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
Little by little, she learns Rebekah that July.
Rebekah reveals herself in small, telling ways. In her propensity for gift giving—the birthday cake awash in candles, the new clothes which Elena luxuriates in on a daily basis after years in those same old outfits selected with a teenaged girl in mind, the expensive new furniture which they had picked out together for no other reason than that Elena had wanted to update her home to reflect her personal tastes, the surprisingly thoughtful flat iron, the hordes of necklaces and rings and hair pins which Rebekah bequeaths her from her treasure trove locked up in the attic—Rebekah shows her affection and her regard in grand gestures because it's easier for her to shower someone with over-the-top gifts than it is for her to simply tell someone she likes or values them. Because she cannot bring herself to ever say she is sorry, not for anything, because to do that would be to succumb to the fatal weakness of looking back. Of regretting.
She finds out that Rebekah's mother had been a witch. That she and her siblings had each of them had a degree of ability in their mother's skill, and that she had studied for years the elements of her mother's craft, always assuming she would one day practice in her own right, before her family's lives had taken that fateful twist. (A twist which she never, ever elaborates upon—and it amazes Elena that she could have lived so long amongst Original vampires without ever discovering the exact nature of their origins as such.) She learns the names of Rebekah's other brothers—Finn and Kol (Kol! That had been the name of the brother who had plotted against Klaus! The one who must've penned those oh-so-helpful journals—) and the ages each of them had been when they had become vampires.
("Wait. So that means Klaus is a member of the 27 Club," Elena interrupts in the middle of one of Rebekah's tragic soliloquys lamenting the path each of their lives might have taken had they remained human. She does that when she has too much to drink.
"Sorry, come again?"
"The 27 Club. It's a club made up of a bunch of artists and musicians who all died tragically young, age 27."
"Oh, how droll. Nick must love that. If you haven't noticed, he's rather pretentious about these things.")
A thousand other details follow. Rebekah's love of dancing in all its many forms. Her particular predilection for sweet summer stone fruits. The fact that she keeps her nails filed short to prevent herself from nervously biting them down to the quick, a habit she admits she's had since adolescence.
The particulars of Rebekah's life continue to spill out as they pass their days together. Anecdotes from the distant past—her travels over the centuries, places she had seen, men she had flirted with only for their names to later make it into the history books. Poems she had read, which she now recites from memory into the chirring night air as Elena drinks her in.
They even begin to talk about Klaus again.
(Hardly ever Stefan, though. Elena suspects that wound is still too fresh for Rebekah.)
In turn, Elena offers Rebekah the pieces of herself she has kept close and shuttered tight since the night she had been abandoned here. She tells her about the things from home she misses most—her friends, the comforting routine of her school day (which Rebekah inquires after in fascinated detail), the freedom of getting in her car and driving anywhere at all, whenever she felt like it. She finds herself recounting the plots of the novels she's written to Rebekah, describing the vague ideas for future stories swirling within her. She opens up to her about Tyler. What he had done for her, how he had saved her. What it had meant to her when Rebekah had freed him for her.
("There's no need to mention it," Rebekah assures her, clearly uncomfortable.
"No. There's every need. I'll never forget that kindness."
Rebekah blushes, then, and changes the subject—)
Elena forgets what it had ever been like to fear her.
After years and years spent without anything other than the touch of her own hand to stave off her stark loneliness, the temptation to draw close to Rebekah is impossible to resist. She finds herself painting Rebekah's fingers for her, kicking her under the table whenever she comes up with some wildly inappropriate observation from the latest gossip magazines, letting her rest her head in her lap to drowse away as she reads aloud from the book of Neruda poems she had once found in Klaus's bedroom. They develop a whole short hand of expressions and looks and body language shared secret and unspoken between the two of them.
("We're friends now, aren't we?" Rebekah asks her one morning as they drink their coffee.
Elena starts. Laughs. "Yes. I think we are."
"Good. I've not had very many, in my life. I'm glad to count you among them."
Somehow, when she says this, what Elena hears is this: I'm as lonely as you are, but not when I'm with you.)
She wonders at herself, that she could read Rebekah's diaries, and forget that the girl spilling out her secrets on those pages has a real heart.
Lazy July melts into sticky August.
With a start, Elena realizes four years have passed since she came to live here. In another life, she might have been starting her senior year in college right now.
In some ways, when she steals a glance at Rebekah, as radiant and fresh as she had been on that first morning when she'd traipsed into her room covered in Stefan's bloody caresses, it's impossible to believe that any time has passed at all.
Other times, she'll be flipping through her journals, jotting off a letter to Damon or Caroline or scribbling down a seed for a new story, and it feels like a lifetime has elapsed since that time when she had been so young and restlessly full of hope.
The same nurse comes as always to take her vitals and draw her blood.
Rebekah watches the whole encounter with a critical eye.
"What does my brother care for your weight or the date of your last blood?" she asks as the nurse sticks the hollow needle in the crook of her arm.
Elena shuts her eyes and methodically squeezes the little rubber ball the nurse had given her. "Presumably to make sure I'm still healthy enough to have a child one of these days," she replies tightly, doing her best to keep her answer mechanical and apart from herself.
Later, after the nurse has left, they sip at mint juleps in the cool dark of the parlor as the last of the afternoon sun slants hazy yellow beams across the floor. Rebekah stirs her drink while Elena fidgets with her bandages.
They haven't bothered to light the candles in the chandelier all summer—Elena has never lit them at all since she took possession of the house— but, suddenly, she cannot help but miss the hot melting glimmer of the candle flames as the evenings stretched impossibly late. Cannot help but long for the romance of those long nights she used to spend in this room listening to Stefan play at the piano. There had been evenings, curled up in an armchair in the corner of this room, Stefan at the piano, Rebekah lounging on the old fine sofa, Klaus lingering in the doorway, watching, watching, when her entire universe had shrunk down to this space and the people within it.
"You didn't seem much pleased that my brother expects you to eventually bear a child," Rebekah notes abruptly, pulling Elena from her ruminations.
"Because you so enjoy it when Klaus forces you into things."
Rebekah doesn't argue with her. "I always wanted children," she confesses. "I used to dream of it when I was still human. Yearn for it." She looks into the bottom of her drink like a woman staring out across the ocean toward an impossibly distant horizon line. "It's my biggest regret—that I never will. Sometimes, I still dream at night about having a child of my own."
It's impossible to quell the rising tide of memory and regret that Rebekah's words stir up within her, like silt rising from the bottom of a riverbed.
Elena twists the ring on her finger. She's staring hard at it when she tells Rebekah, very softly, "I lost a child, once."
It's the first time she's ever said the words out loud.
Next to her, Rebekah is silent for a long time. Elena can feel her eyes on her as the other girl watches her.
"This was before, with that blond boy Nick had me bring here?" she asks at last.
Elena hums non-definitively. Allows Rebekah to assume what she will. The details of time and place don't particularly matter, anyway.
She's startled when she feels a hand grasping onto her own. Rebekah threads their fingers together and squeezes. "I'm so sorry, Elena. Truly."
Elena looks up into Rebekah's sincere blue eyes. Absorbs her words, her hand in her own. Wonders at this simple act of giving and receiving comfort—something which was once so second-nature to her now rendered alien, overwhelming, unwieldy in its enormity. In its capacity to pierce her heart.
She throws her arms around Rebekah, and Rebekah does not let go.
There are very few secrets, after that, that they are not willing to share with each other. It's as though Rebekah has determined to repay Elena in kind for all the trust she had put in her that afternoon.
They spend hours together talking, Rebekah weaving a spell as she reminisces over centuries and centuries spent wandering the earth, trailing after her older brothers. Running from her father. It's during this time that she reveals to Elena the truth of how she lost her virginity ("Not that I had any innocence left, by that point—I'd been devouring women and children for years by the time it finally happened,")—as well as a whole host of other stories she had never heard before—about the time she had accepted a wedding proposal only for her lover to plant a dagger in her back ("The first and last lover I took, other than my brother, for the first two centuries of my life—") or about the impulse that had driven Klaus to liberate Marcel as a ten year old boy and raise him as his own son, then, later, to uplift him as his brother, his shadow, and, eventually, as his rival.
"It seems like the most dangerous thing to be is someone Klaus calls family," Elena muses, thinking on Marcel, whom she had mostly forgotten about these past few years. She's not even certain he had survived that catastrophic last night in New Orleans, despite her best efforts to save him.
"He used to call you family."
Elena shades her eyes against the glare of the sun peeking through the tree limbs overhead. The iron lawn chair she reclines upon is cool against her skin in some places where the shade of the tree has kept it in shadow, scalding in others where the sun has touched it. "Used to being the imperative phrase."
Rebekah doesn't disagree.
That is not to say that Elena doesn't keep some secrets.
Rebekah barges into her room one morning as she's finishing up a letter to Jeremy.
"Most spectacular sunrise. Hurry, or we'll miss it," Rebekah says as she hops onto Elena's bed. She plucks the papers out from under Elena's pen. "What's this?"
Elena looks down at the empty place where her letter had been on the old rolling tray table, commandeered these past few years as a writing table to use when she doesn't feel like getting out of bed. "I write letters home. To all the people I left behind. It helps me feel like I'm still connected to them." She pulls out the box of all of her unsent mail from under her bed to show Rebekah. By now, there are hundreds of letters in it.
Rebekah hands the letter back. Smooths the edges where she had crumpled it a bit when she snatched it away. "This one is addressed to a Jeremy. That's your brother's name, right?"
"We were really, really close. I miss him all the time."
"I know."
Elena looks up sharply at Rebekah, whose mouth hangs open in what could nearly be called a grimace as they stare at each other. Were Rebekah anyone else, Elena might almost describe her air in that moment as distinctly awkward. She has no idea that Elena remembers that evening where she'd compelled her to think Jeremy had been killed at her hands. No ability to explain how she would have any insight into Elena's relationship with her brother unless she explains what she'd done, and to do that, she'd have to tread awfully close to an apology, since they're really friends now, but Rebekah absolutely positively will never do that.
Elena decides to save her. "You can relate."
Obviously relieved, Rebekah smiles, that soft, beautiful smile that feels like a cool breeze. "I can."
Half an hour later, the sun has fully risen. With some doing, Elena had convinced Rebekah to climb to the top branches of one of Elena's favorite trees on the edge of the lawn to enjoy the sunrise.
"You've done this often?" Rebekah had asked her as they climbed, taking in the surety of Elena's movements as she had picked out grips for her hands and feet.
"All the time."
"A bit dangerous, with you here on your own."
"That was the point."
"You're right, of course," Rebekah tells her later while Elena inspects her pepper plants. Rebekah doesn't really participate in gardening, but she tends to shadow her while she works, either trailing after her like today or watching her from the comfort of a spread blanket on the lawn or the iron lawn chairs in the shade.
"Right about what?" Elena asks her, distracted. The peppers look like they'll be ready to harvest in a few days. She cups one in her palm, feeling the round weight of it, the warm slick skin.
"I do miss my brothers, very much. They're the only ones who can completely understand me."
Elena turns away from her garden to study Rebekah. "That's probably true."
"I'm glad I left Nick, but it can be very hard, to be separated like this. Every other time I've left his side, I found shelter with my brother Kol. I've never spent so much time on my own before."
Elena doesn't take offense that Rebekah does not count her as quite sufficient company in this respect. She understands what Rebekah means exactly. She feels that way too, missing the faces she grew up with. "You're homesick."
"It's laughable, isn't it? You'd think I'd be too old for such things."
Rebekah has never grown up enough to realize that there are some things you never grow out of.
"Your brothers are all daggered, right?" That's been her suspicion, anyway. Why else would Elijah have gone so conspicuously missing after failing to kill his brother at the sacrifice?
"Yes."
Together, they meander over to sit beneath the shade of the Japanese Maple.
Elena chews her lip. "I guess I don't understand what's stopping you from undaggering them. You're an Original vampire. It doesn't seem like there's anything you can't do, if you wanted to."
"It's not a matter of simply undaggering them, though. To do that, I'd have to have access to them."
"Klaus has hidden their bodies?" Not surprising.
"Not as such, no. I know where they are, of course. But Nick doesn't trust anyone but himself. He has ensured that he alone can choose the time and place of our undaggering, just as he alone of all of us has the ability to sink one of those accursed daggers into our hearts without suffering the consequences Nature intended."
"What are you saying?"
Rebekah stares right into the sun, and doesn't blink. "He's put up an impenetrable barrier spell around the coffins in which he keeps my family imprisoned. Only his unique blood can break the blood ward and allow entrance." She shakes her head. "My brother has an unfortunate skill in charming witches to do anything and everything he asks them to do. I don't understand how he manages at all, but there you go. My other brothers are as inaccessible as though they really were dead."
"But not forever."
"Hm?"
"You're immortal. Truly immortal. You'll see your family again. It's inevitable."
What's left unsaid is the reverse. Elena, mortal as she is, cannot rely upon time and chance to do the work for her. If she ever sees her family again—still a huge if—it will have to be through her own actions.
An old conversation drifts up from the depths of her memory.
"Ah, but that's the fine thing about destiny. What you wish is irrelevant. So, since you cannot change your fate, why not enjoy yourself?"
"I don't see you following your own advice. You go out of your way to take your fate into your own hands."
"On the contrary. My fate happens to coincide with my wishes. I wished to break the curse, and it was my destiny that I should do so. It just required some effort, as all things truly worthwhile do."
That night, after saying goodnight to Rebekah, Elena settles onto her bed and runs through her meditations again. Weeks have passed since the last time she did this.
But all things worthwhile take effort.
She recommits herself.
And, as she is falling asleep, she thinks on how she might take those efforts to the next level.
"I lied, you know, when I told you why I came here."
Elena looks up from her journal. They've been cloistered away in Rebekah's sitting room all morning while a thunderstorm rages outside. The rain taps against the windows. She's been sprawled out on the chaise longue for the past half hour, committing the last couple of days to paper, while Rebekah picks restlessly through her wardrobe, trying on sweaters and blouses and earrings in front of her full length mirror before tossing them onto the floor.
Now, Rebekah hovers at her side, twisting her fingers.
Elena drops her journal onto the floor. "What, did Klaus send you?" She phrases it like a joke, but the possibility has her stomach knotting.
"I told you I came here because I wanted to be around someone who understood what I was going through. That implied that I thought of you at all."
"What are you saying?" Elena asks her softly.
"That for three years you hardly crossed my mind. I never thought about how we had abandoned you here, and I never wondered how you had gotten on in your isolation. I only came here because I knew my brother would forbid it if he ever found out, and I badly wanted to do something explicitly against his wishes."
She makes room for Rebekah to join her on the chaise. Rebekah sits down gratefully, her expression as open and vulnerable as it has ever been. It occurs to Elena that this is the closest to a verbal apology as Rebekah will ever come. The implication of her words is clear: She's sorry that she never thought of Elena in all that time. Sorry that she had been so thoughtlessly cruel to someone who had turned out to be her friend.
"Coming here was your rebellion," Elena says, her voice free of any recrimination. She's been so hollowed out from the past few years, has been so happy these past few months, that she really doesn't feel any at all. She'll have to worry later whether that's a problem.
"Do you think it worked?"
"Are you happy?"
Rebekah looks at her for a very long time. Tentatively, she reaches out, hooks the tips of their fingers together as she sometimes has before. As always, Rebekah's touch warms her through and through.
Elena glances up from their joined hands, into Rebekah's blue eyes, so similar and familiar that it makes her heart clench. Gets caught by the intensity of her regard as Rebekah visibly struggles for an answer to her question. Time itself seems to lie down and be still as they stare at each other. The only sound in the room is the rain pattering against the window, the shallow sound of their breath, like the sound of the waves inside a seashell.
When Rebekah leans forward to press her mouth to her own, it feels like something Elena has been waiting for, has known would happen, forever.
The shock of such an intimate touch after years without any intimacy of this sort outside of her dreams thunderstrikes her. For a moment, all she can do is sit in stunned silence as Rebekah kisses her.
Rebekah nearly pulls away. Elena senses that trepidation in her, though, that fear of rejection. Tenderness swamps her. Desire. She opens her lips against Rebekah's and kisses her back with all of her pent up want and love and hunger.
They kiss for what feels like a very long time, until Rebekah really does pull back. She looks deeply into her eyes, studying her for long, drawn out minutes.
Elena bites her lip, a blush rising on her face. She wants Rebekah to lean back in. To keep kissing her until she can forget. Until she can breathe again.
"Ah. You're still in love with my brother," Rebekah says after a time, a little wistfully, as though she's read it in her. She places a hand against the side of Elena's face and smooths her hair away from her cheek.
"I don't want to be."
Rebekah pulls away. Her fingers brush her hand. "You say that. Yet you're still wearing his ring."
Elena plucks it from her finger. "So here, have it."
Rebekah just shakes her head. "Love doesn't work like that."
After that, Rebekah stops visiting her late at night.
It doesn't matter. She's still haunted.
There are times when she catches Rebekah looking at her, this familiar intent look on her face, and she'll think, Kiss me again. This time she'll get it right. This time she won't think of Klaus at all. She won't.
Rebekah never does kiss her, so she never gets her chance to prove herself.
She can't quite gather the nerve to be the one who moves first.
They never talk about that afternoon, but it lingers between them just the same.
A thought. A possibility.
She wants—
She wants to be in love with someone who will love her back.
Her love for Klaus is like an old wound inside of her. Mostly she never thinks of it, but every now and then, it aches so terribly that she cannot think of anything else.
A certain restlessness overtakes Rebekah as August marches on. Elena can see it in the way she no longer seems content to loll about all afternoon drinking French 75s or watching Alfred Hitchcock movies. She quits midway through croquet and suggests they go inside to read, but sighs and lowers Sonnets from the Portuguese to her lap, leaving the poem she had been reading aloud unfinished.
She's not at all surprised when Rebekah expresses a desire to leave. What does surprise her is when she says, "You should come with me."
The tip of her charcoal pencil, pressed hard to the paper as she sketches the flowers in her garden, snaps and crumbles into dust. Elena brushes her hands off and sets her drawing aside.
Rebekah, sunning herself at her side, waits patiently for her response.
"I can't."
"Nonsense. By my count it'll be months before my brother notices you've absented the premises. Think of all the fun we could have between now and then. I might even have you back before he ever notices that you've gone missing."
"No, really, I can't. The last thing Klaus did before he left was compel me to remain on this property." Not to mention, if she does ever leave this place, it certainly won't be to run off to play with Rebekah, tempting as the idea is, only for Rebekah to return her here.
Rebekah tilts her head back and really looks at her. "That's probably true, but you're also using that as an excuse. You're not sure you would leave even if you had the chance, and you're too afraid of the answer to really find out."
Her words pierce her like an arrow. The blood drains from her face, and she feels all of a sudden that she's going to be sick, right here, because Rebekah is right. There's every chance that she'll figure out a way to sidestep the compulsion and she'll remain here anyway. She'll tell herself that it's to keep her friends and family safe from Klaus's retribution and she'll happily swallow her own lies. When had Rebekah learned her so well, that she could call her out like this? Force her to face herself like this?
Groaning, she curls her knees to her chest and buries her face in her hands.
"There there," Rebekah says, patting her back. "No need to be so dramatic about it. We all have our weaknesses. I thought we had grown comfortable revealing them to each other."
In Rebekah's words of consolation, Elena spies an opportunity. Despite her internal agony, her roiling self-doubt, she cannot help but rise to the occasion.
She lifts her head. "You could help me find out."
"What's this, then?"
"Help me beat the compulsion." If she sounds desperate, it's because she is.
When Rebekah doesn't respond one way or the other, she barrels on.
"There are ways to become immune to compulsion. Meditation practices to reroute the cognitive hierarchies that make a person susceptible to a vampire's will."
Rebekah finally blinks. "I'm aware."
"Then you're also aware that I'll never be able to make real progress without a vampire to help me practice."
"You haven't just thought of this," Rebekah says, slowly, as though she's testing the veracity of her words as she speaks them. "You've already tried your hand at this resistance."
"You don't know what it's like to live under another person's will. To live, because you've been compelled so that there is no other option."
"But I do. What do you think my life has been for the past millennium other than an unending living at my brother's pleasure? My only possible death is at his hands."
Yet even that is impermanent. He can't even compel her like he can everyone else. Klaus has no real power over Rebekah, save what she gives him. But saying that out loud would only hurt her.
"Then you understand what I mean when I say I cannot go on like this," she tells Rebekah instead. Begs. "Please, Rebekah."
Rebekah shifts away from her. Looks over her shoulder, back toward the edge of the lawn—toward that spot where she had daggered Klaus so long ago that the memory now feels like a dream. "I cannot."
"Cannot or will not?"
"Can't or willn't, it amounts to the same thing in the end."
The depth of her rage at this shocks her.
Elena jumps to her feet. It suddenly occurs to her that Rebekah has never offered to do a single damn thing that would really help her, nothing that would save her from this Klaus-enforced exile. Never offered to mail her letters to her loved ones, or stopped the nurse from taking her blood, or interceded with her Klaus on her behalf. For months, she'd been content to play at being friends here in Elena's picturesque prison, to indulge in this fantasy that she was visiting, because of course she had free will and could come and go as she chose. Even her offer to leave with her had been no more than a lark, a temporary reprieve. Rebekah had told her right up front that she would deposit her back here at the end, hopefully before Klaus noticed her hand had been in the cookie jar.
"I can't believe it," Elena fumes. "You talk a big game about leaving your brother and striking out on your own, but at the end of the day, you still won't do anything that countermands his wishes, no matter how screwed up and twisted they are. You're still loyal to him, even when he's used you, used me—"
"Don't throw stones, dearest. You're living in a house of glass."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
Rebekah surges to her feet. Picks her apart with just her eyes. She leans in very close, and murmurs, "I think you do."
Elena stumbles back. No. No. She might be so warped inside that her heart refuses to let go of her memory of that quicksilver creature she had loved, loves still, but she would never— could never betray another for his sake. Hadn't she proven all of that the night she'd freed Tyler and lost everything else?
She could never betray herself the way that Rebekah suggests.
"I thought you were my friend," she says at last, her voice tight with tears.
"I am. But Nick's my brother. He's family."
"And I'm not." Of course. Family. That thing she no longer has. Her rage crumbles, replaced in an instant by a terrible, bitter wave of loneliness that crashes through her. "I have to go," she mumbles, and runs inside.
Runs. The thing she is best at.
She avoids Rebekah for days after that. Cannot bear to face her. Whether it's from the hurt of having Rebekah spell out exactly where she ranks her next to Klaus, or from a fundamental desire to avoid acknowledging whether there had been any truth to what Rebekah had said to her, Elena shrinks at the thought of actually talking to her again.
It's a better and a worse kind of loneliness than she is used to, having Rebekah within arm's reach and yet pushing her away despite it all.
There are a couple of times when they run into each other—Rebekah doesn't quit her habit of sunbathing on the iron lawn chairs just because they've had a fight, or shrink from using the parlor, the kitchen, even the library howsoever she sees fit. For her part, Rebekah never makes anything much of these meetings, silently stepping out of Elena's path, or quietly and pointedly ignoring her while she mows the grass or waters her garden.
There are a few times when Rebekah pauses, though, shifting from foot to foot as though she would like to speak. Elena always hurries away before Rebekah can say whatever devastating thing that would undoubtedly spring from her lips.
Rebekah hadn't really been wrong about her, is the thing. That had been the thing that cut her most. How in knowing her, Rebekah had also learned where to aim the knife.
Maybe, if Rebekah would come back to sit at the foot of her bed, in those thin hours between night and morning, she might be able to reach out—to take her hand, and everything between them will resolve into its simplest shapes.
But those early hours have always been a dangerous time for Elena. A time when her lies melt into nothing more than sound, and the truth of her heart beats live and glowing and impossible to deny.
She can't risk seeking Rebekah out, then, brave as she feels lying hot and twisted up in her bed linens, unable to sleep, because she knows it would do no good.
Rebekah would see through her.
Worse, Elena would see through herself.
Five days go by before Rebekah slips into her bedroom one morning as she is meditating and promptly disrupts all of Elena's hard work.
"I have to speak to you."
"I'm sort of busy."
"You're just sitting about with your eyes shut. Hardly looks busy to me."
"What do you want?" Elena snaps, rising from where she has been sitting cross-legged on the floor at the foot of her bed.
"I came to—to give you something." She holds up slim black bracelet, made from braded rope with a polished black stone woven into the center.
She had seen an identical bracelet once on Davina Claire's wrist.
"Where did you get that?" She can't keep the surprise from coloring her voice.
Rebekah's brows quirk. "You recognize it then?"
"I've seen one like it before."
"The High Witch of the French Quarter Coven entrusted me with it—that Claire girl who was at the center of all that bother a few years ago."
"I remember. Why would she give it to you?"
"It's a bit of a story…" Rebekah gestures to Elena's bed. "Do you mind?"
Elena waves her permission for Rebekah to sit, but, rather than join her on the bed, she crosses to the other side of the room and leans against the wall, arms crossed over her chest, waiting.
Rebekah sits down at the edge of her bed and sighs. "I see you will not make this easy. Very well." She takes a deep breath. "New Orleans was where I made port when I first returned to the West. At the time, enjoying Marcel's hospitality seemed like the best way to really put my thumb in Nick's eye." She smiles to herself then, a smug little secret smile. "Naturally, he welcomed me with open arms."
"So he survived the werewolf bite." Enough to take Rebekah back into his bed, at least.
Rebekah startles, as though shaking herself from a reverie. "Yes—that's exactly where I was heading with this story. He's astonishingly close to that Claire girl, you know. Like a father to her—a very good, loving father. I grew restless in the City that Care Forgot after a mere couple of weeks—it was soon obvious to me that Marcel and I no longer fit into each other's lives the way that we once did— and it was as I was organizing my effects to leave that Davina sought me out and gave me this token." She rotates the bracelet between her fingers, a contemplative crease between her brows. "She told me that if I ever saw you again, that I should give you this. She called it a friendship bracelet—isn't that amusing? — a token in gratitude for saving Marcel's life from Nick's bite."
The vial of blood she had managed to slip off of Klaus in the middle of that battle at the Abattoir.
Rebekah laughs, though there's no humor in it. "That's how I got the idea to pay you a visit, actually. That here might be the rebellion I sought. Before that, I'd planned to strike out for San Francisco."
Elena wrestles with her inherent suspicion. "You've had the bracelet all summer. Why are you waiting until now to give it to me?"
"Because, whether or not that witch chooses to call it a friendship bracelet and pass it off as some silly symbolic gesture, it's obvious it's enchanted somehow, for good or for ill. I couldn't just hand it over."
"You don't know what it does."
"No, but it's obvious that you do." She holds the bracelet up once again, offering it to her. "Here, take it."
She hesitates. "You haven't answered my question. Why are you letting me have it? You're obviously suspicious and don't trust Davina one bit."
"Because despite all of my misgivings about her, I do trust you. And because I want us to be friends again. I no longer enjoy your frowns or your pain, least of all when I know that I am the one who has caused a portion of it."
It hits her all at once what she's doing. Presenting her with this gift, this peace offering, because she won't go against her brother when it comes right down to it, nor can she bring herself to apologize for it. How very like her.
"You're taking a risk," Elena tells her softly. "That bracelet could be a weapon."
"I doubt you'd warn me if it was, but I'd choose to trust you with it even were that so." She takes a deep breath. "Elena, I can't grant you the freedom you desire from my brother. No one can. And I won't betray him, no matter what, even if I could release you myself. But… I do hope that this bracelet, whatever it is that it does, helps you to live with that."
Without even realizing what she's doing, Elena finds herself perched on the edge of her bed, taking the bracelet from Rebekah's hand. "It's charmed with a protection spell," she tells her vaguely. "A powerful one, but that's it. Davina used to wear a bracelet just like this, when she was on the run from the French Quarter Coven. I'm not even sure what Davina had in mind when she made this. I'm surprised that she would."
At her explanation, Rebekah's tense posture relaxes like a marionette whose strings have been cut. Relieved, obviously, that she hadn't miscalculated and unwittingly handed Elena a Dark Object. Instead of commenting on this, though, Rebekah focuses on Davina. "She called you her friend. I don't suspect there are too many she would name so. Perhaps that is the long and short of it."
"Yeah. Maybe."
"So. Friends again?"
Elena smiles. "I'll never not be your friend, Rebekah."
"This is going to sound terribly stupid, but I'm so relieved. You're the first female friend I've had since—I don't know. I've only ever had my brothers, really. And of course Marcel and later Stefan. Everyone else has come into and then raced out of my life before I really had the chance to get to know any of them. You're the first girl who's ever stuck. I wasn't ready for us to no longer be friends."
Gently, Elena hooks the tips of her fingers against Rebekah's. Even now, just the barest touch of Rebekah's skin against her own sends little shocks of heat all through her. With deliberate slowness, she leans forward, and presses a chaste kiss to the side of her mouth. "You came back for me when no one else ever did. I'll never forget that. Not ever."
Rebekah pulls her into a tight hug. "I'll never forget you, Elena," she whispers into her hair, so softly, she doesn't think she had been meant to hear it at all.
They get rip-roaring drunk that night. So drunk that Elena thinks it's a great idea to teach Rebekah the Electric Slide, which she hasn't actually attempted since grade school. Rebekah mocks it, of course, but still takes pains to time her steps perfectly to the rhythm of the song, which they pull up on her phone. After, Rebekah tries to teach her the Charleston, but Elena can hardly see straight and she ends up doubling over and giggling uncontrollably into her knees every time Rebekah sashays across the room like a silent film star. The third time Elena tries to kick her leg up for the first step, she falls into the parlor sofa and doesn't get back up.
"There's one thing you've never told me," Rebekah says, later, after they've both caught their breath and have made it through the last of Klaus's good brandy. "How is it you've had free rein over the entire manor? Nick compelled you not to open any closed doors."
Elena squints at Rebekah through one eye. "All of his old compulsions fell away when I daggered him. The only ones left on me are the ones he set just before he left."
Rebekah startles. "But that would mean you remember…"
"Yeah."
"I would never do that to you now."
"I know."
But she never says she takes any of it back, either. That's not her way.
For a few more weeks, as August gives way to September, things between them settle back into the familiar routine. The days begin to shorten, and the nights grow cooler as summer dissipates into the first breath of autumn. The restlessness remains in Rebekah, but softer, easier to ignore.
One morning, they are in the kitchen making Cherry Bounce and giggling over the polaroids they had taken of each other the night before using one of Stefan's old cameras when Rebekah's phone rings for the first time all summer. They both freeze for a long moment, the inoffensive jingle overly loud in the sudden silence between them.
"I have to get this," Rebekah says, staring down at the screen with huge eyes. The way she has the phone angled, Elena can't see whose name flashes on the caller ID, but she doesn't need to.
She knows.
Abstractly, Elena notes the way Rebekah's hands are stained red with cherry juice up to her wrists as she lifts the phone to her ear. The low autumn sun streaming in through the kitchen windows illuminates a bright golden bar of light across her cheek and mouth and the hand holding the phone to her ear, leaving her eyes and throat in shadow.
Faintly, for the first time in years, Elena hears his voice. Indistinct and tinny over the connection—she closes her eyes and reaches for him on instinct, grasps nothing, nothing—over the oceans that must lie between them. It is still his voice. Low and warm. Coaxing. A voice he had used with her often, in those halcyon days during their first week in New Orleans, when she had first fallen so helplessly in love with him.
She clutches at the edge of the counter, her knees suddenly weak. Impossible for her to have the strength to hold herself up—not when all she wants to do is to listen, to curl up close to Rebekah so she can hear him just a little better; not when the specter of that old nearly forgotten urge to escape, in the most profound way possible, billows up within her so oppressively she thinks she may faint.
All at once she realizes that Rebekah is speaking, her voice calm and quiet, dripping in ennui, indecision. "Traveling on my own, yes…. I've met all sorts of interesting people…. No, not so interesting as all of that— but they tasted divine…. " Her answers, short and cool to begin with, grow warmer as the conversation continues. "You must be teasing. Of course I've missed you." She turns away, then. Lets herself out the door, onto the lawn, carrying the sound of Klaus's voice away with her.
Elena watches her, frozen to the spot, as she wanders over the grass, her bare toes curling in the cool blades whenever she pauses. At one point she laughs, tipping her face back, and the sun catches blindingly bright against her sharp white teeth.
Rebekah slips back inside some fifteen minutes later, the phone still pressed to her ear. "I've amassed a few more trunks since we parted ways—I'll need some time to make arrangements," she murmurs into the phone. Then, very softly, "Always and forever." She hangs up. Tosses the phone on the counter. "That was Nick," she tells her, somewhat needlessly.
Elena opens her mouth to speak, but the words don't come right away. She takes a swig from the bottle of cognac they were using to make the Cherry Bounce and lets the sharp heat of it fortify her enough to ask, "What did he want?"
"To reconcile. Elena, he wants me to return to him."
"You told him yes."
"What else should I have done?"
She doesn't know. Stayed with me, she wants to shout, except she knows Rebekah too well for that. She's never been able to tell her brother no. She can't even be angry at Rebekah for this—not really. She's always known their time together would be limited. Always known it, except that somehow she's allowed herself to forget that Rebekah would eventually leave, and her life would have to return to its old patterns once again.
She can do that. She can survive.
She doesn't have another choice.
Elena takes another sip from the bottle. Her hand shakes, and she ends up dropping the it with a clatter when she tries to set it down.
Rebekah steadies it before it can tip over. Her hand closes over Elena's. "This won't be like the last time," she says.
"How can you say that?"
"Because I'm going to come back for you. I promise it."
The next morning, Elena stands out in the gravel drive, watching Rebekah load the last of her luggage into the trunk of her sedan.
She turns back to Elena. Gives her a brief, tight hug. "I'm coming back for you," she reaffirms, murmuring the words into Elena's hair.
Elena watches her as she pulls away, before eventually disappearing around the bend in a haze of white dust.
Alone again, she has trouble returning to the routines which had so grounded her during those lonesome years. Solitude no longer suits her as it once had. She misses the sound of Rebekah's voice, the warmth of her body, the inventiveness and unpredictability of the little distractions she would devise to pass the long warm days together. She misses her friend.
She goes on long walks in the woods. Spends hours out there, ambling through the familiar dips and swells of the landscape, surrounded by the noise of forest creatures, the wet crunch of brown autumn leaves under her feet. It helps to clear her mind of the inevitable: thoughts of Rebekah, out there with Klaus, with Stefan. What would they be doing right now? Exploring some exotic city so distant Elena might never have heard of it before? Carousing together around the dinner table, laughing and drinking, their hands stroking possessively over each other as they plan out their next fresh debauchery? She should feel disgusted by the image, but all that comes to her is a nauseous longing flecked through with anger that she eventually recognizes as jealousy.
The big question: Would Rebekah forget about her again? She had done so so very easily before.
She's of two minds about it.
She hopes, of course—always hopes—but she does not count on Rebekah returning any time soon.
(Three years, the blink of an eye. She might be middle-aged before Rebekah thinks to keep her promise.)
One morning she accidentally knocks over her jewelry box. A panoply of twinkling little gems set in gold, silver, and platinum, gifts from Rebekah, spill from the case onto the floor, along with the dainty watch Klaus had gifted her and—the cloaking bracelet. Tucked away and forgotten about during those last few happy weeks.
Curious, Elena slides it onto her wrist. Doesn't know what she had expected to feel—Pins and needles? The sensation of ice sliding down the back of her neck? An itch, maybe?
All she feels… is an absence. Subtle. Something she would never notice if she weren't straining to detect something, anything at all.
She keeps the bracelet on anyway. Takes to wearing it. Something to remind her that, somewhere, she still has friends out there. That she hasn't disappeared from the face of the earth altogether.
Elena walks her dreaming garden.
It's one of those gray fall mornings where the air is so heavy with mist that the sky bleeds into the ground, where the familiarity of this space she knows so well has been transformed into something new, something mysterious and unknowable. She feels as though she is swimming through the unseen world as her thoughts tumble into strange patterns.
At the base of the Japanese Maple, she looks up, into the thicket of scarlet leaves drooping with water droplets. The tree almost glows in the pure gray light, red as a wound.
Elena is midway back to the house when she pauses. Looks back to her tree. Something about those blood red leaves, about that stray thought, red as a wound, had sparked something, a connection…
Blood red leaves. Her love for Klaus, like a wound within her. That was it. She had been sitting, just there under the tree, when Rebekah had explained how Klaus liked to use blood wards in order to keep others out. The leaves then had been a rich emerald green, not this unnaturally vivid color, but now, as she gazes over at that tree, her tree, she cannot help but be reminded of Klaus's blood. Her blood, in his veins. Making him hers.
The glint of the black stone on her wrist catches her eyes, triggers a memory.
He is your creature, and he exists because the magic that is your blood animates him. Like the bloodstone. You made both of them with a piece of yourself, and now you're their master.
The windows of that locked room irresistibly draw her focus.
She thinks she knows how to get in.
Elena spends two days in the library, poring over her notes, the drawings of the spellwork she had observed that time she'd successfully completed that trance ritual last fall (another lifetime ago), searching out any and all references to blood wards that she can find in her stacks of literature. Double-checking her reasoning, making sure that what she's planning isn't something incredibly stupid, something that could disrupt the wards around that room in some way that would make the spellwork volatile or dangerous.
On the morning of the third day since her epiphany out in the gardens, another bright, gray September morning, when the white light pouring in through the windows renders each room foggy, indistinct as a dream, she rises from her cocoon of notebooks and old journals and ancient texts, grabs a sharp, slim knife she keeps in her bedside table drawer, and heads to the magically sealed room on the second floor.
If her hunch is right—if Klaus had set these wards when they had arrived, after the sacrifice— then disabling them will be as simple as slicing open her palm and smearing her blood along the invisible focal points of the magic webbing the spell together. She thinks she's determined where those places are, based on her drawings and some engraved images she had found of similar spells in a few of those old leather tomes. Probably.
If she's wrong, or if Klaus had set the wards before her blood had changed him—had reforged him into an extension of herself, into her creature, into hers—then the snares she's identified embedded into the blood wards will snap down on her like a set of jaws. They could tear her apart, or crush the air from her lungs, or incinerate her on the spot. She's not certain what the specifics would be. Had decided not to pursue that, once she had confirmed that Klaus had indeed set up some nasty precautions against others trying to break through this spell.
Elena's hand trembles as she slices the blade across her palm. The blood wells to the surface, ruby dark and gleaming in the strange morning light.
For a moment, she cannot bring herself to press her bleeding palm to the first focal point. It's too great a risk, she cannot say with any certainty that this will work, she'd better turn around—
No. She takes a deep breath. Seizes control of herself as she slowly ticks through the opening mantras of her meditations, taking deep breaths through her belly as she feels her heartrate slow to calm, regular beats. Feels the blood pumping through her veins. Keeping her alive. Strong. Anchors herself to her own will.
This is going to work.
When Klaus had set this blood ward, he had inadvertently given her a share of the ownership over it, because her blood flows in him, and she is his master.
She tells herself this, fiercely, over and over, until she believes it. Until she believes it's true.
Until Klaus's compulsion to live resubmerges itself in the dark waters of her subconscious, because it no longer senses a threat to her life.
Without giving herself a second to doubt herself, Elena lunges forward and slams her palm against the place in the doorjamb where the first focal point should be. She works quickly, smearing her blood along each of the seven places tying the spell together. Allowing the magic in her blood to dissolve the wards.
She feels it the instant the wards give way, like the sting of a rubber band, drawn tight, snapping back into shape.
The doorknob turns easily under her hand, the latch disengages, and the door swings up.
Triumph soars within her as she steps inside.
As she takes in the sight of four closed coffins gathering dust.
A/N: Buckle your seatbelts because this next chapter is going to be a wild ride.