Chapter 2: I Dream of You
oOo
She was quiet, unhappy, bored.
She wandered around his apartment for days in the same mangy nightgown, eating bowls and bowls of Cheerios that she left half eaten in the sink for somebody else to clear up. Nobody did.
She watched hours and hours of daytime chat shows, endlessly amazed at the things people found okay to say to each other in this century.
She bought endless things on the shopping channel that she didn't even open, on a credit card that she didn't own.
She drank a lot of blood, which made her maudlin and aggressive.
She was silent all day and cried all night.
He couldn't help her. If a kind word came out of his mouth right now, it would open the floodgates for them both. He could only watch as she suffered. She was a girl out of her time, out of her place - grieving and lost.
Sometimes he just sat and covered his ears and let her rail at him. Sometimes she used her fists, sometimes she held him as she sobbed. He responded the same way. He did nothing.
Weeks passed. Months. They didn't hear from Klaus. They didn't hear from Elena or Damon.
He knew he needed time. He had to be functioning one-hundred percent before he took on the hybrid, and he was so far off of that mark he could practically see it going the other way.
If there really was a purgatory, then this had to be it. They were damned and they only had themselves to blame.
He'd stopped measuring time. He'd stopped doing a lot of things actually. Eating was right up there, washing was a close second. She complained about that a lot.
As soon as he could nail not dreaming, he would be a happy bunny.
What he did do, was write a lot. The words poured out of him like a flood. He filled dozens upon dozens of leather bound notebooks. He'd run out of space for them on his shelves, and they were heaped in towering piles around his living room; strange pillared guardians of his mattress, casually thrown on the floor to serve as a bed whilst Rebekah used the only bedroom.
Not that he slept. Most nights he wandered around Chicago with his hands in his pockets wondering how his life had spiraled into this.
"Stefan!"
He heard his name and sighed. What now?
"Stefan, it's a message from Nik!" Rebekah said opening his door without knocking. She never had understood the concept of personal space.
Nevertheless on hearing her news and seeing the phone she waved in her hand, he jumped to his feet. He was by her side in a flash and snatched the phone from her. As always, her first response was to sulk.
"I don't know why you have to be so rude," she huffed. "I would have given it to you if you just asked." He ignored her and let his eyes scan the text.
"What does this mean? It's gobbledegook. Just letters," he thrust the fascia under her nose angrily because she was to blame for him not understanding, for the weather being gloomy, for the fact it was a Tuesday -
She shrugged. "Even if I knew, what makes you think I'd tell you?"
He had her by her throat and against a wall in a second. His red eyes blazed at her. His veins pulsed.
"Get off of me," she said, as though she was telling a mischievous puppy not to jump up and muddy her skirt. "Who do you think you are?"
He dropped his hand and retracted his teeth. "I'm going out," he protested, slamming the door behind him.
"Good!" she shouted after him. She folded her arms and pouted.
He took a walk through Grant Park and as no one was around, he leapt up to sit next to Lincoln at the memorial statue. His legs dangled over the side, his back touching the plinth of the 16th president. He liked the view of Chicago from here. The lights of the Willis Tower could be seen from everywhere, but from this angle he could actually see the Masonic Temple.
He looked at his hands and sighed. He wondered what Elena was doing right now. Damon probably.
"So this is where you go to sulk."
He glanced down and saw Rebekah looking up at him, her golden hair almost white in the streetlight.
"So you can get dressed then?" he muttered bitterly, though he may have had a split-second of regret when he saw how her face briefly fell. But her tough exterior rebounded quickly, as did his apathy and irritation.
"Why are you so mean to me?"
"Because you let me be, I guess."
She leapt up next to him. There was hardly any space next to Lincoln, but she shoved him over enough to make sure she could sit. She mirrored his body language, dangling her feet over the edge and resting her clasped hands on her knees.
"Is this what you do all night?"
"Sometimes."
"Wow, looks like I missed a lot in ninety years." She looked at him with a faint smile, but it died quickly on her face. "I hate it here," she said, her voice suddenly cracking. "I hate this time. I don't understand anything. People are so... different."
"You'll adjust," Stefan responded, neatly demonstrating his current lack of empathy. She nodded, but after a moment or two her resolved cracked and she burst into tears. He actually had to resist the urge to roll his eyes. Instead he flung an arm around her as he felt obliged to do, but she shrugged him off.
"Don't do that if you don't mean it," she said accusatorily through teary eyes.
"What?" he replied with exasperation. "I can't do anything right!"
"You just don't get it do you?" She jumped down off the statue and began to walk away. Something about that irked him and so he leapt down too and went after her.
"What did I do now?" he complained gruffly.
She stopped dead and spun on her heel to face him.
"Do you know what it's been like for me? You've got to live, breathe and exist in the last ninety years, but one minute I'm living my life and the next minute I wake up and I've lost a century. Before I know it, I'm pulled into one of Nik's plans; which leaves me on my own, with my father dead, murdered by my brother. And you - you don't even notice me."
He frowned. Perhaps it was time he stopped assuming she was whining and actually listened to her.
"Oh, forget it," she said and began to walk away.
"I'm sorry," he called after her.
She turned to face him. "No you're not. And why should you be? You got to have a life, got to fall in love. Got to move on. Me, what did I get? A dagger through the heart."
She turned away and began to walk on, pulling the red coat she wore closer around her even though the evening was balmy.
A cyclist wove between them, probably heading home after a night shift. It served as a pithy reminder that what she said was true; while dust gathered on her corpse, life went on. He jogged to catch up to her and put a hand on her shoulder.
"Rebekah, wait."
She shrugged him off.
"Please!"
She slowed to a standstill, he moved in front of her and took her by the arms. "I'm sorry I haven't been very understanding. I realize it must have been rough for you -"
"You still don't get it, do you?" She shook her head. He looked confused. She pulled her arms tighter around herself and pushed past him, leaving him standing there feeling like he'd missed something, but couldn't work out what.
In the morning when he entered the house, she didn't appear to be in her usual spot in front of the TV. He knocked on her bedroom door, when she didn't answer he spoke through the closed door. "Rebekah, please come out so we can talk." There was no answer. He frowned. "Rebekah?" Nothing.
He tried the doorknob, and the door swung open easily. Her bed was unslept in. He dashed around the house in a panic, flinging open the few doors he did have.
She was definitely gone.
He was stood in the middle of the living room cursing himself for his stupidity. That message from Klaus was probably some code telling her that he was coming for her. He'd been so wrapped up in himself he'd missed it. "Shit!" he said out loud to the empty room.
"What's up?"
He spun around and saw Rebekah standing in the doorway, her arms laden with two large bags of groceries. "What?" she repeated, seeing his look of anger.
"Where have you been?"
"Disney Land, where do you think?" She pushed past him and went into the kitchen. He followed, glowering. She began to unpack the groceries, and he noted that earlier he had missed the fact that the kitchen was sparkling. She had cleaned up.
"I'm doing what you should have," she said into the fridge. "Acting normal. So Mr. Patel at the mart knows now that a lovely young couple of newlyweds has moved into this old abandoned flat. Word will get around quick enough." She turned and faced him accusatively. "Well, you want us to blend, don't you?"
He stared at her. She had combed her hair so that it looked like spun gold, and pinned it into a neat chignon. She had ditched the bulky red overcoat and wore the black designer one that nipped her in at the waist and showed off her legs. She undid it now and tossed it over a chair, and the red dress she had underneath certainly would have guaranteed that the shopkeeper would remember her.
"You know as well as I do Stefan - if all we do is eat blood and move around at night, then we are not blending. May as well wear a sign that says 'vampires'."
"I'd have thought you'd want Klaus to find you."
"Yet another thing you're wrong about then."
She pushed past him again and brewed them both coffee. She slid a cup over to him and went and sat at his kitchen table, sipping her own and staring at him. He slowly went to join her, sitting down at the other end of the table, feeling like this was some kind of awkward truce. He drank a bit of the coffee. It was the first human thing he had tasted in weeks. She'd remembered that he took his with cream.
She crossed her legs and her dress rode up a little, he could see the lace tops of her stockings. He looked away almost immediately, but it was too late, she had seen him. He suddenly felt dizzy with the memories that flooded his mind. She always wore stockings. The best silk ones that money could buy. He had remembered what it felt like to unclip them from the garter and run his hands down those smooth, long legs as he removed them, before his hands slipped back up to that responsive, soft, wet place between her legs. He glanced at her, his breathing a little ragged. She tilted her head to the side, her blue eyes glinting as though she could see precisely what he was thinking.
Before they knew what happening, their cups had smashed to the floor and he had her in his arms. She wrapped her legs tightly around his hips as he carried her at warp speed to his mattress. He fell on top of her, bruising her red lips in a breathless kiss. Her white-gold hair unravelled from its neat chignon and spilled across the mattress in a fragrant pool. He undid his belt and she helped him with his zipper. He tore at her panties and had them off her in seconds. He pushed up her dress and was inside her. She gasped as he thrust against her. She gripped at his ass as he ploughed into her. She was desperate for him to make eye-contact, but he looked ahead of him, concentrating only on the feeling of her surrounding him. His grunts of pleasure were just that - his pleasure, not hers.
He came quickly. Shuddering as he spilled into her. He collapsed onto her body and as she went to place her shaking hands on his back, he rolled off her. He panted as he looked at the ceiling. She turned onto her side and tried to place her hand on his chest, but he quickly got up and did up the jeans he hadn't removed.
He paused looking away from her. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to get carried away," he said quietly, before walking out of the flat.
She turned onto her other side on the bare mattress, and she felt silent tears run into the fabric.