fic: here is the deepest secret nobody knows (3/5)
(a/n: sorry this took so long. lj is a bitch to format, and i'm trying to make a new archive here anyway. so don't mind me for the ugly this place is going to turn to.)
III. THE RESTORATION
She remembers Bulgarian well enough, though the past two decades of her life had been dedicated more to Italian and Latin than anything, but now she plays the coquette well enough, the words easy in her mouth.
It is just a role, you see. And Rebekah is a queen of facades.
“He loves you!” She insists with all the certainty of a girl long dead. “You can tell, Kat. He looks at you as if you are a queen.”
Katerina Petrova rolls her eyes, smiles wickedly. “Well, he certainly kisses me like I am one.”
Rebekah gasps, slipping easily into the body of the jealous friend. Of course the village boy with the foolish grin kisses like a Lancelot. Rebekah had seen to that.
“And you let him?” She inches forward. “Tell me, Kat. Tell me all of it.”
It is easy, grooming the girl with the long dead face like a pig for the slaughter, and she plays them all, like puppets on their lines, dangles them forwards and backwards at her own pleasure, making sure everything is just so before she-
“Will you marry him?” Rebekah asks in the wistful voice of the romantic.
Katerina smiles. “Father shall object, of course, but once he finds out-”
“Finds out what?” Rebekah inches forward. “Has he proposed? Oh, Kat, tell, tell-”
Katerina Petrova smiles, a smile like a secret, a smile like a thing to be worshipped by millions. “I am with child.”
-strikes.
(Truth be told, the boy had wanted to marry his Katerina, and if he had pushed for it, if he had pushed for it the way he planned to, Katerina would be happily married by now, with a bouncing little girl.
Rebekah is a vampire. She is a monster and a killer and more than anything she is a destroyer of worlds.
She tears it all apart with a few well-chosen words, looks the boy in the eyes and tells him to abandon the doppelganger, looks Katerina’s father in the eye and plants an idea, of a duke in England, a land far away from his daughter’s shame, a monumentally better life for his soiled darling.)
It isn’t a stake through the heart, but Rebekah sends Katerina to her death all the same.
She sends her brother a message when the doppelganger sets off for England, to be carried over land and water.
Your move.
Rebekah celebrates her five hundredth name-day alone, a single, solitary figure standing in a clearing, now eroded by nature and time, feet bare against the cold ground, at the same spot where half a millennia ago she had lived with her family, had laughed, had smiled without intent, had lived in the fullest sense of the word.
She leaves a white flower, a water-lily, on the ground, in the exact centre of the clearing, and allows herself this final weakness.
I am strong, I am strong, I am strong.
“Here lies Rebekah,” she says out loud. “Here lies Niklaus.”
Rest in peace.
The Marrano sits, lavish, in the Holy Throne of Saint Peter’s, and Rebekah wears a gown of gilded silk, sitting demurely in the terrace of Klaus’s new palazzo. She leans back and her hair, in the thick heavy curls of the Roman fashion, spills over the back of the chair. The clamour of the city floats through to her, elevated on a hill that had once housed emperors.
She speaks before her brother even enters the room. “You’ve lost her, then.”
“Not for long, sweet sister, but thank you for your concern.” He stops, stares at her for one moment before letting his eyes drop, sweep over the landscape of the city. “You’re back, then.”
She rakes her eyes over the length of him, like a hungry, wanton thing.
He smiles easily now, and it seems that now he is always smiling, a smile that twists just as easily into a snarl. There is a new kind of cruelty etched into the lines of his face, and she had studied, days past, the way his servants cower and bow around him, even when he laughs and takes everything in good cheer.
She has not seen him for nigh on a hundred years, and it is only now that he ceases to smile.
“Hmm,” she says. “Bulgaria was beginning to bore, so I ventured back, just in time for your return.” She sits up, opens her heavy lidded eyes and smiles at her brother, a smile as bright and hard as the ruby around her throat. It winks, red as a knife wound. “Quite a clamour you made, coming to Rome. Nothing gets these Colonnas going like a nice, young, marriageable duke. Where’s Elijah, Nik?”
He smells of musk and sweat and the distinct, thick scent of his Barbary. Rebekah drums her fingers, idly, on her lap, above the material of her dress, and lets the scent of him curl around her, like perfume, like chains. Beneath it all, there is the raw velvet of blood.
“Concluding a little business with dear Katerina.” He shrugs. “She runs, her family dies. Ways of the world, really.”
She does not reply for a beat, a split second in which his eyes meets hers, and holds. “I see.”
His hands clench into fists, and he looks down at his boots. “Bekah-”
“I heard he was infatuated with her.” Rebekah says. “Petrovas… Petrovas are a weak spot of Elijah’s.”
“I cured him of it,” Klaus replies. “I reminded him that we are not weak.”
She looks away from him, smiles and makes a contemplative noise. Thinks, I am strong, I am strong, I am strong. Thinks, I am not weak.
He does not move to stop her when she glides past him, her fingers barely skimming against the fabric of his sleeve.
“I’ve missed you.” He says instead.
They fall into their old patterns, of wants and deaths and blood and Rebekah keeps no more secrets from her brother. Elijah stays away, does Klaus’s bidding as always, but they do not see him except for official visits.
Rebekah has not the heart to leave as she had done before, has not the heart to leave him, not now, not again. Instead she fills the hole Elijah leaves behind, follows her brother though the war-torn states of Italy as Il Valentino rips it apart. She follows him through cities and forests and villages and farms and deserts and seas, and she begins to recognize the places where she had tread years ago, decades, centuries ago-forests razed for the building of castles and fortresses and towns, rivers turned into irrigation, and it is as if she is looking into the past, as if the very air is humming with her deaths.
“I will be stuck with this curse my whole life.” Klaus says one night, years after she comes back, his lips bloody and red, a girl’s corpse flung carelessly to one side. “I will be stuck, Bekah. My whole life. I will be an abomination twice over.”
She does not comfort him, does not soothe him with false words or lies. Instead she reaches forward, fingers light against the unshaven surface of his jaw, and touches her forehead very lightly to his. “And I will be with you, through it all, Nik. I am cursed too.”
He closes his eyes, breathes very slowly through his nose, and threads his fingers into her hair, gold, same as his.
I love you.
This they do not say. Those are three words used too often and used too soon. For them, only one word matters, and they have promised it to each other, over and over, and that word, too, is corrupt, broken, and fraying.
They track Katerina to the ends of the world and back.
They burn down entire villages, slaughter entire populations, and blood falls in a rain that rains for days whenever they wish, whenever Katerina runs just a few steps out of their grasp. Rebekah no longer looks upon a dark-haired girl and sees someone six hundred years dead, no longer feels her heart jump at the sight of dark curls on a street corner, no longer feels anything except a deep inextricable pull towards her brother. She only feels when he does, only allows herself to laugh when he does, and slowly, slowly, piece by piece, she rips herself apart at the seams and crafts herself out of blood, out of flesh, out of death, out of him. She remakes herself in his image.
He is the only one she has left, after all. And she has learnt the hard way that he cannot be replaced.
She does not want to be alone.
Where they walk, there are always corpses strewn alongside, beautiful women for him and handsome young men for her, all of them as golden as their predators. They leave their mark on their homeland, the same as they had centuries ago, and for years, the starved peasants of the land tell hushed tales of vengeful, heathen gods. It is not far from the truth. They are immortal, after all, and all powerful. Rebekah wages that they are the closest the peasants would come to paradise.
Images of them begin to arise, a pair of golden, blood-soaked beasts-a blood countess in Hungary, a vampire count in Romania. They are both of them bound together, together, always.
“Artemis and Apollo,” he says one day, “The immortal, golden twins. The god of the sun and the goddess of the moon. Her arrows bring swift death, and his, a slow, agonizing, lethal pain.”
She smiles at him. “I see your delusions of grandeur have reached new heights.”
“Absolute loyalty within the family,” he says. “Total, absolute loyalty, without a shadow of doubt. When the Theban queen, Niobe, insulted their mother, Artemis and Apollo slew all of her fourteen children, but spared the queen so that she can suffer for all eternity. They say that she turned into stone in her grief, but continued to weep, from which the River Achelous was formed. That-that is loyalty, Bekah.”
She has learnt to read him as easily as an open book, and now she stops, looks him in the eyes. “What is it, Nik?”
He looks at her through heavy lashes, says, “He killed our mother. He turned us into abominations. He destroyed our family. And now he’s after us.”
They begin to run.
parts i), ii), iv) and v)