a/n: speculations for the future, spoilers through 3x14. enjoy and please review!

She likes to watch her brother paint.

She sits by his side and watches his fingers grip around the dark charcoal, leaving black smudges on that stretch of pale, immortal skin. She sweeps behind him and watches the calm, measured spread of his hand across the fabric of the canvas, his lips pursed in thought, those incongruously dark eyes narrowed.

Italy is crumpling all around them, but the two of them sit, ancient and immovable, in a small apartment in Rome with the smell of paints and turpentine. Il Valentino is turning the streets into blood and the towns into Borgia strongholds but Rebekah is here, her brother is here, and all she sees is the sweep of her brother's hand to trace the bare long lines of the model's back, all she breathes is the bite of paint on her brother's skin when she brushes her lips over his cheek in the dark of night, and all she knows is this.

"She's beautiful," she says now, watching Nik add the glint of gold to the girl's hair on the canvas. A few feet from her, the girl shifts, her back long and sinuous. She is caught exact in Nik's paints, as if her brother had drawn out her soul and imprinted her into the grooves of the canvas, sealed her in with blues and greens and the palest of golds. The girl shifts, and her long bright hair falls, tumbling down the side of the couch.

"And my painting is not?" Nik replies, amused, though he does not break his gaze from the girl. Rebekah feels a coil of irritation in her stomach. She is not used to Nik looking at anyone but her. "Bekah, you wound me."

She shrugs. "It's adequate, I suppose. Nothing truly remarkable—you'll be outshone by that Florentine scribbler for sure."

He laughs. "Leonardo? God forbid—if he finishes anything, you mean. Besides—" He drops the brush and turns to her. Rebekah relaxes; he is looking at her now. The world is once again at its right angle. "The beauty of eternity, sis, is that I will always have a second chance."

She smiles at him, and there is the hint of a cruelty in that curve, something cut and hard in it, as if suddenly she is made of her own dark corners, no longer full of light. "You know that's not always true, Nik."

She is thinking of Finn, of Elijah's self-exile over the Petrova doppelganger, of the hard steel of this family, of the unknown edges of the map where she must not roam. She is thinking of freedom and a life without her brother. She is thinking thoughts she thinks every day.

She says none of it. She has learnt to hold her tongue, has learnt to refrain from saying the words that cannot be unsaid.

Nik stands, sets down the brush and makes his way to the girl, runs his hand down the length of her hair, runs his fingers slowly and roughly through the tangled gold curls, and bites.

When he lifts his head, his mouth is dark with blood, those eyes framed by heavy veins. "La Bella is gone." He gives a nonchalant shove, and the girl's body rolls to the ground. "I'll base the rest of it on you, sis. How would you like to be immortalized?"

She runs her hands lightly along the edge of the canvas, her eyes drifting downward to the long, luxurious lines sketched in her brother's hand, the dark background of thick velvet blue, the fall of long gold hair that looks more like her own than the dead girl's, on the floor, tangled around her bloodied throat.

There is a hint of the sinfully erotic in the curves of the girl's body, captured in charcoal and paint. A perverse appreciation of the flesh caught in the flicks of her brother's hand. Rebekah feels something within herself curl and catch.

Her hand drops from the canvas.

"Don't bother." She says, her dress sweeping around her. "I don't want some dead girl's left overs."

She has her eye on an apprentice.

He is young and golden, with a face so beautiful he should be the subject, and not the painter. Perhaps this is why she decides that he shall die young.

Rebekah appreciates beauty, you see. She was a child in a world of bleakness and grey, a world where men and women clawed for survival from their birth. She has learnt to appreciate the luxury of languor and the sublime apotheosis of the aesthetically pleasing. She is a patroness of culture, as it is, and over the years she has learnt that humanity is the highest form of art.

She prefers her victims to be of silver and gold, same as her brother, same as her. Death shows so easily on her pale toys, like blood on snow, like stars in the night sky, like a single flame burning against the blue dark before dawn. There is poetry in that, she thinks, a rhythm and rhyme not unlike the cut of teeth or the curl of tongue against the human red of life.

She covers her long hair in a veil of pale silk, like a good Roman maiden, her dress modest and blue, the very picture of the Virgin come to earth. There is a cross around her throat and a string of rosaries wounded through her fingers, and she wears piety like a new gown.

The boy is shy. He paints with a fervour and a passion unknown to his fellows. His brushstrokes are uneven, hurried and frantic and desperate, but by god, he does humanity justice. He paints the way he wishes to live—fast and hard and like a great star, burning itself out. This boy will never burn brighter than he does now. He will never paint humanity as he does now. The Academia will take his fire and quench it, they will take it and replace it with cold iron, and no, no, Rebekah will not let that happen again, she has seen it happen once before but this time it will not happen again, no—

"Paint me." She says to him now, in the dark of night, the boy between her legs. She whispers the words into the hollow at his ear, breathes them into his skin the way she imagines her brother paints his canvas. She too, is creating her masterpiece.

"Paint me," she says. "Immortalize me."

Let me be your greatest work, she thinks.

She leans back against the rise of the chaise, her hair loose beneath the transparent fall of her veil, long and pale and cold and wrought. Her eyes fall, half closed, and the world is hazy through the dark of her lashes, the world is blurred and compliant and hers, and the boy sits, across from her with his eyes narrowed and lips hardened into thought.

If she tilts her head just so, the sun outside would light his hair bright enough into another shade. If she tilts her head just so, the line of his jaw would sharpen and lengthen. If she tilts her head just so, the world would craft him into something crueller, something harsher, something brighter and harder and entirely her own.

Rebekah closes her eyes. Her hair is heavy, falling across her bare breasts and weighing her to the ground, like chains.

"You're beautiful." The boy tells her, his eyes bright and shining. "I would paint you all my life if I could. I would immortalize you a thousand times over."

She does not open her eyes. She never does during these sessions.

"Is that so?" She asks mildly.

The boy stands, makes his way to her side and runs a hand through her long, falling hair. He traces the curve of her breast and then the dip of her waist, resting, then, just before the rise of her hip. "In a hundred years, they'll look back, and they'll hang your beauty in the Academy next to the Madonna and the Apostle and all the great men of Italia and they'll say, Rebekah. Rebekah the Beauty, Rebekah the Gold. In a hundred years they'll look back, and all they'll see is you."

In a hundred years I won't even remember what you looked like, she thinks sadly. In two hundred I'd forget your name.

"You'll be the greatest work of my career." The boy says. He is so earnest it hurts. "You'll be my masterpiece."

The boy dies before he finishes the painting.

They find him beaten and left in an alleyway, his beautiful face mangled and broken, that golden hair dampened dark with blood.

See, Rebekah thinks later. Like blood on snow.

His throat is not ripped red and raw, but Rebekah knows her brother's hands, knows his touch better than anyone else.

Six hundred years later, Rebekah is alone.

She stands, still and unmoving behind the protective glass in a gallery in Rome, her fingers clasped around a brochure.

The woman in the painting has her eyes closed.

The woman in the painting has long, gold hair.

The woman in the painting is caught, as surely as she ever was, behind the paints, behind the glass.

("Why won't you paint me?" She asked her brother once, watching him sketch another golden beauty onto paper with lazy, negligent hands.

"Would you like me to?" He had replied, grinning. "Would you like to turn your back to me with your hair streaming down and the light playing ever so coyly on the curve of your breast? Would you like me to immortalize you?"

Her cheeks had flushed. "Nik. Be serious."

Her brother's smile had waned as he looked up, and for an instant she could see herself through his eyes—naïve and girlish, limned in gold from the sun at her back, golden and immortal but such a child, always, always, such a child.

His voice had been soft. Not a purr, not the purr he so frequently employed, but soft and almost kind, and for that moment, devoid of corners and caprice.

He had stopped. "Because you are already immortal, Bekah. You are the greatest piece of art I can ever possess."

That is his truth. This is hers:

She is already caged. She is the greatest piece of art he can ever create.)

The American tour guide a little while beside her gestures for silence, reads from his little clipbook.

"Portrait of a Woman of Gold," he intones in a dry voice. "Painted in 1502, left unfinished by the artist's death. The rest of the painting—the hair, the face—was completed by an unknown artist."

A woman of gold, Rebekah thinks. A woman in chains.

Mystic Falls is a ghost town now, haunted and destroyed by the deaths of almost all its supernaturally-aware inhabitants. Her mother is dead. Her family has scattered. Rebekah is alone.

The woman in the painting is caught. The woman in the painting is trapped. She wonders, if her artistic counterpart could, would she fight her way out of her cage? Would she twist and struggle until she is free?

Rebekah stands, and watches, and is still as a picture.

He watches his sister from the hall, traces the lines of her back and the curve of her waist. She is tiny against the huge canvas of the painting, a small slip of a girl against the woman in paints, and she is standing too still, standing too straight. She is standing as if she, too, is caught.

Klaus feels something catch in his throat, like a pulsing muscle, like blood.

"Ready to go?" Caroline asks him, breaking away from a group of tourists. She smiles wide, smiles red, smiles like a human still.

"Yeah," he says, wrapping an arm around her waist.

(Later, he asks her:

"How would you like to be immortalized, love?")

Her brother's steps echo out of the gallery, and Rebekah closes her eyes, bows her head. She lets go of a breath she didn't know she had been holding.

A respite, then. An end.

And she is still here, stuck, caught, and infinitely locked into place.