A/N: This was originally written for but_seriously, for the prompt: Rebekah/Matt: you've made a believer out of me. you've swallowed me whole and made a believer out of me.
Count to three.
One, two, three. The boy has blond hair and he hates her. Well, this feels familiar.
The advantage, when you're four hundred years old, is that you can weed out the bad stories and keep only the best, juiciest ones. You learn that everything is true. One way or another.
"Make every lie count," that's what Nik tells her when he pushes her towards Stefan, knowing, the bastard, that she won't make it to the end of the night.
The year is 1922 and the world is incandescent. Stefan's smile burns her retinas. She thinks: it's love. It's not love.
A pair of fingers - Matt's: blunt nails, slightly calloused - snap in front of her eyes. Not unkind - he doesn't know how to be unkind - but not kind, either.
"What's going on?" he asks. Where are you?
She shakes her head. "Reminiscing," she says.
His eyes take on a strange hue, like he's wondering what portion of history she's reminiscing about. She considers telling him. In the end she doesn't. Let him think. Let him think she's dreaming of the fall of empires, instead of her much-too-breakable heart.
"What about?" he asks.
She smiles from the side of her mouth, mischievous. "A girl never tells," she says.
He looks at her for a moment, stoic. She can read him like an open book, written in giant type. You're not a girl. You're a monster.
Then he walks away. He's an honest, hard-working boy: no time for games. Too bad games is all she has, all that's left from centuries of power gained through manipulation and slaughter.
She waits, her feet feeling like they're made of lead, but he never looks back.
"Don't tell me you've got a crush on the resident Ken, Rebekah," Klaus snipes. His voice strikes the practiced note between boredom and sarcasm.
Elijah doesn't look up from his book. "Don't tease her, Klaus."
Not that he'll listen. Klaus doesn't listen. He makes a point of it, as though being a hard-headed jerk solidifies his position as self-proclaimed king of the world.
"Well, at least I'm not sending priceless pieces of jewelry to Caroline Forbes," she snarks back. He colors a little. His infatuation with that little girl is ridiculous.
At last Elijah closes his book. He pinches the bridge of his nose. "If you're going to bicker like children, can you at least do it outside?"
Outside they lose their footing. They never hate each other, not really, and it's easier to tip forward and rest her head against his bony shoulder than fight.
"Don't kill him, this time," she says, breathing in his scent, blood under the expensive cologne.
He purses his mouth. "I can't make any promises," he says.
He takes her face between his hands. Rebekah prays in her head that he won't kiss her. He doesn't. He rests their foreheads together.
"Eat him whole," he whispers.
No, Rebekah thinks. No, no, no. She thinks about a thousand threats, about killing that girl Caroline, about leaving for good this time.
In the end she says, "I will."
It's the way things go. Always and forever - right?
"What do you want?" he asks her once, exasperated.
She raises an eyebrow. Really? You don't know?
He blushes. Of course he knows.
"You could have anyone you want," he says. "Go and compel... I don't know, a prince or something. But leave me and my friends alone."
Does he mean it? Maybe she could do just that, compel him and have him open his mouth while she drops all kinds of words in it. But you can't make someone who doesn't love you love you, that's the first rule of magic. (She calls it magic, otherwise it's all monsters and demons born in the sulfurous dust under children's beds. She doesn't like the idea.)
"This is better," she says instead. Everything I've ever wanted in a sturdy package, blonde hair blue eyes and that supernatural kindness.
He throws his hands up. "Will you and your freaky family ever leave?"
She allows herself a smile, but she can't quite take the sadness out of it. "No," she says. "That's the point, you see."
It's the same thing every time she sees one of those pesky humans holding a sword, or a bayonet, or a gun: she laughs. What do you think you're going to do with that, darling? Change the world?
The thing is, she's been in countless revolutions, and not one of them has changed anything about the way the world works. The strong eat the weak. The rich crush the poor. It's so predictable it's almost boring. So she ought to know better. She ought to learn. After four hundred years and the world has not changed a bit, not once, she ought to know that when she falls in love there is only one possible outcome: heartbreak.
But she doesn't. That's why there is so much disdain in Klaus's love for her, and so much pity in Elijah's. She just can't seem to learn.
Of course, they don't know that she's holding to it, to that naïveté that makes humans what they are, the stupid and stubborn, hopeful animals they are. One day she's going to get that cure. One day she'll open her mouth and her blood will start pumping again. One day she'll dig into a chocolate cake and find nothing lacking, no bitter aftertaste.
She tells Matt that. He's compelled, a box for her secrets. She wishes she didn't have to, but if he was free he would probably spring behind her and stick a dagger in her back. Rebekah has had enough of the people she loves punishing her and thinking they're brave for it.
"What's the first thing you'll do when you're human?" he asks, a blank slate.
She thinks for a minute.
"Braid my hair," she says.
He doesn't answer. He keeps looking at the ground, fiddling with the grass, spellbound.
When she releases him he staggers backwards. His lips draw up in a snarl. But his best attempts at seeming feral will never work, because he is surrounded by real monsters. Stop trying, Rebekah thinks. Your white knight armor suits you so much better. She's never been able to stop thinking in archetypes.
"I wish I'd never met you," he tells her before running away.
Rebekah nods in the silence. I understand. Sometimes I wish I'd never met me either.
The thing about that boy, the dangerous thing about him, is that he makes her sad. The boys before made her smile and forget - forget why she was here, her allegiances - but he's real. He's strong and kind and he refuses to die, that same mule-headed survival Elena Gilbert keeps exhibiting. He loved her, didn't he? Elena. She's like Stefan - it seems that everyone loved her at one point or another.
She shows up at the bar and he sighs, circles under his eyes like he hasn't slept in centuries. Or maybe that's her.
"What do you want?"
Bite your tongue. "Vodka tonic."
He looks at her. His eyes are blue, honest. Why does he have to be so honest all the time? It's exhausting. How is she supposed to win if there's no game to play?
He prepares her drink in silence, not remarking on the fact that it's barely four pm. When he slides it on the counter he looks kind.
"Don't pity me," Rebekah says.
He shakes his head. "I don't."
"I brought it all on myself, that's it? I deserve everything I've got?" What is that, exactly? What has she got? No cure. Brothers who love her only when it's convenient. A coffin and a dagger with her name on them, for when Klaus gets testy. Lovers turned into enemies.
"Look, Rebekah... this isn't my problem."
That's an admirable quality, too, the way he keeps insisting he has nothing to do with the madness Mystic Falls is constantly embroiled into even though everyone he knows is elbow-deep in blood. His sister was a vampire, Rebekah remembers.
"Isn't it? We're alike, you and I. We keep being pawns in other people's games."
His mouth twists. It's automatic in them. I'm not like you. I'm never going to be like you. They don't know.
"I'm sorry, Rebekah, about whatever happened to you. But we have nothing in common."
"Maybe you're right."
If she could get him to love her, just for one minute. Maybe it would feel better. He wouldn't have to remember. If she could just take a year of his life and use it like a healing balm. What are his people doing to him, anyway, besides hurting him?
"I wanted to be human," she says without really thinking about it.
She sees him try to keep his mouth shut. Not a word, lest the toxic vampire reels you in. But -
"Why? You can have anything you want, you're immortal, you can literally make people do your bidding. Why would you want to be human?"
You. You. You're the reason I want to be human. I want to be like you, instead of wanting to consume you. Eat you whole, that's what Klaus said. I want to say: that's not how I love. That's not me.
In the end she waves her glass like the centuries-old addict she is, pretending alcohol tastes of more than smoke and ash in her throat. "You wouldn't understand," she says.
He doesn't insist. Good for him. At least he knows not to dig where the dark things are buried. That'll get him far - further than where she got to, while there were still places to go.
It's a neat trick: promising them the world, and not telling them that all of it is nothing but ash and ruin. No, really. Rebekah has to hand it to him, for once. Nik knows what he's doing.
She watches him babble wonders at the blond doll and sees lust behind the thick disdain. Who can resist a beast who wants to show you the world? Maybe that's what she should do with Matt. Maybe she should take him away, instead of trying to pretend she's not who she is.
She hears Klaus's voice in her head. Let him blow away to bits. That'll get rid of the dilemma. It's always his solution when something goes wrong; at heart he's a true arsonist. Elijah would say something grand and preachy about true love and about how this isn't it. Well, screw him. She's seen what happens to true loves, both his and hers. Time for a winning streak.
His eyes widen when she kisses him, but he doesn't push her away. Surprise. Death is always so close when you're human. His heart is beating so hard it fills the entire universe, a singular backing track as she steps onto the explosive.
"Rebekah..."
Rebekah thinks about the things she could say. You make me want to be better. You danced with me and gave me your jacket and I felt three centuries and a half lifting from my shoulders. In the end she doesn't say any of them. There'll be time later, when his friends are safe and his heart has calmed down. She's got time, after all. She's got nothing but time.
When he's gone the wind whistles in her ears. Every tick of the bomb is deafening. Blown away to bits. Imagine that. Too bad she can never die, isn't it?
(Not that she hasn't tried. She has. It gets boring after a while, no matter what Klaus tells you, baby doll.)
"You'll kiss me back," she says to the vibrant silence, "right?"
The wind whistles harder. Who knows, it says.
Even with Venice as a backdrop Matt looks unfailingly American. People squint when they look at them, unable to determine exactly what's wrong, what doesn't work in their combination of pretty blonde girl and pretty blonde boy, which one of their faces is a mask.
Matt doesn't notice. Matt smiles like he has never been happier, like only humans can, like every renewed dawn is a gift. In his presence Rebekah feels like the seventeen-year-old girl she never got to be, careless, her hands clean of blood. Her brothers will be mad at her for escaping but she can't think about them. In fact she can barely remember their faces. There: it's their time to be forgotten, daggered and silent in their distant coffins.
In Paris Matt rests his head in her lap and tells her about his sister. Vicky, he says, her name was Vicky. I don't think I've ever loved anyone that much. Rebekah doesn't take offense. She knows the feeling. She's got loves etched from her ankles to her collarbones in permanent pencil, scars that won't ever come off in the wash. But this is better. In many ways this is better. This doesn't eat her from the core, this doesn't rot her like a poisoned apple: this smells like cut grass and the muddy water in the canals and freshly baked bread. Like being human, even though Rebekah will never be human.
(She drinks a little, from hotel valets and Nadja and waiters and random executives in elevators but never from that boy whose smile shines like the sun. She's never been leaner.)
In Tokyo she takes his chin between her fingers and asks him, "Do you think you could ever love me?"
He grins. He can't keep anything in. Even if she tries not to look, I already do jumps to her eyes, gaudy like a chapter title.
"Maybe," he says. "Could you?"
She frowns. "Very humorous," she says, not to spook him.
His arm slips under her waist and she falls back on the mattress. There he is, leaning over her: blue and gold as though she were looking right through the ceiling at the radiant day.
"Kiss me, you fool," she says. She means for it to be an order but it comes out very softly.
He doesn't kiss her. He keeps looking at her, frowning like he can't quite make sense of it. With his finger he chases a curl from her forehead.
"You're beautiful, you know that?"
Rebekah wants to snap, of course I know that. What do you think I've been doing all these years? But her throat feels tight, clogged. No word will make it through. Like a flash of lightning, she thinks, if I drank his blood right now I would have my cure. The certainty pulses in her like a ghost heartbeat.
"Kiss me," she says, weaker.
This time he kisses her. Rebekah's body melts in his hands, like surrender was all it had been waiting for.
In Zaire his skin gets red instantly. He laughs; he sleeps on the clay floor to let her have the narrow bed, and before sleep he kisses the inside of her knee. She stares down at him, bewildered.
He frowns at her. "What is it?"
She swallows the excess declarations. "Nothing. It's nothing. Go to sleep."
He shrugs and lies down. But she doesn't sleep. She listens to the sounds of the ambient night, the crickets and the mosquitoes and the elders in the next hut over, talking in hushed voices of things like crops and cattle, and she feels full to the brim with something she's never felt before.
It's dawn when she's finally able to put a name on it. She watches him turn over in his sleep, still wrapped in a web of dreams and she knows. Peace. It's peace.
Her brothers don't come searching for her. She can hear Elijah's sanctimonious voice even over the oceans, saying: we're giving you respite. You need it, sister. And Klaus: you'll come back to us. She will. The clock is always ticking: a few weeks and Matt will want to go back, fifty years and he will be dead, a few centuries and her arms will lose the imprint of Elijah's body when he swallows her in an embrace after a broken heart. A thousand years and her lipstick will fade, the burning wound of Klaus's lips on hers.
She thinks about the men she has loved, how her schemes failed and they turned against her, one after the other like a bunch of automatons with poor imagination. For once, she thinks in a rare moment of lucidity, I have chosen a man I can't use as a weapon. I have chosen a man so white, so pure, so untouched by evil, that he is completely worthless.
So she lets herself enjoy the taste of his mouth, and his chest under her hands, and the feel of his thighs against hers. She loves him with all she's worth, all the wealth of passion and empathy she's accumulated over her centuries of looking at humans and wanting what they had, of being in love with love and herself. She does all that, and when he asks, one morning in Rio de Janeiro, looking faintly embarrassed, "Can we go back?"
- she says, "I'd love nothing more."
It's a lie, but he can't tell. Besides, for once it's almost worth-it.
She's never been good at goodbyes.
No, that's not true. She's never gotten to be good at goodbyes, because people have either been ripped from her or lived forever. Rebekah rehearses forty speeches in the bathroom of the diner they stop at a few miles from Mystic Falls. They all end, or begin, with I love you.
In the end she doesn't decide on any. She comes out with fresh red lips and wolfs down half an apple pie, Matt looking at her with an amused smile. Then she convinces him to stay the night, sits astride his lap and kisses him with as much force as she can, to leave bruises that will last at least long enough for her to get to the other side of the country.
Afterwards when he's lying besides her, his arm curled around her shoulder like it's no big deal, he says, "You're leaving, right?"
She scoffs. "Don't be silly. Why would I leave when we're having this much fun?"
He nods. He's getting too wise. Here - another reason to leave while she still can.
When the darkness has completely enveloped them, she says, "Yes. I'm leaving."
But he's already asleep.
Do you feel free? No. Maybe if I'd learned to be alone. But I was never alone. I need someone to love almost as much as I need blood, to survive.
Do you feel free? The wind is whipping your air, you're driving an expensive car, there are bruises on the inside of your thighs and you're driving away from Mystic Falls, the unluckiest town in all of South Virginia. Surely you ought to be happy.
Instead she's replaying in her head the smile that floated on Matt's face when she said the words, the unsurprised tilt of his head. Don't you dare miss me. Will he, though? He knows her. He knows she didn't mean it. Will he keep a notch on his heart to say that she was here?
She's still thinking about it as she crosses the plantation. Klaus always had a morbid sense of humor. She parks the car and dust rises from the dirt ground. Everything smells like dog. Of course she was going to come back here. No need trying to fight it.
In the end she finds him when he crosses the door, his lips curled in a smirk, dragging his pet wolf behind him.
"Sister," he says, unctuous and unbearable.
"Cut to the chase. Where's Elijah?"
Count to three.
One, two, three. Klaus's smile means: here you are. I've been waiting for you to come back. Well, Rebekah thinks - this feels familiar.