans. I came to you—against my better judgement, I came to save you. And what do you do? You refused me. You said revenge and I said run and you said stay and you broke my heart."
"I was young," he says.
"You were nine hundred years old," Katherine says.
"And yet," Kol grins, "I am older now—and much wiser, darling."
Katherine snorts despite herself.
Kol eyes glitter knowing that he has made her laugh, but his face looks troubled. He eyes linger on her face and then dance down her skin, falling to the chain where the ring he gave her hangs.
"You kept this?"
She hates that the question makes heat go wild in her chest. "Of course I did."
"Why?"
She refuses the easy lie. "You gave it to me."
His troubled face goes soft and his smile turns crooked, like a joyful boy. "Marry me again tonight, Katerina?"
"Here?"
"We've been married in worse places."
"Oh, I remember," Katherine scoffs.
"I have already apologized for the mess in Macedonia," Kol snickers. "How was I to know that Skopje would catch flame that very night?"
"You set the fire."
"Oh," Kol leans close, barely a breath from her face. "Apologies then, darling. I had forgotten that particular detail." Before she can respond, he kisses her again—and it's ridiculous how fast he can leave her feeling breathless. "Say yes."
"I have not seen you in almost a century, Kol," Katherine sighs. "Things have changed."
"Then you can tell me what has changed over a celebratory breakfast tomorrow," Kol concedes. "You do like breakfast still, don't you?"
"I do" she says.
"So that's a yes."
"It's a yes to pastries," she says. "And to you not killing my boy."
He makes a show of sagging. "You are determined to teach me mercy."
"Consider it practice for the next time you need to charm someone without threatening to feed them their own severed fingers."
"I am always charming."
"Practice being tolerable, then."
"Katerina."
She kisses the corner of his mouth to shut him up. "Relax. I did not love him as I love you... but..." she trails off just to watch his eyes go dark.
"But?"
"If I had liked him more, if he was more than just a passing fancy—what would you do?"
Kol's eyes narrow, his voice velveted with threat the way she likes it. "Then I would learn his laugh so I could cut it out of him. I would find every place where your hands touched him and flay the skin from muscle. Then I would leave him alive for the gift of keeping you sated while I was, regrettably, preoccupied."
She shivers in delight. "You're a menace."
"I am your menace," he says easily, "and you love me for it."
"I did," she says, and she hates the way the words make something unclench in both their chests. "I do."
He stills.
"Don't make me repeat it," she warns.
"I love you too," he says immediately, obedient to the spirit of their long stupidity if not the letter. "I love you, Katerina—I love you when you're cruel—especially when you are cruel—and when you are crafty and when you are spiteful and when you are kind, rare as it is. I love you when you think you can trick me and when you make that face when I say something particularly clever when you are angry with me and when you say my name like you're the only person who has ever understood it."
She makes the face. "You're being very sweet."
"I am," he says solemnly. "Would you like a taste?"
Katherine does not answer instead she leans forward to catch his lips.
Kol Mikaelson wondered if this situation rendered him un-Original.
Wait…what was the phrase people were using these days? Oh yeah, basic.
He was basic now.
Because, like apparently every male supernatural creature in existence, he'd fallen in love with Katherine Pierce.
The woman who was famous for destroying brothers.
Not that it'd take her well-honed skills to destroy his relationship with Elijah.
Hell, he could probably just leave a coffee cup in the kitchen sink and his older brother would go running to Klaus for an excuse to dagger him again.
Still, as far as bad decisions went, falling for the woman who had over five centuries of complicated with his two older brothers who only stopped worshipping themselves long enough to worship each other was right up there with conspiring with Mikael take said brothers out.
Which Katherine had actually done on two-possibly three- occasions.
Yet, here Kol was, leaning against the doorjamb in the brightly lit doctor's office, admiring the beautiful curve of Katherine's neck as she turns her face to the side and winces,
"Alright love?" he asks, pushing his way into the room, setting the medical transport bag full of blood on the ground. Katherine doesn't answer but sees the bag and pales,
"I feel sick," she grumbles, shifting her long, skinny jean clad legs,
"I…everything's spinning."
The doctor is compelled to take a fifth of blood from the now human doppelganger so that Nik can have his bloody hybrid army.
She doesn't let anything interfere with that process, not even Katherine visibly losing consciousness.
And Kol knows that giving her his blood to heal would be a monumental screw-up on his part.
Since being delivered to New Orleans in chains, Katherine had been forbidden from receiving any vampire blood, no matter what the circumstance.
Any vampire that tried to give her any enjoyed an afternoon of agony and hallucinations courtesy of Nik's werewolf venom, either followed by an evening of threats or an incurable case of death.
However a nurse passing by helps him revive the doppelganger and then advises him to get some food into her.
As luck would have it, there's a café near the hospital and Kol watches as Katherine orders herself three meals and a large coffee, handing the waitress what he's almost certain is Elijah's wallet.
"I'm…" she glances at him and looks away, clearly embarrassed,
"I'm on my period."
He fights his ingrained disgust at the mention of the womanly curse.
"Why didn't you say something?"
"I did," she snaps, "I told both your brothers and even your damn sister. Elijah said it'd be fine, Klaus said he didn't care and Rebekah said she hoped I'd die."
Perhaps that's one of the reasons Kol cares for her, he knows what it is to be ignored by the golden trio.
Overlooked and uncared for unless they served a purpose.
When Kol had made his way back from the Other Side the only reason he'd actually been welcomed into bloody NOLA was because he had connections with the witches and they were willing to work with him.
Perhaps it's also the fact that even as a human she's stunningly beautiful but he suspects that-for once-he's a lot less superficial than that.
Katherine Pierce is fun.
She's snarky, sarcastic and witty.
The first time they met they ended up in an argument that must have lasted a good three hours and were too busy trading insults to actually remember the cause of the fight in the first place.
She's spontaneous.
Even when imprisoned in New Orleans she can find ways to be adventurous and have fun. Kol can't remember the number of times she's texted him or shown up at his door because she wants to go skydiving, hot air ballooning, race car driving… If it can be done in New Orleans, and is safe for humans, Katherine will find it and then find him to partner up with her.
And he loves it.
He loves living every day chasing excitement and experiencing new things.
He loves the adventure and most of all, he loves not being alone.
Because for all his power as one of the first vampires, he's a footnote in history. Brother of Klaus and Elijah. The fourth Original (nobody remembered Finn) who fell outside of the bizarre circle of co-dependency that kept his siblings enchained to one another.
And Katherine Pierce.
The famous Katherine, the woman who danced destruction throughout history, the woman who had half the known supernatural world deeply in love with her and inspired the passion of some of the greatest people in history…
She was desperately lonely.
Kol had first heard about her when Rebekah had told him that Elijah had betrayed Klaus for the second doppelganger. That after five hundred years he had loved another woman enough to turn- even momentarily- away from his beloved half-brother. When she had turned up in New Orleans, Elijah had swept her up into his arms and into his bedroom, keeping her there until Klaus agreed to let her live in return for blood donations every other month. He claimed to be deeply in love with her but Kol had to wonder if that was the truth or just the remnant of a long ago passion.
There couldn't be two people more mismatched for each other than Elijah and Katherine.
Elijah attracted women because he was the last echo of a dying world of chivalric romance, of walks through stunning rose gardens and waltzes across glittering ball rooms. He knew proper tea etiquette and lived in suits. Katherine lived in high heels that could probably kill a man, she adored the twenty-first century, the nightclubs where they could dance until dawn and the bars where everything was available as they sweated to music from around the world.
She loved every gritty truth about the world that spun merrily towards its own destruction and she grew lonelier every day that Elijah tried to draw her back to the stuffy old rooms where they first met, back when she was a frightened damsel in distress, too young and naïve to make an independent decision.
Except that Kol is there, trying not to stare like a lovesick fool as she polishes off her food and makes a disgusted face at the poor coffee, already trying to plan their next adventure while calculating how much time he can monopolize before Elijah begins to notice that his little brother is spending more time with his lover than he is.
He's not a fool, he knows that to kiss her would be to risk both their lives.
If Elijah were to find out, Kol would be daggered upon request and Katherine…she would be forced into an even more rigorous blood donation schedule than she already was. Maybe placed in a coma, forced to spend the rest of her days imprisoned in a bed, kept alive only to generate more blood.
He wouldn't do that to her.
He knows that what they're doing now is only existing, not living, but he wouldn't do that to her.
But he's also not as strong as he thinks.
The next time Katherine is due for a blood donation, Kol arranges for a mix-up at the hospital and the compelled is doctor is unavailable while he takes her on a flight over the city at twilight.
That night there's a commotion with the werewolves in the Quarter and when he goes to investigate he finds himself being led into a dusty, forgotten church attic where Katherine is waiting for him.
She steals their first kiss, nervousness poorly hidden beneath her façade.
He steals the next one and from there…well…there's a strange lack of sass in their lovemaking.
It isn't until afterwards when he's cradling her in his arms and she's shivering under an old, musty blanket they'd found that they even think to jest with each other.
"Would you care for me even if I was an only child?" he asks and she shrugs,
"I don't know, I mean I don't even care for you now." she replies.
He laughs and lifts his head to look down at her, his free hand trailing up her arm, marvelling at the bare skin that many had touched and loved but few had ever bothered to understand.
"Are you using me then?" he asks quietly, meeting her dark eyes and seeing into her soul.
"Yes," she says carelessly, "Are you using me?"
"Oh," he chuckles, "Completely."
She rests her head on his chest and smiles, walking her fingers across his stomach
"Isn't that strange?"
"Very" he kisses her hair and wonders how ever they'll survive this.
Ten years later the legend of Katherine Pierce gains another chapter and the fourth Original brother Kol steps out of the shadows. Accounts vary as to whether he seduced her or she seduced him, or whether they might actually have loved one another.
What is definitely clear is that they set New Orleans alight and fled into the night, they were hunted of course and appeared from time to time. Rome. Venezuela. Hong-Kong.
They stayed in penthouses in bustling cities and bungalows on beach fronts.
They danced their way across Europe and walked across Africa.
They hunted down every wonder known to man and saw it first-hand.
They met people from all walks of life and immersed themselves in every culture they encountered.
Katherine aged of course.
She grew old and their travels grew less frantic, less hurried and more relaxed.
They spent more and more time in the same place as Katherine's hair turned grey and her dancing more sedate.
Their nights began being spent in bed, looking at photos and reliving their wilder days.
Katherine no longer avoided the topic of Kol's brothers and began asking him what he planned to do after…after.
Every time she did he silenced her with a kiss and tugged her gently towards another adventure.
But people didn't need to know how Katherine died, they don't need to know where Kol had buried her or how he mourned her, what they left behind.
In the end there was only one important detail that summed up everything that had been important to them.
They had lived.
Together.
Isn't that strange?
And that will probably be the last Kolatherine? fic that I write.
Based on 5x01. Bonnie sees Silas' true form after he attacks Stefan, and with Qetsiyah's help she escapes the veil. Silas creates havoc in MF. First on his list: Katherine, then to destroy the veil & reunite with his wife. Qetsiyah reveals a secret from her past. Can Bonnie save Stefan & the veil? (x)
