She senses, in her alleviated conscious, the great weight removed from her chest, and feels from beyond the great haze of sleep her blood begin to beat.
He is allowing me to live again, that is her first thought. She wants to curl her hand into a fist, but her fingers are solid, dead, still. No matter what her brother wishes.
She drives the dagger in deep, twists it in until she feels it knock against his spine, until he breathes a silent, strangled cry against the fall of her hair, until he collapses against her, his hands finding their way to her hips, as if this is an embrace.
"Rebekah," he had said. It is the same curl of the tongue, same hard push of the lips, and it is a strange thing, this—how so much remain the same when everything has changed.
"This is for our mother," she whispers back, lips close against his ear, words murmured and soft and oh, she can feel the brush of his eyelashes against the bare skin of her shoulder, can feel the abrupt stop of breath. She feels her hate coil inside her, deadly and still and wordless, and cold.
She is her father's daughter.
He makes to collapse against her, and she pushes him back, vicious, and thinks—no, no, brother. This time I shall not bear your weight. This time you are alone.
He is compliant and he is quiet as the brothers Salvatore leave. She watches through hooded eyes as Kol's hands tighten around her brothers, as Kol bends those arms back hard and twists until the bones are on the verge of breaking, and she says nothing. He will break. She will tear him apart, she will rip him apart into shreds and he will whimper this time. For her alone he will be weak.
He looks at her, and his eyes are dark. He looks at her, and it seems for a moment as if she is a girl again, a slip of a girl falling on his arm. But the she stands up tall, stands up and remembers the cold dead skin of her mother's cheeks and the gaping hole in her mother's chest, and she is a girl no longer.
"I like what you've done with the place, Nik." She says to him, calm and pleasant and light, and the hate coils cold inside of her.
Mikael is dead, is what he had intended to tell her.
Oh, no, no, brother, she thinks. Mikael is right here, inside his daughter. Mikael will haunt you for another thousand years.
An eternity of misery, for you and me both, she thinks. How about that, Nik?
The glass vase flies across the room in a blur, and her lips curl as she watches it shatter into one of his paints, shatter and pierce and fall, watches him flinch on impact though his back is turned.
You fool, she does not say. You golden, deluded fool.
"I wanted it to be for all of us," he says, voice thin and quivering on a single strain. Such a child, she thinks. A thousand years old and you are such a foolish child. "So that none of us will have to be alone again."
This is the truth that will break him:
He does not want to be alone. He fears his own reflection, the sound of his own voice bouncing back at him in a cavernous room, fears his own breath when it is not shared by another. Her brother is a man deathly afraid of solitude, and so he has crafted himself out of this family, and this family will be what destroys him.
None of us ever will be.
"We're leaving you, Nik." She draws out the words, and there is a hint of a smile in her voice, something cruel and dark and brutal, and oh, brother, you should know this better than most. You taught me how to be a part of you. "Right after I kill that doppelganger wench. And you—"
Her voice breaks, stops on a breath and halts in her throat, a final weakness she must quash at all costs. She will break him. She will tear him limb from limb.
"You will be alone." She says, thinking of his hand in hers over her mother's grave, thinking of a promise, a vow. Thinking of the great lie of her life. A line in a play, nothing more. A line for a doll, for a fool, for a naïve little girl who knows nothing of the world, dancing on her brother's strings, taught to twirl and courtesy for his pleasure. "Always and forever."
Always and forever, isn't that the thing. It was always meant to break.
That is the final blow, the coup-de-grace.
Goodbye, brother, she thinks, almost sadly.
This is it, you see. This is the thing that must not be said. The two have them have crafted themselves of each other, of words unsaid, of truths and untruths unacknowledged. This is the turning point. This is the Rubicon.
Rebekah murmurs the promise into a joke, and the world laughs in turn.