Work Text:
Rebekah found Elijah just as he was about to leave the house, noting the heaviness that seemed to weigh down his shoulders.
"Do you think you can go through with it?" she asked, scrutinizing her brother for signs of second thoughts.
"Whatever are you referring to now, Rebekah?" His voice was cold, showing no chinks in his seamless armor. And yet Rebekah had known him for a millennium, she saw the turmoil in his every line of movement. In the way, the skin under his eyes was tight with a fought-back grimace, even while his eyes seemed to remain flinty with oncoming battle.
"Don't treat me like a fool just because you've become one, Elijah," Rebekah scoffed and narrowed her eyes. "Are you ready to threaten her life? You know I'm not going to play a very gentle jailor here, and a threat means nothing if you're unwilling to go through with it."
She saw him close his eyes and found the taste of something like regret at the back of her throat, sharp and a touch bitter.
"She lied to me. And mother-"
"-might be planning something," she finished for him, pain flashing through her chest with betrayed denial like water hitting the surface of boiling oil. It could still be nothing couldn't it? Just Elijah borrowing some of Nik's paranoia and blowing it out of proportion. But could she take a chance that slim? "And you are still a pathetic fool in love with the latest Doppelganger-"
"-Elena," he snapped, eyes opening with a glare.
"Elena," she corrected herself with a roll of eyes. At least he had enough respect for Rebekah's intellect not to try denying the obvious. "So, the question stands, are you really ready to go through with putting Elena's life in jeopardy to find out what big, terrible spell our mother is about to cast?"
"She has left me very little choice in the matter," Elijah said, the heavy air around him seeming to gain a few additional tons of weight made up of pain and the resigned betrayal of a man doomed to scorch his own heart to cinders.
Rebekah had known months ago, the moment her back had crashed against the side of the car, when she'd recognized Elijah and saw the way he hovered in front of Elena like a guardian angel.
He might as well have covered the ground around Elena's feet in a rainbow of flower petals, it would have been less obvious.
Not that Elena was any better. Busy being torn between the two Salvatores and yet somehow still finding time to stare at Elijah like all the wind had just been knocked from her lungs, instead of Rebekah's.
They were honestly straight out of a Shakespearean tragedy. If she wasn't so angry at Elena for her first betrayal, Rebekah would almost have been fascinated by the oncoming trainwreck.
Because Elijah might not see it - busy thinking himself absent from the battle for the human girl's heart - but Rebekah certainly saw - unfortunately.
Elena was maybe entangled in the mess that was Stefan and Damon vying for the first spot for her hand right now. But not so busy as to not have her breath catch, and her heart flutter when someone so much as mentioned Elijah's name in her hearing.
Like Rebekah said that first time - pathetic, the both of them.
"I will do as I must," Elijah said, eyes clouded over with centuries of age "Our family means everything, always and forever."
Something cracked behind his eyes, and she felt the hatred Elena had inspired in her when she drove that dagger through Rebekah's back, doubling in intensity at seeing the breaks in the brother who had remained unbroken for a thousand years.
Rebekah was watching herself lose her brother, she realized with a sharp drop in her stomach. Whether Elena Gilbert lived through this day or not, Elijah would never forgive himself for what he was about to do.
Viciously, Rebekah hoped that Elena would be forced to face the ruin she'd made of her brother's heart.
But it was a vain hope. She knew her brother too well for that, Elijah's old oaths to his siblings meant he could not keep Elena safe this time, - would in fact, have to be the one placing her in harm's way - but he would not use his heartbreak to inspire more pain than he had to in her.
And suddenly Rebekah wasn't sure what drove her bloodthirst more.
That old petty wish for payback? Whatever deal Elena had made with their mother last night while protected behind the secret wall of a privacy spell? Or the oncoming loss of her older brother to his own foolish, foolish heart?
"She doesn't deserve you," she tried, frustrated and angry and terrified to her core.
"No, Rebekah," he disagreed and looked at her with eyes that for once, hid nothing, "if I am about to prove anything, it's that I will never deserve Elena."