STOCKHOLM SYNDROME ⇉ KAI PARKER

TWENTY TWO

Basket Case

❝I am one of those melodramatic fools,
Neurotic to the bone, no doubt about it.❞

"How long were you planning to drag this out anyway?" Jasmine curiously asked the heretic who was sat on the end of his bed drawing out his plan to enter the Salvatore boarding house without Jasmine this time.

 "Six months minimum but then we hit a few obstacles." Kai drew the map of Salvatore house out whilst drawing out his route through the house.

"Why don't you just do at locator spell?" Jasmine felt slightly better after resting for a few days in her bed, Kai keeping her company but also leaving sometimes to spy on the Salvatores and to examine how many times a day that they left their home.

"I have and there are some vials at the boarding house but it doesn't give me an exact location in the boarding house." Kai replied whilst crossing off Stefan's room and putting a question mark at Damon's room.

"It'll be easier if you took me with you, we could cover more ground." Jasmine reasoned but Kai shook his head immediately in protest. "You can barely walk ten yards or stop blowing chunks for longer than five minutes. You need rest and we're not going to discuss this again." Jasmine watched the boy and took in his appearance for the first time in the three months.

His hair was longer than when she first met him and he had more of a beard now rather than just a slight stubble. The evil glint in his eyes had faded and was replaced with a stressed panicked look but he looked healthier and less malevolent.

He had his jaw clenched as he annotated his map and he furrowed his eyebrows at certain spellings and certain rooms. Something had changed between the two, a shift in emotion and tone. 

They were different and Jasmine just believed that the compulsion had changed her opinion of him. She cried a lot less now and laughed a lot more and she actually enjoyed his company.

She hated how she had grown fond of the heretic, someone capable of such murder and destruction and here she was acting friendly with him as if they were best friends. However, she allowed herself to be, this was the only socialisation she has received in three months (excluding Matt) and she had the right to converse with the sociopath.

He had hurt her, abused her and said horrible things to her but she always came back to him and couldn't ever betray him again but that was just compulsion talking and it wasn't as if she could go anywhere, she'd be bound to him since the beginning.

"You never told me what breaks the curse that Esmeralda placed on you." Kai visibly tensed up at the mention of curse and Esmeralda. Nothing scared him more than Esmeralda, Hell, Two Princes by Spin Doctors and prison worlds but Esmeralda finding out that the curse was broken would be the most frightening thing of all.

"It's best that you don't know Jazzy, it'll only put your life in more danger." Malachai stated more as a warning than anything else. Esmeralda hated being undermined especially by a human teenager, the infernum witch couldn't quite believe that a human teenaged girl was powerful enough to break a curse of that strength and power.

Jasmine rolled her eyes but complied anyway not asking anymore questions anymore but her mind was running into overdrive at the thought of what would break the curse.

"Are you sure you don't want my help by coming with you?" She smiled slightly, playing with a loose thread on her sweatpants at the joking groan that Kai let out at her nagging. "I should have just stayed downstairs and planned all this away from you." Kai looked up at the ceiling dramatically before tilting his head to the side like a dog as he watched Jasmine's admiring stare.

"And to answer your question, no I don't want you to go. It's not safe and you're too weak to go." Kai placed his whiteboard on the ground along with the red whiteboard pen and all the papers with his messy handwriting all over them. He had been planning for days another search of the Salvatore mansion but hadn't yet gone in there.

He was anxious, anxious about being caught red handed in the act and he was anxious that they would figure out that he had Jasmine. If they caught Jasmine and rescued her, he didn't want to think what Esmerelda would do when she came to Earth.

"I'll die of boredom being stuck in bed before this poison actually kills me." Jasmine joked but neither of them laughed. "Jazzy-"

"No, Kai it's fine. I'm allowed to joke about my pending death." She smiled sympathetically but Kai couldn't shake the sinking of his heart at the mention of her death. Jasmine furrowed her eyebrows, placing his fingers to her nose where the black liquid seemed to pour out of her nose and then her ears.

"Well that's new." Kai observed as he grabbed her tissues from the bathroom for her to press against her nose and her ears. The guilt was eating away at him, the next emotion to be fully unlocked as he stared at her with concern. "It started happening last night, I used to get nosebleeds all the time when I was a kid. Besides, at least I'm not throwing-"

Jasmine immediately leaned over the bucket that she was beginning to resent and emptied the black liquid into the bucket whilst Kai held her hair back to stop the substance from staining your hair. "It's getting worse, we need to get that blood soon." Kai felt even more guilty as she wiped her mouth with the back of her hand.

"I can handle it, it's okay." Jasmine placed a hand on Kai's forearm to reassure him but it did the complete opposite. She couldn't deny the slight skip of her heartbeat when she touched him but she prayed that he didn't notice. Kai stared down at her pale, small hand back up to her brown orbs.

"I will get you the cure, I promise."

"Don't make promises you can't keep, Malachai." He grimaced at his full name but didn't say anything in protest. He found that he did that a lot, didn't bother threatening or scolding Jasmine anymore and he was scared that she was softening him up, taking away his sociopathic qualities. He shrugged the idea off, once a sociopath always a sociopath and he didn't want to change.

Like he had already told Jasmine before, he wouldn't change for anybody, he was always going to be Kai Parker The Sociopath.

"I'm not, Jasmine." Placing emphasis on the Jasmine. It felt foreign coming from his tongue and it felt strange for Jasmine to hear Kai call her by her actual name rather than Jazzy. She didn't like it, it felt wrong for him to be calling her Jasmine.

 "That felt wrong on so many different levels." Kai fawned being sick causing her to giggle slightly, lightening the mood considerably.

Jasmine didn't know what to think or how to feel. She was dying yet she was happy in the company of Malachai Parker the murderer and sociopath that couldn't feel anything. She couldn't tell if the compulsion was controlling her emotions or if it was just her true feelings. However, what scared the human the most was the uncontrollable butterflies that swarmed around in her gut at the sound of his laughter or the sight of his smile and that she didn't want it to stop.

I'm probably going to do a double update because Monday is my first exam and then I have five weeks worth of exams so I'll probably be updating less and less.

Thank you so much for reading and thank you for 3K!