𝐀𝐧𝐲𝐨𝐧𝐞, 𝐀𝐧𝐲𝐭𝐢𝐦𝐞, 𝐀𝐧𝐲 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐜𝐞

- - -
❝My daddy told me, I should have better taste
But I'd rather pay to see the look on his face❞

I'm in Love With a Monster
~Fifth Harmony
- - -

Hands like these!, Tyler could hear the girls' cheers - especially Kat, shouting their cheers for Stefan. What's so special in that guy? He wormed his way into the team, and into Kat's life. Tyler didn't feel sane anymore. He felt angry.

Stupidly, unnecessarily angry.

With every crack of his wrist against Jeremy's face, Tyler felt some of his anger leave only to be replaced with Kat's shouts. A sick part of him felt satisfied to know that all her attention was focussed on him now. 

"Tyler stop! Tyler!" she ran to the boys at the edge of the lawn, followed by Stefan and half of Mystic High. They watched like it was a circus act, except Caroline and Stefan - the nearest to the fight other than Kat who blindly ran at the boys without a second thought. "Ty stop! What the fuck - Tyler, stop!" she screeches on top of her lungs. Jeremy flops down weakly before reverting with a series of his own punches. Grass, spit and blood rose in sprinkles around the huddled boys as they attacked each other.

Caroline gasps when Kat falls in the body roll with a grunt, but the girl had no time to really think this one through - she was with Tyler and Jeremy in their fighting space, and she didn't have long to break up the attack before a fist would go flying at her nose.

The moment Tyler paused for the slightest of breaths, Kat yanked him off her brother before locking him in a bear hug. It was a hurried act of barricading - Kat's frail arms were up around Tyler's neck, her legs almost clinging onto his own as her screams became more frantic. The beefy boy struggled against her grip but slowed down when he hears her whisper against his heaving chest "Tyler, stop! Stop, Ty..."

Her familiar scent made the fog of his anger settle down, as he saw what he had done. "Oh shit, oh-" He was cut off by Kat's shrill scream. It wasn't like the ones she gave to bring his anger down, it was one of horror, as Jeremy's half bloody hands pulled back the Lockwood boy from Kat's ineffective hug to land another box right across his nose. And the fight resumed. 

"Jeremy no!" 

She felt the rush of her blood thudding in her angry veins, blocking out the sounds about her. Vicki, rushing from opposite her, was now holding her back tightly from the wrestling boys. And for once, Caroline worked with her. Stefan pulled Jeremy off this time, suspending Tyler's fist in his own. The Salvatore's muscles rippled as force met force. He held off the punch inches from Jeremy's face, glowering at the Lockwood "Hey, he's down! Enough!" 

Though Tyler was one of the strongest boys standing on the field right then, his hand felt useless under the far-fetched resistance pressing against his hand from Stefan's fist. In blind rage, Tyler snarled and punched Stefan, eliciting yet another sound of terror from Kat. 

Stefan didn't even flinch at the attack, staying rooted to his place as if Tyler's punch couldn't have knocked out a fly.

Kat wriggles out of Caroline's chokehold around her waist, throwing herself  in between the boys angrily. She pulls Stefan and Tyler apart and above the ground, thoroughly holding Stefan's face  close to check for injuries though he didn't look remotely hurt. 

"What's happening? What did I miss?" Elena ran to the crowd from her trip to the school's washroom, just an amused onlooker of drama until she saw both her boyfriend and brother panting near Tyler. Stefan was nowhere near the bloody state the others were in, and that's when she notices her sister for the first time.

All they heard was Caroline's uncharacteristic screech before Kat looks up from observing Stefan. 

Everyone gasped from the crowd when they see Jeremy charging at Tyler with spitting rivalry. To be truthful, the piece of broken glass in his hand was not aimed at his own sister, but his brain couldn't comprehend the sudden shove that his elder sister gave Tyler, pushing his enemy out of his trajectory. 

Stefan's hands loop around her stomach to pull her out of the way, but not completely before the broken bottle in Jeremy's hand cuts through Kat's outreached palm with a deadening slush of piercing flesh. Jeremy was left dropping the now bloody glass out of his hand, immediately regretting his misplaced violence. 

Kat whimpered at the pain - her entire left hand suddenly feeling numb as she staggered under her feet. Shocks of stinging sensations ricocheted from her palm when air nipped at the slice. "Fuck, fuck, fuck" she hisses, flopping down onto the grass - a thump of gritted teeth and clenched muscles.

The girls knelt beside her like lightning. Bonnie quickly wrapped cloth over the bleeding with frantic words while Caroline forced her angry face to the beaten boys, fuming and halfway in tears as she resisted assaulting Tyler and Jeremy right there and then. "What the fuck Jeremy?! She's hurt now, are you happy? Why would you hurt her! Get out, get out of my sight right now, boys or I swear I will find a broken bottle of my own!"

Tyler and Jeremy looked in guilt at Kat whose innocent beckons brought Caroline off their backs. The hurt Gilbert's voice was all the way down with all the energy she could muster. A permanent knot bulged at the back of her throat as she focussed her attention on anything but the bright red pain that appeared out of nowhere every time she moved. 

As Elena lectured Jeremy, Matt held Tyler back from running to Kat. "Ty not now, cool off"

Jeremy barged by Elena, Tyler doing the same with Matt as they try to approach Kat. Vicki stepped in between both the groups with her eyes set in determination "No one is coming near the field until Kat is taken care off. Go." If everyone wasn't looming over her in concern and inquiry, Kat would have hugged Vicki for standing up to them with her real personality. 

"It's okay guys," she breathed out kindly instead. She could never be mad at those two "I'm fine. Go clear your head"

Caroline turned to glare at her with her mom instincts clouding any and all sense of the public around "You are not okay! Look at what they did, they should be arrested for this! Kat!"

"I'm fine Care, nothing a few painkillers can't fix" Kat lied through and through, even trying to give her best pearly-white smile. The painful shiver in her face might not have exactly helped. 

Near them, a completely different myriad of thoughts spun through the new boy. Stefan knelt in front of her after all this drama, his eyes mentally refusing to budge from the sight of blood leaking out of Kat's poor excuse of a bandage. It was like a beautiful disaster he couldn't look away from. Elena and Bonnie were quick to lead Jeremy out of the crowd to get him cleaned up, Vicki and Matt had left with Tyler, leaving Kat with Caroline stressing over the rivulets of blood that ran down Kat's hand sloppily. 

Her left hand was now clutched in her right, Kat frowned over the blonde head "Stefan?" 

She blinked through her tears of pain to make his blurred silhouette seem still. His stance was unmoving, as he just stood there, doing nothing but gulping down on his spit - a pathetic ruse to hide his obvious thirst. He was afraid. He just couldn't tear his eyes away from her. Blood was smeared on her uniform, running up and down her red drenched torso. Unlike others, Stefan Salvatore could see the blood stuck on Kat's neck - the part of her skin that seemed to have its own heartbeat as she looked up at him with the very doleful spark in her eyes that he often imagined when he closed his own.  

"Stefan" 

His head rises up from her taunting blood, the look on his troubled face making her eyes widen. Her mouth parts with widening eyes but before she can remember to take a breath, he runs away in the direction of the parking lot.

All she could think of were - his eyes.

His red eyes.

▻▻▻

"Care... I said I'm fine... It's okay! I don't need stitches, just... go find Jeremy okay? Go!" Kat pushes her and Elena away from her in the girl's gym. Caroline worriedly kisses Kat's sweaty forehead before stomping off to find Tanner. It was a miracle that there was not one teacher or parent was there to break up the fight or even control it. Only the team-medic had been present to dress Kat's palm into proper antiseptic bandages.

Jeremy was mostly looking at a long lecture from a hysteric Jenna, probably even a beating from Caroline. And Tyler... Well Tyler had no one to actually be calmed down by except Kat herself.

Elena sighed a second after Caroline's departure and fled out wordlessly, leaving Kat alone with her thoughts. And as absurd as it sounded, the girl wasn't thinking about her brother or Tyler. The only thing that kept playing before her eyes like a broken recorder, were Stefan's eyes. They used to be so beautiful - oak green with the slightest spark of yellow that shone at her the first day she ran into him. The kindness they held within them was one of the reasons that Kat developed feelings for him in the first place.

But tonight, for that one fleeting moment she saw them, they were red... Kat found herself pinching herself out of the vicariously imprinted image in her brain.

They were blood red, with black streaks crawling up to them underneath his cheeks. 

No, it can't be. 

"Lighting, that's what it is, lighting" she convinced herself and walked out towards her car in the parking lot when she heard two voices. "-Because deep down inside, there is a part of you that feels for her. I was worried that you had no humanity left inside of you, that you may have actually become the monster that you pretend to be" Stefan's voice floated off the corner of the wall with a lilt of desperation weighing it down.

Pressing her back flat against the far wall, Kat peeked from the corner that became more and more unsteady in her eyes. Under the light of the empty building, Damon smirked at Stefan "Who's pretending?" he scoffed.

Stefan shook his head, stepping forward "Then kill me" Kat pressed down a whimper, cringing as her eyes take in the brothers. Stefan had always taken the opportunity to negate Damon, but right now the conversation he's forcing onto Damon seemed like he thought Damon was a cold-blooded killer. 

"Well, I'm..." Damon's gaze darted to Kat's half-hidden form. She froze. Not even breath escaped her. 

"...I'm tempted"

"No, you're not!" Stefan cried "You've had lifetimes to do it, and yet, here I am. I'm still alive. And there you are. You're still haunting me. After 145 years. Katherine is dead. And you hate me because you loved her, and you torture me because you still do. And that, my brother, is your humanity"

After 145 years... Katherine...  She gasped through her tears, the lead knot in her throat struggling to keep it together.

"Salvatore!" Tanner's voice boomed from the door of the boy's gym "What the hell? We've got a game to play!"

"If that's my humanity...then what's this?" Damon growled at Stefan, pointy teeth growing out of his mouth onto his lips as he whooshed from his place to pounce on Tanner the next second. "No!" Kat rushed into the light. 

Damon dropped Tanner's still body onto the slimy ground. Blood shone on his pointy fangs, dripping down onto his chin to give him a monstrous aura. Kat saw the the same red eyes and black veins as he addressed his brother maniacally "Anyone, anytime, any place" he disappeared as fast as he had attacked her teacher.

Kat ran to her History teacher, taking his head in her stinging arms "No no no no, Mister Tanner! Wake up! No no no... Mister Tanner!" she shook him again, finally rewarded by the slight up and down of his bloody chest.

"He's alive! He's alive" she cries in relief, looking around to find Stefan. He gulped in his standstill position feet away from her. He wanted to help them, so so much. But he still couldn't help but fail at resisting his bloodlust rearing its enchanting attraction. 

"Stefan! Stefan, help him" Kat whimpered, trying to get the fallen man up. Her hands were slowly sticking with blood. The overdose of pungent iron on her fingers made her head ache, although there was more to that throbbing than mere bleeding.

Stefan took a shaky step forward but was interrupted by another loud voice. The next time the girl blinks, all she sees is air in the place that the boy once stood. "Hey Kat what ar-" Matt Donovan came out of the gym to freeze in his tracks "Oh my God. Shit! Somebody help! It's Mister Tanner! He's hurt. Kat!" he shouted, taking Tanner's head from Kat's hands into his own. "What happened? Who did this!"

Kat stared blankly, eyes devoid of the fear that she was trying so hard to hide. She couldn't speak, when she tried and all that came out was a strangled cry. Her hands were closing the rip in her History teacher's neck and the red of her cheerleader jersey was matted with a darker shade of its red.

Matt's cries of help bounced in her ears like a bomb echoing in a valley. Eventually, people crowded around them in terror, making way for an ambulance. Days ago, Kat had held her hands in the same way over Vicki's neck. 'If that's my humanity...' a predatory voice hissed in her mind. The sounds blended into someone's incessant calling.

"Kat? ...Kat? Letty? Look at me" a pair of fingers held her cheeks with urgency and my eyes refocus to make her realise that she was looking at Tyler. His words seep into her slowly "ᴸᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵒᵏ ᵃᵃᵃᵃᵗ ᵐᵉᵉᵉᵉ"

"Huh?" 

One nudge in the wrong direction and all the surroundings that were moving in silent slow  motion, crumbled into reality. Everything was now so fast, so loud and so scary. Caroline took Kat's hands from over Tanner. Hovering over her and Tyler's illuminated heads were Bonnie, Elena, Jeremy, Matt and Vicki and half of the football team.

"Kat! What happened?!"

"M-Mountain lion..." she choked out a nonsense reply squinting against her friends blocking the lawn floodlights around them. "It- it came out of nowhere, yeah... Mountain lion" she staggered up, the tears sticking onto her lashes making it so hard for her to see where she was headed.

Faculty rushed Tanner's barely alive body into an ambulance while the girls arrested Kat into a protective hug. Caroline even strokes her head with her own soothing hum. But nothing made Kat stop herself from shaking, she wanted everyone to just stop shouting around her, she wanted them to leave her to Caroline, or Jenna whom she saw running towards them in fright and concern. She missed the warmth of her mother's calming songs that she hadn't gotten a sense of since she was 10.

Kat didn't realise, until she lost it, that she chose to find such forgotten solace in two green orbs, that were no more what she thought they were. She felt so little, and underminable.

By the trees at the edge of the school, a silhouette's rapid movement catches her panicking eyes.

The boy she liked. 

Sweet, caring, abandoning, vampire.

▻▻▻

Before anyone could come in her way anymore, she clutched Caroline's hand tightly. She couldn't bear to stand without her or Jenna supporting her. In the same position, they help her clean her hands, scrubbing the red stickiness off her skin. They both were painfully silent and it tortured Kat that she couldn't get anything out of her lips. 

"Let's take you home" Caroline finally whispers, draping a jacket over her that she found in her bag.

Elena and Jeremy said hasty goodbyes to the rest of the group and filed into their two cars to get home. The whole ride was the same as before, silent and tightening of their hug once or twice by Caroline. Once inside, Kat rushed up the stairs to her room. She stayed by Elena's bed so many nights in the last few months, that her own room looked too foreign to her. 

All she could imagine was red. She couldn't see the fairy lights her father had strung up, she saw Damon's red orbs blinking back at. She couldn't see herself in the big mirror that ran along from her roof to the carpet, she only saw Damon biting into a helpless Tanner while Stefan merely stood by and watched.

Kat's breaths came in puffs of gasping air as she locked her door, pulling up a chair against it and all other windows of her room. She burst into her bathroom, immediately retching her guts out in the sink. God, she wished she could have done that long ago. Just when she thought her gag reflex had gone under, she was reminded of Tanner's bloody neck under her shaking hands. The thought of his blood commanded a headache and she was back to puking.

Tears fell plopped down from the edge of her eyelids as she held her own hair back with a sob. She shouldn't have told herself that Stefan was just a normal high boy that she and her sister liked. She should have believed herself. 

But she didn't, because she did not want to be left alone again. Kat had always been haunted by the thought that her parents' death had left her to bear the guilt all alone - that her family's life had changed for the worse. Death wasn't the way her faith put an end to a soul, not having her father's shoulder to cry into or her mother to sing to her, certainly felt like death was a cold thief. And that it was closer to her for a reason.

With Stefan, Kat had felt like before, like she was whole. When she had crashed into him, she felt so tempted to embrace his aura of warmth. 

Alas, death did follow her trail.    

Choking on her sobs, Kat stepped into the shower with the same trembling form, letting the water flow by and down her cheerleader uniform that once gave her a sense of who she was. She clutched her hair tightly in vain hopes to dull her fear. Her open mouth did nothing to let air into her lungs as she struggled with realisations. 

It can't be. No no no...

Minutes later, wet hair, sticking new clothes and torch in her hand, Kat rushed up to the attic and looks at the herbs her father grew. That she grew. A strange apparition of adrenaline rushed her legs downstairs, where all the three girls were pacing in wait. Jeremy seemed to be long ago grounded.

"Kat you left us the-"

She rushed right past out the door, leaving the people left behind to rush after her hurrying form. Before anyone could stop her, Kat had whirled her hand onto the wheel of the running car towards the one place she was scared to be. She swallows breath the whole way and gets out at the lion's den.

The Salvatore Boarding House had always made her seem small, with the way the wooden manor loomed over most of the times she had been there, it wasn't really a friendly place until Stefan's presence had inserted some appeal into its standing. 

But right now, Kat's eyes caught the shadows colouring the walls, the archaic lights hanging over every steelpost that the huge lawn had offered. It felt scary with the potential secrets it had withheld within its walls in the past century. 

She ran up the porch steps, not realising that her legs felt like jelly until her shoulder leaned against a pillar. Nonetheless, she barged into the house.

Kat still remembered how violating she felt when her sister first barged in here to encounter Damon. It was just the Universe mocking her for doing the same thing as her twin, only to confront her the boy she called a friend about his secret existence as a creature of the dark. 

In the parlour, Stefan Salvatore stood by the fireplace as she yanked him towards her. Looking him in the eye, she snarled "Who.... Are you!"

A tear slides down his cheek as he grabs her bleeding bandage gently "I am Stefan Salvatore"

"No" she whispers, stepping back "No no no no you're not"

"Vivi listen to me! Pl-"

"NO" she screeched, running out the same way she came. She shook her head. He can't be a vampire. Vampires don't exist. No...

"Vivi please!" he appears in front of her, making her slip back and almost fall down. "Vivi please..."

She was so scared, she was scared and alone to fight the secret her father had entrusted to her. Kat turned around, bolting up the stairs into a random room. She hoped to find something, anything, that could make her believe she hadn't been living the lie she told herself all these days.

"Viv trust me, please" Stefan pleads from behind her. He couldn't lose the only person who had the kindness to carry his secret. He was tired to pretending and he wanted to protect her.

But all hope left him when Kat whipped her face towards his, and he caught the fear in her eyes. She shook her head with a hysterical laugh, stumbling backwards towards the open balcony "Please don't lie to me, please, ple-please tell me you're no—"

The rest of her words drown in her scream as she feels the ground give in from under her feet. This was it, she felt, this was how she was going to die. Alone, scared and as a girl who wouldn't even bother to be remembered. She was ready for the pain to hit her, for her spine to feel life crash into her with full force until she wouldn't be able to breath.

It never does.

Cold arms were wrapped around her like a life vest, her eyes were no longer sewn shut with the thought of death. Instead, she was staring into his dark eyes. There was something so telling, yet so secretive about the way his gaze met hers, the way his fingers held tightly onto her— like her heart knew deep inside why he was looking, but neither of them wanted to believe it.

"Who... Are you?" her lips tremble, marred with tears that clicked down without her control.

"I'm a vampire"

She goes limp in his arms.

▻▻▻

"Vivi?" cold hands gently slap her cheeks "Vivi please..."

Kat groggily opens her eyes with flutters, looking into relieved oak green eyes in the light of yellow. "No..." she gasps, pushing him off and stumbling out of bed. Stefan walks to her "Vivi let me explain!"

"Explain what Stefan? That you're a vampire? That you're not the Stefan Salvatore everyone thinks you are! That you drink blood and live forever!" she screams.

The boy who was supposed to be her friend swallows his hurt "I'm Stefan Salvatore. Yes, I am a vampire, and yes I drink blood and live forever" he treads closer to her slowly "Is that what you want to hear?"

He was so close to her, Kat felt her heart take a dangerous leap in her chest. She takes in a small breath "Did you hurt Vicki?"

"No, God no" he runs a sorry hand through his hair. Part of her, the dark part, wished he had said yes. At least she would have a reason to be scared of him. Stefan had a way to get through the walls of her heart and mind, settling there on a throne of lies that she told herself. 

"That was Damon, not me... Look Vivi," his chiselled palms cup her shoulders, so gentle and even somewhat caressing that Kat hated herself for already getting ready to listen to him. "I mean no one any harm, not you, not Elena, no one... Please" 

Tears well up in his eyes as he hugs her shoulders "Let me explain"

▻▻▻

"And the moment I saw Elena, I couldn't..." he looks to his teary-eyed friend "All I want is a new life, nothing else. But Damon... he wants to make my life miserable every stop along the way"

"That's why you gave us the vervain. To protect us from Damon" The unhealed cut on her hand was itching and shooting daggers of pain up her arm as she held the cup of very hot chocolate a few minutes later. 

He nods "From him and... from me"

A weighed silence echoes between them, their gazes not meeting them as they each find a window to look out of. Crickets chirped outside, Kat's feet bounced on the wooden edge of Stefan's bed in awkwardness.

"...So you feed on animal blood?"

"Yes, I don't hurt humans, I don't want to..."

She could have easily said she believed him and leave all of it behind in the past. But was it really that easy? What if the past was just an illusion, a grand scheme of omitted truths that all fell on her in a pile of responsibility?

"How can I believe all of this?" she flinches "How am I supposed to believe that you're good? How am I supposed to believe if there is any good at all?!"

"Hey hey hey" he holds her flailing arms "You have to trust me Vivi. I mean no harm. And you're my best friend. I love Elena."

There it was. I love Elena. Of course he loved Elena, it was why he chose to stay in Mystic Falls after all. Kat loved her twin with all the heart she could muster in that moment, but she couldn't really deny the wave of hatred she felt for herself because of Elena. There was Elena Gilbert - the dream of every teenage boy of the town, the girl who barely tried but got credit for her benevolence anyway. Kat was born merely fifty-five seconds before her, but that near minute had somehow given people the idea that Kat wasn't always enough. Most of the times, she might not really be, but she was more whole at heart than her sister. More responsible, involuntarily taking all of her sister's blame and her own failures as a welcome burden. 

Among all this, a fog of silent fear gave way to some clarity. Stefan had been different the whole time, but he was sweet and he was certainly stronger than any of Elena's men to take her bullshit. Granted, Kat wished that it could've been her in Elena's place, but no one really liked her that way.  

"Stefan, I trust you" she avoids his eyes, whispering "But what do you think I'm going to go through the next time you leave me alone?" That was what everything boiled down to - Kat's worst nightmare of being left alone.

"I'm sorry" he chokes at her innocent eyes welling up with tears she didn't want him to take pity over. He shouldn't have been so selfish. It wasn't just him alone anymore, now he had Vivi with him. However, that took time to be remembered and by the time he had run away from there, it was too late to go back. 

"I'll keep your secret" she nods, sniffling in her palms "But you have to promise me something Stefan"

"Anything" he begs and he meant it. He couldn't bear to see her like this - so unlike her. He hated to not see the twinkle in her jade eyes whenever she giggled. He never wanted to see her cry again. 

"Never leave me alone, hm? Just... Just do that for me please"

Stefan takes her up in his arms, his hands so fearful as if she were a fragile little baby, as if he was holding his heart that would break without his embrace. Her sniffles break out into sobs wracking them both with emotion. So then there were two - one who was scared of being together, one who was scared of being alone. 

"Shh, it's okay, I'm here, everything's alright. I'll never leave you, I promise" Stefan rocked her gently, sitting form back and forth under the silver moonlight that fell on them from the night sky.

She had never felt so afraid yet so content in her whole life. This was the next phase in her life and for once, Katherine Gilbert was not guilty.

"You're Broody Salvatore" she laughed hysterically through her tears "You're a vampire"

He sighs "And you're Vivi Gilbert... You're my best friend"

"Please don't leave me" she begged him again, and again, and again. Right up until she fell asleep on his shoulder, exhausted.

𝐈𝐫𝐞𝐧𝐞'𝐬 𝐜𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐞𝐫
Ouch! That's gotta hurt... What do you think peeps? Okay till now?
Or did any person bring out the waterworks? Heh jkjk guys. I'm not so cruel to distribute the real heartache this early
* crickets chriping *
You: WHAT DO YOU MEAN THIS EARLY REENY?!