Sorry I haven't updated in awhile, but I hope that it's readable ;)

Disclaimer: Julie Plec, L.J Smith and the C.W own tvd, not me, I'm just using their characters and changing parts of their storylines.

It was starting. They were one step closer to getting back to Mystic Falls. Katherine smirked as she followed Kai outside, Silas right behind her.

"So, you're wondering around like a crazy man, why?" Damon asked, looking at him as he held the ascendent up in the light like, well, like a crazy man.

"Looking for the exact right spot. We need to find where the power of the eclipse is focused." Kai replied, squinting into a hole in the ascendent.

"Yes, I've already started doing that, it's somewhere in the tunnels underground." Silas rolled his eyes in a clear sign of impatience.

"Yeah, but you didn't have the ascendent, did you? It'll make it more accurate." Kai replied, still squinting up at the ascendent.

"You know you could have just shown us the Ascendant to begin with." Katherine pointed out tiredly. "Would have saved us a load of trouble, and by now I could have been back in normal time, alive, and cooking Tyler Lockwood's brains out."

"Yeah, but I wanted to feel Bonnie's hand on my chest." Kai winked at a perturbed Bonnie, ignoring Katherine's last comment.

"There's something not right about him." Bonnie muttered.

"Tell me about it." Silas hissed, giving him an evil look.

"You're just not used to guys hitting on you." Damon smirked.

"You know, I can't wait to get out of here and talk to somebody else." Bonnie replied jokingly. Katherine smirked, and elbowed Silas, who was already grinning at their flirting. Looked like Elena and Jeremy had some competition.

"Can we just have a few lasting seconds of peace while this idiot uses that thing to get the stars to align?" Silas sighed, linking his arm through Katherine's. She smiled up at him, about to reply, when she kicked something on the ground. It was a paper plane made from a newspaper that she had seen Damon throwing around. A headline stood out to her on the front 'Family Massacred in Portland' and she picked it up, unfolding it to read the article.

"Hey, what's up with the nature walk?" Damon yelled at Kai as she straightened out the page.

"I used the ascendant to figure out where we need to be standing during the eclipse." Kai replied grinning. Horror washed over Katherine as she read the page, a sickening wave of disgust curdling in her stomach.

"Great. Let's do some magic and get the hell out of here." Damon said, looking at Bonnie.

"Oregon." Katherine whispered.

"What?" The others came over to look at what she was reading.

"Oh, I've seen that paper like a thousand times, there's something in this article about Oregon." Bonnie said.

"What about it?" Silas said blankly.

"You know, Kai said he had all those brothers and sisters." Katherine muttered, glaring at Kai.

"Mmhmm." Silas nodded, still looking confused.

Bonnie read the paper aloud, voicing Katherine's suspicions. "'Family massacred in Portland. The only one missing was the oldest boy, a twenty-two-year-old named Malachai.'"

They all looked over at Kai, who had turned around, watching them devilishly.

"Who names a kid Malachai? It's like they expected me to be evil." He said, looking more annoyed than anything.

"All these kids were murdered!" Bonnie snapped at him.

"Hello! Not everyone died! I had a soft spot for one of my sisters, 'cause otherwise, I would've cut her lungs out, and not just her spleen." Kai shrugged.

Katherine blanched in horror. "What?" She managed to choke out.

"You can survive without a spleen." Kai grinned.

"Something tells me you're not speaking hypothetically." Damon frowned as Kai headed over to them and casually pointed at the photos on the front page.

"Look, well, these two, I, uh, hung off a stairwell railing. Then I put a hunting knife in her abdomen, and him, I drowned in the pool. But, he kept fighting me, I was like, 'I saved you for last, you ungrateful little...' Anyway, that was that." Kai shrugged, casually heading over to where he had previously been standing.

"You're telling us that you just murdered your entire family?" Silas spat out. Even he was horrified by the newspaper.

"Coven, to be precise." Kai said, examining the ascendent again, before looking back up at their blank faces. "Oh, you know, family of witches."

"You're making us all jump through hoops, and you're a witch?" Silas said, indicating him, Bonnie and Katherine.

"Sort of, yeah. No powers, obviously." Kai nodded. "Oh, and of course, the Gemini Coven did not take it too well when they heard what I did in Portland. It's why they banished me here."

"This place is a prison." Bonnie realised, looking towards Kai, stepping backwards. "They created it for you."

"Yup. This place isn't your hell, Damon." Kai said, staring almost wistfully at the sky. "It's mine."

Bonnie pursed her lips for a moment, looking at the newspaper, before she turned around and stormed back to the Boarding House. Katherine threw the newspaper to the ground, overcome with a sudden urge to stamp childishly, and followed her, sighing at the hypocrisy of her situation, and the loss of Nadia suddenly heavy on her mind.

"Katherine!" She turned around, taking a deep breath, and saw that the others were following, Silas running after her.

"We're not letting Kai out of here, okay? He just said he's a serial killer." Bonnie snapped, marching into the living room.

"It doesn't matter." Damon shrugged. "We wanna get out of here, don't we?"

"I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm with witchy, we can't let him out to just destroy his entire family, or whatever's left of them." Katherine added, glaring maliciously at Kai. She didn't quite know why she was so bothered by it, a year ago she wouldn't have been, but perhaps after watching her daughter die and knowing it was her fault...something had just broken in her, leaving her vulnerable and more emotional than she'd ever been.

"And I can't believe I'm saying this, but I'm with Damon! I don't care! We've all killed people, what does it matter? We weren't gonna let this stop us before!" Silas gripped her arms tightly, imploring with her. Katherine stared at him and Damon, shocked.

"How can you not care? Maybe because of all the horrible things you've done? Or maybe, killing your own family isn't a big deal to someone who's killed a pregnant woman or abandoned their own doppelgänger to drown in a safe at the bottom of a quarry." She snapped bitterly. Damon looked away from her guiltily, but Silas just looked stung.

"Katherine-"

"Am I wrong?" She asked, looking at him square in the face. This was the closest they'd been standing to each other since the kiss, the contact she'd craved, and now ironically, she wished she could be as far away from him as possible. "Or do you actually feel remorse for that?"

"Ooh," Kai said, sauntering over. "I haven't heard this story before. So, Silas, you tortured Damon's brother? Is that the reason you don't get on?"

"Oh, shut up." Silas snapped at him, before turning back to Katherine.

"Come on, Katherine. We wanted revenge, like Kai, we deserve it. It's not like Damon and Bon-Bon trust us either."

Katherine sighed. "That revenge plan I had intended for Tyler is still pretty tempting..."

For a second she pictured it. Getting revenge on Tyler had been the only thing really keeping her going, to convince her to find a way to survive, but letting an entire family die by unleashing a psychopath? For some reason, that was just something she couldn't stomach.

Then she looked at him again. "But I can't let an entire family die again. My whole family died because I didn't do the right thing and I always regretted it. I'm sorry, Silas." She said guiltily.

"Coming from someone who let their entire family die, to save their own skin, that's rich. No one changes that much." Damon retorted.

"I didn't let them die. I was seventeen years old, a newbie vampire, and running from a psychopath who wanted to use my blood in some sacred ritual, Damon. Excuse me for panicking and not being able to outsmart someone five hundred years older than me!" Katherine snapped at him hotly.

"And as for you, don't turn this around. You've treated your brother like crap for the past two centuries, every single time he trusted you. The last time he did that, a pregnant woman died, didn't she?"

"Ouch. Poor nephew-uncle Zach." Kai said, not sounding the least bit sympathetic.

Damon sighed, glancing at Bonnie as she stared at him curiously. "Stefan compelled Uncle Zach to forget about the girlfriend and the baby. But, he couldn't cover up all those murders. Founder's Council was restarted, and Stefan took off. Left Mystic Falls for about fifteen years. We both did." Damon said, looking at Bonnie, a guilty and upset expression on his face at the disappointed look on hers. "And then when I saw Uncle Zach again, I couldn't look at him without remembering that I ruined everything, so it was a nice relief when I got to kill him. Okay, can we go back now?" He snapped impatiently.

"Oh, come on, you two. You guys wanna go home to your friends, you guys wanna go home to get revenge on their friends, and I wanna go back and give the rest of the Gemini Coven an excruciating death. Win-win." Kai shrugged.

"We go back together, willingly." Silas said to Kai threatingly, glancing at Katherine.

Damon took Bonnie's wrist, squeezing it tightly. "I gotta get back, okay, not just for Elena, but for my brother, I need them, and they need me." Damon looked at her desperately, then at Katherine.

"I'm sorry, Damon."

"Sorry doesn't work for me." Kai said, reaching towards them, when Silas stepped in front of him, moving Katherine to the side, blocking him from getting to her, distracting Kai from Damon, who took the opportunity to grab him and pin him against the wall.

"We may be having a bit of an disagreement, but don't ever lay a hand on her." Damon said in a low, steely voice.

Kai sighed. "Kind of a non-issue now." He looked out the door, where a bright light was blocking out the Salvatore gardens. "We missed the day's eclipse. Rain check for tomorrow?"

Katherine threw him and Silas a venomous glare, then stalked past them into the hallway.

"No."

"Oh, for God's sake, Katherine." She heard him groan, before heading off after her. "What is this really about?"

She stopped before the staircase, and turned around to glare at him. "Excuse me?"

"I'm sure I didn't stutter," Silas replied brusquely. "what is this really about? You were the one who was all like 'come on, let's get the ascendent and ditch Bonnie and Damon as revenge!' and now all of a sudden, some immature sociopath murders his siblings, and you're determined to stay here no matter what."

She gritted her teeth. "Oh, I'm sorry. Am I supposed to condone letting some psychopath out of his prison to murder his family, when I was the one responsible for triggering Nadia's killer's werewolf gene that led him to become the hybrid that bit her?" She smiled sarcastically. "My bad."

He sighed. "Is that what you've been obsessing about? Katherine, you didn't kill her, Tyler did."

"Yeah, but I started it!" Katherine snapped, gritting her teeth. "If I had just told Nadia to stay away, or if I had just left Mystic Falls after jumping into Elena's body instead of staying for some insanely pathetic, moronic notion that I could get Stefan to love me without being me, then she would still be alive. She'd still be with me!"

"Yeah, and you weren't there when Tyler bit her, I was!" Silas yelled back. Katherine blinked at him.

"What?"

He stepped forward. "I saw her compel Matt to forget about you, and then went to leave the house, but Caroline was there after Matt had texted her. She went to leave, but Caroline attacked her, so she retaliated, before Tyler intervened and threw her to the floor. She managed to fight him off, but he bit her arm before she could get away."

Katherine felt sick. "And then, after you had both died, all he felt bad about was the fact that Caroline had slept with the man who had killed his mother, when he had just killed someone's daughter. So no, Katherine, it wasn't your fault. It was unprovoked, Tyler didn't know Nadia was helping you stay alive, and she didn't do anything to him, he attacked her because he was worried about Matt and Caroline, and though I wasn't exactly fond of you at the time, I still thought Tyler was responsible, and what he did disgusted me then, and it still does now." He finished vehemently.

Katherine was stunned by the intensity of his words. "Why would you say that?" She muttered. "I mean, at the time you hated me, you couldn't care less about what was happening to Nadia, you've even tried to kill her yourself, so why would you say that now?"

"Well, we're - we're friends, right?" He smiled. "Friends care, they help each other, make each other feel better, or so I've been told." Katherine smiled back at him briefly before turning away at the irony of that sentence, when they toed the line of so much more.

"What is it?"

"Are we ever gonna talk about it?" She asked. Silas came up behind her.

"About what?"

"Don't play dumb, you know what!" She snapped, turning to look at him. "About the kiss."

"What-" Silas cut himself off and cleared his throat, looking around for nosy vampires. "Not now," Then he took her arm. "But later. When all this is over and this world is behind us."

She snorted, the rejection clear in her mind. He didn't want her. Why did she always fall for men that were incapable of loving her back? "Yeah, that's an if we leave this world behind us."

"Look, we can still get outta here, Kat. We can steal the Ascendent, find out what Kai knows and we'll ditch him, and Damon and Bonnie because they aren't very useful anyway!"

"You should know by now that nothing ever goes that easily." Katherine sighed, heading towards the kitchen. "Not for us."

"What are you two talking about?" Damon smirked. He was holding a plate of pancakes, as though cooking that pregnant woman's favourite food could serve as redemption for what he did.

"Never mind, it doesn't concern you." Katherine sighed, hopping onto the counter.

Silas followed her. "Yes for us. The villains, in the end they win, right? We've just got to out-villain Kai."

"Actually, it's not that simple." A voice said from the door. They both turned around to see Kai behind them.

"You gotta stop doing that. It's creepy."

"Here's the thing: I have a killer effect on magic. I can't generate it myself. But, I can consume it from others temporarily. My family called me an abomination. That hurt my feelings." Kai said, and without warning, grabbed Bonnie's wrist. Pain instantly exploded in Katherine's throat, cutting off her breathing, and flames roared to life on the stove, and she could tell from Damon's groans, and Silas clutching his throat that she wasn't the only one in agony.

Silas threw out his hand, and Kai was jerked away from Bonnie, stopping the spells.

"Okay, we get it!"

"You can see why my coven and I didn't get along." Kai smiled innocently.

"I smell an ultimatum." Damon growled, still clutching his head.

"If I consume any one of all you three witches magic, I'm just gonna end up killing you. But, if we work together, we can all go home as friends." Kai smiled, then adopted a darker look. "Or I can devour your magic, kill you all, and go home alone. What's it gonna be?"

He didn't wait for an answer and sat down at the table, eating the pancakes, and Katherine couldn't shake the uneasy suspicion that whether they helped Kai escape or not, they weren't all going to get out of this prison world alive.

Thank you for reading :) reviews are appreciated, and thank you to those who have been reviewing so far, I am very grateful. Till next time, hopefully the update will be quicker 😘