hello. i'm sorry for the five-month hiatus. not sure if i'm back, but i did write something new after months of not being able to, so... why not.

this is set after the events of 3x22, and i'd really like to know what you think of this. review if you like cute animals?

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—

this type of life didn't come with instructions

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—

—

She's not sure where they're going, except that they keep going.

She looks at Elijah every so often and doesn't even bother to hide the fact that she's staring—it's not like Elijah acknowledges her, intent as he is to break every speed limit known to man. Bands of gold flash across his face as they race down yet another empty freeway and he never flinches, which comes as a wonder to Rebekah. The street lights shine so bright it glares straight past her eyelids, making her see white even through closed eyes.

If she weren't worried she'd wake Kol up, she would have screamed for Elijah to stop the car.

Instead, she tugs on her seatbelt (Kol had scoffed) with whitened knuckles and says, "I can't see the sky here."

"Hm?" Elijah breaks out of his train of thought and gives her a quick glance, the needle on the speedometer firmly stuck on 130.

"The sky," Rebekah says again, not bothering to clear her throat even when her voice sounds like someone's shredded it to ribbons with a blunt knife. "It looks like someone's lit a match to it."

Elijah reaches out a steady hand to press a button - suddenly Rebekah feels wind whipping her hair back from her forehead. The great vast nothingness above them seems to drown out Kol's snoring, but then Rebekah realizes he's woken up. His voice is husky against her ear when he asks, "S'morning yet?"

"No." The edges of the seat belt cuts into the palm of her hand. "But it looks like it, doesn't it?"

The two of them crane their necks upwards, and Elijah surprises them when he joins in as well. Rebekah doesn't bother telling him to watch the road.

—

—

They're heading in a straight line to somewhere and to nowhere, and in the recesses of Rebekah's mind she thinks it's ridiculously romantic.

In New Mexico, she and Kol eat cabrito al hornos washed down with Margaritas while Elijah sits and tries to look dignified while they dance mad drunken circles around him, even when Kol rams a glittery sombrero down on his head.

In Los Angeles, she buys flip flops in every colour she can find, all of which were scandalously thrown out the window when they reach Shenandoah National Park, when she becomes more preoccupied with luring naive backpackers away from those tourist trap binoculars.

"That book any good?" is Kol's skewed version of foreplay whenever he sees one of them, while Rebekah prefers to smile and lower her eyes just so. Later, she makes sure Kol disposes of the bodies properly this time and Kol points out a spot of bright red on her pristine white shirt.

"Thanks," she says, discarding the shirt for the gift store sweatshirt Kol had bought. Even as the tip of her fangs glint in the pale sunlight, wrapped in the thick cotton she feels like a tourist.

"Where to next, brother?" Kol asks easily when he's stretched out in the backseat of the car later. He's reading a worn, dog-eared book (Kafka, Rebekah thinks she hears Elijah murmur, but she can't be sure). It has a bloodied thumbprint on the battered cover.

Elijah doesn't say anything about that. In fact, he doesn't say much at all.

—

—

"How long do you think it's been?" Rebekah asks Kol as they wait for the car to finish getting serviced. Elijah's inside looking over the paperwork, and he looks ever the older brother in his pristine suit and neat hair despite weeks - months even - of straight driving. "Since the last time he slept."

Kol never tears his eyes away from the game of Monopoly he's playing on his iTouch. He looks annoyed at even being interrupted in the middle of trying to get Boardwalk. "I dunno, I don't exactly snuggle up to him and ask him to tell me stories when I can't sleep."

"You wouldn't be able to either way," Rebekah says, rolling her eyes at Kol muttering angrily at his touchscreen. "He sits on the terrace at night."

Kol's eyes stop following his marker down the screen. She can see bright colours reflected in them. "You watch him?"

Rebekah shifts in her seat. "Sometimes."

Kol raises an eyebrow at his phone.

Rebekah hugs her jacket closer. "Always."

"Always," Kol repeats under his breath, then goes back to his game. With his eyes away from hers, it's like he's mocking her.

—

—

Days turn into weeks. She tries to stay awake when Elijah drives.

Weeks turn into months. Some deluded part of her thinks (hopes) that maybe it would bring some sort of comfort to him. If he stares out into the darkness with his tired eyes, he'd see the same ones staring back at him.

—

—

Elijah prefers to drive at night, and sometimes, when the large green billboards get lesser and further in between, Rebekah can hear him humming some kind of tune that eerily reminds her of the dark caves they used to play in as children.

She looks out the window and wishes the world weren't so quiet at 12:47am. She can hear nothing around her, but thinks it can't possibly match up to the silence filling up the space in her chest.

She's not worried at how fast he's going—it's when he slows down that she finds her hand reaching out to cover his, tiny and pale against his big warm one. She thinks it brings him relief, the sheer mechanics of being able to control this juggernaut of a car and nothing else. Nothing but the stretch of road ahead of him and her hand on his.

Sometimes when Elijah slows down, she wishes he would pull over; stop driving and just talk to her. She wishes she could tell him how impossibly lonely it feels to have a brother sleeping in the backseat and another driving beside her.

Instead, she says, "Don't stop."

—

—

Kol has that hungry look in his eyes whenever they make pit stops to rest and feed. He'll scan the area for the best-looking girl with a paperback rolled up in the back pocket of her jeans and immediately he'll be upon her, flashing smirks and leaning way too close.

"I don't think I've read that," Rebekah hears him say as clearly as if he were beside her, and scoffs into her drink. Liar, she says to the polished oak of the bar top, thinking of the three other copies, with different covers, of Dostoyevsky he's tossed in the boot of Elijah's Mercedes. All dog-eared. All blood splattered.

Rebekah watches her follow him to the back of the smoky bar they're in, and she looks eager.

"Humans can be awfully stupid," she comments out of the corner of her mouth to Elijah. He's perched on the stool next to her, nursing a crystal glass of whiskey.

"Sometimes, Rebekah," Elijah responds, "you will find that they can surprise you."

She thinks of Matt then, and the way he always offered to drive her home whenever he saw her sitting dejectedly on the front steps of school after cheer practice. Matt, with his doopy smile and kind eyes and big hands that shot a crossbow into Esther's heart.

Elijah has a different sort of hunger in his eyes, and she doesn't want to agree with her brother because she knows he's thinking of Elena.

—

—

"Why do we live forever?"

Mother smiles and brushes her hair away from her face. "Is that not what people long for?"

Rebekah frowns, fiddling with the flowers in her hair. "I never did." She looks down. "I... I thought it would be nice to see Henrik again. One day."

"Sweet Summer child," Mother sighs and brings Rebekah to her chest. She whispers something unintelligible into her hair, and she can feel the warm and wet tears of her mother dripping down on the flowers. If no one had known better, they looked like they were moist with morning dew. Her mother puts her lips close to her ear and says softly, "I do so love you."

"I know," Rebekah says back, and breathes in the scent of her mother. The stars twinkle above them and she melts into her mother.

There's a great stomping of feet and suddenly Mikael appears in the garden, a vein throbbing in his neck. "Go on then, boy," he practically spits. "Tell your mother what you did."

He swings his fist and something heavy lands across Rebekah's stomach, and she raises her eyes to see the bluest blue, like the sky at first light, and she feels his tears on her face as she reaches out a hand to stroke his cheek. "Shh, do not cry, shh, Ni—"

Rebekah wakes with a start and looks around wildly, hands groping her cheeks. She feels nothing but cold skin there, and leans back against her seat, trying to calm the thrashing in her heart.

Elijah's looking at her, a question in his eyes, and she thinks he looks scared-or maybe it's just wistful thinking.

She takes a deep breath to tell him she's okay, but instead what come out is:

"I dreamt of him," she blurts out before she can stop himself, and she feels the car swerve sharply. She tries to take in more air into her lungs but ends up gasping, and her shoulders tremble with the effort to keep from just screaming it out. "Elijah, N—I saw—and there was moth—Esther, and Mikael, and I saw him, and I ca—"

And then the car stops and Elijah's by her side in an instant, scooping her out of her seat and placing her on the cool grass some metres away. Her cheeks are wet with her own tears and she keeps trying to wipe them away because it feels like she's still dreaming and oh god her hands won't stop shaking and—

Blood. Warm and sweet down her throat. She sucks gratefully, hungrily on the blood bag and discards it once it's empty, wiping the blood from her mouth sloppily.

"I dreamt of him," she says again, quieter this time. Elijah is looking down at her with concern, and when he finally opens his mouth, his voice breaks.

"Rebekah," he says while shuffling nearer, mud and cold grass seeping through his pants. "Sometimes, the only way we can remember the dead is through our dreams."

She nods, her arms wrapped tight around her torso. Elijah shrugs his jacket off to drape it around her shoulders, a useless attempt at getting her to stop trembling. She's not shaking from the cold, but she thinks it's a nice gesture.

She thinks of Matt again.

She looks up at her brother with glassy eyes. "Niklaus... Nik," she corrects herself, "always said that it's not remembering. It's a haunting."

Elijah sighs. "He's not haunting you, Rebekah."

"We could have saved him," she whispers into his jacket, feeling another onslaught of tears coming on.

"We could have," Elijah agrees hoarsely, "but then Elena—" he lets out a sharp breath at her name and his face contorts into something that she would hate to describe as pain, but does anyway— "would still be alive, and where would that leave us?"

"Running." Rebekah looks up at the night sky, so bright it hurt her eyes. "Aren't we already doing that?"

"We're not running," Elijah says firmly, more to himself than anything else. "We're..." He shakes his head, pinches the bridge of his nose. "We're not running."

The look he gives her tells her that there's nothing to run from.

And then Elijah looks at her—really looks. Elijah looks at her with clear eyes, the eyes of the Original vampire who'd promised to tear cities apart lest his family not be returned to him; the eyes of the man who has so much silence in his chest it's almost breaking him from the inside—not the eyes of the dazed madman who'd led them on a cross-country trip to nowhere in search of answers to questions that didn't even exist. Elijah looks at her and tries to smile, and she realizes she's been waiting for him to be okay so she can be okay; waiting for him to come back to her all along.

Rebekah breaks the neat parting of his hair as she runs her fingers through it, and Elijah closes his eyes.

—

—

"Beks."

Rebekah awakes slowly this time, surprised to find Kol awake before her. He's a rumpled heap in the backseat, with his collection of bloodied books and handheld consoles he's picked up along the way of their unconventional road trip. He stretches luxuriously and she rubs her tired eyes, asking why he'd even woken her up in the first place and the reason better be fucking good.

Elijah chuckles from where he's driving and Kol smiles. "Just wait for it."

The car's retractable roof folds back and her hair moves along with the gentle breeze. Rebekah looks up, and as the last of the street lights finally leave them, she sees a star for the first time in months.

/

fin