[ fic ] when i was a little girl the world was small to me ; rebekah, the vampire diaries
Written for the prompt "I don't know when I'll be home / So save a place for me 'til I get there" by ever_neutral at The Vampire Diaries Free-For-All Comment Ficathon: Part 3. Originally posted here.
when i was a little girl the world was small to me » the vampire diaries. rebekah. pg. 939 words.
Rebekah learns that Mystic Falls is the same land she used to call home. warnings: um, none? I don't own these characters.
"Did you know, sister," Nik tells her as they drive, "that Mystic Falls is situated in almost the exact geographic location of our old village?"
They have lived in many places, but his tone makes it clear to which he is referring. Rebekah looks at him, looks for the trick, but he only smirks, and adds "Fun fact," as if that's all it is.
She tries to picture their old home, a frequent exercise but one in which she's never able to dredge up as many details as she would like. She remembers shelters of wood, the way the light filtered through the cracks, and how children ran laughing down the pressed dirt path. Flowers grew along the edges of the trees and she would pick them. Her father would build fires at night. Once a month, wolves howled in the woods.
There is a static silence between Nik and her, unspoken memories prickling the hairs on her arms, and she leans over to turn on the radio.
When they arrive at the town, it is hard to remember what she was expecting. (Home). This place is just as modern as the cities they drove by, all impressive, structured buildings and paved roads. There is a high school, there is a bar, there are signs that mark off everything she needs to know.
"Are you sure this was our home?" she demands, grabbing Nik's arm. He laughs at her vexation, and shrugs his arm free.
"Positive," he tells her, and the corner of his mouth twitches. "This is what a thousand years of change does."
She has never felt so old.
And then Nik leaves her in this town.
She fumes when she realizes he's departed without her, and buys a set of crockery from a local shop just for the sake of smashing it. Nik would call her silly if he was here to see, but of course the whole point is that he's not. He left her. Here. In the place she used to call home - when it was a different place.
Rebekah goes into the forest, away from the streets and cars and chattering voices. She makes her way through trees and underbrush and almost expects that if she goes just a little bit further, just a little bit further, she will stumble into the village where she grew up, as untouched by time as herself.
But of course, she finds nothing of the sort, and it doesn't surprise her truly because she's long accepted that she's condemned to an eternity of watching everything die around her.
"You were born here?"
Stefan looks up from his bloody game of Twister to raise an eyebrow at her. "Excuse me?"
She rolls her eyes and picks her way over to sit down beside him. "In Mystic Falls," she clarifies. "You were born here, when you were human?"
"Why in the world are you curious to know, Rebekah?" He puts a certain lilt on her name, sarcastic, and she wrinkles her nose and decides that she will have a word with her brother about this too when he gets back; he's made Stefan many times less agreeable and frankly it's annoying.
She takes his evasion as confirmation, though, and ponders what that means, that the Salvatores - and the dopplegangr too - came from the same earth as Nik and she and their other siblings, that the ground has changed so much but here they all are.
She goes into the forest again at nighttime, too choked in by this town to sleep. The moon is faint, half-formed in the sky, and it is dark between the trees as she listens for the crackling of a familiar fire.
She is going crazy. Rebekah tries to laugh, as if to prove she doesn't truly care, it's merely a joke, and if she can laugh at herself there is nothing to be worried about. It comes out too hysterical, and she closes her eyes.
Then she hears it: the trickling of water over rock. Opening her eyes, she begins to approach the noise. Was there a stream outside her village? There had to be, they fetched water for drinking. She remembers that now, and hot summer days where she'd dipped her feet in the water. Once she'd tried to push Elijah in, but he'd caught her with a laugh, and took her down with him.
But water changes. Streams dry up and new ones form, and it has been a thousand years.
And then she arrives at the waterfall. "Oh," she says, and her eyes fill with tears.
Rebekah lies at the top of the embarkment, and the water rushes by her. She remembers.
The waterfall scared her when she was a little girl, so she never climbed to the top. Her brothers wouldn't have let her anyway, and they were usually close by.
Now Nik is off building himself an army, and Elijah is waiting in a coffin to be brought back to life, and she is here, lying at the top of a waterfall that seems so small. She wishes her brothers were with her - always and forever, and this is the ground they walked when they were children.
There is a peculiar shooting star, flashing, moving quickly through the sky, and she thinks to wish on it before realizing that is an airplane. That would have scared her too when she was young, such terrible heights so many times greater than the waterfall.
She is a thousand years old now, and there is (almost) nothing left to scare her.
She wishes anyway.