Set in an uncertain timeline (what is new) where Rebekah and Elijah are running from Klaus in the 1850s.
random notes: this is for the devil on my shoulder, a.k.a. Hannah (who is surprised), because she whined about me never writing her stuff; for the prompt: rebekah/elijah - don't you bother to attempt or i'll scream/ i will just wait for the sun to rise again / stop; your heartbeat will fall / and i will cry until you wake up
They boarded the boat before everyone else, without their usual fanfare.
Get us away from him, she had said with an ugly curl of her lip, fearful and desperate at once, and he hadn't been able to protest.
—
The house is haunted by a woman poet and a painter. They are not inconvenient, alive; even less dead. Savagery is always a reassurance when everything is slipping away. Since waste is the privilege of luxury and luxury is the heart of their permanence, they let the blood drip onto the wooden planks of the terrace until it's glossy with it, tainted to their fancy.
"This will not be enough," he says. He is always this man —beast— in their dealings: the realist, the one that reins their brother in, tightens the leash on his throat.
"No," she says in a sigh, tipping her head back to bare it to the wide ocher sun. "But this is."
It's not; it's written somewhere in their genetic signature that they share an endless desire for destruction, for the dramatic crush of bodies on the ground, for monsters-made apocalypses. She takes comfort in the lie, though, because if Klaus is the black sheep in their family then she is the adder, inoffensive and invisible.
He rings two fingers around her ankle, without thinking. Among the tangle of her thoughts —a jungle when it comes to her brothers— she singles one out: this one is mine, still.
And he is.
—
"How long have we lost him for?"
"Hard to tell. He will miss us."
"He always misses us. He's too afraid someone else might dagger us." She is not so bitter, usually. When they were children the wild card was her favorite brother, the one she folded in her arms to shield him from rain and thunder. How times have changed —now he is the one chasing after them to inflict upon her his own idea of protection.
"We can stay here for a while."
She looks around, and beauty wraps its noose around her neck, chokes her —the endlessness of the beach sprawling beneath them, with it crown of verdant trees; the ocean's blue lapping mouth, ready to take them in and never give them back. Behind her she knows the house is standing like a ghost, silently looking over her shoulder, miles and miles of wood panelling, the large bed they do not sleep in but where he sometimes rests his head upon her shoulder, because eternity only makes running away more tedious.
"Yes," she says. "He will grow tired of hunting."
He doesn't call her on it, even though they both know he won't.
—
They are not used to such a quiet life: no noise at night but the howling of the wind in the trees, a hot and decadent whisper, no screams, no bustle like there always is in the cities they wreck their way through like beautiful ravages. After a few days she abandons the heavy dresses and bothersome corsets and instead adopts the simple clothing she's bought in the village a few miles over, where her pasty skin terrified all the locals. He won't let go of his suits, but to please her he walks barefoot, with his trousers rolled up to his calves.
They feed from the boatloads of tourists attracted by the promise of an easy life doused in sun. She delights in their confusion when they see the two of them: they're obviously not natives, and she imagines they make a peculiar couple, him with his perfectly coiffed hair and sharp-fanged grin, her with her floating fabrics, all decked out in vermillion and azure, the literal goddess life failed to make her.
And they are good, those times, tip-toeing onto the beach and watching the human masses pour out of the ships, and looking at each other, a silver glint of lust and confidence —good like the flavor of reaching out and running, and learning what blood tastes like when it crunches under the teeth, mingled with sand, odorant and musky and thick, that elixir —good like those scraps of ruby-colored freedom, like nonchalantly wiping their hands on someone's lifeless chest, and like falling into each other, forehead to forehead, like feeling blood slap forward in their veins like a mad drum— but good, good—
—
So good, in fact, that they forget caution, which they never really knew in the first place; and kick the woman poet's ghost out to clamber into the illuminated house, grins on fire…
He leads her into a dance, a European jig, and she doesn't trip over her feet like she used to. They all had to learn: dancing is a necessary tool in the art of camouflage which they all came to master so well, except maybe him… But it doesn't matter right now: what matters is the warmth of his hand at her waist and the length of his fangs, the pugnacious darkness of his pupils, boring into her bottom lip.
"Brother," she crows, grinning from ear to ear, "what big teeth you have."
He smiles. It feels like she's turned on a lantern at the bottom of a well: something rare and precious and underworldly, meant only for her. "All the better—"
She finishes the sentence before he can, not even made slightly breathless by the way he slaps them into a chair, the wooden limbs creaking under their combined velocity. "—to eat me with?"
He bites the kiss out of her mouth.
—
What happens is a chemical reaction. What happens is fire fighting with fire, is acid and ice, is terror and awe and the sweet ache that accompanies something familiar rearing in front of you, smoothing his thumb over your cold, cold skin and biting your neck.
It was always a given that they love each other. What's more worrying is what happens after that, when centuries spent together have worn down the fondness and left only the rock-hard foundation of love, what love becomes when it has rotten and died a hundred times. Rebekah is the romantic of the family, but sometimes even she wonders if love is really made to withstand such a long period of use.
Then again, maybe it is —if the way Elijah's fingers are digging into her hips are any indication, the harshness of his lock on her shoulders, tearing silence out of her mouth in outrageous kisses, he who is usually so measured in everything. It's funny, because she would have imagined this would be the way Klaus kisses, like he wants to drink you until your veins are scrubbed clean, left useless in his wake because Klaus can't bear to be unneeded. But this is him. This is Elijah, this is her knight brother, the one who knows the answers, and—
And his blood is poison wrapped in sweetness, and the phantom heat of his body sears her skin, and the relentless whispers of the waves on the sand are drowned out by every noise he makes reverberating inside her skull, the groans against her teeth, the rustle of his clothes, three ivory buttons open at the chest, the murmur of his hands when they splay across the small of her back, pulling her closer—
"Rebekah."
As she holds herself erect over him, looking down at the spectacle of his dishevelment —mussed hair, exposed fangs, the bulging vein on his throat—, she tries to remember the last time she saw him like this. With blood smeared on his mouth, she thinks, and heat pools in her stomach, because at heart they are the same, and they belong to each other.
"Always and forever, brother," she says, and in one smooth movement she spears herself onto him.
—
I could whip up a storm, she thinks. It's not that impossible.
Fact is —fact is, she has witch blood in her veins, and she has hunter blood, vampire blood, all kinds of blood mixed up in that one stream, right now, the one that Elijah is licking from between her breasts like it's the fountain of youth, and she could do anything. Be anything. What does she need to be human for?
It's easy to believe now. She thinks, they will be here forever, a canting of hips and her vision whites out, and she kisses down onto the air, mouth forming words, the absent brother, he will find us, and this one —this one she used to scorn when she was a little girl, thinking he was too old for her games, but when she was afraid she would run to him because the wild card wanted to take the fear and mold it into something else, something better. This one would hold her and kiss her. Comfort her.
And this is how he comforts her now, by turning her body into a pyre, and she knows he thinks, deep down under all the guilt and the machinations, that they are burnt angels, some peculiar species of monster made from the once-beautiful who sinned. This is how he atones for it.
They've done this before. They've done this before, and she hated herself for it, for a while, because there's being wicked and then there's this, and she's never been good at guileless perversion like them, except when it comes to posturing and tearing people from limb to limb —but that's fun, that's different. This —this is like dying again, like feeling your soul (if they even have one left) twist into that bramble and plunge into the next grave over, his grave, their grave. That's what they mean when they say always and forever, isn't it?
When the chair cracks to pieces under their ministrations she almost doesn't register it; a stake of splintery wood that breaks through the skin of his shoulder, and he grimaces but doesn't stop kissing her, wouldn't, she thinks, wouldn't, for anything in the world, any of all the riches that have passed through their hands…
—
She would be lying if she said she hadn't thought about it: does he have coffins made for them when they're still alive, as a precaution? Does he go to the cabinetmaker with their measurements one Sunday morning with death —their death— on his mind?
Does he see this, from wherever he is? Is he jealous of the way they fall apart without him? Does he wish he were the one to drag his fingers between Rebekah's legs, the one to catch that hitch in Elijah's breath when she hits that sweet spot, the one that says, we know each other so well?
—
Here is the truth: tomorrow for them isn't another day; it is merely the continuation of an unbroken combination of moments, tart purpurin dawns and dark and dusky evenings spent drinking sugary alcohol from each other's mouths. Respite, he calls it. She doesn't call it anything, for fear that doing so will it make it real —and real things can be broken.
Take as proof, if you want, Kol waltzing into their living-room just as the sun breaks over the ocean, grinning like the fool he is. In passing he grabs a pomegranate on the counter; when he opens his mouth to speak, undisturbed by their tangle, Elijah's fingers covered in knots of Rebekah's hair as though the radiant shine of it could wash his hands clean, red juice drips onto his chin.
"What," he says with a pout, "an orgy and no-one invited me?"
Elijah sighs, draping the sheet over them in a access of amusing modesty. "Technically it's only an orgy if there are more than two people present, brother."
Kol waves the remark away with the back of his hand. "Semantics."
Rebekah considers asking him what is he doing here —but then, what good would that do? They always find each other, in the end. Running is an exercise in futility.
Elijah is the one who asks. "What are you doing here?"
"Can't I want to visit my favorite brother and sister?" He laughs, cruel. "Well, to say I was in the area would be a lie. I'm going to the States, figured you might want to join. Brother dear is onto you."
They don't even pretend to be surprised. That's the thing about respite: it is only ever the pause between two wars. It's not made to last.
And Kol knows that, doesn't he? He too operates on the instincts that he sucks from the marrow of this bare-bones love —save them, hunt them, protect them. One day she'll forget there was ever anything else, she thinks as she regards him from under her sweeping eyelashes, tracing the vicious outline of his mouth. One day she'll forget he was ever other than he is now.
His smirk is made of red shards. "I'll wait while you pack, then, shall I?"
—
There is this, about her: her brother —the mad one— called her the girl who loved too easily, and she never could shake the nickname, never could slither out of its bounds. It is a web: a web, Klaus's sneer when he threatens to love her even more, Finn's hand low on her back, Kol sucking on her wounds, Elijah—
Elijah, Elijah's fingers circling her wrist to keep her from going down the stairs, turning her around to say, "One minute," as though minutes made any difference to them, as though their lives weren't measured in centuries now…
And he presses their foreheads together. Elijah, he's always been the one willing to pretend for her, that nothing has changed. But she will need the strength now, to be crude and unrelenting, the gloved hand that strangles you with a lipstick-sweet smile —won't she?
She disentangles herself from his arms. Soon the feeling of him inside her will only be a faint memory, a tingle in her belly, like going to sleep hungry.
"You were right," she says —and she's already rebuilding herself, tightening the laces of her corset, impacting the marble of doorways with her sharp little heels, because the peace of ruins was never made for them— she kisses his mouth, the most cloying, unbearable sweetness, and she sees him turning to stone, to steel, to salt —"this wasn't enough."
—
"He will turn up here, too, you know. He will never stop chasing us, not until he's found us."
His words catch in the wind and flutter around her neck, disorganizing her ringlets. And punished us, the wind adds, all-knowing, and it takes her a second to remember what exactly Klaus is supposed to be incandescent at them for. A distant memory.
"Do you want to surrender?"
Kol laughs, sharp. Their eyes catch —Elijah and Rebekah, two sides of a same mirror, opaque and limpid, a perfect set of tricks—his mouth quirks up, as if to say, touché.
There you have it, she thinks, to no-one in particular —and for once she's the one with the answer.