“How….” I said slowly, trying to get my head around what Katherine was telling me. I was her humanity? I was her SOUL? “How…” I said pathetically again. She sat down on the sofa and held her empty glass tightly. She looked up at me.
“When Emily removed my humanity, she locked it away. She told me that the only way I could ever get it back was if it was…born again. Then she would chant a spell and my souls would be united.” She stared sadly at the floor. “But Emily has gone. Her spell has gone. There’s no way I can get my humanity back…” Damon’s mouth stopped hanging open and he fumbled out his words.
“So, Elena is…you? She’s what you were like when you were human? What you would have been like if those vampires hadn’t attacked you?” He rubbed his eyes and ran his hands through his hair. “So if you were to join back with your humanity…what would happen to Elena?” He asked quietly, his face dropping as he guessed, just like I had already.
“Her body would die but the soul would remain. Like a ghost.” I shuddered.
“W-w-would I lose myself?” I asked, frightened. What if Katherine managed to do it? What if she managed to get her humanity back? Would she still remember everything that I had been through in my life? Would I be alive as her? I didn’t want to die.
“I don’t know,” she answered thoughtfully. “Well I don’t think so, seeing as you are actually part of me.” Amazingly this comment didn’t make me feel any better.
“Oh my god, this is way too much…” I said faintly and I fell backwards onto the chair behind me. Damon rushed to my side.
“Are you ok?” he asked softly, brushing my hair out of my face. His eyes were full of worry.
“I’m ok. Well, I guess I’ve been better. How is Isobel involved in all this though?” I asked Katherine.
“My soul was protected in a charmed locket. If anyone opened it the soul would enter them. I always thought that the soul would just reside in their body, like the body acting as a host, but it seems to me,” she said as she circled me, staring at me intensely, “that the soul took on the form of myself as a baby, and the person who opened the locket carried the baby. The locket could only be opened by a human. I kept the locket with me searching for someone to help me get my humanity back, a suitable human who would be happy enough to die, or so I thought, to make room for my soul. It was until one fateful day that my locket got stolen. A band of travelling vampire’s allowed Emily and I to join them, but one night, one of them stole my locket whilst I was sleeping and the next morning they were all gone. And they had taken my humanity with them. Of course none of them could open the locket, but it was devastating thinking that I may never get it back. I searched for them for years alongside Emily, who did everything in her power to try to find them. Eventually we ended up in Mystic Falls, where I met you two,” she said, pointing at both Stefan and Damon and grinning. Damon’s face softened suddenly.
“Katherine, I’m so sorry. Now I understand everything. You didn’t love me because you literally COULDN’T love me, and you can’t help but be the way you are. That must be terrible.” He walked over to her and placed his hand on her shoulder, but she brushed it away instantly.
“I don’t need your pity, Damon,” she retorted. The fact that she couldn’t use most human emotions and experience most human feeling crushed me more than I thought it would. It was like something was aching horribly inside me. I clutched my painful chest and breathed slowly. Damon was back at my side and he held my arm.
“Elena, what’s wrong, are you ok?” he asked again.
“I just had a weird pain in my chest,” I breathed as I composed myself. He held me in his arms. Katherine cleared her throat.
“Anyway,” she began. “The locket must have travelled from vampire to vampire or something. I’m not quite sure. But one day Emily had a vision. She came to me and told me what she had seen. She said “…Isobel will save your soul.” She didn’t say anymore on the subject apart from that one little sentence. I never knew what she meant…until now.” She was in front of me in a blink, but stopped abruptly as Damon put his arm out to stop her coming any closer.
“Isobel was your mother, wasn’t she?” Katherine asked. I nodded and she sat down in the chair next to me. Stefan, who had been quiet for a very long time, also sat down. We all sat in silence for a while, taking in what each of us had learned in the evening of events. I was dumbfounded. All this information was a lot to take in. And thinking about the fact that I was only Katherine’s humanity made me feel…not completely human. It just made me feel like a kind of “storage box” for her soul.