#also @ my title: i am forever t r a s h for f scott fitzgerald

[austennerdita2533]

A/N: Okay, so...I'm not entirely sure what this is?? haha. I was hit with a truckload of Kalijah nostalgia during Katherine Pierce Appreciation Week recently and this 3k more or less tumbled out of me without much provocation, steamrolling into a lot of Elijah POV and prose I never thought I'd think about let alone expected to write? 

 As a result, I don’t know how I feel about it. But I hope you like it, anyway! *prayer hands*

xx Ashlee Bree

Summary: Elijah ends things between them abruptly in Mystic Falls. Katherine clings and chases him to New Orleans, refusing to let him off the hook without a fight because she's learned something that's changed the game. It's changed everything. Now, if only Elijah would get out of his own head long enough to listen...

(Canon Divergence + post-s4 of TVD + Mates)

(FF.net) (A03)

There Are Girls Who Will Tear You Apart With Their Lips

who put this brain inside of me?

it cries it demands it says that there is a chance.

it will not say “no.” —Love is a Dog from Hell, Charles Bukowski

Tantalized.

It’s what Elijah feels. It’s the first thing he thinks the moment he perceives her standing in the middle of the foyer, ensconced in lamplight, with her hip cocked to the left and her expression calculating, a little nefarious, an expensive bottle of Bordeaux peeking out of her handbag. Chestnut curls cascade down her back to bounce against the intricate lace of that little black dress she wears. It’s tapered slightly above the knee to hug her thighs, accentuating her lithe curves perfectly. Sinfully.

She’s the devil in kitten heels and Dior perfume, and she knows it. Flaunts it. She brandishes it at him like a whip that's headed straight for his Achilles heel.

Five hundred years of reserve, and constraint, and pain, fade away with the flicker of her curled black lashes to his face, her pert simper widening as imaginary strings pluck in time to the sashay of her hips when she glides past him into the sitting room; heels clicking against the hardwood. Brushing against his shoulder, she precedes to strut through the room with a newly-acquired familiarity. She allows her gaze to catalogue everything. As if she’s resorting it to memory.

Next, she pulls back the light feathery curtains to toss a perfunctory nod of approval at the streets below, humming something to herself unintelligibly. Then, after another moment, she opens the doors so the French Quarter humidity and musical commotion can billow in through from the courtyard. It seems she’s making herself at home—like she owns it. Or, like avarice is nothing to her but a wieldable commodity for him to nurture.

Elijah forgets to move.

The house somehow grows smaller with her in it. More claustrophobic.

It’s far too snug with these used bricks and cherry bookshelves caging them in on all sides, at every angle. It feels like the ceiling’s about to descend to crush every last gear still churning inside his head. What if it does? How will this chess game finally end?

The available space between their two bodies shrinks and shrinks until she’s a magnified map of history, half truths, and conflicting body language expanding before his eyes. She’s in every room or hallway, lurking around every corner; and before he knows it, he’s unable to look away from the tome of her he doesn’t want to read.

The sun trickles in from outside like yellow fire droplets. It sizzles against Elijah’s back so heat snakes down his spine like burnt cigarettes and nearly causes him to fall to his knees.

His whole body tingles and itches until everything around him blazes as red as that profane mark on his wrist, sucking out his well-preserved faculties like blood because he knows when he permits himself to move closer, he’ll be too weak to locate the door he needs. He knows he’ll never be able to sneak back behind it. No. He’ll never be able to find the strength to slam it shut between them again.

Also, were he to endeavor such an escape now, she’d never hesitate to strike from behind with her talons extended. She’d never pause to claim him like the prey he often was around her, and perhaps still could be—so he remains still. As formidable as stone.  

“Good evening, Katerina,” he says stiffly, addressing her with a curt appraising nod. “To what do I owe this intrusion?”

“Missed me bad, have you?” she replies with a smirk.

“Not quite the phrasing I’d choose, no.”

“That’s unfortunate.”

“And why’s that?”

She twines hair around her finger and says, “Because I’ve missed you terribly, ma chérie, and I’m here to collect what’s owed to me. What’s owed to us. Time’s up for you, I’m afraid. No more charades.”

Katherine’s an entire dictionary of words: a little bit of everything convoluted and picante:

Coquettish.

Possessive.

Calculating.

Indulgent.

Dangerous.

Stylish.

Sexy.

Lovely.

Too lovely.

The adjectives burn like cognac on Elijah’s tongue and he knows he needs to bury them. He needs to stop all those inexcusable words from flashing through his head, from sliding across his suddenly blunted teeth in want of describing her. But they’re delectable in all their disaster. Perfect in their crunch. Like blood dipped in roses or Debussy. Like a lovebite scarred on his neck in shades of faded red lipstick. Like hands leashed around his wrists. Like…

Clearly he’s tantalized by her yet.

The thought makes him want to crack her open like a book spine to study the language of her entrails, to find out where the pentameter cuts off and where the free verse of hell begins. The face of Athena, Aphrodite, and Hecate—her face—wears an underworld of dark and delicious secrets this spring evening; and they pulsate like veins beneath her hungry, inscrutable eyes like they always have. Like they probably always will.

Changed and unchanged in a multitude of ways, Katherine’s a chameleon with fangs who prowls from century to century. Haunting him. Seducing him with fingernails that claw into his back to mark love there, against his skin. Torturing him with too many questions he’ll never be able to answer: like why their hearts are forever tangled in manipulation, and lies, and ‘almosts’ that never come to fruition.

She’s a one-headed Medusa whose name still purrs in the reticent bones of his mind—Katerina, Katerina—and he cannot stop hearing it like a refrain. He knows he cannot. He knows because he’s covered his ears; he’s shut down his own heart too many times to count.

And tried.

“I’m disappointed. You don’t seem happy to see me,” Katherine says, breaking the ice with a tut and a pout.

“No,” Elijah replies as he glances at his Rolex. “No, I’d say I’m more surprised than anything.”

The smile she offers in return is thin. Terse.

“By the way you keep checking your watch, I’d wager you’re expecting a visitor of the female variety.”

“I am.”

It’s a lie. He’s not expecting anyone. Hayley’s long gone; he and his siblings ushered her out of the city after her wild, elaborate tales regarding Klaus and a magical child proved to be as fallacious as she was.

“Who is she?” Katherine demands tartly, swallowing back a snarl.

His answer is impassive. Stoic. “I fear that’s none of your concern.”

“You really believe that, don’t you?”

He dignifies this with nothing but silence.

“Okay. Have it your way, Elijah,” Katherine purrs. Her movements a little too casual and nonchalant, she waves him off only to pivot back around like a black swan ballerina. “But I bet she’s not as hot for you as I am.”

“In fact,” her teeth widen in smile; her voice sharpens, “I’d bet my heart on it.”

Elijah folds his hands. The barest hint of courtesy levels his voice into something flat and steady, “What do you want, Katerina?”

“You.”

“And how can I be of service?” he says with a blink.

Angling closer, Katherine narrows her eyes then unloads,

“Did you think you could get rid of me that easily? Me? A Petrova?” she laughs, but it comes out cutting. Sardonic. “Let me let you in on a little secret, baby: I survive; I never say die. So don’t you dare believe for one second there’s a world for you out there without me in it, because there’s not, because there never will be. Do you understand me?”

Elijah’s jaw ticks and he frowns, offering her a look ripe with skepticism.

“No, no,” she wiggles her finger at him as a wicked glint transforms her features, “you can’t run from this any longer. You’re done locking yourself off from me.”

Circling him in those tall, fancy heels, trailing a finger down his shirt almost like she’s marking territory or preparing to fillet her prey, Katherine stops to spread both hands against his chest before pulling him to her by the lapels. She pulls him until their faces are only inches apart. Until Elijah’s close enough to smell her last kill (a vodka-drinking attorney) on her breath.

“Did you really think I’d let you go after some vile, half-assed goodbye? Or that I wouldn’t follow you after I learned the truth? After I felt it literally brand into me, burning my muscles and bones?” she snickers again.

“In the five hundred years you’ve known me, have I once struck you as the kind of lover who wouldn’t scratch, fight, or scheme until the man I desired conceded? Until he swore he was mine?”

“It makes no difference. The point is settled. Moot.”

“That’s where you’re wrong,” Katherine spits out cruelly, challenging him. “It makes all the difference.”

A lump forms in his throat at her words, but he bites it back, too self-controlled for his own good. In any case, hope for them is gone. Dead. So he answers her cooly instead,

“I don’t care.”

“What a fool you are, Elijah,” Katherine sneers, malicious humor dripping from the edges of her mouth like rubies. “I warned you I wouldn’t let you off the hook again, and I won’t…now stop pushing me the hell out, you insufferable, pretentious ass!”

“No. You must stop pulling me in,” he fires back.

Zeal mixed with anger and perseverance turns her pupils into flames. It accentuates her Hadean beauty; it heightens her severity enough to strengthen it into something fixed and implacable, something almost ruthless.

“Sorry,” Katherine says without a hint of remorse, “but you should know this by now: I do as I damn well please.”

“This is madness!” Shaking, he grasps her by the shoulders and flashes them into the library. Pressing her hard against the nearest bookcase. “Desist with this nonsense, immediately! I beg of you.”  

“No.”

“Why are you doing this? What for!?”

“I think you already know the answer to that,” Katherine whispers like a caress.

She simpers up at him knowingly when his sleeve slips up his wrist to expose the intricate ‘KP’ calligraphy engraved into the skin of his left hand. Which, despite being slightly obscured by his watch, looks as if it were elegantly cat-scratched against his veins—only it wasn’t.

“It was foolish of you to come here, Katerina,” Elijah says, drawing out a sigh. “This little act of yours will not alter my decision. I meant what I said to you before I left Mystic Falls. You and I have come to an impasse—we are not…I fear we cannot seem to…”

He clears his throat.

“This—this thing carved into my flesh is nothing but a superstitious trap, a compulsive trick of the mind some vengeful witch devised so that I would…so as to suggest that we are somehow…”

“Yes?”

He steps back. Hardening, he drags a hands down his face and clenches his jaw to add, “It’s not real, you understand. I’m certain it’s not real.”

“Liar,” she growls. There’s hunger in Katherine’s eyes now, and something else, too—something prickly and unnerving as hell because it crackles in the air around her like lightning: certainty. “Coward.”

“You feel the tug; you hear the call in the howl of your bones just as I do,” she says, “except you’re too afraid to let it course through you. You’re as stuck inside your own head as you ever were, Elijah, but I swear on my my precious-and-padded, about me life I won’t move until you let the only truth that matters consume you.”

She’s not entirely mistaken. He’s terrified.

Elijah’s terrified because they both know precisely what being ‘marked’ means…what it entails…how choice and providence each play a part in the official elevation from being ‘intended’ to ‘knotted.’ Soulmarks are embedded in any number of the myths and whisperings they’ve encountered throughout the centuries, and some offer convincing proof of their existence despite the proclaimed rareness among the Originals. And, yet…how many grimoire’s in his family’s possession state that perhaps—perhaps—

Elijah’s mind is so bleary all of a sudden. His heart is so thunderous and unrelenting against his ribcage, so burdensome with all these wretched, blaring sensations it thrums whenever it’s within her proximity, that he struggles for purchase. He feels himself spiraling and unraveling to the point that a door squeaks open inside of his head, just an inch, and that’s when the intolerable buzzing begins.

In an effort to compensate and correct, he stands taller and firmer. He pinches the bridge of his nose, more fatigued than he’s felt in a thousand years, and says,

“Please. Please, I can’t do this now.”

“Oh, don’t worry. You won’t do it to me now,”  Katherine says with a curl of her red mouth, “or ever again.”

“It’s over between us, Katerina.”

“The hell it is! I always get what I want, and I want you to let me in.”

“No,” he says, shaking his head and pushing her away with closed eyes and balled fists which he shoves into his pockets. “I-I won’t.”

“Fine then,” Katherine relents, but only for a second. “If that’s how you want to play it—” She rakes him over with a predatory gleam in her eyes, “Kiss me like it’s over and maybe I’ll believe you.”

“This isn’t a game, Katerina!”

“Maybe it is, E. Maybe it is. This could be the universe’s Most Dangerous Game, or perhaps you’ve failed to consider that?”

“I said no. It’s not real!”

“Yes. It is!” she hisses back with resolve heavy on her black lashes. “Believe.”

“You’re…you’re being impossible. This is indecent! Asinine! Absolute lunacy!”

She rolls her eyes.

“Like I want a vocabulary lesson when I know you want this, too.”

Suddenly, she’s tugging on his lapels again, and her hands are diving beneath his tailored jacket to tear at the designer fabric until it’s ripped from his shoulders, shimmied down his elbows, and discarded from his wrists into a ball behind his feet.

Katherine’s all around him in seconds. Visions, dreams, memories, flesh—she’s everywhere:

Her tiger-doe eyes…

That blood-and-Dior scent on her clothes, against her lips…

Those soft brown tresses falling to brush her chin, framing her face until they’re wreathed around his fingertips like a web, trapped and tangled as they tug along the back of her scalp, never to free themselves again…

The way she laughs, screams his name…

How the air bends into heat, and lust, and skin, as she bites into his neck to free him of constraint…

Her meowing heartbeat…

The perfect swivel of her hips when she wraps her limber legs around his waist and smashes back against the shelves, straddling him as if she’d ride him through every page of history only to proceed across the blankness of forever; determined to write their lovemaking across the epochs of eternity…

How she ties his intestines into knots with a look, with a single touch…

‘Mine, mine, mine’ kissing along each one of his ribs…

The feel of her teasing, scratching, goosebump-eliciting fingernails drawing initials into his back so they’ll never heal, never fade…

She’s everywhere—in everything. And there’s no way in hell to tell what’s real or how it’ll end. All he knows, all he feels, is this tantalizing magnetism in his veins pulling him forward. Into her arms.  

“Sue me, but I told you this was the only way to call your bluff, Elijah. Kiss me more. Again,” Katherine both demands and pleads.

There’s a clock tick-ticking somewhere inside his head now, counting down the seconds until he’s entirely unlocked by the key of her mouth.

“Come on. Kiss me harder, ma chérie.”

Elijah gulps and steps back, but not far.

He barely smothers the temptation to lurch forward to take her—blood and lips, skin and sin, love so volcanic it could erupt—by reinforcing the knot of his tie and smoothing down his Armani sleeves until they’re as stiff as armor: determined to keep the world out. He’s resolved to knight himself up from head-to-toe to keep fate from bounding in. It shall not overtake him; it will not win. He’ll do almost anything to keep that word from snaking and coiling itself all the way through him like that soulmark on his wrist, like this girl with the pomegranate poison on her tongue, if he can.

If he can.

“Give me your mouthful of forevers,” she says. “Let me suck them from your lips.”

Katherine’s smile unravels into something sharp and cunning as she runs her thumb across his chin, teasing him by leaning in to nibble her way along the edge of his jaw and closed mouth until he’s forced to give up, give in. She’s daring him to try and resist the sweet and sour taste of her tongue—which he doesn’t because he never has. He never can. And now he never will again because the little minx has whittled him down until he’s transformed into the one thing he swore did not exist: Mate.

Elijah’s heart and mind sigh in conjunction with this epiphany. This is it. The end. He’s let her all the way in. The last walls of resistance wobble then crumble, receding into corners that fill him with a permanent sense of acceptance and warmth. Something akin to…well, heaven if it weren’t a myth.

“I don’t know about you,” Katherine purrs against his mouth, “but I say we continue this conversation upstairs. Yes?”

He cups her face in both hands.

“And, if I don’t care to venture that far? What then, hm?” he trails off with a pursed look. But it abruptly unwinds into a small smile.

Pulling back, Katherine considers him with a grin before she rips his shirt down the middle to send buttons skating across the floor and to pepper his exposed chest with kisses. The promise of more is eminent when she crashes them both atop a mountain of books and reaches for his belt, sliding it free with a deft tug,

“Then I suppose the desk will have to do,” she says.