Katerina Petrova

   “What do you think of this?” she asked the other as she held up the almost antique locket for them to see. “They don’t make lockets like this anymore. I wonder who S.C. is.”

“It doesn’t look that old,” she started with a little too much insistence even before she’d laid eyes on it. Although, the following instant she took the item out of the girl’s hands and gave it a closer examination. “But it’s very pretty, and... look here,” she pointed to the detailing. “The craftsmanship is very delicate. I think it might be a custom piece.” And that statement was primarily due to the lapis lazuli stone on the front of it.

In this dream world, Katerina believes that she was reunited with Nadia sometime after her daughter turned into a vampire.

Her memories are completely twisted and she legitimately does not remember some of the bad things she did or why - Klaus has been erased from her memories.

She believes she is still a vampire. 

Instead of running from Klaus she has ran from Travelers, and this is how she knows she is a doppelgänger and felt it was her duty to keep an eye on her direct maternal line to protect her descendants. 

@whitelightcr

'Stefan.’ She didn’t know why her mind had gone to him earlier when Klaus was choking her, as if she in any way deserved his help, deserved that he of all people be the one to save her from the clutches of her oldest bête noire. So she’d tossed the thought of way and as almost always, found a way to elude death, even if it was in a scrappy, squirming struggle. 

Yet in spite of that her mind kept wandering to Stefan, even if she had no idea why, her heart racing as she had sped away putting as much distance between herself and the original hybrid as she physically could, now that she no longer had the speed of a vampire to carry her. She finally slowed down trying to catch her breath and looked over her shoulder, power pulsing through her veins at the ready in case she’d have to react to Klaus tailing her.

Klaus let out the growl as he was throw back against the wall. He grabbed for the tree next to him and pulled off a branch before throw it in towards Katherine. She turned into a little witch. That was going to be a very annoying problem. “You are the one that attacked me,” he reminded her before he reached for another branch. “I’m happy to just kill you now and deal with the rest of it later. Now break the spell before this next one goes through your heart. Because having some cute witch powers down not make you stronger then me. It never will. And you can either get in line with that or i am going to kill you. And what i do with my doppelgangers is none of your business,” before throwing the branch at Katherine. 

Katerina lifted her hand as the branch flew towards her, suddenly losing its velocity before gently bouncing off her and falling to the ground harmlessly. She lifted an eyebrow. “That’s where you’re wrong Klaus. Never forget... A witch created you. A witch bound you. And though I do not remember the last 500 years, it seems I recall right before you murdered me, discovering that you needed a witch to unbind you. You begin and you end with witchcraft, and since my father is no longer around to scare me away from using it, I’ve gotten quite handy with it.” She pouted as he threw another branch and it flamed up before crumbling to ashes at her feet. “Although I admit it’s still a little volatile.” She shrugged as he pointed out that she had started the fight. “Consider it a warning shot, and an insurance policy, what else am I supposed to do with the psychopath who betrayed me and murdered my entire family? Invite you for tea?” She scoffed, knowing Klaus was far too smart to genuinely think that. “Besides even if you could kill me, it wouldn’t break the spell and you’d still be stuck here. Maybe forever.” Her smirk faded when he referred to the doppelgängers as ‘his’. “Now see there’s your problem. You think the world belongs to you, you think people are your property to do with as you please. But we aren’t. I may have given my heart to you once but you never owned me and you never will. Until you understand that, I may just have to leave you in time out. So if you want to get out of here, you have to give me your word. You will not be using me or Elena to make any hybrids. Nor will you harm us. ” 

@warriorprincss

Wyatt’s latest antics had definitely left her unimpressed, and still feeling weird about how she ended up getting help from Elena. Nonetheless she had, soon after had her run-in with Klaus and they were now in a very real, very vulnerable position, at the mercy of his moods and grudges. She did not like it one bit. And what more, she had slowly come to realise that Stefan and Elena hadn’t been aware of each other’s returns until recently and there was... something weighing on her mind about her doppelgänger. Perhaps she could get away and evade discussing it, but she couldn’t make it too obvious either.

Which was why she had texted Elena to meet her by the firepit at the lake, booze in tow, because there were some things they had to discuss. To be clear, she hadn’t invited Elena, or asked her, she had told her to come and hadn’t even waited a response. Annoyingly, she just expected her to show up. 

Noisily, she sighed and uncorked the bottle of bourbon she’d brought with a muffled thud before bringing it to her lips and taking a swig. What? She deserved a break after eluding yet again the psycho who’d tracked her down for 500 years.

Klaus was instantly piss and his eyes turned golden and he lunged at the girl he had haunted for 500 years. He grabbed her around the throat and squeezed. “That was the wrong move,” he growled. “You have nothing i want. And given my brother has no idea who he is. He really isn’t going to care if i kill you.”

Spitting a few curse words in arcane Bulgarian, Katerina’s eyes widened with both fear and rage as he began choking her. Undeterred, she twisted the bones in his wrist snapping them clean in half and squirming out of his grip as his fingers involuntarily released her before she scrambled away and sent him flying several yards back against a tree. Using the tree as a natural force to bind a perimeter spell, she put up an invisible wall between Klaus and herself. “Your brother might not, but your daughter will. I wonder what she would think if she knew her father murdered an innocent girl’s entire family because she wouldn’t consent to having her blood spilled and her life taken over some silly little rock, then proceeded to chase her down for 500 years. Or so I’m told,” she added with a shrug, feigning ignorance of her own past. It was strange now looking at him like this, the fear and hatred she had towards him, when once upon a time so long ago, she’d been in love with him. She stepped closer to the barrier. "Now look, if you leave me alone, I'll leave you alone. And I better not hear of you trying to use anyone else with my face as a bloodbag either. If you agree to my terms I'll tell you how to break this spell. Or if you ask nicely I'll lift it myself."

“Oh, Katerina. It’s funny, I heard you where died. Would you like me to make that a more permanent solution?”

Narrowing her eyes she allowed one hand to drop to her side and focused on Klaus, visualizing the bones in his body, and taking advantage of the spell she’d been working on for self protection for a while... Suddenly snapping her hand closed into a fist, she directed her energy such that bones in his arms would start to twist and splinter in an unnatural, painful way. “I was dead... then came back. Now I know this neat little trick. Besides, I’m worth to you more alive than dead.” If he wanted to make more hybrids, at any rate.

Klaus looked up at the raining sky and brought his umbrella back to cover his head and new jacket. 10 years he had been sleep and the world looked just the same. “Well Mystic Falls is just as miserable as ever.” 

Katerina froze as she noticed the familiar face a stone’s throw away although his oddly sullen demeanour seemed uncharacteristic. Her grip tightened on her umbrella and she felt her magic sparking up inside her like a starting engine. “Then why are you here? It’s not like your presence improves the situation.”

“it looks worse than it actually is.”

“Do you mean your face, or your injuries?”

«My mojo?» Jace mumbled against her skin, not entirely sure what she was getting at - but he did not waste much time waiting for an answer. The hybrid was already biting down on her wrist and while he could sense the tension in her body, it did not seem like she was about to FIGHT this. Good. He honestly preferred to feed on volunteers and he sure as hell did not want to cause a scene. «Mh-hm.» Jace hummed against her skin as his mind registered and processed her question. Of course it was. Judging by Katherine’s tone she knew that as well as he did. The male exhaled through his nose while he took another gulp of her blood, but he quickly reminded himself not to take too much. This was a SNACK, not a full course meal. He licked his lips after he pulled away, his eyes already searching for hers. «Yes, it is.» Or well, was. «Do you need some?» He questioned as he lifted his own wrist. «I wouldn’t let you try to bite it, because we already established that wouldn’t be fun, but I could do it for you.»

The tension of course was simply a natural reflex, one she couldn’t help, but she relaxed as soon as he started to feed, shivers coursing through her body occasionally, but they weren’t shivers of discomfort or fear, simply a physiological reaction to a sensation that was in a weird way pleasant. She was a little surprised when he stopped sooner than she expected, but she took no offence. Katerina glanced at the wrist Jace held up, hesitating for a moment. The last time she had tried drinking vampire blood, her body had rejected it, as if permanently cleansed by the cure. Slowly she nodded. “Yeah, I think that would be good, it’ll spare me the trouble of having to conjure up something to wrap the wound with,”  she replied in reference to her own arm, before snickering at the mention of him biting himself and reaching for a strawberry from the banquet table. “I mean... I could always stab you with something sharp, but I feel like you’re going to have a bit more precision with your own fangs.”

The whitelighter’s hands were fisted around the framework out on one of the main balconies. He had to get away. He had to. He wasn’t sure what was real and what had been invented in his head as a form of relief for his two year long torture. Silas was back. He knew that. Katherine, too. But Elena? She was gone. He’d merely seen Katherine tonight. Seen her and then imagined Elena there because of it. Familiar faces were everywhere, and he didn’t know which were real, and which he’d merely invented to help him survive the night. He’d not even seen Caroline. If he were dreaming, surely he’d let himself have that? His head lowered and his back was bowed slightly as he tried his hardest to BREATHE. The heat was rising inside him. Not anger. 

Panic. 

He’d felt it before. So many times. While he waited, enclosed in a safe, for somebody to find him, and nobody had. Whilst he’d died; over and over again. When innocent thoughts of his family and the people he loved had turned to them suffering his pain, too. When Katherine had tried to help him. He thought of her now, of the technique she’d once used to help him separate the emotional trauma from the physical.. But there was so much of BOTH now that he didn’t know how to separate. If there even WAS anything to separate. 

He was so close to the edge, to falling over it, that he hadn’t heard the approach of somebody else behind him. 

She needed to get away from the crowd... needed to reduce the chance of running into someone who’d be all too happy to off her in this perfectly vulnerable state. Oh sure she was crafty. She escaped an original vampire and an original hybrid, when she was human once. She eluded Silas - the original immortal being as well, until she bothered to make a pit stop to help Damon Salvatore for his alleged emergency only to have him slit her throat and feed her to Silas like a lamb at the altar of slaughter. But even knowing all this there was only so much she could do in this state, and she could get at least an advantage on all these other temporary humans by moving as far away from the epicentre of the festivities. 

Katerina tried one of the balconies only to find it already occupied. By someone who clearly had some issues. She began to turn on her heels without so much as an apology for the intrusion, until she recognized the familiar hair and bone structure of the man she had taught to love and hate in equal measure. She paused, hesitating, before taking a step towards him.

“Stefan?”

elena had expected this sort of reaction already, but that doesn’t mean that she found it easier to digest. while elena is a harbor of grief and bad luck, she’ll never be able to say that she fully understands the terrible things that katherine went through, like losing her entire family and being on the run for most of her life. all of this went back to klaus, and even if elena hated katherine, she would never be able to stand in front of her and enjoy the fear that sprouted within the girl at the mention of his name, much less him being in their presence. “ hey, it’s okay, ” elena says reassuringly, stepping closer. “ there’s nothing he could want from you now, right? “ she asks, though she’s unsure of how terrible klaus still is. from what he described to elena, though, it seems as though he isn’t the same person the two of them knew so well. “ for an hour, ” she adds, part of her fearing that katherine’s mind is already at work in a direction elena doesn’t want to go in. 

The fear that grips Katerina - primal, at this point instinctual at the mention of Klaus - distracts her temporarily from the surprise she’d felt if she’d paused to realize that Elena was helping her. But just as she wishes for everyone else to give her the benefit of doubt in spite of her suspicions, she’d have trouble dispelling the notion there could be a hidden angle. How many times have they stood like this before face to face with opposing agendas, or even just antagonistic feelings. So it’s a bit of a shock when her shadow self steps closer with a reassuring tone in her voice. Her eyebrows furrow. “Elena if he’s-” she shakes her head. “We’re both...” she gestures to both of them vaguely as she takes another gulp of champagne. “Now that we are both very much alive, we’re walking hybrid factories, and you think he’d just pass up this opportunity?” A look of determination steels her eyes, the warm velvet brown seeming suddenly cold and nearly black. “For an hour. We have a chance to put an end to him and put an end to a thousand years of terror. Please, Elena we have to!” 

“ i know, “ elena says as soon as katherine doesn’t finish her sentence, understanding where she’s coming from. having everyone at the party be equals is both a blessing and a curse, especially with the tension being so high already. “ thanks, “ she adds, taking the glass and turning on her heal. she walks towards an area with less people, only surrounded by others who spoke in quiet mutters. she turns to katherine, then, clearing her throat. “ listen, even if i’m still … getting used to you not being evil, i think you should know that klaus is here, ” she replies carefully, watching her for her reaction.

Katerina nodded in silent acknowledgement as Elena thanked her for the drink, and glanced over her shoulder for anyone that may know them, know of them or otherwise have an interest in either or both. Her tension eased a little as she took a sip of her glass and they reached a more quiet area, though she still scanned the faces around them. Only once Elena started speaking did her gaze focus on her. She wanted to argue that there was an important distinction between being Evil, and doing bad things, though she bit her tongue suspecting that semantics would win her no favours. Plus there was that whole Queen of Hell thing. Defending her dubious honour was the last thing on her mind in the next instant however at the mention of Klaus. She tilted her head giving Elena a pointed look. “No.” She shook her head glancing at the crowd again. “You saw him?! Elena, we can’t be here if that’s the case!” She reached for Elena’s wrist. “We have to g-” wait. Realization struck. “But he’s... human right now.”