fic: here is the deepest secret nobody knows (2/5)
II. THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT
For her services in the Conquest, Rebekah is granted a lordship.
Bravery, they say. Bravery and courage, even in the face of Death.
That, she laughs at. Laughs and thinks, I am Death.
“Lord Niklaus,” the Conqueror says, and she rises, the blood still drying on her fingertips.
Let none say she does not earn her power, does not conquer it when she realizes she has none. Let none say that hers is the power of family, of entitlement, because this-this is hers. This is Rebekah’s. Not her father’s, not her mother’s, and not her brothers’. She has dipped her hands in blood for this, has let death roar in her veins and burn through what is left of her heart for this, and this-this is hers.
(She exists in a cage, you see. And the caged need something to call their own.)
Their younger brother finds them, more than a hundred years after he left, and Nik smiles kindly, murmurs reassuring words, and drives a dagger through his heart.
Rebekah’s words choke on a strangled cry, and she falls forwards-still such a girl, such a little girl-inches towards the brother she does not quite remember fully, whose face she does not quite comprehend.
“He betrayed us, Bekah.” Klaus says, and Elijah says nothing, stands by, averts his eyes. “He left us. We cannot tolerate any hint of treachery. Our loyalty to each other must be absolute.”
“He didn’t betray you.” She whispers. “He just-”
“Left.” Klaus’s voice leaves no room for dissent. “That’s betrayal, Bekah. That’s betrayal in its purest sense.”
“It’s freedom.” She says. “He wanted freedom, from us. From you. He wanted a choice.”
He looks at her through heavy lashes, and does not say a word, wills her to take it further, if she dares.
She does not. What she fears isn’t the same fate. What she fears is that if she says it, if she gives voice to the words in her mouth, then there will be no way back. What is said cannot be unsaid, and the two of them, they live in a perpetual cycle of unspoken thoughts.
And what would you do, dear brother, she thinks, when my loyalties do not prove absolute?
The first doppelganger is born into a brothel in Calais, doe eyes dark and bright and a mouth that twists easily into the smile of a whore. She is her mother’s daughter.
It is a shock, the first time Rebekah sees her, pale and bloody in a soldier’s barracks, beaten to death. She bends, brushes her hair away from her forehead and sees, for the first time in over two hundred years, the face of a girl dead and rotting in the ground.
Klaus does not speak for a month afterwards.
She thinks, on some nights, that he shall surely leave her.
She does not voice it. She gives the thought no sound, merely lets it fester in her mind, lets it blur her vision every time her brother smiles at her, calls her Bekah in that reverent tone, and it is always on the edge of her tongue, aching to escape, but she says nothing. If she voices it, it becomes true. If she lets it out of her, lets it out of the hole it is burning inside her then it shall be real, and he will create his hybrids and one day he shall cease to call her Bekah and instead look at her like she is nothing, like she is not there. She must not let it escape.
That is her deepest fear. She has given up everything she might have had for him. She has allowed herself to rot from within, as surely as if she is dead, crafted herself a cage of words and bonds and blood. For him, for him always.
This is why, she supposes, when the young knight in her brother’s retinue smiles at her, she smiles back.
He is tall and golden and grins like a boy, with something almost like purity in his eyes. She feels her insides flutter when he bows low over her hand, murmurs some trite recycled courtesy, and cannot help when the pulse in her wrist quickens.
“Like the sun,” he compliments her one night, at one of the events her brother likes to organize. He winks at her, and it is clear that even he finds the words in his mouth hackneyed and stale. “The moon, perhaps, if you like that better.”
She smiles up, smiles prettily for her white knight, the way she hasn’t smiled in decades. “You must say that to every lady, Sir Francois. You should not seek to trick me thus. I am but a girl.”
“Only the ladies who are worthy of the sun and moon,” he replies, smooth and quick and Rebekah should be wary, she should be careful, she should think, one death, simply one and it shall be Anica all over again-but instead she smiles back and steps forwards, watches his smile twitch, watches the pulse in his throat quicken, and her eyes darken.
When she speaks again, her voice is low, hoarse. “And am I a lady to you, Sir?”
She watches him swallow hard. “A queen,” he says finally. “The Queen of Love and Beauty.”
There is a tourney the next day, and she sits by her brother’s side, watches the boy ride with her colours around his arm.
What a strange turn of events, Rebekah thinks. She has a champion now, never mind that the boy has no idea what it means to swing one’s sword with the intent to kill. He looks at her like she is a lady, and she acts the role for him, adds the word to her long repertoire of characters-killer, monster, vampire, sister-and lets it rub against her skin, lets it chafe at her, as sure as if it is a physical thing.
When he unseats his challenger, her white knight wheels his horse over to the grand stand, places a wreath of flowers in her lap, and grins like a boy. “For the Queen.”
Beside her, her brother’s face is blank, white and clenched, fingers digging into the arms of his chair.
She smiles graciously, fakes a valiant blush for her champion, and her brother is silent, her brother says nothing, but for the first time he looks at her truly, and she thinks-ah, there you go.
It has taken three hundred years, but he sees the monster now. The girl is gone.
She takes her champion to bed that night, lets her sighs mix through the strands of his gold hair, and bites hard. She bites until he cries out, until her teeth hit something very red, very thick and very vital beneath his skin. She kisses him with his blood on her lips, and sets him to sleep with some of hers.
Outside, under the moon, her brother waits for her.
His face is tight, a muscle jumping beneath the fall of his gold hair, just above the square cut of his jaw. His fingers tap, quick and insistent on the goblet of wine in his hands, and Rebekah folds herself, long and sinuous, against the wall, next to him.
How perfect her copy had been. Her white knight lacks the steely quality of her brother’s dark eyes, so incongruous against the rest of him, lacks that leonine quality in the cut of bone and the curve of cheek, but silently, Rebekah watches her brother’s mouth arch and twist and curl into the dark, and forgets, for a split second, that she has not kissed it.
He does not call her Bekah, does not speak as though he is about to pray.
(That is her tragedy, you see. They are both of them about to leave, but she leaves first, and she leaves last, just so he cannot do the same to her.)
“Do you wish to keep him?” He asks instead, his voice very low, very calm.
She reaches for the goblet in his hands, and presses her lips to where his had been. She drinks deeply, lets the sour bite of the wine merge with the velvet of her knight’s blood on her tongue. She does not lie.
“Yes.”
He closes his eyes, and bows his head, as if he is bearing a great weight. Rebekah swallows hard, and turns her head. Bites her lips so that they almost break skin.
“I suppose this was going to happen sooner or later.” He says, voice low and smooth and dangerous, just the tiniest hesitation before every word, as if he is working very hard not to give into his nature, to purr and not snarl. “You are still a girl, after all. Foolish infatuations are… bound to happen, I suppose.”
There it is again. That word, even when he no longer believes it. The denigration to girl.
“Why are you doing this?” He asks, but that is not the question. The question is why are you leaving me? The sentiment is you promised me forever. “Have I not loved you enough?”
She fixes him with a stare, lifts her chin, and her voice does not shake, her voice does not quiver. She does not hesitate. “The love of a brother.”
He stares at her for a long time, mouth twisting, as if he means to yell. And then he turns away.
“Fine.” He says. “Have him. Have your pet. Take him away, far from here. Mother to your heart’s content, and find me the next doppelganger.”
She looks away. “I shall not see you for a time, then.”
He stands up, straightens the cambric shirt she had stitched for him. “Do not come back until you find her. I don’t care how long it takes. You made your choice, and now you have to stick with it.”
She smiles, an ugly, twisted thing. “I never made a choice. I don’t make choices, Nik.”
He looks at her then, and his eyes are blank, and he looks at her as if she is nothing, as if she is not there. She listens to his steps until they fade into the night.
She goes back inside when the sun is beginning to rise, and snaps her knight’s neck.
She ventures south first, with her knight, to the caves and deserts of Africa, traces with her fingers her brother’s carvings in deserts and on long-abandoned city walls, eroded by sands and time.
How easy it is, she thinks, to toy with the future.
She learns different tongues, twists the words in and around in her mouth until they are perfect. She visits temples and castles, sees the world, for the first time, without her brother, only a proxy of him by her side. She indulges in every kind of delight, drinks and kills and laughs in equal measure, teaches her pet how to slaughter without staining his shirt, teaches him to hide his tracks, to bend others quietly and seamlessly to his will, and together, they lap at blood the way a cat laps at milk, and kiss each other with their victims’ blood still on their lips.
(And she does not notice, does not allow herself to notice, that her knight never bites as hard or slaughters as much as she would like, that blood does not enhance the shine in his hair but rather dims it, that his eyes are too blue for her liking, too light and too pure, even after all these years, that she prefers something darker, as if she is staring into the eyes of hell-
She says nothing, but barely a decade into the exile she so sought, she begins to ache.)
She plants her spies in every village, every castle, every land. Stewards and chamberlains and dukes and lords and half the serfs in every village in Europe, searching for a single face, for a single name. Their lives are hers, vampires and humans alike. They report to her, pay her penance, worship her as if she is a goddess, and her name becomes a blessing and a curse, long before the same happens to her brothers.
She is in Greece when she hears word of her brother, the first time in fifty years.
A village in Romania, the young vampire says, head bowed. Slaughtered, men and women and children alike, and amongst the piles of bodies, a single coffin is wheeled back to England, inside-another brother stuck with a silver dagger.
She brushes her hands down the front of her elaborate dress, and tilts her head, enjoying the fall of thick gold curls against the nape of her neck.My loyalties are absolute. “And?”
“He has the moonstone.” The boy says. “Your brother Kol had it all along.”
She smiles, looks down at her demure, folded hands. “And Elijah?”
“Still by his side. As dutiful as ever. They are establishing their own network of spies-”
“Tell my brother I have that covered.” She says. “I have eyes and ears throughout Europe, the Middle East and the Orient. It will take him years to set up a system like mine. Tell him not to bother.”
The young boy shakes his head. “Not of vampires. Or humans. Werewolves.”
She lifts her eyebrows.
“The Curse of the Sun and the Moon, Klaus calls it.” he says. “He has created a tale, a curse. If a werewolf breaks it, he says, it shall end their slavery to the moon, and for a vampire, the sun. He means to have two warring species looking for a single doppelganger. He wanted me to tell you, ‘you’re welcome’. Also, he told me to deliver this.” The boy hands her a piece of folded parchment.
She lifts it from his hand with delicate fingers, strokes its unbroken seal.
Kill him, it reads inside, in Klaus’s stark letters with his signature flicks. No loose ends, Bekah.
It is an order, not a request. She pours the boy another glass of the finest wine, and compels him to take off his ring.
(Finally, then, finally, a name, a face-
Katerina.)
parts i), iii), iv) and v)