Fic Commentary: The Chase

[jedi_of_urth]

wheatear requested commentary on The Chase a bit of Elijah fic I wrote for vd_kink a few weeks back.


Before we even get started I’ll say that the title was added for this posing, in the original comment fic I left it untitled. I have bad habits when it comes to comment fics.

It’s just a short little thing, exploring the different feelings Elijah has toward the doppelgangers, and even how they’ve changed over time, all crushed into a dream world Elijah is forced into by Klaus daggering him.

He’s in the wild, untamed wilderness of America when only the natives and a few settlers who would never be remembered had lived there. The trees grow thick and barely controlled by the small population.

He chases after Tatia, as he always did in life. She was as untamed as the wilderness they lived in. Sometimes she stops and waits until he catches sight of her only to run away again. It’s a game to her, one he will never win, never could have won if he’s honest with himself about who she was.

We all have our own headcanon version of Tatia until the show gives us more to work with, and this is basically mine, that she enjoyed Klaus and Elijah’s attention but she really didn’t want either of them. A bit wild, a bit shallow, a bit needy, mostly never willing to settle.

The wild woods give way to cultured English gardens and now it’s Katerina running from him. He jogs after her, not really caring if he catches her. He’s wiser now and knows that even if he does catch her it means the end of their game.

I kind of wish I’d treated this a little differently, separated it from the actual chases a bit more, since this isn’t really part of the main chase of the story. But I was focused on keeping it fluid between the scenes rather than the structure of each.

But when he does grow close her face changes into a vampire’s shape and with a vampire’s sped she runs away faster than before. This isn’t a game and now he chases her in earnest. The changing world flies past him as he runs after his prey

I don’t know about anyone else, but I find Elijah/Katherine difficult to deal with. Because I don’t really think he had feelings for her, but she reminded him that he used to have feelings toward anyone besides his family. And then once she ran and proved that he she wasn’t “worth” having feelings for he focused on catching/capturing/killing her.

until he’s back in the Virginian woods.

He watches helplessly as Klaus sinks his teeth into the neck of the only doppelganger who knew enough of love and honor to let herself be caught. He can only watch as she falls to the ground, dead.

I’ve more or less convinced myself that Elijah, Damon, and Bonnie weren’t that far away when the sacrifice happened and Elijah could in fact have seen it (although he was probably holding Damon and Bonnie back at the time), so he’s haunted by the memory of seeing even part of it happen.

“You promised to love me,” Tatia taunts him, dancing around him trying to recapture his attention, only interested now because his focus isn’t on her.

“You promised to catch me,” Katerina says, but the sounds of her flight reach his ears almost as soon as the words do; she’ll run all the faster knowing he won’t be following.

Basically revisiting the way he sees the former doppelgangers now. Whatever he used to feel for them now he remembers Tatia as kind of shallow and needy (he doesn’t love her anymore, hence why he mostly talks about Klaus’s love for her in the dinner scene), and experience with Katherine has taught him how hard she runs to survive.

He waits for Elena to remind him of the promises he made her that he failed to keep, but she remains still and lifeless on the ground. Every second her heart doesn’t beat nor her lungs draw breath cuts deeper than the taunts of her predecessors.

It’s quite difficult to track Elijah’s falling for Elena, he definitely had ~feelings by the end of s2, but in s3 he’s pretty much totally in love with her, so I kind of wanted to capture a moment of him realizing that she means more to him that he even meant for her to.

Wake up and tell me I failed you, he silently begs her. Just come back. She doesn’t move, and he can’t move until she does.

For this fic I went with the idea that Elijah hadn’t even known if Elena survived the ritual or not, that the last he saw of her was her dead body carried off by Damon, so that’s how he sees her in the dream.

Come back to me.

The world goes black; he’d forgotten about Klaus and that damned dagger. And then he’s back in the wilderness of his youth. He’s always running toward women with the same face; one to catch, one to kill, and one to save.

I wanted the dream to have a circular quality to it and a flow as the times blur together, the thoughts spinning around while he sleeps. He can’t control it so ends up reliving it over and over again.

He never manages to succeed.

I’m never great at ending fic, so I was just trying to tie off the closing thought about how depressing this dream world is while he’s trapped in to.


Request commentary

Comments

[wheatear.livejournal.com]

Hmm, interesting! I shall have to do this meme.

I don’t know about anyone else, but I find Elijah/Katherine difficult to deal with.

I know what you mean. My feeling on it is that it's just so very complicated, it's difficult to get across. Because in a way Katherine is to Elijah as Elena is to the Salvatore brothers - she's the first doppelganger, he was kind of bowled over just by looking at her. But they were never together; Klaus courted her, not Elijah, and they didn't have much time with each other. But then he clearly had feelings for her. So... complicated.

[jedi_of_urth]

It's a fun meme.

It's like, I don't want to just *ignore* Elijah/Katherine, because it clearly did get to Elijah but I'm never sure what to do with it. Yeah, a lot of it had to do with her being the first doppelganger he encountered, and it throws him for a loop because 500 years later and they're back in the Tatia drama except not really because they're mainly just using her.

It's kind of why in my headcanon Klaus killed Tatia early on, *his* Tatia issues died with her, where Elijah's were there for Katherine to mess with, but that ended his doppelganger drama. So when Elena comes along he's more guarded against letting doppelganger issues be an actual issue, only to have her get to him in new and different ways by being Elena.

[wheatear.livejournal.com]

Ooh, interesting theory. I wonder if from Klaus's point of view, he loved Tatia, and the others could only be poor copies. He only saw them in terms of their usefulness in breaking the curse, whereas Elijah wasn't obsessed with breaking the curse in the same way. So not only did he see a girl who looked exactly like Tatia, he also saw beyond that to the person behind the face.

[jedi_of_urth]

I'm sure Klaus's reasons did include relevance to breaking the curse. He had a goal,, and if he enjoyed playing with Katerina while he waited for it to happen that was all it was. I guess it's mainly that we see some chinks in Elijah's armor when it comes to Kat that we don't in Klaus's, meaning the 1492 flashback, neither of them is very chinked in modern day when it comes to her.

I also have tried to make my theory work with the idea that there are supposedly other doppelgangers out there (2x03 Isobel's assistant talks about it as if it's a thing that's not just in the Petrovas), So I have an idea that doppelgangers are somehow tied in with werewolves and the fact that werewolves have to kill someone to activate that side of them. As such I've tied Tatia's death in with Klaus's werewolf side in that notion, the fact that it's also tied in with Esther's spell to create the vampires makes it even more complicated.

Yeah, I may have tried a little too hard to make this show's mythology fit together, it really never completely does.