Our Grand Denouement [Elena&Rebekah, 1/1]
Title: Our Grand Denouement.
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries (TVD).
Pairing(s): Rebekah/Elena, Caroline/Damon.
Rating: PG-13.
Word Count: 3821.
Warnings: Spoilers for Season Three.
Disclaimer: I do not own TVD, or any of its characters. :)
Elena and Rebekah didn't start out as a fairytale.
.
'This is what it feels like to have no choice,' were the lasts words Elena heard before she died.
Rebekah had whispered it into her ear soothingly, as if a lover, and snapped the girl's neck before she even had the chance to scream.
She sat with Elena for a few hours until the girl sputtered and gasped and sucked in the tense air between them, clawing her way back to the realm of the living. The wild tearful brown eyes found the vicious blue and there was silence. Rebekah did not smile, did not speak, did not explain. She waited until recognition and fear--paralyzing and heartbreaking--dawned on Elena's face, and then she leaned forward and purred, 'Welcome back' just as the panic began.
She beckoned for the blond boy she'd compelled--Matt Donovan--and had him bear his neck for the completion of Elena's turning. Elena had, of course, resisted, until Rebekah smashed the girl's head into Matt's neck and forced her to drink. Elena felt her fangs emerge, pushing through her sensitive gums, and she gasped out as her own blood intermingled with Matt's. When she had finished and Rebekah had released her Elena had fallen backward and begun to cry.
'Don't cry, Elena,' Rebekah said, coldly. 'Now my brother won't be able to make any more hybrids, and you can spend eternity with Stefan. Or is it Damon now? Ah, well, you've got time to figure it out.'
Elena closed her eyes and began to tremble. She was rendered wholesomely dumb; stricken with a shock so crippling it muted the fear. She lay on the floor and remembered Rebekah's face when she opened her eyes again--Rebekah's face, fringed with a halo of golden hair made impossibly brilliant by the dim sunlight filtering in through the windows. Elena remembered that Rebekah looked quite like an angel, then.
An angel that had just taken her soul.
.
Caroline and Bonnie had held her that night.
They'd fetched her some blood bags from Damon's stash and just laid with her in her bed and soothed her as she wept. She was still weak from the transition; her body was sore all over, and she was hungry, painfully hungry. Caroline tried to cheer her up by renting some movies and popping some popcorn like they used to a year ago before their worlds had exploded, but nothing could subdue Elena's turmoil.
After a while they stopped trying.
Bonnie perhaps took it the hardest, even when held against Damon and Stefan. She was there for Elena as much as she could be but there was only so much she could take. Now that her last human friend--her best friend who had been so reluctant to turn--was a vampire, Bonnie felt even more isolated and alone. A witch surrounded by vampires, told to do their bidding.
She could have killed Rebekah for what she did, but she wouldn't, because she knew better.
When Bonnie stopped coming around, it fell to Caroline to teach Elena how to adjust to her new reality. Damon, too, was of use, but had changed profoundly since Elena's turning; he had been captured by a quiet determination, as if absorbing Elena's sadness and becoming desperate to seek retribution. Stefan hadn't been seen in weeks.
'It's like when we all practiced for cheerleading try-outs. You just gotta learn the right moves,' Caroline would chime, chinking away at the wall that now separated she and Elena. But then bringing up old times proved to be a futile exercise that only led to a gripping nostalgia and unspoken melancholy.
Alaric was with Elena every minute of every day, assuming his role of surrogate father with an intrepidity that could not be matched. She was grateful for him, Elena was; but she lacked the words to tell him so.
He heard them anyway, in every smile she forced, in the tender way she touched his hand, in how her soulful brown eyes would glance at him when she thought he wasn't looking.
But he was always looking.
.
It was like learning to live all over again.
Elena hated being helpless and it seemed her new lifestyle made her just that. Caroline always had to be with her; Bonnie had to help her walk in sunlight; Alaric had to catch the tears that never fell; Damon had to make jokes at which she'd never laugh.
Stefan was still missing.
She ached for him. Her whole body longed for him in a way she couldn't explain and that terrified her. This was not what she wanted but he was what she wanted, and now that this was forced upon her the only thing she wanted was for him to hold her and tell her it was going to be alright.
At night she dreamt of him and when she awoke she felt empty. The same sort of emptiness that she felt after her parents had been killed. The same sort of emptiness after Jenna died and Jeremy left and she was alone. It throbbed deep within her, tugging on her heartstrings so that every breath she took felt like a chore. Until now, Elena had been able to manage it.
But eventually the emptiness consumed her.
.
When they died she found herself jealous.
The desire to die was so strong that her envy blocked out her sadness.
Bonnie died, leaving Matt and her daughter Sheila. It had been excruciating for Elena to watch her friend grow old; but perhaps it had been more excruciating to not have grown old with her, or been allowed to know her family. Bonnie and Matt had been married for forty years and for forty years had been living mundane human lives, and with every fiber of her being, Elena envied them. They found sanctuary within one another and raised their daughter outside the supernatural world. Elena was Sheila's godmother but she was not allowed to see her, to reveal her secret.
It was a lonely position but one that Elena filled without hesitation. She owed the Donovans that much.
Alaric was next. His vampire hunting eventually caught up with him and he died as he had lived, protecting Mystic Falls.
She and Caroline clung to each other with grief as their high school class passed, one after another, as if they had never even lived. So short and so sweet was a human life, Elena had thought. How she wished it was her in one of those caskets instead of Matt, Bonnie, Alaric. How she wished it was her all curled and old and gray, fragile and broken and bent in on herself. How she wished all those tears were tears shed for her. How she wished it were her children bent over her frail empty body.
It was a long time coming, but Elena was finally learning to be selfish again.
.
Damon and Caroline never once left her side.
She was grateful for them; for the strange, splintered family they had formed in each other. After all, they were all she had left.
Only hearsay of Stefan kept him in her mind. Funny, how the man to have brought her into this supernatural world was now so completely out of it. Apparently he had reverted back to his ripper ways; a combination of being away from Elena and learning that she was turned had driven out what little remained of his sanity.
She still loved him. Of course she did. But it was a love that had been blurred by the decades; blurred, but not eradicated. Not completely.
She found love with Damon and Caroline; even met up with Katherine a few times, shared a few laughs about the 'Petrova Fire.'
Life wasn't great but it was worth living most of the time.
.
Damon held her after she staked Stefan.
It was long past time, in 2056, that his days as a one-man slaughterhouse be put to an end.
He was long past redemption; Elena, Caroline, and Damon all knew that. But it didn't make his death any easier, any less agonizing, any less difficult to justify.
It seemed like a thousand years ago that Stefan was stable, that he was the one with a cool head on his shoulders and a plan--always a plan. Now he was crazed, demonic, gripped in the clutches of a bloodlust so paralyzing not even Damon could shake it.
'I will never forget you,' she'd whispered as his Stefan's faded to gray; the shock, confusion, and pain, all intermingling with something so close to a plea that she almost drove the thing into her own heart afterward.
'It had to be done,' Caroline would say for several days after, and Elena never knew if she was saying it to herself or to Stefan, as if he could hear her somehow.
It didn't matter either way, because soon enough Elena was saying it too.
'It had to be done.'
.
A lifetime ago Elena had wanted to be a writer.
Caroline reminded her of that, one day. 'When in Rome…' she'd said, with that little giggle immortality could never change. And they were in Rome, matter of fact. It was the eightieth year anniversary of Elena's turning and though she would have preferred to spend it moping around in a crypt, as Caroline so eloquently put it, she and Damon had arranged for a vacation in one of the world's greatest cities. Maybe to get her mind off the memories this anniversary would always bring, or maybe to help her make new memories to replace the old. Maybe a bit of both.
'Blondie's got a point,' Damon said, and the two shared a look that Elena had been noticing for the past few weeks.
Damon and Caroline made sense. Elena told them so, after she let them know that she knew about them.
'We didn't want to make this vacation about us,' Caroline had gushed, guilt reprising its role as peacemaker between she and Elena. 'I'm sorry, Elena, I should have told you sooner, but I didn't know how.'
Elena said she understood but she didn't. Not then, anyway. It had been almost a century since she last kissed Damon but she wasn't ready to accept that he was happy without her, not yet.
There was something so irritating in the way they could make each other happy and she couldn't even make herself happy.
There was something so irritating in being so alone.
It was then, after she had lost both Salvatores, that Elena began to honor her old dreams.
She started writing again.
.
She had to publish under a pseudonym; she had no choice. No one could be given the opportunity to discover she was the same Elena Gilbert of Mystic Falls, 2012.
As her pen name, Elena chose Tatya Pierce. It seemed fitting to share the names of those who shared her face.
It wasn't until she published her second volume of poetry that 'Tatya Pierce' received the Nobel Prize for Poetry in 2111.
She got up to make her speech and in the crowd found the eyes of Damon and Caroline to give her the strength to do it. Elena didn't think she deserved the award but she took it anyway because she knew that somewhere up in the sky her mother was watching and there was still a large part of her that wanted to make Miranda Gilbert proud.
In her cold, dead, heart, Elena knew that each of them in their own way had made their mothers proud. Elena, a Nobel Prize winning author; Caroline, a successful fashion designer; Damon, a reformed cynic (that was about all he had going for him, Caroline would snort between beers later that night).
'It's like a fairytale,' Caroline would say, her words slurring together. 'We're all somebodys now. Well, Damon isn't, but at least he's my somebody.'
Damon rolled his eyes like he always did when Caroline got cheesy but Elena knew he adored every minute of it.
'No, but seriously, you guys,' she'd insist, trying to present a sober front. 'We went from rags to riches. We used to be little suburban nobodies and now… we're worth shit. You know?' She took another long drag from her beer. 'We're regular Cinder-fucking-rellas.'
Elena didn't feel like a Cinderella, though she didn't say it then.
Later she would write a poem to get it off her chest, but for now, she smiled and laughed to humor her friend. It was her Nobel Prize party but the evening would quickly become less and less about herand more about Caroline, especially later when Caroline convinced Damon to let her be his wife so it could be all 'official and stuff' and she could wear his last name like the dresses she designed.
They would decide on a June wedding.
Elena wanted then more than ever to die.
.
'I read your book.'
It was just as soft and high and impossibly angelic as Elena remembered, and she shivered when it touched her ears.
'Came to say happy anniversary, Rebekah?' Elena quipped, not turning around to face her.
They were in the manor off the coast of Connecticut that she and Damon and Caroline had bought on a whim a few decades ago, and Elena was sitting in her study. She didn't know how Rebekah got in and she didn't care, she only wanted her gone. She couldn't handle her, not today. Not today.
But Rebekah didn't give her the option of ignorance.
'You're doing well for yourself, Elena. Vampirism is treating you nicely.' Rebekah was being catty, of course, as she skirted around the room until she stood in front of Elena, and Elena was forced to look at her. 'Your poems are lovely; such a delicious sadness to them. I wonder where that comes from?'
It's only seconds before Elena has her pinned against a bookshelf, hand tightening across her pale white throat. 'What do you want?' she growled, the fierceness to which Katherine always alluded kindling a flame in her dark brown eyes.
'Easy, easy,' Rebekah whispered, straining to keep her voice level as her throat buckled. 'This isn't you,' she referenced Elena's violence.
'I don't know who I am anymore,' came her reply. 'You took that away a hundred years ago today, Rebekah.' Her mouth twisted ruefully around the girl's name. But the words had taken effect, and after a moment she released the blonde and gave way to stewing rather than hitting.
'Can you believe it's really been a hundred years? My, but it does go by so quickly.' Rebekah was stalling now, Elena could feel it. She wondered why the girl was here and her curiosity grew only by the second. She would be lying to herself if she didn't admit that she wasn't the slightest bit afraid, too. 'Look,' Rebekah said after a pause, 'I just wanted to apologize for what I did to you. I did inherit my father's temper, and it didn't help that you and Nik betrayed me. I did what I thought was best, Elena, and I see now that if I had shown any mercy Tatya Pierce's little masterpiece would have never made it to the shelves, and we wouldn't want that.'
She was apologizing, but she was not doing it right.
'Get out of here,' was the only thing Elena said.
'I'll leave after you've forgiven me.'
And that did it.
'You can't always get what you want,' Elena shouted venomously, rounding on her. 'You may be a princess in your own little fairytale but I'm not. All I know is that I should be dead right now, but instead, I get to watch everyone else do that and live with the knowledge that I can't ever join them. I want to die, Rebekah. That's what I want as an anniversary gift. First I want you to leave and then I want to die. I want to do what has to be done at Damon and Caroline's wedding and then I want to disappear like I should have done years ago. I want you to get out of my home and I want to be alone and I want you to understand what you have done to me and why I will never, ever forgive you, no matter how much you ask me to.'
'You're angry. Good. Means it'll be easier for you to say yes when I ask you to help me kill my brother.' And finally, the real reason why she showed up was revealed.
'The princess wants my help, how touching,' Elena baited, sourly. 'Why should I help you?'
'Well, for starters, I can imagine you've wanted revenge on Nik for some time now. But more importantly he's also got designs for your little witchy friend's great-granddaughter… and if I recall correctly you promised to keep the Bennett girls out of the line of fire.'
The girl sighed and leveled her eyes with Rebekah's.
That was how Elena Gilbert ended up saving the day for the girl who killed her.
And that was how Elena Gilbert once more put faith in second chances.
.
They fell in love slowly, and it took nearly a year for them to admit to themselves that something was between them.
It happened at Damon and Caroline's wedding.
Elena was Caroline's maid of honor, naturally, and they had a beautiful ceremony held at the Connecticut manor. Rebekah was invited after having become somewhat chummy with the gang--she and Elena had expounded upon the bond that they'd only begun to discover the day Elena staked Rebekah and sealed both their fates, and Damon and Caroline had noticed it.
Dancing had never held much appeal for Elena after Stefan died, and so when it came time for the bride and groom to share the first waltz she quietly left the ballroom and sought some fresh air on one of their balconies. Rebekah followed, a mess of jumbled emotions and frayed heartbeats.
'Don't care for dancing?' she said, knowing the answer already.
'Not much anymore,' Elena admitted, managing a dry chuckle. 'But you know Caroline, she had to go all out for this. I'm sure she'll try to get me to dance before this whole thing is over.'
'Well, the night is yet young,' Rebekah observed, demurely, 'and you have time to learn to love dancing again. Perhaps I could help you,' she said, offering her arm.
Elena took it and smiled, but this time when she smiled it was real. 'I'd like that.'
A jittery energy fluttered within her and she found it almost too difficult to restrain a gasp. She couldn't remember the last time she'd felt those butterflies stirring inside of her; but she embraced their return like an old friend, and though she was cold and long dead, inside she felt warm, and bubbly.
They danced for hours to a beat of their own, and when the night was no longer young they returned to the balcony and Elena felt like a girl again and Rebekah brushed back the hair from her face and they kissed for the first time and breathlessly Bekah said, 'I have been alive longer than I care to remember but in all my years of living I have never felt this way before, and I have never kissed a girl like you.'
She had smiled and tried to keep a straight face but the only thing she could think of was;
Elena Gilbert, a regular Cinder-fucking-rella.
.
They didn't kill Klaus, nor would they, but they did spend an awful lot of time trying.
The good news was that they were successfully protecting the Bennett line and sort of became the champions of all witches, Elena and Rebekah.
Damon would poke fun at them, call them the Dynamic Demon Duo, point out the irony in their sudden devotion to the witches' cause.
Elena didn't mind; she had found her purpose. Protecting the balance of nature by ensuring that no Bennett witch or any of her like was forced to use her powers for something against her will. As for Rebekah, she had found her happiness in Elena, and that was all she required. She could find another hobby in another life; this life was Elena's, just as her past lives had been Klaus's.
'You know I meant it, that day I said I was sorry for turning you,' Rebekah said one night over dinner while she and Elena discussed their next move against Klaus's crazed witch hunt.
'I know,' and she placed her hand over her lover's. 'And I've meant it each time I've forgiven you since then. It was just meant to be, I guess.'
'It was childish and cruel of me, but I can't help but be glad I did it.'
Elena could never say so, but she was starting to be glad of it herself. So, 'I love you,' she would say instead, and Rebekah sensed what it meant. She was good at interpreting Elena's subtext.
They didn't need fairytale words to live in their fairytale world.
.
They lived for a while this way; protecting the rights of witches, hopping from town to town, city to city, country to country… wherever Klaus went in pursuit of a witch strong enough to help him, Rebekah and Elena were always close behind.
Elena continued to write, and Rebekah continued to love her, and all was well.
Eventually they would return to Mystic Falls with Damon and Caroline and the four of them would live permanently in the Salvatore boarding house. It had been long enough that all the people who would have known about them were dead.
In a strange way, the four of them were inextricably linked to Mystic Falls. Though they would frequently come and go and spend decades at a time in other places around the globe, they each found themselves thinking back to where it all began--back hundreds of years ago in a sleepy town that time forgot, where every one of them had lived a different life.
'Let's go home,' Caroline would say one day, and the other three would look at her and ask her where home was, though they all anticipated the same answer. This enigma, this aura of home, became characterized by a recognition of a time long past--a place where their worlds had once been young, a place where they had once found great peace and joy.
And so they would return. So they would go home.
And the funny thing was, they would be content. Damon, Caroline, Elena, Rebekah: an unlikely family, but a family no less.
Of course, Klaus would be an ever-present threat to their happiness, but what was a fairytale without a decent villain?
.
Elena and Rebekah didn't start out as a fairytale, but they ended as one.