a/n: heavy on rebekah. spoilers through 3.11. klaus/caroline if you squint.
if suddenly you did not exist
If suddenly you do not exist,
if suddenly you are not living,
I shall go on living.
I do not dare,
I do not dare to write it,
if you die.
I shall go on living.
(PABLO NERUDA, THE DEAD WOMAN)
When she does wake up, she is sitting across a richly furnished room from her brother.
"Bekah," he says, and it is the same voice, God, it is the same—
The dress hugs her in all the wrong places, clings too tightly against the flesh that is only now reawakening, and Rebekah marvels at the stupidity of the girl she had been, God knows how long ago—the girl who thought she was young enough for a school dance of all things, the girl who thought humanity can be regained simply through the farce of wearing a new skin, how stupid—
"Sister," he starts. "Sis—"
"Don't." The single word explodes out of her like a gunshot, like some kind of primitive instinct, though that's not entirely true. He is my brother, that is her instinct. Don't, that is her humanity. "Don't call me that. Don't you dare call me that. Not ever again."
She can count the amount of times her brother had hesitated on one hand, and now he stares at her, through dull, darkened eyes, for a moment, before hanging his head. He presses the palm of his hand to his forehead, presses hard, and she knows that grip, knows how easily that grip bruises, and watches now, with a new kind of menace as he turns all that violence inwards.
Rebekah stands, on shaky legs. She stands over her brother, looks down on him from new heights, from her slowly corroding pedestal and her mouth twists, ugly and cruel and foreign.
"You don't get to call me that." She says. Her voice takes on a harsher growl, a harsher kind of curl around her tongue, something barbaric about the way the words twist her into a creature a millennia old, and for a split second, she isn't sure which language she is speaking, isn't sure which tongue she is using that her brother shares too. "You don't get to call me, ever. Not ever again."
Still he says nothing, bows his head, the muscles in his shoulders stretched tight beneath the thin white cotton of his shirt. She grits her teeth, the bones clattering hard against one another in her mouth, and her fingers curl inwards, knocks hard against the bones of her hip. She wants to lunge, wants to draw her nails across the broad expanse of his back and chest, wants to stain his shirt in red, wants to stain his shirt the same colour as his hands.
"I am going to leave." She says now, gains control over her voice until it is shaking, low and kept in check. Her control is tenuous. "I am going to walk out that door and I am going to disappear. You will not come after me. You will not attempt to contact me. I am going to go, and I am going to leave, and I am going to be free. This—" she gestured to the space between them, thick and cut with tension. "This never happened. These thousand years never happened and will never be mentioned by either of us again. We're done. We're finished."
She is not thinking of freedom. She is not thinking of open skies or valleys and hills, not cities she has watched grow from a village in the dirt, nor of that secret place in the shadow of the Delphi temple where once she had threaded her fingers through this monster's hair—
No. She is thinking of cold steel between the bones of her ribs, a cage, as hard and sure and inside of her as this family that she had once belonged to.
She is thinking of another death of her own, and she is not afraid.
She is tired. She is old.
Her footsteps sound clear and echoing against the hard wood floor of the room, and she is by the door when he speaks.
"She betrayed me." There is a sense of desperation in his voice, a strangled kind of child in that creature's golden body. "She was my mother, she was supposed to love me, love me like she loved you, not punish me for what I couldn't control—"
"And you killed her." Rebekah hissed, her voice impossibly loud in the room. "You ripped her heart out of her chest and you lied to me for a thousand years. You are in no position to talk to me of love. You are nothing. You are my mother's half-bred bastard, and believe me, Klaus, when I say that if I had the ability, I would tear your heart out of your chest and I would smile to do it."
In a flash he is by her side—always, always—one arm hard and unmoving, fisted against the door, his breath desperate against the back of her neck as he traps her there, squarely into place.
Rebekah has no fear of death. She has tasted it many times over, and would not hesitate to taste it again.
"Kill me, then." She goaded quietly, turning her head sideways so that her hair brushed against the line of the creature's jaw. "Drive a dagger through my chest. Isn't that how you deal with your family anyway?"
She can already feel the dagger a breath away from her skin, thinks he must be carrying it, must be holding it behind him as he whispers her name, forms it easy in his mouth like a plea.
She closes her eyes for an instant, allows herself this final weakness, and sends this monster in her brother's skin flying across the room.
"I said never again."
She sees him in Rome, fifty years later.
She is leaning into the arms of a man with her long-dead-brother's hair, a man who walks with the confidence of a brother she had once known, a man she is about to lure into an alley and kill in a thousand horrific ways long after he takes his last breath. She smiles into his chest, snakes her hand across to rest over his heart in the perfect imitation of a girl long since dead.
She spots the gold first.
She recognizes it instantly, recognizes the shine of it, the way the sun glints on the individual strands of gilded hair, recognizes it the way she recognizes her own reflection.
The monster with her brother's face is smiling, his arm around the waist of a girl Rebekah remembers dimly—Caroline, a voice whispers, sweet Caroline—his lips pressed to the rim of her ear, and she wonders, then, wonders in that moment of human frailty, if he mouths her name like he is praying too, if he is as traitorous a penitent as he is a brother, a false pilgrim praying to many gods in the hopes of being granted a boon.
He looks up.
Their eyes lock in a fraction of a second that seems to hang, suspended above the world, and she has not been seeing things, has not imagined him out of wrath and hunger. It is the same eyes, the same incongruously dark eyes in her brother's face, staring out of whatever messy decay that is pressing against the confines of his skin.
Rebekah feels her breath catch, in the memory of a blade, the memory of a promise.
When she gets back to her hotel room, the man's blood on her tongue, her mother's necklace is sitting on the silk of her bed. There is no note.