❝Look who’s eager to bring up heartfelt confessions.❞
You’d not think —
with the smile that’s secrets shared
and past remembered
and smugness of a thousand contradictions from way back when
— that any of his words have perforated the cerebrum.
But one often remembers
that the truest thing concerning Katherine Pierce is the promise of illusion.
The mind’s nowhere near immune from the sting,
practised though it may be on the receiving end.
{ It’s every time he so much as looks at her doppelgänger,
and everything she finds contrasting when their gazes intersect.
It’s how his words strike true
and how his actions prove it. }
Perhaps the one thing that the cure had failed to dull was just that;
beatings of a heavy heart that in five hundred years she’d not learnt to shut down completely.
Continuation is a struggle; unappreciated, unnurtured, and everyday —
one she’d lost during unsympathetic goodbyes at a tomb’s mouth,
the same one she’d won the second he had entered the vehicle.
Still, judgement day would sooner arrive than the instance
in which green eyes are allowed to glean any more than whispers of mischief,
the schemes yet to unfold,
and excessive unconcern that clashed with current efforts —
She’s not yet so addled by desperation to expect
{ for one second }
that the baring of any such weakness would win her Stefan Salvatore.
Hands meet cheekbones in two light pats,
under the guise of selective deafness & impaired interpretation.
He’s here — the human’s not yet lost hope.
❝Let’s talk about Elena.❞
& now the voice is dipped in exaggerated feeling.
❝ It must be so sad that she chose Damon.❞
A thought comes and sets to go.
The walls that let it spring alive drag it back, clamp on it. Feed on it and peel its layers decades behind, raw, so far as to chafe at the built-up fundaments Giuseppe's son laid.
“You know, you keep saying that.
With the --- tragic tone, which is more mocking than anything, like a pet you hated
finally died.
Cheeks jerk, like they're about to come apart around teeth, but they change
their mind on short notice. He hits sudden comprehension as the end of the
sentence droops towards its full-stop:
“It's not all that bad. I chose him, too.”
The sort of comprehension that is important enough to be sorted out of levels
of understanding.
He knows now, has the knowledge and jars inside with it, will sink with it into depths of honesty he imagined unreal. If he tastes disappointment in the victory his mouth at last crinkles with, it's because
------ because it's taken him so long. Too much time. Too much filtering, and his brother's not hearing what Stefan wouldn't permit past his throat, were Damon here, on that seat, feet passionate to muck signature along the dashboard.
She's here, though.
Right.
That alone shifts the little stability he found.
She's been --- here, there, close --- for as long as he remembers; presenting
herself intermittently, as though something to be held precious, worth wanting,
worth destroying oneself and others. All of which she used to be to the dead
parts of him; those responded well to Katherine's exhausting outer beauty that
she'd wielded then --- that now tows her along like she's a pile of bricks.
Nothing ahead, and too much behind, with the lights' pulsing rhythm locked in a queue, numbed through the windows, he sits with her all the same. Doesn't mind. Intentions, so repulsive no amount of good could cleanse their fruits, collect sprinkles of oblivion; albeit tediously; albeit Katherine's.
All this gives reason to want to recoil into the space on his left that's not there. But he doesn't. Old habits die hard.
And as far as semantics go, she's full of life.
baratheonpilled
origamiaround
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