fic: here is the deepest secret nobody knows (4/5)
IV. THE AGE OF REVOLUTIONS
They run through the length of Europe, always one step ahead but not always as siblings.
In London he is a wealthy American banker and she plays the role of demure wife, floating white cotton stitched into a Josephine gown as they ride through Hyde Park, all the society darlings hanging onto her every word, all the dapper gentlemen at his beck and call.
In Paris she is a socialite and he is her betrothed, and she goes through every shade of pastel while they row on the Seine. She meets an artist on the shore, some whelp named Renoir something or another, and her brother voices the thought, on quiet afternoons, of chopping off the boy's dainty white fingers, wonders aloud and comes to the conclusion that even artists must bleed blood, and not paint or dreams. She keeps him for a few months, discards him when he becomes bothersome, and leaves behind another boy haunted by her face.
In Vienna she is a rich widow, and he is her servant, dragged along in tow. He fills her champagne flute and whispers to her, Latin verses in velvet opera boxes, the gold tassels same glint as their hair. He whispers Norma's lines to her, Lucretia Borgia's, Anna Bolenna's, lips just air behind the curl of her hair, and she laughs at his inflections. They both pretend they do not remember what it is like to sing instead of snarl.
All these years and she is still by his side. All these years and she is still his.
She has pledged him her life, after all, she has killed and slaughtered and massacred and tore herself open for him. She has held his hand through it all, and he has clutched at her hard enough to bruise. In sickness, in health, for richer or poorer, till death do they part.
(Much of the late nineteenth century is spent in New York, under different names and different guises. This is a city that forgets quickly, a city of stars burning quickly and dying with even greater speed. Elijah makes an art of being forgettable.
It is 1899, and the three of them glide through high society, the new darlings of the gilded age, posing as the children of a southern oil tycoon, raised in the prestigious salons of Europe. Rebekah charms, Klaus beguiles and Elijah-Elijah is sober, remote, the dutiful elder son, though he is charming on occasion, a quiet tranquillity capable of drawing smiles and virtues from even the most solemn of matrons, and the most prudish of maidens.
In short, they lie.
Klaus has made an art of lies, you see. He is the master of the three of them-he is the one who plans, who thinks, who schemes. Elijah does. Elijah acts. Elijah executes. Elijah is a pair of well-trained, weathered hands, while Rebekah, in her blind, golden loyalty and the naiveté, still, of an innocent, seeks only to temper the worst of Klaus’s little cruelties. She is, more than anything else, his long dead heart, the last cog in the machine.
Now, Elijah stands, on a deserted street outside of the brothel Klaus and Rebekah frequents, on the outskirts of the city. He hears a laugh float down the street. A laugh like summer rain, like air bubbles in cold champagne. Elijah looks up, and sees, as if through different eyes, his siblings walking down the road, their hair glinting beneath the new gas lights.
She wears a shell pink dress, an airy confection of silk and lace, and Elijah, watches, silent, as Klaus leans over to whisper something into her ear, something that makes her shiver and smile.
“Elijah!” His brother sounds genuinely delighted to see him. “Have you taken leave of your paper work, then? Decided to become a man?”
“Nik,” Rebekah admonishes. “Don’t be an arse.”
Elijah straightens, and one of his clenched fists fall open, a single leaf of paper flying free.
His brother had always had an instinct for survival, a unique sense of danger. Elijah supposes it is his wolf side. Now Klaus’s eyes flash gold, and his lips curl.
“Bekah, love.” Klaus says. “Go inside, won’t you. Find me a pretty little thing for dinner.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” Rebekah’s mouth purses, a dainty gloved hand curling into a fist. “Say please, like a gentleman, for God’s sake-”
“Please go inside.” Klaus amends, voice even lower. “Bekah, go.”
“No,” Elijah says. “Rebekah, stay. You need to hear this too.”
For a moment, Rebekah stands between them, train held in one hand, looking from one brother to another, until, finally, she drops it, sighs, and glides over to plant an apologetic kiss on Elijah’s cheek, before whirling into the brothel in a haze of silk and perfume. Elijah remembers-Rebekah’s first loyalty had always been to Klaus. She had belonged to him before she had belonged to anyone else.
“The hybrid,” Elijah says finally, low and even, gesturing to the paper beneath Klaus’s feet. “Killed the Original Witch.”)
Later, when Rebekah comes outside, her tongue thick with perfumed blood, she finds her brother crumpled against a lamp post, a red stain on his white shirt.
“He’s gone.” Klaus says finally. “Elijah left us.”
They carry on. They carry on, as they always do; only now the two of them are well and truly alone.
Their family falls away around them, existing only in coffins and whispers and shadows. And Rebekah becomes her brother’s family twice over, thrice over, to fill the holes left behind by their brothers and the father who wants their heads. She smiles and grins and slaughters by his side, dips her hands in blood redder and thicker than the war she had fought almost a thousand years ago, becomes everything and more for her brother, just so she is enough.
(It weighs on her, heavy, as sure and real and solid as Atlas’s burden, but still she says nothing. It wraps its cold hands around her long white throat, but still, she chokes back words.)
In 1922, they are in Chicago.
The feeling she gets when she sees Stefan hits her like a physical thing. Knocks out the air in her lungs, makes her gasp, makes her stop.
It’s the light, she tells herself, as he poises himself on the bannister, grins at Gloria, grins at Gloria the same way Nik used to grin at her, almost a thousand years ago. It is the same, the same playful quirk of mouth, the same way how his sharp white teeth shine against his bottom lip, how the line of his lips are not swathed in shadows, how, for a split second, he seems incredibly young, this spitting image of Nik, this exact copy, better than her knight, better than any knight-
His eyes are not dead. That is the thing.
The boy turns his head, and the illusion shatters, like glass.
Smile again, she urges silently. Smile, smile.
Rebekah falls again, harder than she had before, for the same playful cruelty, the same quirk of mouth, the same way he whispers her name as though he is praying. It is only now that she realizes she has not heard her name murmured that way in over five hundred years.
She whispers to him what she had never whispered to her brother, wraps her legs taut around him in the dark of night, and says, I love you.
(On some nights she lies next to Stefan, in the crook of his arm, watches his chest rise and fall in this imitation of life and she presses her lips very lightly to his skin, thinks there must be something desperately wrong with her.
She has begun to wonder. Has begun to wonder about this whole thing, this whole enterprise, about her brother, about herself. Thinks there must be something wrong with her that when she looks on this man-this boy-in her bed, all she sees is her brother, all she sees is gold. She has begun to wonder lately, about this, about her family, has begun to wonder if she can ever love whom she chooses, if she can ever love outside the family.
This body is a fortress. This family is a cage.)
Stefan is a boy. He lights up her existence like so much unfiltered light, drinks and kills and laughs while he does it, shines with something that can almost be mistaken for gold. She looks at him, and thinks-I can make him better. She looks at him, and thinks-just a little work.
For the first time in her life, there is another path.
“A king,” he tells Klaus now. “You can be a king.”
(Klaus becoming a king does not make her a queen. She has nine hundred years’ worth of experience to know this. She knows, in royalty, which issues of one’s own body counts. Knows that a sister is nothing, compared to one’s own children.
“You can leave him,” Stefan had said once, with that grin. “Craft your own kingdom.”)
All it takes is a few words, a few well-placed thoughts, and this house of cards all comes tumbling down. Stefan looks them in the eyes, whispers a few well-chosen litanies, and tears it all apart. It is a different kind of compulsion, but it works, all the same.
“Then choose.” He says. “Him or me.”
She closes her eyes. Makes the first choice in her life.
And what will you do, dear brother, when my loyalties do not prove absolute?
parts i), ii) and iii)