Archive of Our Own ^beta

They go west.

It’s surprisingly simple, all things considered. Damon and Stefan are so guilty, it practically bleeds from them in waves. All Katherine really has to do is take hold of that emotion and tug, ever so slightly. And that ends up being just enough force to unravel the entire dynamic they had going on.

It's easy enough to fake her tears, to blubber to them something about how she's just been so confused and so lost lately, and that she really thinks the best thing to do is to find herself.

That means nothing to Katherine, personally — what does it even mean anyway, finding yourself? It's other people who try to find you. No one knows you better than you know yourself, after all.

But regardless, apparently, it's just the thing that poor sweet little Elena would say. Katherine's gotten pretty good at this whole 'pretending to be her' thing.

There are plenty of teary farewells; Katherine doesn't mind those. She may hate them, but she knows they're necessary. It’s easy, too, to convince them that this goodbye isn’t permanent. She’s a vampire, after all — all she has is time. She’ll be back eventually, she tells them — and if she has no intention of upholding that promise, well, that’s neither here nor there.

Best Friend Bonnie and Best Friend Caroline are the most likely to suspect something. but even they're fools, it turns out, because they don't even know that the person they're talking to isn't Best Friend Elena. Idiots. Honestly, Katherine's doing them a favor. They've got to smarten up sometime.

Her point is proven further when they don't even blink an eye at the fact that Nadia's leaving town, too. Part of her smarts at them thinking her daughter isn't considered as much of a threat, at how they so clearly underestimate her.  But by all appearances, she's nothing but a daughter grieving for her mother. She only came to Mystic Falls for her mother, and now she has no more business here. Ex-boyfriend Matt, though, seems unusually upset by the news of her departure. Katherine has to resist the urge to snort in amusement when she sees that. As if he could think someone like him would ever be good enough for Nadia.

So they go west. A little town in Oregon. They get an apartment.

Nadia is thrilled. Katherine is...she doesn't know what she is.

It’s all too new, too weird. All adds up to make her antsy. Not the body she’s in, though — that, ironically, might be the one thing about this entire plan that she’s the most comfortable with. There’s no flinching every time she looks in a mirror, not the slightest bit of hesitation or difficulty in recognizing herself. And why should there be? This was her body, her face before it was Elena’s. She had it first, and now she’s ensured that she’ll have it last. That she’ll have it forever.

It isn’t even the town that bothers her. It’s not that Katherine likes small towns, necessarily — it’s just more that she doesn’t dislike them. She’s spent time hiding out in them for more years than she can count. Small towns are the best: fewer people to compel, a higher chance that she’ll hear about it if anyone comes to town looking for her.

Not that they will anymore. The best place to hide, she’s learned over the centuries, is in plain sight. And as far as everyone’s concerned, they know exactly where Elena Gilbert is. She’s told Best Friends Bonnie and Caroline all about her move, her new town. She’s even gone as far as to send them pictures of her apartment — conveniently leaving out the fact that her new roommate is also her daughter.

She didn’t think the two of them would be on her side — because they think they’re on Elena’s side, she reminds herself — but they have been. They’d just texted once, tentatively, about whether she wanted to talk to Stefan and Damon, about how the two of them missed her, about how they would like it if she could text them.

I can’t, she’d replied. Not yet. It’s just…too painful. I need some time.

Of course you do, Bonnie had jumped in. We completely understand. Take your time.

And it was that easy. Game, set, match. It probably helped that Bonnie was itching for any evidence she could get that vampires were evil, that people would be better off without them in their lives — the fact that Elena is a vampire notwithstanding.

It’s on the second day of her new life here that Katherine understands exactly what it is that’s unsettling her so much. It’s just that: it’s a ‘new life’. That she’s free of her old one, that there’s no one chasing after her anymore. That she doesn’t have to be constantly looking over her shoulder.

“So?” she says to Nadia once the movers compelled to bring their stuff have left. That was another thing that was convenient — it was good that Elena ended up burning her old house. Little dramatic, but Katherine can’t say she doesn’t appreciate the sentiment. No one gave a second thought to Katherine buying all new things for her apartment here. The last thing she wanted was to take any of Elena’s things, to have them hanging over her head like a reminder, like a coffin. “What do we do now?”

“Now,” says Nadia, barely able to hide her glee, “we live our lives. “

It’s not just her, Katherine realizes, who’s starting over. This is a fresh start for Nadia too, who’s spent her entire life chasing after a ghost of a mother. Who spent years tracking her down, even going as far as to get herself turned for nothing else than if only to have more time.

Maybe running, she realizes, isn’t really all that different from chasing.

“Okay,” she says. “Let’s live our lives.”

But, as it turns out, there are a lot of hours in a day. A lot of days in a week. And all of that only goes on and on even more when you’re immortal.

Katherine watches, seething, as Nadia goes off and does whatever it is that her heart feels like. She brings home paintbrushes, canvases, baking sheets. It’s as though she’s throwing herself head-first into everything the world has to offer.

It’s times like this where Katherine can’t help but wonder how it is that Nadia turned out like this. So…genuine. Sure, she’s deceitful and ruthless and can be, admittedly, kind of a bitch sometimes — she gets all that from her mother. It’s getting harder with each day that passes for Katherine to bite down the feeling that arises following thoughts like this one — something warm and fuzzy and decidedly un-Katherine-Pierce-like.

Nadia’s life had always had a clear point, a clear path. She’d wanted to find her mother. That was all. She’d lived her whole life up until this point wanting nothing more than to accomplish this goal, and she’d done it.

But for Katherine, it’s impossible to distill her whole life into one goal like that. Maybe ‘stay alive’ could be considered one goal, but not really. The point of a goal is that there has to be one single moment of achievement; something that you can feel, rejoice in, and then move on. But staying alive isn’t like that, isn’t one goal. For Katherine, it’s always been a series of them, constantly re-evaluating and taking stock of where she is and how far she’s come.

Wake up, don’t get killed, look over your shoulder, run run run as fast as you can, do it all over again the next day, and the day after that and the day after that and the—

No, she tells herself. Not anymore. That’s not her life now. Now it’s just her and her daughter.

Her daughter. That’s another thing that Katherine has no goals for anymore, no direction, no path to follow. Another thing that life has stolen from her. She’s not ashamed to say that she had plans with regard to motherhood before — she was human once, after all, even if some people don’t believe it. But there’s a difference between raising a child — between molding them, watching them grow — and having a grown woman drop back into your life. A grown woman who’s older than you, if not in vampire years than human.

Maybe, Katherine realizes, that’s the problem. Maybe it’s because Nadia was human for longer than she was that she’s able to return to that so quickly.

It’s late night by the time she gets back to the apartment they share, the apartment they’ve been calling home. She’s taken to long walks, which makes Nadia happy because at least Katherine is doing something other than locking herself up in the apartment, constantly checking the doors and windows. Though it’s not like she’s really getting out there and experiencing life, or whatever it is that Nadia seems to want her to do.

The walks help, though not in the way anyone else would expect them to. Katherine walks around the limits of the town border, walks through all of the roads that lead into town. Times herself to see exactly how far it would take a vampire — or a hybrid — to show up on her doorstep.

Her new body resists the urge to run as fast as it can. Typical Elena, resisting her nature all the way, even past the end. She may have been a Petrova, but blood runs thin, grows diluted over the centuries, through the generations. She’s always had everything that Katherine did, and that includes a life where she got to put down roots, a life where she didn’t have to run, didn’t have to look over her shoulder.

It was only right, then, that Katherine ripped those roots out with her bare hands.

She opens the door to the apartment softly, quietly, carefully. Nadia’s been sleeping on the couch lately, and Katherine doesn’t want to wake her if she is. She’s thought about why before, once or twice, and if she wasn’t sure, the way Nadia would always wake up at the slightest sound of her footsteps was enough to tell her — and she had a feeling it had nothing to do with vampire hearing.

It was that Nadia wanted to be awake for the moment her mother returned to her, to make sure that she wouldn’t run off again. That Nadia wouldn’t be thrown back into her life of chasing again.

Maybe Katherine should stop coming home so late on these walks. Maybe one day she’ll take Nadia with her.

Maybe one day, she won’t have to go on those walks at all.

But when she tiptoes in, she sees that Nadia’s not asleep. Instead, she’s up, curled up on the couch and struggling with a bundle of yarn.

“Welcome home,” says Nadia the second Katherine’s stepped inside. That’s another thing that Katherine hasn’t had in far too long, something that she never thought she would ever have again. Someone to welcome her home.

Firelight casts soft shadows on Nadia’s face, softening her features. She looks just like her grandmother, Katherine thinks.

“What are you doing?”

“Knitting.” Nadia raises her hands, which are tangled in the yarn. She looks up at Katherine and laughs; it’s getting easier and easier for Katherine to return these laughs, these smiles. These easy shows of affection that seem to mean the world to Nadia.

It’s a strange thing, Katherine thinks, affection. She’s used to weaponizing it, to twisting it until it’s just as dangerous, if not more so, as a knife in her hands. She’s not used to giving it freely, and more than that, she’s not used to receiving it from someone who wants nothing in return from her, who wants to give it just for the sole reason of giving it, and nothing more.

Katherine crosses the room and sits next to Nadia on the couch. It’s a small couch; their legs are pressed up against each other.

“Let me help,” she says, and reaches out to start to extricate Nadia from the yarn. Her daughter holds herself still, letting Katherine do as she pleases. Putting absolute faith and trust in her, in the fact that Katherine will save her, will do anything in her power she can to save her, and will keep making that choice day after day. That she won’t run away again, despite every single urge in her body and her brain and her blood — her Petrova blood — screaming at her to do so.

“I didn’t think it would turn out like this,” Nadia says. She’s embarrassed. And Katherine understands why, sympathizes. It’s a vulnerable position to find yourself in, especially when she probably wanted nothing more than to look as competent as possible, maybe even to impress Katherine by the time she came back.

But this, Katherine remembers, was one of the goals regarding motherhood that she had so many years ago. When she was young — was she ever so young? It feels like another person, another lifetime. But one of her goals was to teach her child something. The what in particular wasn’t specific. How to walk, how to speak.

How to knit.

“Our needles weren’t this good,” Katherine says quietly, Nadia’s fingers almost completely untangled. “And neither was our yarn.”

“You used to knit?” Nadia asks, watching her carefully.

“My mother taught me.” Katherine hesitates, unsure of whether or not she should reveal her next secret. In the end, she ends up doing so. “I made you a baby blanket, while I was pregnant with you.”

She finishes, and the yarn is reduced to nothing more than a soft bundle; the only thing connecting their fingers.

Nadia swallows. “Can you…can you teach me?”

The affirmation comes quickly, effortlessly; she’s getting better at learning to make Nadia happy.

Maybe, Katherine thinks, she doesn’t need one big goal like Nadia. And more than that, maybe Nadia doesn’t have a big goal either. Maybe that’s why she’s been doing so many things lately — painting, baking, knitting. Just a series of little goals to follow day by day.

And Katherine can do the same thing. Starting with teaching her daughter how to knit.

Nadia’s a fast learner, after all. She takes after her mother.