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
Elena falls into her friendship with Rebekah like falling in love.
After that afternoon together rehashing the past few years, whatever distance Rebekah had thrown up around herself during that first week back dissolves into mist. Beneath the icy exterior, Rebekah is just a lonely girl badly in need of warmth and honest intimacy. After three years all on her own, Elena needs those things more than she needs air or water or sunlight. Needs them so much that none of their unhappy history much matters to her anymore.
It helps that, in many ways, they are remarkably similar. Both romantics at heart, believers in impossible dreams. Neither of them the least bit realistic, nor ultimately prone to cynicism.
Most astonishing of all: she finds in Rebekah the same limitless capacity for forgiveness that she knows dwells within herself. Once she figures this out, she cannot help the rush of tenderness and affection that overtakes her whenever they spend time together.
It's very easy to like someone who shares your deepest flaw.
Easy to spend time with someone witty and charming and beautiful, with similar tastes and a real penchant for turning dull, hazy afternoons into carefree adventures.
Rebekah teaches her how to play croquet while they drink champagne straight from the bottle. They go up to the attic together, unpacking all of those trunks and trunks of old clothes, trying on hand-beaded dresses that clink when they walk and whimsical bejeweled diadems that sparkle like stars upon their brows in the dim attic light and lustrous taffeta gowns that sweep the dust from the floor when Rebekah leads her in a Virginia reel around the room. They lounge in the iron lawn chairs, laughing and drinking Bee's Knees as the sultry golden June afternoons pass into close blue violet evenings, the air thick with the hum of cicadas.
Her days take on a shape of unreality, of being caught in a bubble out of time, that throws her back to those winter days spent rollicking through the manor with Tyler Lockwood, in that easy time before he'd become her lover, when they had merely been each other's closest friend.
They're both relearning some essential aspect of how to exist—Elena, in the company of another person; Rebekah, without either her brother or her paramour now that she's up and left them both.
She more than suspects Rebekah of using her as a distraction. As a means to forget about the sorrow she must have felt in abandoning Klaus. In Stefan's refusal to run away with her—especially, Elena thinks, when he had been so fast to suggest the two of them take off together on that fateful May evening so many years ago now.
That's okay. She doesn't mind. Not when Rebekah is so ready to smile, to laugh, to fill the long still hours with conversation and interest.
Research falls by the wayside as she makes room in her life for this happiness with Rebekah. Even her meditation regime—usually so strict, and kept carefully hidden from Rebekah's notice— grows shaky and irregular as she lives moment to moment, passing from one distraction to the next under Rebekah's diverting influence.
She knows it's only temporary.
That's okay.
She's learned to live a whole lifetime in just a handful of weeks.
She'll take what she can have.
(She'll take more than she can have, every time.)
There is only one unspoken rule between them: They do not talk about Klaus. Ever.
They are both much happier for it.
If there are days when Rebekah inexplicably disappears for hours at a time, the way that she had that afternoon she'd found her adrift in Klaus's bed, Elena never mentions it.
She understands, after a time, what Rebekah must be doing when she slips off, a hungry gleam in her eyes that Elena remembers so well from her nightmares. Perfectly well she grasps exactly what it means when she returns some time later, her cheeks flushed, her manner cool and silvery and still as the first tendril of dawn in the night sky.
Where is the chill of horror she used to feel when she would think about Rebekah stealing off into the night? Where is the condemnation?
Surely, if she looks deeply enough within herself, she should be able to find those feelings somewhere?
Her flat iron breaks the morning of her twenty-second birthday.
She can't help it: It feels like an omen.
For a long time, Elena stares at the cracked husk of smoking wires where she'd fumbled it onto the floor. Then, slowly, up at her reflection, where her damp hair has already begun to curl of its own volition. Not the smooth, dramatic curls Katherine had favored, but the softer, natural curls she hasn't worn since middle school.
Sighing to herself, she ties her hair back into a braid and heads out to face a new year.
"You seem off today," Rebekah notes from her towel spread out next to Elena's yoga mat, fluidly mimicking her posture as they move from a tiger curl into downward facing dog.
"It's my birthday," Elena mumbles to the floor.
Immediately, Rebekah drops the pretense of following along with Elena's routine. "Oh! Lovely! How old are you then?"
"Twenty-two."
"So young!"
And yet, so much older than she will ever be.
That's the thing about Rebekah. Maybe the secret to how she can get along with her so easily now, when the other girl's mere presence used to incense her, burning her up from the inside out until there was nothing left but a brittle shell filled with smoldering ashes and embers.
She'll always just be a teenage girl.
But, at some point, Elena has grown up.
"How old were you, when you became a vampire?" Elena asks her later that morning.
Rebekah pauses to think. They've been playing at lawn bowls for the past half hour, though it's a bit dull—which, Elena has come to realize, nearly everything is for Rebekah. Everything is just one mild distraction after another from the eternal doldrums of immortality.
"Seventeen, I should think," she says after some consideration.
"We have that in common. I was also seventeen when I died."
"You're so morbid, darling. Isn't it exhausting?"
Elena laughs, startled. "Yeah, it really is."
Rebekah's just a seventeen year old girl. Not even a particularly mature seventeen year old girl. Not in the way that Stefan had been older than his years when his clock had stopped ticking at the same age.
Rebekah will be seventeen forever.
It's her great tragedy.
She'll never have the opportunity to be more than that.
She'll always be young. Always be reckless. Always be waiting for the first great love of her life.
Everything about her is potential, and none of it will ever be realized.
She'll never get a handle on her temper. Never learn to put the needs of others before herself.
She'll never fall in love the way she dreams of doing, because she'll never mature enough as a person to be able to give of herself enough to do that.
She'll always be too trusting, and her heart will always be broken.
It's so easy now, from the perspective of twenty-two, to realize these things about Rebekah. To forgive her for the past, and to recognize the source of her violence and her cruelty as an immature lashing out. A manifestation of her insecurity and self-doubt.
It also doesn't help that Rebekah simply isn't human.
Oh, well. Elena no longer has the heart to hold that against her, either.
"What's this?" she asks that afternoon, coming down from a sun-exhausted nap on the library sofa.
Rebekah beams over the sparkling flames of twenty-two candles stuck into an immaculately frosted chocolate cake. "It's tradition, isn't it?"
The warm kitchen air is still redolent with the sinful smell of baking chocolate, the sink piled high with used bowls and whisks tacky with batter. A couple of cracked eggs melt yolk onto the counters.
Rebekah's braved the kitchen for the first time ever, and she's done it to make her this birthday cake.
"Where'd you get the candles?" Elena asks, blinking back the sudden prickling in her eyes.
"Oh, I ran into town for them. Now, come on, make a wish."
Touched, Elena screws her eyes shut.
Her heart has so many wishes in it.
She could never choose just one.
That's why I'm doomed, she thinks, fleetingly, before blowing out the candles.
(The only true resolve she has ever had is this: she wants to win, more than she wants to live.)
(She doesn't know what winning even looks like, anymore.)
The candles sputter, for a moment, before erupting back up into geysers of flame.
Rebekah's mouth falls open as she stares at the candles, overwrought surprise flashing across her features. She glances around as though she expects someone else to be in the room with them. A witch, maybe. "I didn't intend for this," she huffs, snatching up the cardboard packet of candles. Trick candles, she mouths to herself, appalled.
Elena laughs, delighted. "It's a happy accident," she sing-songs, pulling Rebekah down to the table to help her blow the candles out.
Every time they blow them out, the flames billow up again, merry and flickering. The outrage on Rebekah's face, so tense and out of proportion to the situation, sets Elena off into giggles, which prove infectious. Blowing out candles turns out to be very difficult when they can hardly breathe through their laughter— Elena blows useless puffs of air that barely make the little flames shiver, somehow managing not to extinguish a single candle after multiple attempts, and Rebekah laughs so much her arms slip off the table. She barely catches herself from sliding off her chair altogether. The wax melts into the cake.
It takes them a very long time to get all of the candles blown out.
After, they sit around the table in the lengthening twilight, eating bite after heavenly bite directly from the cake.
"I don't remember the last time I had a birthday celebration," Rebekah murmurs.
"When is it?"
"Hm?"
"Your birthday. What time of year?"
"We used to celebrate it on Lady Day."
Elena's not sure when Lady Day is. She makes a mental note to look it up.
"But that was a very long time ago," Rebekah continues. "It hardly seems worth thinking about now. One year is so much the same as the next."
"You've changed your hair," Rebekah notes a few days after that as she watches Elena tend her garden.
Elena touches her fingers self-consciously to the ringlets that have inevitably slipped free from her braid. "My flat iron bit the dust."
"Oh, I like it," Rebekah assures her. "It has an appealingly natural air to it." She glances past Elena, to her vegetable garden. Breathes a laugh. "We may as well be ensconced at l'Hameau de la Reine."
Rebekah takes a special glee in flipping through the magazines Elena's stockpiled, assessing haircuts and colors, fashion, and interior décor, asking for Elena's opinion page by page. The gossip columns never fail to scandalize her—she, a girl who can tear a man's arm off and suck out the marrow, still titters when she reads about anything racier than holding hands in public.
"This writer recommends putting pepper under a man's nose before he climaxes." She tilts the magazine to rest against her throat so she can peer at Elena over the pages. "Have you done this?"
Elena glances up from her painting, startled. "What? No!"
"Oh. How disappointing. I was hoping you could tell me whether or not it works."
"Rebekah, you realize you literally have centuries more experience with men than I do."
"I never had access to all of this information, though. It took me centuries to discover some of the acts mentioned in this periodical."
"So you never read the Kama Sutra?"
"My brother would have had kittens if he'd caught me reading it."
"Klaus? Really?"
She regrets mentioning his name as soon as it slips out.
A pinched look comes over Rebekah's face. "No. Elijah."
(It's weeks later, sprawled out together on the plush library sofa, empty bottles of Tattingers between them making Elena drowsy and warm, that Rebekah tells her, very matter of factly, "Nick was my first lover. I gave him my virginity.")
(And days later still, Elena asks, "Was that before or after you were turned?"
Rebekah shares with her a rueful smile. "Oh, after, naturally. Years after, in fact. When we were mortal, Nick only ever had eyes for Tatia."
Intrigue ripples through Elena. She can't help herself. "Is that who he lost his virginity to?"
"It's fascinating to psychoanalyze him, isn't it?")
"Tell me about your childhood," Rebekah asks her sometimes.
The first time she voices this request, Elena feels suspicious. "Why?"
Rebekah looks at her for a long time over the rim of her glass, her dark sunglasses slowly sliding down her nose to reveal her pale blue eyes, startling in their sincerity. "I don't remember my own very clearly at all. Sometimes I like to fantasize what it would be like to be a normal girl again."
Elena stares down at her hands, studying the way the morning light glints off of her silver fleur de lis ring. "I haven't been a normal girl in a long time."
"But you were, once." Rebekah adjusts her glasses so her eyes are once again obscured by the dark lenses. "So was I."
So Elena tells her about her childhood. Summers on the lake, stuffy town fundraisers, sneaking out past curfew to party out at the Falls, cheerleading on cold autumn nights. Game nights with her family, and Christmas caroling with Bonnie and Caroline.
She always leaves off before the end of her sophomore year. Before the sudden, definitive climax.
Rebekah only ever asks about her childhood, which is a relief, because she's still not ready to share with her anything about that last year in Mystic Falls.
Eventually, Rebekah shares her own history with her. Bits and pieces. There's so much lived experience over so long a period of time that it would be impossible for Rebekah to share it all. But she hears about her childhood as the only daughter amongst a passel of boys. About the younger brother who had died young.
"I can't even recall what he looked like anymore," Rebekah tells her as they pick through a trunk of old lawn games stashed in the basement. "Was he fair, like Nick and me, or dark, like the rest of my brothers?"
Elena has a sudden premonition of herself ten, twenty, fifty years down the road. So far along this path she's on that she can no longer even remember her own brother's face. Can no longer even remember that she had a brother at all.
It could happen, she thinks, half wild as her heart thuds against her chest like a trapped bird. Look at Katherine.
"Ah, here we are," Rebekah announces brightly. She pulls out an ancient net and a feathered shuttlecock. "Fancy a game of badminton?"
"I do remember that I loved him," Rebekah tells her abruptly, after they've grown weary of the game.
She doesn't need to clarify who.
Rebekah's just a teenaged girl, but there are some things she understands better than Elena.
She's hunted by her memories as surely as she is. They're both full of the past, both of them cups overbrimming with the wine of sorrow and regret.
Rebekah has a lot more experience living with it. Starting over. Smiling.
Things Elena would like to learn from her.
("Is that enough? To love a memory?"
"For the most part, memories are all I have.")
Day by day, she does learn.
For her part, Elena does her best to educate Rebekah on the past century. One rainy afternoon, she shows Rebekah how to stream movies on her phone—wonders at how neither Klaus nor Stefan had ever bothered to teach her that her phone could be used for more than just making telephone calls or sending texts.
"I don't much care for these modern picture shows," Rebekah tells her as they browse titles.
Bit of a broad statement.
"Well, which ones have you seen?"
"Some film about a sled. Another one with the same actor—The Three Men?—also terribly dull. There was another film where everyone's name was a different color, and they all killed each other by the end."
"So you don't like Stefan's taste in films," Elena reasons, recognizing each of the movies Rebekah describes from her year as Stefan's girlfriend. Sensing the tension that still lingers between them around that name, Elena quickly brazens on. "I'm certain I can find some movies you'll like."
She starts with the most obvious one she can image. Titanic, about an event Rebekah would be familiar with, but on a huge, sweeping, romantic scale. She's gratified by the tears Rebekah surreptitiously wipes out of her eyes with her wrist by the end of the film.
"Alright. You've won me over," Rebekah admits, later, over a bottle of wine. "What next?"
They watch an endless stream of movies after that— Casablanca and Back to the Future and Moulin Rouge. You've Got Mail and The Breakfast Club and Gone with the Wind and Meet Joe Black and Grease. And, once the initial binge of musicals and romantic dramas winds down, they branch out—she considers Interview with the Vampire to be a particular stroke of genius on her part, and discovers, oddly, unexpectedly, that movies about space travel enthrall Rebekah in particular. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apollo 13, even Alien.
The mundanity of curling up on the sofa in front of a softly glowing screen, of letting the familiar jokes and dramatic beats wash over her, is so surreal after all these years that Elena cannot help but to check her surroundings to assure herself that yes, she's really in her own home, safe and quiet.
The hybrid Elena had been expecting back in June finally shows up a week into July.
"Finally! An assistant," Rebekah declares, pulling out a stack of dog-eared catalogues. "Sit down, right here," she tells the woman, hardly glancing at her as she beckons Elena to join them at the kitchen table.
The woman taps her fingers against the surface of the table, an inexplicably familiar tick that wrings Elena's heart when she suddenly recalls what's so memorable about that gesture.
"I really don't have time for small talk," the woman announces.
"Sit," Rebekah orders, her whip-crack tone brooking no arguments. She flips through the glossy magazine on top—an interior décor magazine—and pauses on one of the pages. "What do you think of this silhouette for a new parlor sofa?" she asks Elena. " I cannot recall whether you preferred it to this other shape." She flips through a different magazine to compare the two sofas side by side.
"What are you doing?" Elena asks as she settles down next to Rebekah.
"I'm helping you finish your refurbishment. It's ridiculous for you to be stuck simply rearranging armchairs and end tables when we can order anything we'd please and have it delivered right to our door."
"I'm supposed to restock the pantry, not go furniture hunting for you," the woman—Elena still hasn't caught her name, shame on her—insists.
"Nonsense. You're supposed to do whatever I ask you to. I'm certain my brother would agree were he here." She picks up another magazine and bends her head close to Elena's. "You were fond of this marble-top console table, were you not?"
Elena shoots an apologetic shrug over to the hybrid before focusing on the glossy images Rebekah's laid out in front of her.
Together, they pick out new sofas, tables, rugs, draperies, lamps, all sorts of things Elena hadn't even thought to want until Rebekah suggested it.
"This is ridiculous," the hybrid says when they hand her the list. "How am I even supposed to find some of these things in rural New Hampshire?"
Rebekah smiles and pats her on the top of the head. "Not our problem. Besides, you have all day, do you not?"
Just as the hybrid is about to leave, she stops her again. "I nearly forgot. We have wardrobe and toilette orders as well."
Elena watches the hybrid trudge off, her fists balled up at her sides as she stomps back to her car. "We could have ordered any of those things ourselves with your phone," she notes as the hybrid slams out of the driveway.
"Oh, I know. But it's so much more fun this way, isn't it?"
The hybrid—Althea, Elena finally learns—finally makes it back after sunset, her arms laden with bags and boxes.
At least, here, Elena helps her carry them, although Rebekah flat out refuses to do more than tell Althea where each purchase should be stowed.
After Althea leaves, Rebekah takes her time unpacking bags of clothing wrapped in tissue paper, bottles of perfume, and boxes of heeled sandals in bright summery floral patterns, setting each of her prizes out on the dining room table so she can admire them, like a dragon looking over her treasure hoard.
Elena picks through the bags with a vague interest, frowning when she realizes that some of the shirts and sundresses had clearly been picked out with her taste and frame in mind.
"For you," Rebekah says without looking at her. In her hand is a flat iron, still in its packaging.
Elena takes the appliance from her and turns it over in her hands.
"A girl should have a choice in her appearance," Rebekah explains, finally glancing up from her purchases. "Just in case you preferred your old look."
"How did Tatia wear her hair?"
"Does it matter?"
"Maybe. Tell me."
Rebekah shakes her head. "No. However you wear your hair or color your mouth or pluck your brows belongs to you and you alone. It doesn't matter how Tatia used to style herself."
"It does though. We have the same face."
Rebekah studies her, seriously. "Not anymore."
For a moment, Elena doesn't understand what Rebekah means. "What?"
"Tatia was a teenager when she died. Her face never saw twenty-two summers." She pulls a hat out of a box and tries it on. "Haven't you noticed that your face has changed over the past few years? It's no longer exactly Tatia Petrova's face at all."
She doesn't register the depth of her shock until her knees buckle and she has to scrabble at the table to keep her balance.
"Steady on!" Rebekah exclaims as she guides her into a chair. "Alright there?"
"My face is my own," she says, testing the weight of the words out on her tongue. "My face is my own." If she says it enough, maybe she'll believe it.
Rebekah looks at her like she's mad, but then, Rebekah could never understand what it means to live every day knowing that you're just the copy of a girl a thousand years in the grave. To be haunted by the vampiric ghost of the life you could have led.
Elena jumps up and runs to the nearest mirror—the huge gilt-frame mirror in the hall she's never dared try to move for fear of being crushed if it ever falls off its mount.
She stares at herself for a long time. Tries to mark the differences Rebekah had mentioned, things she's noted about her appearance before, but never in this context— It's true, her face is different—Thinner, darker, shadowed in ways it never was before—
It's still a Petrova face, though.
Nothing can change that, or the nature of the heart that beats within her.
"If you've finished your existential crisis, I have some things for you to try on," Rebekah calls from the dining room.
Existential crisis. Ha! Trust Rebekah to reduce her grappling with a shift in the most defining fact of her life to a glib phrase.
That's the joke, though. Her life. Rebekah's life. Everyone's life is a joke, and the trick to living, she is starting to suspect, is in recognizing this.
And so, Elena laughs, and leaves the mirror behind her.
In the end, she lets her hair curl.
(If part of her longs to reclaim her resemblance to the other women who wore her face before her, now that she's noticed that exact similitude slipping further away each day… she doesn't dwell on it.)
The next morning, Rebekah brandishes with particular glee a pair of heart-shaped sunglasses for Elena, a perfect match to the pair already sliding down her nose, as they sprawl out on an old yellow blanket on the lawn, a stack of old novels and magazines between them, which Rebekah ignores to paint her nails moon-white.
Everything through those heart-shaped lenses is syrupy red and sweet.
They snack on sliced peaches and drink lemonade spiked with gin—Rebekah's favorite spirit, as she's come to learn.
The sun climbs high into the sky.
Elena flips through a faded copy of Madame Bovary, silently mouthing the words as she reads. It's all in the original French. If not for her years of seclusion here with nothing better to do than trudge through old books in foreign languages, she might never had grown confident enough to read the untranslated text. It's a little thing to be happy about—the sort she's grown so expert in picking out over the past few years.
"Your pronunciation's off," Rebekah informs her from over her shoulder.
"How can you even tell?" Elena asks without looking up from her page. "I haven't said anything out loud."
"Your mouth's moving, isn't it? I can read your lips."
Frustrated, Elena sits up. "I've been thinking of asking for one of those learn-from-home CDs. Maybe to even try to learn something outside the Romance language family." Before Rebekah had arrived and turned all of Elena's routines on their side, she'd been fantasizing about studying something truly challenging, truly outside the scope of her experience—like Russian or Arabic or Mandarin. Something else to feed her hungry soul. To fill the long hours that she used to spend all on her own. (The blank oceans of time she knows will come again, once Rebekah inevitably grows bored of this little summer idyll and leaves.)
"Why bother with the CDs?" Rebekah asks. "You have me."
Those old interminable Christmas dinners flash through her thoughts.
"How many languages do you think you speak, anyway?" Elena asks, remembering how Rebekah had chosen a different language every evening for weeks.
Rebekah turns back to painting her nails. "Hard to quantify. Would you count English as it exists now as the same language as what we called English eight hundred years ago? When you're as old as my brothers and I are, everything changes eventually." She blows on her nails. "Even our names have changed from what they once were."
As is sometimes the case, Rebekah means well (for, as Elena knows from personal experience, she often doesn't mean well), but her dedication to actually instructing Elena in foreign language is sporadic at best.
Elena's not sure what she expected when Rebekah had volunteered. Exchanging pleasantries and talking about the weather in Italian over morning coffee? Maybe some pointers on sounding out the Cyrillic alphabet?
What it actually amounts to is long hours spent listening to Rebekah as she reads from a collection of Pushkin poetry, her voice resonant and clear as deep water as it tumbles through each line of verse. To watching an exorbitant number of French films—Amélie and Last Year at Marienbad and the entire Three Colors trilogy— without subtitles, so that Elena can focus on the sound of the language, the two of them pressed close together on the parlor sofa or the library floor or on Rebekah's bed, so that Rebekah can whisper the translations directly into Elena's ear.
She doesn't mind—quite the opposite.
There are still nights when she wakes up to sense Rebekah in the room with her, watching her sleep.
The urge to reach out to her and draw her close wells up stronger within her each time she catches Rebekah like this.
It no longer occurs to her to be afraid.
"Do you think of yourself as seventeen or do you think of yourself as a thousand?" she asks late one night as Rebekah aimlessly fingers the piano keys.
"Neither, I suppose."
Elena watches as her hands leap through a complicated pattern of notes without seeming to pay any attention to what they are doing, as though it were nothing more than a nervous flutter. Perhaps, for her, it had been.
"How do you think of yourself then?" she presses.
"As my brother's sister."
The movers arrive with their new furniture two weeks after Althea's visit. A quartet of stout young men who sweat and groan and shoot her flirty grins as they haul all of the new furniture into place according to Rebekah's orders.
"There are faster ways to catch flies," Rebekah teases her, gently guiding Elena's mouth closed with two fingers under her chin.
Elena shakes herself, embarrassed. "I can't help it. These are the first men I've seen in years."
Rebekah turns to Elena, her brow quirking. "Really? Do you mean to tell me that every one of the hybrids who've been by have been female?"
"Yep," she affirms, popping the 'p'.
Rebekah rolls her eyes. "It's pathetic how transparent he is." There's no need to clarify who he is. "Obviously he's afraid you'll run off with the first male you encounter. That, or he's afraid that any male he sent here would fall prey to your charms." Rebekah shares a conspiratorial smile with her. "He obviously doesn't realize that your charms are universal."
A/N: I ended up cutting what I've already written in half AGAIN because things were running long and I was anxious to update. The good news is that the next 4,000 words of this fic are already written, and I just need to write a few more scenes to have chapter 47 ready for you all ASAP.
If you're enjoying this fic, please drop me a review and let me know—your words of encouragement really help me to write, and to keep this project sprinting toward its conclusion!
For any of you worrying when on earth we'll see Klaus again, have faith—you'll see him soon enough and the reunion will be WELL worth the wait!