Fairytale Ending

by adlyb

Disclaimer: I own nothing except these words.

Summary: Klaus takes his girl and his hybrid and gets out of that one pony town.

Spoilers: Through 3x05, The Reckoning

Rating: R

Warnings: Extremely dubious consent verging on non-con/ Miscarraiage / Hostage situation/explicit violence and torture/gratuitous angst/ potential character death

Rebekah stands in the foyer, her face tilted up as she examines Elena's murals along the walls and ceiling. Time, of course, hasn't changed her, though the minor details have shifted—the length of her hair, sheared now to a sleek chin-length bob, the 21st century starkness that has seeped into how she lines her eyes and colors her brilliant mouth. Nothing can alter the fundamental strangeness that emanates from her, though, invisible and yet insistent against Elena's senses, like the ozone that lingers in the air after a thunderstorm. Rebekah is almost too bright and otherworldly to look upon, like gazing out over a vast rippling body of water when the sun strikes the surface and transforms it all to shivering diamonds that slice at the eyes and yet are so breath-catchingly beautiful that it is impossible to look away. How had Elena ever doubted the reality of her? In the streaming morning light there is a terrible gravity to her presence that defies fancy. She's a sliver of eternity amidst an endless sea of dying moments.

"You've redecorated," Rebekah says. "Good for you."

Elena's mouth works. Questions claw at her throat. Choke her. She's out of practice speaking face-to-face with anyone who isn't a stranger. The only continuous presence in her life for years now has been that hollowed-out nurse.

"What are you doing here?" she asks at last.

Does this mean he's coming back?

Rebekah shrugs, oblivious to her inner turmoil. "I grew bored waiting attendance on my brother, and then I remembered that you would be here, so I thought I'd pop by for a visit." She says it all so placidly, as though Elena had not been left marooned here for years and years and years. As though she is a book Rebekah had put down years ago and forgotten about, a book that she had liked well enough and is pleased to pick up again where she left off now that she's recalled where she left it, but whose plot she hadn't cared enough about to even notice she had mislaid it until the moment it is back in her hands again.

"So you're here by yourself."

"Of course. Be a dear and help me with my valises, will you?"

In a total haze, Elena finds herself following Rebekah out to the gravel drive out front, helping her unload a set of matching cream leather suitcases with black patent bows on the straps from the trunk of a white sedan. Although Rebekah can lift the heaviest of her suitcases as easily as she can lift a magazine or a car, she allows Elena to struggle up the stairs with her share of the luggage, waiting patiently for her at the landing before gliding down the hall to her old rooms.

Not a word passes between them throughout the laborious journey to Rebekah's suite. Too many questions and anxieties and surrealties flit through Elena's thoughts to make room for any small-talk, let alone for her to settle on which questions to ask. Just the sight of Rebekah, ethereal as she passes down the hall between dappling sunlight stretching in from the windows and pools of cool shadow in between, disorients her in time and place. It could be any fall day nearly four years ago and she would believe it. She looks at Rebekah and she wants for things she has long since pushed aside, even as she wishes that Rebekah would disappear on the spot, to reveal herself as no more than a figment of her imagination. Her heart churns with delirious bewilderment, with pains and hopes that should feel foreign to her now, years later, but instead shock her with how intimately she recognizes them.

Inside her bedroom, Rebekah pauses. "You've been spending time in here." She drifts over to her former sitting room, takes in the changes Elena has made—the writing desk and the chair, the art on the walls, the stack of journals and boxes of letters and heap of writing pads. "You've positively nested. Have you no respect for privacy?"

"It has the best light."

This unapologetic remark pulls an unexpected smile from Rebekah's mouth. "Quite."

All the same, Elena offers, "I can move my things. The furniture that was in here before is just across the hall. I didn't move anything far."

Rebekah looks out the window at the glorious views of the gardens below. "That's only because it was all too heavy for you to carry far, though, isn't it? You never thought I was ever coming back."

Elena joins her in looking out that window. "Of course it didn't occur to me that you would return here and want your rooms back." She swallows, her throat suddenly tight with an emotion she can't quite parse. Outside, the wind rustles in the trees. A bluejay swoops after a ladybug. "In my head, you'd become this well-worn story that I told myself when I was lonely. I forgot you were actually a real person."

The incredulity is thick in Rebekah's voice when she responds. "But it's only been a few years. A blink of an eye."

"It was longer than that for me." Elena turns away from the window and clears the writing table of all that time. Looks down at her hands, full with her entire life put to paper. "It was an eternity."

She leaves Rebekah alone after they switch out the furniture for her old selections, with the exception of the Fauvist painting, which Rebekah murmurs she would like to keep, thank you. Too overwhelming to stay near her, after so much time in solitude.

For that reason, all day long, Elena tries to go about her normal routine—she goes back outside to the garden, where she had been planting vegetables for the fall, but keeps forgetting herself, pausing mid-motion to stare up at the windows to Rebekah's room, wondering what her visitor is up to. She tries reading a novel in the library, but the words all blur together, impossible to grasp. Her journal entry that afternoon swoops around the big questions that burn under her skin, questions so huge and seismically important to her future that she has difficulty voicing them in specific terms.

Throughout all of this, she cannot help but be sharply aware of Rebekah as she floats through the still hallways, her steps so graceful that even the loosest floorboards never groan under her feet as she quietly contemplates the paintings hanging in the walls or admires the buzz of the gardens through the windows, their panes slick with condensation, her fingers trailing absently over the walls as she wanders from room to room.

She keeps expecting an explosion of some sort. The Rebekah of her memories would have pitched a fit at all of the ways in which Elena had thrown out her interior décor and rearranged the rooms according to her haphazard whims. Instead, the half dozen or so times Elena glimpses her throughout the day, she appears oddly subdued, nearly contemplative. It's a side of Rebekah that Elena has rarely ever seen, and she's not sure at all how to handle her while she remains in this strange mood.

At sundown, exhausted and frustrated with her failed efforts to occupy her thoughts with anything other than Rebekah, Elena breaks out a bottle of fine Bordeaux from the wine cellar and pours herself a glass while she chops vegetables for the ratatouille recipe she's been trying to perfect over the past couple of months.

"Rather stingy of Nick to leave you without a maid and a cook, at the very least."

Elena jumps, fumbles the knife. Completely unaccustomed to anyone interrupting the heavy silence of the house this late in the day. Foolish. Cursing, she sticks her bloody fingers in her mouth and spins to find Rebekah just behind her shoulder, gazing with interest at the diced vegetables. Rebekah's eyes flit down to Elena's injured fingers before flicking over to the open bottle of wine.

"That's an exceptional vintage." She reaches into the cupboards and pours herself a glass while Elena bandages her fingers. "Of course, I prefer the sweeter varietals, but I suppose your options are limited by my brother's tastes. He never did care much for sweet things."

Cooks, maids, wine. There's something almost insecure about the way Rebekah prattles on about these inconsequential topics. As though she's talking just to fill the space. Covering her anxieties.

In a flash, this element of Rebekah which she had somehow forgotten about springs back into the forefront of her mind. It's like her idea of Rebekah had been a statue whose features had been worn smooth by rain and sand and time, until only her most broadly defined features had remained—her temper, her jealousy, her radiant beauty and vicious wit—her boundless capacity for doomed love. This hint of the sad and lonely teenage girl, uncertain of herself, of her ability to inspire love or friendship in another, had been subsumed under those other larger than life recollections which had remained with Elena for years after her abrupt departure.

Now, she can't for the life of her understand how that seed of doubt which defines Rebekah had ever slipped from her mind. That urgent desire to be loved, to be cherished—even if she expects to be struck down the moment she shows an ounce of vulnerability. It's her most human quality. Possibly the only one she has left.

An unexpected rush of warmth for the other girl rushes through her. Elena pulls open the drawer where she keeps all of her saved wine labels. "These were my favorites," she offers, playing along with Rebekah's need for friendly small talk.

She turns back to preparing dinner, all the while watching from the corner of her eye as Rebekah picks through the wine labels one handed.

"Have you always been so proficient in the kitchen? I don't recall ever seeing you cook, before," Rebekah remarks some minutes later.

"I've grown a lot more skilled over the past few years. Tyler—you remember Tyler?—Tyler and I experimented in the kitchen a lot that winter you all were down in New Orleans. It helps stave off the boredom."

Rebekah draws near again, hovering behind her as she adds the vegetables to the pan to brown them. "I've never truly cooked before," she says.

Elena pauses. Attempts to grasp her tone. Intrigued? Off-hand? "Would you like to learn?"

"Not really, no."

"Hm." Elena lets the topic die. Tries to imagine what kind of life Rebekah could have led to be over a thousand years old and to have never cooked a meal. Elijah had said their father had been a wealthy landowner somewhere in Eastern Europe. A thousand years ago, that would have been rare. Rebekah'd probably been born into a household with servants to perform the back-breaking labor of preparing a meal over a smoking hearth. Vampirism had only served to catapult her into the furthest reaches of astronomical wealth and privilege. Only in the 20th century had modern conveniences turned cooking from a chore into a hobby enjoyed by the elite as well as the masses. The 20th century, which Rebekah had largely missed out on.

Despite Rebekah's voiced indifference, she watches Elena prepare the meal with a keen unwavering interest, the way someone might watch some wonderful, strange insect trapped under a glass. Fascinating to observe at a safe distance, with a cool, scientific eye, but not something you'd want to touch with your bare hands.

"Are you hungry?" Elena asks sometime later as she reaches for the plates.

"Oh, I wouldn't want to intrude on you."

"Not at all. I haven't shared a meal with another person in years."

She's shocked by the hunger with which she yearns for Rebekah's company. For the simple act of sharing a meal with another person. Perhaps Rebekah isn't the only one with a need for simple conversation.

She expects Rebekah to turn her down as soon as she realizes how very much she wants her to stay. Were this Stefan she were talking to, he would correct her and remind her that he isn't a person. She waits for Rebekah to do the same.

Instead she pinches her brows together and says, "Well, if you insist."

They eat at the kitchen table. Elena's not sure Rebekah has ever eaten at the kitchen table before, but she doesn't comment or complain, instead bringing the bottle of wine to the table, refilling both of their glasses, and sitting down without a word.

All day Elena has given Rebekah space, too wary to approach her, her head too jumbled with the universes of possibilities that could have brought Rebekah here of all places. That could have delivered this phantom from her past onto her doorstep.

Now she is here, sitting a mere table's width across from her, and the urgency of her curiosity bites at her. She opens her mouth, but fear closes it again just as soon. Fear that she could learn something that will shatter the peace she has fought for with blood and tears and sacrifice.

There's only one question on her mind.

The silence between them pulses, sharp and alive.

Twice, Rebekah opens her mouth as thought to speak, before closing it again just as quickly.

Their eyes catch, and Elena understands her so completely in that moment that she cannot breathe.

They are both afraid of the power of putting their thoughts to words.

They each have stories to tell that can never be unspoken.

The minutes tick by, everything Elena cannot say bursting in her chest, the food without taste or texture in her mouth, the wine a mere afterthought to wet her throat, until finally Rebekah thanks her for the meal and the wine and excuses herself, leaving her dishes on the table for Elena to clear.

For a long time, Elena stares at the empty place setting. A sharp headache blooms behind her eyes. She should have just asked. She still could.

A fierce longing for the past swells up swift and sudden within her. Threatens to pull her under.

No. She's stronger than that.

All that exists anymore is now. Right now.

After everything is squared away in the kitchen, Elena climbs to the third floor and rolls out her yoga mat. Walks herself through the different levels of her meditation exercises, winding deeper and deeper into the depths of her consciousness as her breaths even out and her heart rate slows, until it is steady and strong as the lap of the ocean.

The next morning she nearly convinces herself that the whole previous day had been an elaborate dream. Strange, that it would be Rebekah she would dream of—she almost never dreams about her, and never as more than just a threatening wraith-like presence at the fringe of things—but she's been reading an awful lot from her diaries lately, so it really ought not to surprise her.

Yes, it's very comforting to lie awake in her large, cool bed, the comforter tucked up cozily to her chin, and assure herself it had all been a very strange and dissatisfactory dream.

Except, of course, that when she looks out the window that morning, she spies Rebekah down in the gardens, her silvery head bent over the lilies, and the mystifying reality of her situation can no longer be dismissed or denied.

Nearly impossible to focus on her meditations that morning, with the thought of Rebekah rattling around in her brain, an itch as yet impossible to satisfy.

She's no longer in the gardens by the time Elena makes her way out there to complete her daily yardwork.

A little after noon, she heads inside. The cool dimness of the kitchen is as always a stark relief after the white wavering brightness of the yard, and she pours herself a glass of water from the sink and leans her cheek against the cold table, the glass pressed to her forehead, while she ponders the afternoon ahead of her.

Probably unwise to return to her studies in the library and risk letting Rebekah see what she's been in up to. She'd been in the middle of perusing a stack of promising old tomes, with extreme slow-going due to the antique set of the type and needing constantly to refer to the Latin dictionary one of the hybrids had brought for her a couple of years back. (She also has dictionaries for all of the Romance languages as well as Dutch, and has spent enough time combing through the library here that her reading comprehension in Spanish, French, and Italian have all markedly improved. She's actually quite proud of her progress.)

She'd packed everything away out of sight the day before.

Not possible to go out for a walk through the woods, even though she is certainly so preoccupied that she probably could manage to get so lost in thought that she stumbled off the property. Rebekah would almost certainly grow suspicious if she discovered her missing for hours at a time. (Wouldn't she? The notion that she just wouldn't care slithers temptingly through her thoughts.)

Then again, she could always search Rebekah out. Corner her and ask her, straight out, all of the dreadful questions burning in her throat. Ask her the thing that matters most.

Ruthlessly, she smothers that impulse.

She's too afraid.

A few hours later, Rebekah finds her reading The Secret History in the front parlor. She wanders in like a cat and sits down next to her on the sofa.

Elena can feel her watching her.

She works hard to feign cool, collected nonchalance.

"What novel are you reading?" she asks after a time.

Elena holds up the front of the book so Rebekah can see.

Rebekah notes the flimsy paperback binding. "It doesn't look like something my brother would own."

"It's not. Klaus sends hybrids to restock the pantries every few months. Sometimes I ask them to bring me things back—books, bottles of wine, flower seeds. That sort of thing."

Her brows climb her forehead. "They're doing you favors?"

"If you mean they're exhibiting a little basic kindness to a prisoner, then yes, I suppose."

Rebekah hums, her meaning ambiguous, bored, and stands up to leave. "Self-pity truly isn't your most attractive expression," she muses aloud before she slips from the room.

Elena makes double portions again at dinner, but Rebekah doesn't join her.

In fact, she doesn't see her again until the next day, when she spots her curled up on the old iron lawn chair—missing for the past three years—under the shade of the Japanese Maple, reading her copy of The Secret History.

They dance around each other for days.

Elena does her best to keep herself occupied, to go on with her old routines, but it proves impossible.

Rebekah remains stubbornly at the fringe of things, sullenly picking at the piano in the parlor, playing endless games of solitaire at the stained dining room table, drinking glass after glass of wine while Elena cooks, her eyes on her all the while.

Sometimes Elena thinks she can feel her watching her as she walks through the empty halls of her house. Can hear her breathing late at night, right outside her door, sitting at the foot of her bed, otherwise still as death.

It's all she can do to restrain herself from breaking down and diving straight for the answers Rebekah could surely provide.

Meanwhile, Rebekah makes no attempts to hide that she had swiped her copy of The Secret History. Reads it right out in plain view, each morning, while Elena waters and weeds and mows the lawn. It would annoy Elena, if she weren't already so used to sharing with Rebekah in the first place.

Sometimes, at night, when she listens to Rebekah breathe, she wonders if she does it just to seize her attention. Wonders what would happen if she sat up and spoke to her. Another midnight chat, like the first one from so long ago.

She doesn't dare. Too well she knows how weak she is at this time of night.

"Did men really walk on the moon?" Rebekah asks her, startled, on the sixth day.

Elena twists out of warrior pose to glance at Rebekah, standing in the door to her yoga studio.

"That was over fifty years ago."

Rebekah frowns down at the novel in her hands. "Oh. I thought that seemed unlikely, but that I better check with you." She wanders off, only to return at dinner with a bottle of Riesling. "I missed so much when I was daggered, you see," she confesses as she pours them each a glass. "I don't always know what's truly possible and what's not. I'm still catching up, it would seem."

Elena considers her over her glass. There's something exhausted and resigned in her pale blue eyes that she has only ever glimpsed a couple of times in the past.

"I've come to terms with the fact that I'm probably never going to be able to catch up ever again." She shrugs. "But there's more to living than just that," she says, making a vague gesture toward the outside world. Toward all the little things that she misses but are so distant now she has difficulty imagining them in any substantial detail. "There has to be. If not, you have to make it so there is." To find hope, even when it seems impossible.

"Are your plants and your books and your drawings enough to truly sustain you though?"

"You looked through my drawings?"

"What about a lover? A friend? Don't you need those things too?"

"If I said yes, would it change anything?"

Rebekah looks at her for a long, long time after that. "No, I suppose it wouldn't."

"You're sadder company than I anticipated," she tells her that night before leaving.

She finds her copy of the novel sitting on her bedside table the next morning.

Slowly, Elena climbs out of bed. Looks out the window, expecting to see Rebekah on her iron lawn chair, the way she's been every morning since she arrived, but the gardens are empty.

She goes downstairs and makes herself tea and toast.

Several more hours go by before she realizes she hasn't seen Rebekah all day.

Strange. Every other day this week, she'd caught flashes of Rebekah throughout the day. Seen her reading, filing her nails into perfect ovals, playing disheartened games of croquet all by herself on the farthest corner of the lawn. Heard the warped recordings wafting from the gramophone she'd brought to her bedroom on the second day, and, so quietly that she's sure the gramophone was supposed to cover it, crying behind that closed door.

A terrible thought occurs to her.

Rebekah had said she had come for a visit. She'd never said how long that visit would last.

She might have left without even saying goodbye.

She knows it to be true the second she thinks it.

In a panic, Elena tears through the house, calling for her. It's stupid and this is going to be really embarrassing when Rebekah emerges from some attic or disused billiards room and she'll have to come up with a lame excuse on the spot for why she's calling for her so desperately, but that's nothing compared to the fear that grips her now as she calls and calls and Rebekah does not answer.

She checks Rebekah's bedroom first. Finds it neat as a pin. Impossible to tell if anyone had slept in that bed the night before.

Maybe no one had. Maybe Rebekah had been an hallucination all along.

No. Not time for thoughts like that just yet.

Later.

In a dark repeat of three years prior, Elena rips through the whole house searching, until finally she's forced to admit that there's really no one here.

Once again, she's all alone.

Something in her chest crumples. She can't breathe. Each breath she sucks into her lungs only makes the clawing, suffocating feeling worse. Her whole face breaks out into a prickling sweat that stings her eyes. Breathe.

She can't understand why she's reacting like this. She thought she'd gotten over her need for companionship. It's not like Rebekah's even been particularly warm over the last few days. If anything she's been moody and distant.

And yet—and yet—

There had been a part of her that had already grown used to having her here. That had craved her company.

(And there's a selfish, weak part of herself, the part she likes to ignore and deny and repress more than any other, that howls over never gathering the courage to ask Rebekah a single, solitary thing about her brother. Her one chance to ever learn more.)

She finds herself in Klaus's bedroom without any clear recollection of how she got there. It's as though one moment she had been wandering the upper galleries like a hungry ghost, and the next she had found herself sitting on Klaus's bed, slowly flipping through a portfolio of mildewed sketches dated at the turn of the last century.

Elena lies back against the pillows and turns her face into the cool satin pillow case. Searches out the scent of him, hoping to find some faint trace of him after all these years.

All she smells is the scent of her own shampoo, left here from all the lonely nights she has crawled into this bed.

Even his shirts don't smell like him anymore.

It's a weakness, succumbing like this.

Sometimes, she just doesn't care.

Squeezing her eyes shut, she does something she very, very rarely lets herself do anymore at all.

She reaches out across the universe for Klaus.

As always, nothing.

She's never any less disappointed.

It's why she's had to build this wall around her heart to begin with. To forget him as much as she could, so that she can go on living. Without him.

As he wanted.

"What are you doing in here?"

That cool, aristocratic drawl startles Elena out of her transfixion.

Elena stares at Rebekah with mouth agape.

"What is it? Do I have something on my face?" Rebekah pats at her perfect, smooth cheeks.

"You're still here."

She arches an eyebrow. "Your powers of observation are marvelously astounding." She steps into the room without elaborating at all on where she's been. Shuts the door behind her, leans against the wood frame. Pins Elena with a knowing, soft, pitying look. "You're still hung up on my brother, then."

Elena looks away first. "I try not to be."

"Nick's like that. He gets in your head and then it's impossible to ever be happy again." She holds out her hand. "Come on, now. It's nearly four in the afternoon and I haven't yet had a drop to drink today. It's no way to live."

Somehow, she takes Rebekah's hand and lets her pull her out of that room that could have so easily been her tomb.

They end up settled on the parlor sofa, a sweating bottle of champagne between them. Rebekah had fetched down a pair of crystal coupe glasses and a bottle of gin as well, which she liberally splashes into each of their glasses of champagne before clinking them together.

She never says to what they are toasting.

"The thing of it is," Rebekah murmurs confidentially after a time, "I thought we'd be able to leave you behind." She takes a sip from her glass and leans back against the arm of the sofa. "We'd done it plenty of times before, over the centuries. Abandoned everything and started over. It's never been a problem before."

We. Something turns over in Elena's chest at this first vague mention of what Klaus has been up to these past few years. She runs her finger over the slick rim of her glass. She can hear her blood rushing in her ears.

An almost fond smile tugs at Rebekah's lips as she studies her. "Look at you. You're positively starving for what I have to say, but you're too stubborn to ever ask me about my brother. It's a wonder you haven't bitten your lips clean through this week, with the effort not to pry."

(Does she realize how poor her choice in words is?

She can neither tell if Rebekah knows nor cares.

She's not even sure she cares, anymore.

The scar is just another part of her reflection.)

"Are you surprised?" Elena asks her quietly, willfully clinging to the last scraps of her resolve. "I can't afford to let myself keep living in a memory. I have to keep moving forward."

"Yes. Moving forward. My brother makes quite a show of that." She freshens her drink, adding more gin than champagne. "We've hardly stopped moving at all since we left. Always a new city, a new country, a new continent. We've been everywhere, really. Singapore, Sevilla, Lagos, Jaipur. The world's changed so much over the past century—I could hardly believe some of the things I saw. Not that Nick ever let us make a home anywhere. The moment we'd settle in, he'd grow restless, insist we try someplace new. But for a while, I thought all would be well."

And somewhere, lost amidst the lilting rhythm of Rebekah's words, she forgets to hold on to that resolve. Dissolves under the potency of her interest in this story.

"I assumed he would calm, you see, once the initial shock of the daggering had worn off of him, and we could be happy as we once were." Rebekah frowns, as though trying to piece together something very complicated. Something broken. "You have to understand. So much in those first few months mirrored our past. The traveling—running from my father again, but what ever is new about that? 'Twas the same as it had always been—the game-playing with the locals, the late nights laughing over drinks that would stretch into sleepless days. Our history together is so long. How was I to know anything would be different?"

She hangs on Rebekah's words, her pulse fluttering like a wasp in her throat, her wrists. Everything around her buzzes. The light from the windows too bright, the air shimmery with heat and expectation. Dread and elation. "What was different, then?" She hates that she asks. Hates how her breath catches in her throat as she waits for her answer. Hates how badly she needs to know whether Klaus still cared for her at all beyond the complete indifference she had sensed in him during their last fateful conversation. She needs to know.

Rebekah studies her, in that old familiar avian manner, head canted to the side. "I think you know already. His initial reaction to your betrayal was monstrous, even by my brother's standards. Truth be told I was relieved when I discovered that you had borne the brunt of his wrath, that the greatest share of his preternatural propensity for suspicion and hate had fallen on your head and not on mine. I didn't dare to so much as breathe your name—the one time I did he flew into such a rage that I feared even for my own safety— he drew that terrible bone dagger on me—I don't know when he stole it from my effects—and I think he really would have harmed me with it if we hadn't been interrupted by the concierge pounding on the door. Unfortunate for the concierge, but lucky for me. I slipped away, but when I returned, the whole hotel was in wreckage, and everyone inside of it ripped to bits."

The picture Rebekah paints should be horrible. Should turn Elena's stomach. It doesn't. Instead, all she feels is a sick exhausted longing to hear more.

Rebekah shakes her head. Tops Elena off. "He seemed to recover, though, the further we strayed from the Americas. The more time elapsed after the event. Time and distance. Always the cure for everything, in the end." Rebekah sighs the last of this, a wistful note in the still charged air.

Elena supposes she would know.

Maybe that's the issue. She'll never have enough time, enough distance, to get over Klaus completely. The only way for her to do it will be to find that time and that distance within herself.

It's awfully hard to remember that with Rebekah, who bears such a powerful resemblance to her brother, sitting right here, finally filling in the details for the story Elena has been circling around for years, wondering and wondering but never letting herself dwell too long on the possibilities lest she break her own heart with her yearning.

And a yearning for what? For a terror. For the worst monster of them all.

These descriptors all feel very by rote. A catechism to a religion she no longer believes in.

Rebekah continues on, filling in the gristly details of Klaus's deeds over the past three years in her beautiful, melancholy voice, and the horror of her words never touches Elena at all. Only the sadness.

"He was seemingly better, after that, but mercurial, volatile. Impossible to satisfy. He wanted to see the paintings in Vienna so we rented a villa and spent a few cheerful weeks there. He seemed enamored of the new production of Tristan und Isolde, because he saw it four times before he invited the opera house's entire ballet corps over to our villa. The uproar when the entire troupe of girls were found mutilated was so deafening we had to flee in the middle of the night—In the middle of the night, like we were still children roaming the Tuscan countryside! In Kyoto he truly seemed to appreciate the tranquility of the temples we visited, but he atethe head priest at one of the them in broad daylight over some trivial thing the priest had said to him—I'm not the least bit pleased to inform you that even a placid crowd of tourists can turn into a mob under those conditions. Have you ever had to escape a wild mob? It's never pretty. And it's been like that everywhere we've been, Nick temperamental and unreasonable at every turn. Constantly upending the tables, never caring for the consequences. Our father's nearly caught up with us on four separate occasions. Four. He never used to have such luck. Do you realize how hard it is to hide from someone bent upon your annihilation, when there are always cellphones recording petty massacres and spreading them about on that horrid internet? In the end, I just couldn't bear to spend another moment with him like that. Even I have my limits."

Elena's quiet for a long time as she absorbs Rebekah's story. "Was Stefan with you for all of this?" she asks at last.

"Didn't I say? He wasn't simply along for the ride. He's my brother's constant companion once again." Rebekah downs her drink. "High on blood day in and day out. An endless source of entertainment and diversion for my brother."

"But not for you."

"I would be lying if I told you that part of me wasn't relieved when Nick pulled us back into his bed. As I said, it was familiar. It felt reassuring at the time. A sign he had gotten over his fixation and subsequent disappointment with you and was ready to return to his normal self. To the brother I knew. The one I've always loved above all others. We had been happy once, the three of us. I had every reason to hope—no, to believe—that we could be so happy again. Except, of course, everything was different. I'd discovered what it was to be truly happy during that one spring Stefan and I had had together, when my brother had fancied himself besotted with you. I couldn't return to living at my brother's pleasure. Not after tasting true freedom for the first time in my entire life." She offers Elena a smile, then, small and sad and somehow very brave. "By the time we'd made it back to Budapest it was clear to me that my brother was spiraling beyond my control. As though anyone could ever control him. I asked Stefan to run away with me—to do what we had planned over a century ago, but he refused." She laughs, the sound hoarse as the autumn wind. "Unable or unwilling to leave the party, I suppose. Not for me, anyway."

"So you left."

"Yes. I wasn't willing to go on like that, living half a life at the mercy of my brother's dark humors, so I thought I better try striking out on my own."

Elena studies Rebekah for a long, long time.

They had nearly been friends, there at the end. Allies, certainly. Rebekah had even confided in her, a few times. But this? Never before had she ever known Rebekah to be so brazenly honest, especially in admitting a defeat.

"Why are you telling me all of this?" she cannot help but ask at last.

Rebekah stares pensively at her hands for a long while before she responds. "Because you're the only other person who knows my brother intimately and still loves him in spite of that."

Elena doesn't deny it.

"I wasn't positive, until this afternoon," Rebekah goes on. "But when I saw you in his room, I knew. I knew I could trust you with my story, and you wouldn't judge me for any of it. Least of all for missing him."

"Is that why you came here?"

"Because I was lonely and wanted to be around someone else who understands what it is like to be abandoned by my brother? Perhaps. Also, the grounds are lovely this time of year."

Caught off guard, Elena laughs.

And, somehow, Rebekah laughs with her.

It's later, as they lie stretched out in the damp grass, watching the stars spread out like a silver blanket over the June night sky, that Elena dares to ask the thing she has dreaded and desired to know most.

"He's not coming back, is he?"

Rebekah sits up and peers down into her face.

It's all Elena can do to keep gazing up at that glorious sky.

"No, I don't expect he is."

She closes her eyes. Swims through the abyssal dark within herself. "I had hoped, when you came back, that he might."

"Hope's a dangerous thing, with my brother. The only one he cannot bear to disappoint is himself."

"I know."

A long pause.

"I'm sorry. I hadn't thought of what you might think when I returned."

Slowly, Elena opens her eyes again. Is startled to find the stars just as beautiful as they were moments before.

She had thought the reaffirmation of Klaus's abandonment would destroy her. Is wholly surprised to discover herself unscathed.

"It's okay," she tells Rebekah. And as she stares up at the night sky, she really means it.

A/N: This got awfully long, so I cut the chapter in half (happens a lot). Hope you enjoyed!

Xoxo