AN: Inspired by a post on tumblr about Rebekah and how she most likely lacks maternal instincts. It also speculated that she likely killed several mothers in her time to steal their child. I thought on it, and thought it was actually pretty possible because Bekah's so desperate for a human life. Then this happened.
Mother
The child is crying and Rebekah doesn't know what to do.
"Hush," she whispers, running a finger down the baby's cheek. "Hush now. I'm here. Everything is all right, I've got you."
She is doing everything she's seen other women do, everything she remembers her mother doing. She is soothing it, holding it, rocking it back and forth… so why won't it stop crying?
Rebekah looks around the blood spattered room. Perhaps it's the environment. She remembers overhearing once that the environment around a child was so very important. It must be the red. Surely, once she removes the child from all this red, it will be fine?
Rebekah hears clattering on the back steps, and she is gone from the house, the child in tow, before the maid's horrified screams begin to echo out from the house in the center of the town. Rebekah has taken the squire's child, of course she did, because she wants to raise a lady, not some filthy peasant.
She is removed from the house, from the blood and the gore and she thinks that now, surely now, the child will be at peace. It's so little, it can't possibly know what just occurred. It will grow knowing only Rebekah as its mother, and while Rebekah may not have the husband she wants, at least she will have this.
But even miles from the site of her crime, the child continues to wail and scream, and it's beginning to drive Rebekah mad.
"Hush," she says again, but this time it's more a cross between a yell and a growl, and the sound just makes the child cry more. "Oh, why won't you stop? Just stop crying. You're safe, I won't hurt you. Why won't you stop?"
The pleas for silence are punctuated with the slightest shake of the child. Just something to jolt some sense into the miniscule body… but Rebekah is a vampire. And vampires are strong, something that Rebekah always seems to forget in these early days of her cursed immortality.
She gets her silence, and the child's broken body in her hands sends her to her knees in tears.
"My God, Rebekah, what have you done?" It is Elijah's voice, and it is so filled with horror that Rebekah cannot look at her brother. Instead she holds the lifeless body of the childhood and brushes its hair away from its still face. All she wanted was a little girl. A little girl to spoil rotten and dress in pretty dresses and spoil as Rebekah had once been spoiled, before everything had changed and she had become a monster.
"I didn't mean to," she whispers and looks up at Elijah helplessly. Niklaus is behind him, but Nik is already embracing the monster within and so his face is passive, as if the child we merely a doll that Rebekah had played with too hard.
Perhaps, that is not too far off the mark of reality.
"I just wanted a child," Rebekah continues, pleading with her eyes for her noble elder brother to understand. "By now I should be married, I should have a child already. Even two. Is it so wrong to want that life? The life I was meant to have?"
Elijah just continues to look down on her with horror, but there is pity there as well. Rebekah knows what he sees; he sees a blonde monster in a ripped and blood soaked gown, blood still smeared across her lips, and a tiny, broken body gripped to her chest with far too much strength. She thinks that she must look mad, and then she supposes that she is. Mad and heartbroken over what she can no longer have.
"Come sister, let's go home," Elijah says, kneeling next to her and carefully removing the child's corpse from her arms. Rebekah feels as if she is a puppet with her strings cut, and she allows Elijah to support her, to move her away from the trees and the tiny little body. Niklaus doesn't say anything, but she will learn later that he stayed behind to bury the body before returning to their manor to pack and herd his siblings away from Rebekah's crime.
As for Rebekah, she will attempt this again. And again. She will try it so many times over the next century that Klaus (he is Nik no longer, all vestiges of her brother gone) will have to threaten her with a dagger and a coffin before she will cease. So Rebekah will turn her gaze from children to men, thinking that perhaps, if a child is not in her cards, she will instead have that husband.
And a thousand years later, when the wolf girl gives birth to a wolf girl of her own, Rebekah will not be allowed to hold her niece. Klaus, for all that he didn't seem to care at the time, will always remember Rebekah in that blood soaked dressed, tiny body in her arms, and any time she gets to near his own daughter, he will be there to ensure that infant's fate, and the fate of all those children that followed, will not be his daughter's.
AN: And that's that. Yeah… I'll just leave it here.