Happy Holidays tvd_holidays! (2/2)
THE FIFTEENTH CENTURY
"So many and so various laws are giv'n; so many laws argue so many sins"
14.
In 1451, they are living in Romania, and Klaus tells her they are attending a dinner celebration at the house of a lord. There’s a pretty blue gown laid out on her bed for her, and their servants do her hair, and Rebekah lets her brother help her into the carriage. Elijah is attending to business in the city; Rebekah isn’t sure what exactly, but Elijah has always been allowed more privacy than herself. It is he who arranges that they have all the money they need, and it requires he go out often.
When they arrive at the manor, Klaus smirks at her, reaches for her hand and moves her sunlight ring from her right hand to her left - and she does not understand why, until they’re ushered inside and he introduces her as his wife.
False identities are by no means new, but this is a first, and Rebekah wonders what it means - if anything at all - while she pulls a smile to her face and acts as gracious as can be.
The true reason for their attendance is made clear early into the first course, when Klaus nudges her gently and gestures across the table, where a petite brunette is laughing at the words of the man seated next to her. “Her name is Elisabeta Petrova,” he says, and Rebekah’s throat constricts painfully, suddenly. Petrova.
“Is it-” she starts to ask, but her brother is looking at her, watching for her reaction, and that’s when she realizes he is not sure. The girl is pretty, and her features are similar enough upon inspection but it has been nearly five hundred years and neither of them possesses as clear a recollection as they thought of the girl that was Charlotte.
It seems ridiculous, after centuries of searching, that they wouldn’t know, and Rebekah puts voice to that.
“I think-I think we would be certain,” she whispers. “I do not think this is the girl. She looks similar but she is not-she is not Charlotte again.” She would feel painful, nostalgic recognition if she set eyes on Charlotte’s face again, she is positive.
Klaus’s expression is dark, and he picks idly at the food on his plate. “Soon then,” he says quietly. “Soon the dopplegangr will be born, and I will have the stone-”
“Soon,” she agrees, a reassuring hand on his arm. He glances down, and she knows what he is seeing, her ring sparkling on the right finger.
And later, it is not the Petrova girl that she remembers most about this night. It is the way Klaus called her wife, and the first time she wore her sunlight ring on that finger. She remembers this night a few years later, when Klaus does find the moonstone and returns home ecstatic, crowing, bold and triumphant, and tells her to come with him.
She remembers the dinner with the Petrovas when she moves her ring back to that proper finger, when Klaus finds a priest who doesn’t know better and compels him to marry them, because anything he wants can be his, he is sure of it.
“Don’t tell Elijah,” he whispers to her with a smirk, and then later, when they are tangled in his bedsheets - “This means you may never marry another man, as long as you live, Bekah.”
And she thinks forever, this means she is forever his alone, and she wonders if that is also why he decided he wanted it.
15.
She finds her sister when they are in England. At first, she thinks she could be imagining, conjuring up a face of old, misremembering, but the woman gives a little gasp when she sees her and smiles tentatively and she is assured that this is the Margret that she has not seen in centuries.
“I have heard Niklaus is... angry,” Margret says as they take a promenade through the park. “I have heard is he is devoted to a pursuit of revenge against our father.” She clears her throat, eyes nervous, and Rebekah links arms with her sister.
“You hear right,” she admits. “Niklaus” - how strange it is, to speak that name again - “he is angry... Sometimes I think he forgets why, he has been angry with the entire world so long.”
“Not you, sister,” Margret points out. “Or Elijah. I hear you are still his companions?”
Rebekah nods. “Yes, we are,” she concedes. “I know what you must think, and indeed, there are... difficulties. But Klaus-Niklaus-is not a bad man, sister.”
Margret stiffens at that, and Rebekah flinches, slowly unwinds her arm from her sister’s and stops. “It is true,” she insists softly.
Margret scoffs. “You know as well as I that he would stick a dagger through my heart if he found me, as he did with Finn, and what did either of us ever do to him?”
“You left,” Rebekah accuses quietly. “You betrayed him.”
“Betrayed him? Oh, sister, I fear it might be too late for you. Do you even hear yourself, the way your pretty little voice shapes the words straight from his mouth?”
“Hello, sisters.”
Klaus has always had the worst habit of appearing on cue, and here he is, striding across the grass with a jaunty smile on his face.
Margret tenses, looks at Rebekah with accusation in her eyes, and she wants to explain, tell her this was no set-up, she swears it, but the words die in her mouth.
“Klaus...” she warns instead. “We were just talking...”
Klaus draws up, disbelief on his face for the shortest moment before it’s replaced by scorn. “Now is no time for a sympathetic heart, Rebekah,” he warns, the furrow in his brow a hint of how absurd he finds such a concept.
She wants to protest, wants to defend her sister and stand her ground, but all she can remember are all the times Klaus held her face in his hands and swore he would kill everyone who’d betrayed them - them, not him. She’s seen him rant with fervour about raining down vengeance. He believes it is just, what he does, and she wants to believe as well, but her sister’s words are heavy upon her.
In the end, there is really no choice. Speaking out would be siding against him, a betrayal of her own. She has not seen her sister since they were but a family living in a village in the woods, and it is her brother that she cannot bear to lose - the mere thought of which makes her insides twist and makes pain seem to burst inside her skull at the sheer impossibility of it, after half a millennium at his side.
So she meets her sister’s pleading eyes and does not look away, and she watches Klaus drive a dagger through Margret’s heart. Rebekah is the one who cries out.
And then Klaus is telling her to hurry, they must get Margret’s body to the waiting carriage before anyone notices, unless she feels like engaging in a massacre of London’s citizens on such a sunny day.
She thinks of what she told her sister, he is not a bad man, and tries to reconcile that with Klaus, who has murdered both their other siblings now with seemingly no care, who is so sure that his path is one of righteousness, that he is owed everything he takes - so he takes everything.
Her brother is not a bad man. Rebekah believes that. But for the first time, as they ride away from the park with their sister’s daggered corpse and Klaus acts as triumphant as if he has beat the devil, not a girl who simply went her own way, who was his own flesh and blood, she looks at him and cannot quite recognize her brother inside this man.
16.
She runs away shortly after Klaus lays Margret to rest in a casket. She switches her ring back to her right hand and tries not to think too deeply about why she is questioning everything after a few words from a woman she hadn’t seen in nearly five hundred years, a woman who should have been nothing to her.
It is claustrophobia, she thinks. Klaus’s plans, his obsessions, his zealous crusade - it is all too much, and where once she was convinced wholeheartedly that her brother is in the right, that he is a hero who will claim victory over those who have wronged them, she is beginning to doubt that it is so simple.
Elijah finds her in Venice in 1462. She’s posing as an English noblewoman and she’s compelled a Contessa to claim her as a cousin and let her stay in their luxurious home.
She’s exploring the gardens when she hears his voice behind her - “Rebekah”, he greets - and she curses herself for letting him sneak upon her, for the fact that he managed to find her at all.
Swallowing and fixing a pleasant expression on her face, she turns slowly to greet her brother. “Elijah.” She knows she must paint quite the picture to him, decked in a gown embroidered with gold silk and set with pearls, her hair piled high in nets of curls atop her head - the message is quite clear: she is doing fine by herself.
But Elijah ignores her appearance and cuts straight to the point as he crosses the grass to stand in front of her. “Klaus misses you.”
She laughs, and only offers her brother her arm. After a beat, he takes it, and she guides him over to a stone bench, to sit. She can hear laughter bubbling from nearby, the Contessa’s children, and her lips twitch. It has been almost sweet, pretending these people are her family.
“Klaus only needs himself, he always has,” she lies, but Elijah eyes her so sternly she knows it was silly to even bother.
“I know you’re angry with him-” Elijah starts.
“Yes, I am angry!” she interrupts, before he can even begin. She knots her hands together in her lap and forces herself to breathe as if such a motion will calm her. “He’s... he’s insufferable, Elijah, you know that as well as I. He is single-minded and he won’t stop-it’s absolutely suffocating, he is suffocating, merely to be around. But we love him.” She pauses. “I love him, so yes, I am angry.”
Rebekah laughs, a broken sound that twists her mouth. “Sometimes it seems that is the price of loving our brother.”
Elijah is silent for a long moment, and she smoothes the skirt of her dress, idly running her fingers over the wrinkles.
“Without you, he is... lonely,” Elijah says slowly.
She scoffs. “He would not be lonely if he did not insist on killing every member of our family because they were not as loyal as you and I. Father is the only one who wronged him. I have come to realize that, Elijah.”
“And this... this realization, it is what prompted you to leave?”
It is not that simple, but she does not say that. “I have believed in him,” she says quietly. “I have believed in him so long and so strongly, and now... it is as if I’ve become disenchanted, I suppose, but I still do not... I do not know how to live any other way. But it is not an easy way to live.”
Elijah reaches for her hand, and she lets him curl his around it. “Our brother is too proud to admit that he misses you,” he says after a moment. “But beneath his pride, and beneath his anger, he wishes for your return - as do I. And you know that is the truth whether you will admit it or not, Rebekah. You are his sister. You are so much to him.” And there is something so peculiar about the way he says those last words, with a resigned heaviness, that it makes her wonder how much he truly knows.
Sister she is, but that was a role given to her at birth, a result of biology and no more - not something her or Klaus ever defined themselves. Over the centuries, their natural identities have shed away like layers of clothing, and their many others would span a lengthy list. Confidante, ally, companion, friend, protector, lover...
It is no wonder they wear so many skins in the same bodies, she thinks. It would be entirely too confining to be merely one person for hundreds of years.
17.
It is after she hears of Katerina Petrova that she returns to England to find her brother. She has never shared his timing, though, and as it is, she arrives too late.
She finds him standing outside the Petrova manor. The ground is drenched with blood, so much that it’s formed pools where the earth refuses to soak in any more, and it is slippery under her feet. The mangled corpses of servants practically lead a trail to the front door.
“Klaus...” she breathes softly, his name catching in her throat - or deeper even, in her stomach, which has tightened so much she feels she might retch, and then wants to laugh at the very idea, a vampire put off by blood. Indeed, the smell is overpowering, a shock to her senses, and she has to exert all her willpower to stagger to her brother’s side.
She is too afraid to reach out for him. Oh, she’s seen horrors he’s inflicted before; they are vampires and to crave blood is their nature. She’s slaughtered and drank along with him, but there is something about this massacre that is unbearably personal - an entire household murdered, so many children, all torn to pieces, and it done in revenge against one single, silly girl for the crime of living - and it chills her deeply.
She tells herself that she is being silly, though, and reaches out anyway, a hand soft against his arm. He whirls to face her, a low snarl in his throat, and she sees his eyes are still dark and cracked, filled with a bloodlust he is not bothering to try and control.
“Why are you here?” he hisses at her. His jaw clenches, but his eyes slowly start to return to normal - and then he forces a laugh, cruel and cold. “Come to stop me, darling? Decided you care too much for precious Katerina too?”
She swallows. “Nonsense,” she manages weakly, because it is. She does not care for the fate of the girl she’s spent the past centuries prepared to hunt down with her brother. She does not care for the people inside the manor either, but- I care for you, brother, she thinks. That is why she is here. To pull him back from the edge before he topples off.
But she does not say that, only asks “How many?”
Klaus scoffs, the exact number so clearly beneath his concerns. And then his eyes narrow, and he reaches for her wrist, encircles it tightly and pulls her close with a taut smile on his face that does not match his eyes. “Everyone she ever loved,” he tells her, and Rebekah shivers.
Is that not what you would do to me? she thinks. And what crime did I ever commit?
Klaus curses suddenly, his smile crumpling with rage. “Elijah!” He says his name in a voice so full of hatred that it terrifies Rebekah. She has always had her two brothers, and now that is falling apart so quickly and completely.
“Elijah did this,” Klaus is muttering, his grasp on her wrist growing tighter. “Elijah betrayed me, I know he did, he must have helped her-all these years, we had it planned, for centuries we planned, I had everything perfect, and then-he would help the dopplegangr, condemn me to be trapped like this for the rest of-forever.”
Rebekah swallows, and does not mean to say anything but-“Maybe he loved her.” It slips out quickly.
Klaus only looks bewildered. “Loved her? She was the dopplegangr, Bekah. She was human, she was beneath all of us,” he scoffs. As if the concept of loving anyone that is not one of them - that is not family - is ridiculous.
“I am not surprised you would not understand,” she says quietly. “You’ve never loved anyone.” And she is vicious when she says it, knows how to use words like weapons when it comes to her brother.
But Klaus smirks, raises an eyebrow at her. “Only you, sister,” he swears, and her throat constricts with the frightening honesty of his words. He studies her for a moment, his expression almost soft, painfully sincere and disturbingly out of place.
Then he glances around them, wildly, as if taking in the carnage for the first time. “She deserved this,” he insists.
When she does not reply, his expression hardens. “Precedent is important, darling,” he says, and there, there is something so familiar of her brother, always making excuses. And so afraid himself that he must make everyone else fear him.
“You understand,” he says quietly, and she obliges with a nod, because she does, because they are the oldest of their kind and must be feared, because in some ways her brother does picture them as gods looking down on the mortals below and the illusion is too tempting.
He touches her face gently - “You, Bekah,” - and she does not flinch back, even though she can feel the blood on his hand, faintly hot and sticky. There is something impossible in the touch, that it could be so delicate from the same man who just murdered an entire household and painted the grounds with their blood.
She doesn’t know if it is her that brings it out in him, or if it is merely the gradual crash down from rage, the slope into exhaustion. But she also does not pull back when he kisses her, his hand sliding around her neck. He doesn’t bite her lip, or twist her hair, and when he rips her dress, he does so slowly - even steadies her carefully as they fall to the ground. His mouth is warm on her skin, and gentle - the toned viciousness and hurried desperation that normally mark her brother are nowhere to be found.
And when he fucks her on the drenched grounds, he licks the blood off her skin, and he murmurs her name, whispers “always mine, Bekah, always you,” and leaves her reeling and dazed.
18.
“It doesn’t even affect me,” he whispers later, when she finds him wandering the halls at night. “The Petrovas... all of them... it does nothing to me.”
She isn’t even sure if he is talking to her, or to himself, but she takes his arm, walks with him to his chambers.
“It is what we are, sister,” he tells her when they’re inside, turning to her with a cold glint to his eyes.
“They are human, and we are vampires, the oldest of our kind. We are a predatory race, and they are prey.” He speaks in a furious rush, as if to make up for the uncertainty that rings behind his words, and she wraps her arms around him, lets him pull her close and does not know how to answer him, if such an act can still be wrong - if her brother could be a villain - when it is only their nature.
THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY
"Hail horrors, hail infernal world"
19.
Klaus does not give up his pursuit of Katerina Petrova, even though the girl is of no use anymore. He is hell-bent on revenge against her, and Rebekah dedicates herself as fully to this crusade as she ever has, and ignores how her brother seems to grow worse and worse.
Neither of them has ever held great amounts of sympathy for human life, but Klaus becomes more cavalier with it than she has ever seen, grows more and more ruthless and wipes out entire towns for the sole sin of Katerina not being found within.
He keeps a good face, her brother, as confident as always that his path is the correct one, that he is as justified in this as in everything else he has ever done. But sometimes he seems to crumple beneath all the polished veneer, sometimes he comes to her and she senses there inside is the brother she recognizes, straining to find his way.
“Nik,” she takes to calling him again, like she did when they were children, whether in an effort to find her big brother within this man or because she hears the way others whisper Klaus, like a curse, and she hates it, she is not certain.
But he comes to her at night, and she does not remark on any of it, only whispers in his ear and kisses the cruelty away. And it is only then when her brother seems free, when he’s alone with her and they’ve shed their clothes, warm skin flushed and tight in each other’s embrace like they will never let go in the eons that lie ahead.
THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
"Was she thy god, lovely to attract thy love, not thy subjection"
20.
They chase Katerina to Athens, and they don’t find her, but they do visit an old temple on whim - her brother’s, not hers. Rebekah feels uncomfortable when she steps inside, rubs her arms and faces the statues of old gods with the most neutral expression she can muster.
“Do you remember what you said?” Nik asks her, the slightest lift of a grin to his mouth. He shares none of her discomfort at being in the presence of real gods - foolish, made-up gods, she tells herself.
She nods, but he continues on, chuckling. “Do you still believe it, Bekah? We’re gods? Think, you could be the Hera to my Zeus,” he tells her, with a quick gesture at one of the busts.
A woman, sculpted of marble and lovely to behold. Rebekah gravitates closer, lips drawn together, studying the woman. The Queen of the Gods. There is something magnificent about that indeed, but rather tragic too, it strikes her. She wonders if Hera was ever lonely. All the myths that spoke of Zeus’s numerous affairs - they made it seem like he never cared for her properly at all.
No, she thinks, her brother and her are no Zeus or Hera, though Nik may think himself King of the all the world and she is finding herself strangely empathetic to the woman in front of her. It’s just a statue. A statue of a make-believe woman who never existed.
“She was his sister, you know,” Nik murmurs, having come up close behind her. His voice brushes over the back of her neck and his hands go to her waist. She turns to see him, but his hands remain.
“I did know,” she tells him, and it comes out rather annoyed.
“Zeus defeated their father,” he continues in his low voice. “Cronos ate all his children, too afraid that one of them would one day overthrow him, but Zeus was hidden away, and one day he succeeded, and brought back all his brothers and sisters.”
She shivers at the story, what a wonderful and wretched prophecy, and raises an eyebrow at her brother. “Is that what you are doing, modelling your life’s intent around the stories of ancient Greece?”
He narrows his eyes, and then laughs, the sound sudden and odd in this place. “But does it not seem fitting? I thought so. Or would you rather Hades and Persephone, darling? King and Queen of the Underworld seem more suited to vampires?” The lightness is his tone sounds forced; there is a certain steel to it, bitter, and she knows that her brother would much rather fancy himself King of all the Gods. But that is not what she says.
“Hades kidnapped Persephone.” Her voice is quiet. Nik frowns, clearly having not considered that part of the story. Rebekah lifts a hand to her brother’s cheek.
“She never had any say at all.”
21.
They go into the forest outside of Athens, and Rebekah feels like a child again, remembers days when the world was new to her and she always had her brothers at her side.
Nik insists on feeding on any humans that cross their path, and killing them, ripping throats out as they drink up the blood. Rebekah joins him, feels primal and savage and truly indulges in it for the first time in so many years.
They are not young anymore, and they have learned to control their impulses, but they allow themselves to forget, and there is something inherently exciting about it; she feels electric in her veins, wonders if it is possible that blood tastes better when drunk from the dying, and what that says about the natural world.
There is a grove where they sleep for the night, under the stars, more animal than human. Nik is bright and wild and disarmingly in his element, and she wonders if it is the werewolf in him, if there is some higher call to the wild even more than what she is feeling. She has never been jealous of her brother for his hybrid blood, but all at once she feels ferociously connected to and unbearably separate from him, and cannot decide which it is.
He is soft with her that night, breathing loving words into her ear and caressing her skin. The same teeth that tore at jugulars early in the day nip at her shoulder, her breasts, her hipbone, so lightly they don’t even mark the skin - not even for a short second before it would all heal anyway. She digs her nails into his skin, for once more rough than him, and when she cries out, she thinks she hear it echo across the sky.
They lie in the grass, tangled and naked, and eventually, hours later, Nik dances his fingertips down her bare arm.
“I’ll protect you, always,” he declares, with a hushed sort of intensity to him, before he rolls them over, holds himself above her with one hand and cups her cheek with the other.
“I know,” she assures him, but he shakes his head.
“From Mikael,” he insists. “I’ll protect you, Bekah, I’ll protect you from him better than anyone else. I’ll kill him. I promise you, one day I will.” His throat constricts. “You must never trust him, sister. He wants you as dead as I by now. He- You mustn’t ever believe a word he says.”
Rebekah frowns, and lifts a hand to touch her brother’s face softly, tries to make herself smile. “I won’t,” she tells him, and she means it, believes him.
Her brother’s eyes close for a moment - relief, she thinks - and then he presses a kiss to her hairline, then her shoulder, then his mouth is warm on her throat and she makes a little gasp, arches her head back as he continues to trace over her body, and she lets him unravel her completely, every inch of her skin.
They stay in the grove for a - for time. Not a long time, not a short time, but merely an indefinable stretch of it. Rebekah loses track of the days, ceases caring, because they have all the time in the world to chase after dopplegangrs and paint the world with blood.
Instead, they drink from wandering humans, they tear them apart and they lie in the grass, flush and entwined, and it feels as if time has stopped completely, as if there is no world beyond this.
“I like it here,” Nik declares at one point, offering a grin in her direction. “Out in the wilderness, in nature-” he laughs, and it sounds jarring. “It is as if we were Adam and Eve, sister.”
She has to laugh at that as well, even if it makes her chest tight, not with fear but simply the wrongness of it all that she wishes could unaffect her as it does her brother.
“Eden in Greece,” she says lightly.
“We are the first of our kind,” he reminds her, and it is true, but she still feels a certain unease, that her brother always must compare them to those they are not, as if pretending they can switch identities merely because they want to. She understands it, understands that there is safety in comparing themselves to lovers of old, an escapism from who they truly are - and the fact that they never can truly escape that.
Her brother is always comparing as if imagining themselves anyone else makes this proper, makes this their destiny, absolves him.
He always tries so hard to justify.
“The question, darling,” he continues, leaning close to her, so his mouth nearly brushes hers, “is whether you too will succumb to sin.” And he laughs at that, laughs because he relishes it so, his embrace of their sin even as he compares them to biblical figures. He spites it all.
Rebekah kisses him, moans when he trails his hands down her sides and holds her waist tightly, and she thinks that her brother was wrong, because it was never a question at all.
And so time passes, nearly a month now, she thinks, but still, she cannot see how it matters when they have all of time.
“We could stay here forever,” she murmurs one day. “What are the chances Father would find us, here on one little piece of the Earth.”
She is lying down, propped up by her elbows, and Nik is sitting on the ground beside her, drinking the last pulses of blood from the dead girl he’s got in his lap. Rebekah almost feels a bizarre, irrational jealousy at the way he holds the corpse, but then he tosses it away a moment later, and wipes at his mouth.
“If we stay here forever we don’t find him either,” her brother reminds her lightly. “And then I don’t kill him- but I will, I swear it. That is the only way we’ll ever be free, darling, the only way we can ever stop running.”
She remains silent, ponders the idea of freedom compared to what she has. Although she knows the fear of being chased, has felt it clog her lungs and throat too many times, she does not think she feels as chained as her brother, wonders if that again has to do with his werewolf side, that private struggle of his she will never be able to reach.
“I will never let anyone hurt you,” Nik swears suddenly, shifting closer, and his eyes are steel when they meet hers.
Only you are allowed to hurt me, she thinks should follow his words- knows it to be his truth. But she doesn’t say it, doesn’t ruin the moment when everything is so glorious and her brother’s darker hours seem so far away as to have been another lifetime entirely.
She nods quickly instead - she knows, she knows - and then he leans over her, kisses her mouth, and she can still taste the blood in his. She licks it away, bites his lip to taste his blood instead, not that of an inconsequential girl.
And her brother pulls her up to him, tightly, and she wants to taste all she can of him, his mouth, his skin, and she will let him taste all of her too, until there is nothing left to show they ever existed.
THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
“Better to reign in hell than serve in heav’n”
22.
They do leave Greece, though, and they do continue to chase Katerina Petrova, though never with any luck.
Her brother’s temper grows worse as the stupid bitch eludes them time and time again, and Rebekah grows accustomed to finding him drenched in the blood of others.
He pushes her hands away when she tries to relieve him of his bloody clothing, likes to undress her instead, stain her clothes and skin and murmur “just as bloody as me, sister” or “all my sins are yours too.”
“Don’t say that,” she hisses at him once, when they’re in his bed and he’s inside her, and his teeth are tearing softly at her skin.
Nik lifts his head, runs his thumb gently over her cheek, so gently, even though they are fucking on blood-drenched sheets and probably not even for the hundredth time. “Say what, sister? Sin?” He laughs at the way she flinches.
“Tell me, darling,” he says, presses a kiss to her mouth, whispers to her, “why should the likes of you and I ever need to worry about sin?”
“I don’t worry,” she scoffs, instantly, and smoothly rolls to flip them over so she’s on top, hates how trapped her brother can make her feel.
Nik only looks amused, pushes himself up by his elbows and kisses her again, hard this time. “Good,” he declares in a low voice, a smirk twitches on his face. “Besides, sister, better to reign in hell than serve in heaven.”
She rolls her eyes, pushes him down against the mattress and lets her nails press into his arm as she leans over him, lip curled. “That’s Satan who says that.” She glares at Nik. “Don’t quote Satan.” She can’t explain to him just how much the idea makes her feel like she is choking.
“Fancy yourself religious all of the sudden?” Nik sneers. He reaches a hand around her arm tightly, rolls them over again, and pins her down, mouths a trail along her collarbone and to the soft flesh of her neck, presses with his tongue and bites gently with his teeth, insistent.
“Of course not,” she says with narrowed eyes that don’t meet his.
“We’re above that, sister,” he tells her, moving to the other side of her neck, biting softly at the warm skin there, again not enough to draw blood, but it makes it shiver, and it makes her moan, just as softly.
“We are what people should believe in,” he whispers. “We are myth and legend walking-” and then he grins, “-we’re the monsters in the night.”
“Yes,” she gives in, because there is something intoxicating about the way her brother speaks of power, of how they are so much more than the rest of the world. She remembers being young, thinking them gods, and that illusion is too pleasant to resist most times.
But later, when she drifts off to sleep, she dreams of her brother dead, and herself stabbing a dagger through her chest. She dreams of fire all around her, and wakes gasping for air she hasn’t needed in centuries.
Romeo and Juliet died together; she knows the story, though she scoffs at such romanticism. But that is when she first wonders if eventually she and brother will go to hell together.
23.
Rebekah cries sometimes, cries when Nik isn’t there to see her tears. She cries for her dead mother and her daggered siblings and Elijah gone and her father wanting her dead. She cries because she’s so damn lonely and she doesn’t understand the half of it, doesn’t understand how she could be so lonely when she’s stuck with someone she loves so much.
But she is stuck all the same, and that is the crucial truth. She dares not leave her brother again, dares not run away as she once did. She watches him pursue Katerina, curse the girl and vow all the ways he will hurt her when he finds her, how slowly he will draw out her death - and she sucks in her breath, tries not to imagine what he would threaten her with if she ever attempted to leave.
In truth, she does not even think she knows how to live any other way. If ever she did, she has forgotten it.
And even more importantly, she loves him.
She loves Nik, but sometimes she fears that she hates him more than she loves him. It is his cruelty that is ever-present now, and it is at its worst with her, a cruelty designed for her only, born out of how well he knows her, knows all her innermost corners and edges and hidden, sensitive spots, and knows how to push them in ways that will hurt the most.
He loves her, she does not doubt it. He loves her, and because he loves her, he knows her too well. He presses at her sorest truths, taunts her with their sins to rankle her, breathes words of the hell destined for them into her ear while he fucks her, just so she will squirm.
Sometimes, she wants to crawl away from it all, or crawl under his skin, into him, and hide away, because she knows all his darkest truths too, and hates that she knows them and doesn’t flinch away.
24.
They search for Katerina, search and search until Rebekah feels they’ve traced every inch of the world. But she’s always been prone to exaggeration.
She withdraws within herself more frequently, feels old deep inside herself, remembers all the years she’s lived and cannot fathom how far events have fallen behind her. She feels as if she should be too afraid to say or do anything, ever, because retrospect has shown her that she will one day regret it, even if that day comes not for centuries.
And so they pass from city to city, continent to continent through the years, and she recognizes details sometime - a building that was standing a hundred years earlier, or a structure built where once she walked through a forest.
It is as if they have left ghosts behind them, imprints of themselves hundreds of years old, imprints of different people entirely.
Rebekah wonders why they are so haunted by themselves, and not the people they’ve loved and lost, never their mother, never her siblings. She can hardly remember them sometimes, and even after what Nik’s done, she thinks she would rather face them than all the ghosts of herself.
THE NINETEENTH CENTURY
"She opened, but to shut excelled her power"
25.
She doesn’t like being near the coffins.
Nik will run his fingers over his wood, perch on top of them with a grin on his face and swing his legs, make a mockery of it. Rebekah does her best not to picture her siblings inside them, doesn’t like to imagine that Nik might do the same to Elijah if they ever cross paths.
“You’ll never dagger me, will you?” she asks him, it doesn’t matter when. She asks him more than once.
Her brother is as unnerved as she is nervous in the presence of their siblings. “You’ll never give me reason to, darling,” he tells her.
And this is the moment she will look back at. This is the moment that - two hundred years from now, after ninety years in a coffin of her own - will sicken her in realizing that it was always so inevitable, and yet somehow she still believed in him.
How could she not, though, when they’d promised each other always and forever? And how could they not uphold that, after everything they’d done - who else would have them, who else could they ever love? She has seen for centuries what they will do to each other, how they hurt each other, and that they will always come back - and it scares her, just how much destruction could they rain down, in the name of love or misconceived justice, and never stop.
But Nik only laughs, in that moment, because Nik is always laughing - at the world itself, at the fact that he succeeds so often in bending everyone within it to his will, even her - always her - and that through some fallacy, he is king of it, his own kind of god.
Like it’s all a joke, a trick that he never actually thought he could get away with.