#kolatherine

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?"