[ fic ] our ungodly hour ; klaus/rebekah, the vampire diaries (1/2)
This was written for perfectlystill as a part of the tvd_holidays 2011 exchange, and oh my, what an experience it was. It feels so weird to be posting fic that I finished writing like, over a month ago, especially since I've had all this time to flail about it since and pick it apart in my head and whew, yeah. But anyway, this is my way-overboard fic I've certainly babbled about enough, and can finally post here now that reveals have gone up at the comm! A massive, massive thank you to the lovely ladyrostova who beta-ed this, read through various drafts even when some of it was only written in notes (and lord, you don't ever want to see how messy my fic-notes are) and who put up with all my crazy flailing and panicking and nitpicking and so on. You are the best, hun.
our ungodly hour » the vampire diaries. klaus/rebekah, elijah. r. 10,616 words.
He would come to be the most feared of them all, and she was the one he loved the most, though he dragged her down with him in his long, long fall from grace. A study through her eyes of this nearly-a-thousand-year-long descent. warnings: incest (half-siblings), depictions of violence, mild sexual violence/dubious consent. I don't own these characters.
The title for this fic comes from the song Ungodly Hour by The Fray. The quotations underneath the headings throughout are taken from John Milton's "Paradise Lost" for a purely thematic purpose. Originally posted here.
PART 1/2
OUR UNGODLY HOUR
They don’t believe in fate.
Or, at least, they believe in fate differently -
Niklaus believes in a fate that is his alone to control.
Rebekah does not think it so simple, but neither does she believe, not through all the years she lives, that anyone is predestined to be a certain way.
If that were so, how could her brother have become what he did, and how could she possibly love him all her life?
THE BEGINNING
“Greedily she engorged without restraint, and knew not eating death”
1.
Her father kills her at night time.
He offers them wine with a crook to his mouth, a bizarre imitation of a smile. Later, she reflects that it should have given him away, that she should have recognized it for an act, an illusion of pleasantry.
The wine is thick on her tongue, heavy and bitter, not as sweet as she likes. Niklaus sips it too, and they are mulling over the peculiar taste when their father slides his sword free of his belt. She never even thinks to feel alarm, only a mild confusion, but then he is stepping forward and something deep inside of her twitches, but-
And then his sword flashes out, runs straight through her, and it is truly such a simple action. In the initial seconds shock overpowers pain because it is all so incomprehensible, because it is Father, and she presses her fingers to her chest, gasping-Niklaus is shouting, calling her name desperately until his voice cuts off, gives way to an agonized groan-and it is this that finally tears a shriek from her throat.
She dies with her brother’s cries filling her head.
2.
She is even more confused when she wakes up. She’s curled on the floor, and she doesn’t remember falling asleep, she remembers-there is blood staining her clothes, messy over her heart, and she gasps, fingers scrabbling against the cold ground as she tries to sit up.
Her brother is there, Niklaus wraps a shaking arm around her as their father barges into the room, shoving a girl to the ground in front of them. Rebekah is shaking, dazed, and only able to process the fear clogging her throat. She watches her father slit the girl’s wrist, sees the blood well up on her skin, and an ache ripples through her, like nothing she’s ever known.
She’s trying to breathe, but it all feels wrong, as if the air is getting trapped in her lungs, and she bends her head upon her father’s request, presses her mouth to the cut on the girl’s wrist and sucks in desperately, lets the thick blood coat her tongue and seep down her throat. When she pulls away, she is gasping again, eyelids heavy and hands curled into fists against the ground. She feels all parts of herself so strongly, is struck by new awareness of every inch of flesh and muscle, a certain ecstasy soaking through her.
When she opens her eyes, the first thing she sees is Niklaus. He looks horrified.
(This is the part that she always forgets later. She began to lose her humanity before he did.)
3.
They steal away into the woods, away from the other villagers’ frightened looks and the way they hustle their children quickly over the thresholds of their homes.
Amongst the trees, Rebekah allows herself to breathe, a long, unnecessary, delightful breath of air. Where Niklaus is tense, shoulders tight and hands balled at his sides, she feels relaxed, all loose limbs and a strength surging under her skin like nothing she’s ever possessed.
She closes her eyes, throws her arms out and spins around once, caught up in the euphoria of it. She darts a tight circle around her brother, faster than anyone should be capable of running. She laughs, grins impishly up at him and plants her palms against his chest. Her fingers splay out over his heart, and she curls them into his shirt briefly before shoving hard, sending him sprawling into the ground.
He is back on his feet quickly, a blur of beautiful motion, like nothing she’s ever seen before, and her lips part slowly as she watches. Niklaus saunters closer, and she does not run, not even when he seizes her arm in one hand, and settles the other tight on her waist. His fingers curl and uncurl in increments, adjust; he is testing this new strength as well - and then he throws his weight into her, sends her flying backwards to the ground, only he flies too, tumbling down with her and catching himself on top of her, hands hard against the forest floor.
A noise - a growl - comes from her, and she flips him over easily, smirking even as she untangles her limbs from his and rises. She twirls again, first in a quick flash, and then slowly, arms outstretched, and she has never felt more graceful. Her arms are still hanging out when she stops, fingers curled slightly in the air.
“Look!” She laughs. “It is as if we are gods, Niklaus,” she breathes, exalted.
Her brother is still on the ground, wearing a fond smile that darkens at her words, a curve to his mouth which does not spell anger but sadness, and she thinks that he looks tired, and then - how could he be tired already, when we will live forever?
“We are not gods, Rebekah,” he says as he stands slowly, so slowly, a challenging glint in his eyes as if he is relishing not using the new speed they both possess. He reaches out with his hand, and she thinks he might stroke her cheek, or touch her arm, as he often does, but instead he finds her hand and tangles his fingers with hers tightly.
He squeezes, and his eyes meet hers, and she is appalled by the sorrow in them.
And then he whispers to her. “We are monsters.”
4.
She feels indestructible until the day her father kills her mother. Niklaus is the one to tell her, with shaking hands clutching her arms and a wretched desperation in his voice that would tear her apart if she were not already torn to pieces by his words, what he is telling her.
She cries, gasping sobs that wrack her body as tears run their course down her cheeks. She lets her brother’s arms encircle her, tries to find the familiar safety in them and cries even harder when she can’t, when he keeps talking, delivering this irrational reality she does not want to accept.
“I will hate him forever,” she chokes, voice muffled into Niklaus’s shoulder. A long, deep breath and then she lifts her head just enough to speak clearly, enunciating every word. “I will never love him again.”
She feels her brother’s flinch ripple against her skin.
5.
In the end - later she will laugh at herself for having everything so backwards to think this the end - there are only three of them that remain.
Rebekah wraps her fingers tight around her mother’s necklace, summons up her image in mind and tries to keep it there as she extends her hands out to her brothers.
“Always and forever,” she swears, and she means it.
But she is so foolish to pretend to have any understanding of those words, and too young to realize how foolish she is.
THE ELEVENTH - THE TWELFTH CENTURY
"Headlong themselves they threw down from the verge of Heav'n"
6.
They leave too, because they have nothing to stay for, but they leave together.
7.
They wander the continent, Elijah, Niklaus, and she. They avoid their other siblings who’ve fled with the four winds; they kill all humans they come across. Niklaus no longer looks horrified when they drink blood, has not since that first day. (Or perhaps it was merely that he could not bear her as a monster, but now he stomachs that just as well.)
Rebekah comes to learn her brothers’ sorrow and bitterness as well as her own, and they learn hers, and the three of them wrap themselves up in all of it, in each other, and she thinks that she needs no one else in the world.
She is certain in this, but it is still no safeguard against crying herself to sleep at night, crippled by loneliness that creeps up on her and recedes and creeps back again. But there is usually a brother’s arm wrapped around her soon when she cries, and a shoulder to bury her face and stifle her gasps in, and then it does recede and the world is better again.
They are the world to her, her brothers. They are all of it entirely; she cares for nothing else.
8.
“There is a way to reverse Mother’s curse,” Niklaus tells them, explains about a smooth stone and a sacrifice that would put everything to natural order. They seize on this eagerly - a goal, a quest, something to do with all the time that stretches interminably ahead of them.
Rebekah never considers that they are devoting themselves to a battle that is Niklaus’s alone, or that her brother’s battle could ever be anything but hers as well. She grins at the genius of his plans, assures him and Elijah that the rumours they spread will indeed set the world looking for this stone, that they will find it and victory will be theirs.
And so they travel south first, and they inscribe their little story in stone, paint it on the walls of caves. Niklaus boasts of future generations that will learn of the legend and hunt for the moonstone, and Rebekah feels a shiver of awe at how easy it is to play with the future, carve themselves and their silly curse into the history of civilizations.
They are setting the stage for a waiting game like none before.
Niklaus laughs at this, winks at her, and she knows there is a reason she is doing this that goes deeper than taking the burden of her brother’s feud on her shoulders. She thinks that Niklaus will be happy when the curse is reversed - he seems sad from time to time, a bitterness locked deep inside that even she cannot reach. And all she’s ever wanted for her brother is for him to be happy.
THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
"But what will not ambition and revenge descend to?"
9.
Rebekah is nearly two hundred years old when they leave the continent and travel across the sea. Elijah tells her this is the land their parents came from, and she shivers, more at unease from this thought than she can say.
But Niklaus arranges a manor for the three of them, and Rebekah puts her qualms away in favour of establishing a deep appreciation for riches. She wears gowns of silk and velvet, and the people of the manor - all compelled - call her Lady Rebekah. She and her brothers feed on the serfs and the servants, and sometimes they kill them, because indulgence is their birthright in their second life.
She thinks it is a rather perfect life - comfortable, simple, and with Elijah and Niklaus - Klaus, he calls himself now - at her side. They still treat her like their little baby sister from time and time, and she obliges, even crawling into their beds some nights when it is too cold and lonely in her own. She falls asleep with one of her brothers curled around her, warm, and she thinks that she could go on living like this for a very long time indeed.
When everything does start to fissure, though, she is the one who starts it.
It grows tiring, eventually, being treated like a child when she has been alive for two centuries. (The fact that she herself still feels like a child most days is irrelevant). She blames her brothers for this, and she blames Klaus especially. They begin to argue, like she’s never argued with him before, and one night she runs off, tells herself that she will show him she is no child in need of his constant overprotection.
It takes four days before he finds her, in a village that is three hours away on horseback. And she had planned to throw a fit if he tried to drag her back, but she can’t bring herself to muster up the energy - it is so tiring to ever try to cross her brother. Besides, they still have forever, and she’d rather feel young than old, so she slips back into her old role to content him.
10.
They are still at the manor when their brother, Finn, finds them. Rebekah feels an ache when she sees him, a living memory of the life she once lived before this one. She is excited at first, thinks that he will live here as well, that this has given spark to the possibility that one day all her siblings could be reunited.
And then Klaus drives a dagger through his chest.
She cries out when she sees Finn’s skin grey and crack, and runs to grab at Klaus’s arm, shrieking “What have you done?” She doesn’t-she cannot understand what has happened, because there is supposed to be nothing that can kill them, they ensured that. Other vampires - the people they learned to turn - they can die with a stake through the chest, but not them. They are truly immortal. Or so she has spent two hundred years believing.
“A dagger dipped in ash from the old white oak, sister,” Klaus tells her, face dark. His eyes are on their brother’s body on their floor.
When? she wants to ask him. When did you make this discovery, when did you collect the ash, when were you going to tell Elijah and me?
Instead, she whispers, “And how many daggers do you have?”
He turns to look at her then, cups her cheek gently with one hand and leans close.
“Enough for all my brothers and sisters who think it best to betray me and side with him.”
She will realize her error later, that she never questioned whether by that he meant their siblings who had originally deserted, or that he was prepared in case of betrayals from Elijah and her too.
THE FOURTEENTH CENTURY
"The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n"
11.
They leave the manor eventually, though Klaus takes their brother’s body with them and Rebekah tries her best not to think of it at all. They travel to Lisbon in Portugual, and she is captivated instantly, falls in love with the city and the sun and the sea. She takes to exploring the harbour, awed by the stories the sailors have to tell of far away cities and lands. One day, she will have seen them all, she decides.
There is one sailor in particular, Francisco, who charms her. He has dark eyes and waves of hair down to his shoulders, and a low voice and way of looking at her that makes her shiver with excitement and smile slowly back. He tells her of lands to the south, and to the east, and how he dreams of sailing there.
She does not tell him that she knows a land across the ocean, that she was born there and lived there for nearly two hundred years.
He is beautiful, and his blood tastes even more so, when she compels him in the darkness of his ship’s cabin and buries her teeth in his beautiful flesh. She makes love to him there in the cabin too, and he murmurs pretty things into her skin, goddess and angel divine, and then one day, marry me, darling.
She says yes, knows that it can only last a few years but is enjoying this new happiness too much, enjoying being loved.
12.
Klaus is furious when she returns to the home she shares with him and Elijah a few days later, and shows him the ring on her finger, tells him giddily how they held a ceremony and now she has a husband.
There is a challenge in her voice; she expects her brother will take the news far from well. But she’s still not expecting the crazed bright of his eyes or how he grabs at her hand angrily, rips the ring off her finger so roughly she cries out.
“Why would you do this, Rebekah?” he demands, grabbing her arm now, shoving her back into the wall and crowding close. “You are a stupid, silly girl indeed, to want some human.”
He’s breathing heavily, his words an angry rush, and she shoves him away from her.
“He loves me,” she tells him in a shaking voice, trying to keep her head high.
Klaus laughs, wide-eyed. “That is your reason, sister?” He scoffs. “Then you are stupid, I fear.” He tosses her ring down on the floor between them. “Take it, then. Put it back on your finger and go play at being some sailor’s wife.”
She dips down to pick the ring up, slides it onto her finger under his watchful eye.
“But be careful, sister,” he adds suddenly, taunting. “Surely it is bad luck to take your ring off so early in your marriage.”
“You took it off,” she points out, exasperated.
And her brother grins, impossibly smug. “Exactly, darling,” he tells her before he leaves the room, and she almost shouts after him, too frustrated not understanding what he even means.
It is a game, she tells herself, just another one of Klaus’s games.
Even so, her ring feels loose and heavy, out of place, on her finger. She is imagining it, surely. Her brother’s words have rattled her, nothing more. She hears her husband’s voice again, Marry me, darling, and they sound odd for the first time.
(She realizes it as she steps outside: Klaus calls her darling.)
13.
They have a year together, her and her husband - a happy year. She compels him not to tell her secrets, compels him not to be scared, and eventually stops drinking from him altogether.
And then one morning, Rebekah wakes up in a blood-soaked bed.
Her brother’s perched on the edge, and her husband’s head is on the floor.
She should scream, but her throat is too thick, clogged with the sickening sense that she should have known this would happen all along - that she did know this would happen all along.
Klaus doesn’t even look angry, merely sits up straighter when he notices she’s awake. He hasn’t bothered to clean the blood around his mouth, but he licks his lips now.
“You’ve had your fun, sister, now come along,” he says, his voice slow, delicately dangerous.
“You killed him.” She starts out calm, but her voice breaks on the last word, a mistake slight enough that most wouldn’t notice - but her brother does, her brother is always so hyperaware of her every weakness.
If there was a casual lightness in his face before, it darkens now, and he edges closer to her, balling one fist in bloody sheets. “You’re the one who started this,” he warns. You’re the one that went back on your word, Rebekah. Always and forever,” he echoes those ghosts of words from so long ago, and it almost sounds like a mockery.
She lowers her gaze to the floor, the blood-soaked rug and the strewn body parts that were her husband, if only she could put him back together again. “He loved me,” she says in a dull voice. “And I liked that.”
She doesn’t realize how close Klaus has slid until he’s grabbing her chin, forcing her to turn her face to him. “I love you, Bekah,” he insists furiously, madly. Her brother is mad, or they both are - two mad, mad creatures and pieces of a man on the floor.
Klaus’s hand slips when she shakes her head, though he seizes her wrist instead, needing to hold her - or hold her down.
“That’s not the same,” she tries to explain, suddenly so tired in face of explaining. She should be crying. She should not be sitting here so calm, ignoring the redness seeping into the room everywhere, like a slow drowning of them both. One day we will drown in all the blood, she thinks, and it almost seems true, like their own dangerous prophecy.
“Not the love of a brother,” she tells him as if speaking to child. “He loved me truly, properly-”
And it is as if she has slapped him, as if she is the one who killed his love. (Later she will wonder if in some way she did, through words that contradicted what he already imagined and what she hid from.)
“Oh, but did you love him, sister?” he asks, cruel again, always falling so easily into cruelty. His finger traces a circle into the inside of her wrist. “Did you love him like you love me?”
And she wants to explain it again, wants to tell him that it’s merely different, but it’s all caught in her throat, and nothing she tries to say is sounding right, the words that make so much sense in her head sound so fumbled when she speaks them, and she can’t even try again.
“Shall you pretend I’m him, if you loved him so much?” he taunts, his face pressed close to hers, foreheads sloped together, and he breathes out at the same moment she breathes in, and then he kisses her sharply, teeth biting her lip, tongue sliding harsh against hers - “Was he like this, sister?” he asks softly, unkindly, and she shivers, starts to shake her head.
“Did he kiss you like this?” Klaus murmurs, before his lips brush her own again, silencing the noise in the back of her throat.
She pulls back, makes to shove at him - “What are you doing-Stop it, Klaus,” - but curls her fingers into his shirt instead, clutches him and does not let go.
A slow smile unfurls on Klaus’s face, and she wants to let go of him, wants to push him away but can’t, can’t do anything in this pivotal, impossible moment. Her brother’s hand is on her leg, and he starts to slide it up her thigh, leans into her, over her, until she’s lying on her back, trembling at the fact that this has taken so long to get to and somehow she still doesn’t believe it.
“Was he gentle with you, Bekah?” Klaus asks, and slips his hand under the shoulder of her nightgown, slides it off and presses his mouth to the skin. He lifts his head. “Is that why you loved him, something gentle in your life?”
“I didn’t love him,” she whispers, her lips almost brushing his.
And he smirks, and there’s his tell - he just wanted her to say it.
She thinks she could explain it, though. If he wanted. She knows her reason as soon as the confession tumbles out, but she bites her cheek and holds it inside, doesn’t give voice to it even as Klaus helps pull her nightgown over her head, trails his kisses lower and lower, makes her whimper and writhe and murmurs “Darling” into her skin when he enters her. “I love you” he says too, fierce and possessive, like he is the only man allowed to love her, and she says it back, means it for all the same reasons she could not love her husband.
She doesn’t know how to love anyone who isn’t her own blood.
[Continued here.]