AS THE WHITE OAK stake found her heart, Rebekah screamed in pain, never having felt such misery before. It was as if her heart were breaking a million times over. She felt her eyes go wide and then shut tight, but she didn’t stop seeing. She could still picture the tree, its image seared into the darkness behind her eyes. There was daylight, and children who ran and played beneath its broad leaves. She could see little Klaus’s sardonic smile and Elijah’s warm brown eyes and even the flowers woven into her own hair. Their other brothers were there as well: Kol and Finn and tiny Henrik.

There was no danger, no threats waiting on the horizon. There was nothing but hope.

Rebekah ran to her family’s cottage and saw her mother, the most beautiful woman in the world, stirring something in a steaming pot on the hearth. Esther stood and smiled, in the comforting way she always did, and Rebekah wondered if she had flown into her mother’s arms that day, or if she had simply run to taste the stew. She could see both events, as if her past had been placed between two mirrors that stretched off forever in both directions, but showed two different lives. If she had hugged her mother that day, would she have become a vampire? What small decisions had led her to this endless path?

Mikael swung her up onto his shoulders, striding through a wide field while she giggled and twined her hands in his hair. There was no sign of the villain he would become. He was just her father: tall and strong and impossibly wise, showing her the world she had once believed she would live and die in.

They were all there, together and happy, as if the tree had been holding on to some part of the Mikaelsons for all those centuries. The tree belonged to them, and Rebekah realized she had been wrong to fear it for so long. It wasn’t destroying her like she always believed it would. Instead, the stake in her heart was restoring the life that should have been hers. A real human life—with a beginning, an end, and a family who loved her.

Rebekah could hear her mother calling to her. But Esther had died centuries before, and if she called to her daughter, then she had to be calling from the Other Side. She wanted Rebekah to go to her, to join her there at last.

“My child,” Esther whispered, and Rebekah strained to hear her voice over the buzzing of insects and the chirping of birds in the sunlight. “My darling child, you have lost your way in the night.”

Rebekah blinked, and in the second her eyes closed, she could see the full horror of what her mother meant. Darkness and blood and death filled all her senses, overwhelming them until her eyes flew open again. Her home was there, just where it belonged, surrounded by flowers and children and love.

“You have always belonged here,” Esther told her. The words in her mother’s soft, powerful voice rang true, like the truest thing Rebekah had ever been told. Rebekah could have lived and died in Mystic Falls, and her life would have been perfect.

“I want to be with my family,” Rebekah told her, her voice sounding close and far away at the same time. “Death scattered us, and I’ve tried to hold on to all the pieces.”

She blinked again and saw Marguerite, gruesomely pale, with her brown eyes staring forever at the ceiling. She felt the shock of that terrible betrayal, then the overwhelming grief of losing yet another person she thought would be by her side forever.

Marguerite would be on the Other Side now, along with Esther, Henrik, Eric, and countless other loved ones. Tomás had asked Rebekah where her home truly was; perhaps the Other Side was it.

“And I have wanted to be with you,” Esther promised. “I have watched you and longed for the day you would return to me, to be reunited again.”

There was a shimmering at the far end of the field, where the path led back down toward the village. Rebekah took one uncertain step toward it and then another, and Esther’s voice grew stronger as she approached.

“You don’t belong in that world anymore,” she said, and Rebekah could feel her mother’s voice pulling her. Rebekah had lived as a monster among monsters, and now she could leave that all behind. She could shed it like a worn cloak and be herself again.

There was another voice calling to her, she realized, and Rebekah paused, cocking her head to listen. It was someone wrong; someone who didn’t belong in this time or place. The voice was from another life, one in which Rebekah had been motherless for centuries. Where she had lost siblings and lovers and sacrificed too many parts of herself. But it was telling her that there had been bright spots, as well. Her long life had also been full of love.

She could never have lost so much if she hadn’t loved so deeply. That was worth the suffering, the voice cried, drifting to her ears from what felt like centuries away. Life was full of both pain and joy, and Rebekah had never been one to turn her back on any experience.

“Come back to me,” he told her, and she realized it was Luc. Luc Benoit, with origins at least as humble as her own and the same ability to rise above them. He didn’t belong here, but she could feel him leaning over her, tears streaming down the broad planes of his cheeks as he called to her.

“It’s an illusion,” Esther warned. She held out her hand, reaching out from one world into the next, but Rebekah couldn’t stop looking at Luc. He believed in her. He wanted her. After a thousand years of life she was still a woman who could be loved and admired and needed. All she had to do was keep living.

Rebekah hesitated for a moment that stretched out into eternity, torn between two desires so powerful that either one of them could consume her whole. She couldn’t bring herself to choose, and her indecision was enough to break the connection to the Other Side. Esther gave a gasping sigh, and the shimmering in the air hardened and then vanished.

“Mother!” Rebekah screamed, but it was too late: Her doubt had done its work. The Other Side closed itself to her, then the sunlight faltered and winked out. Rebekah swallowed hard, tasting bitter disappointment as the world of her childhood melted away. She should have known that her mother wouldn’t hold out her hand forever. Esther wasn’t the type of parent who rewarded cowardice.

“I still belong here, then,” Rebekah told the waiting darkness, letting it surround her and seep into her skin. “I want to live.”

It was true, she realized. She wanted life so desperately and suddenly that it took her breath away. Stars swarmed before her eyes and then tree branches made stripes of blackness against the sky. Luc’s beautiful face stared anxiously into hers, and the cold, hard ground pressed into her spine.

“You came back!” Luc exclaimed, kissing her passionately on the mouth.

Rebekah pushed him away, her body still trying to remember how to breathe. She sucked in air once and then again, feeling the strange way it whistled around the hole in her chest. “You tried to kill me,” she gasped when she was able to speak, and she touched the ragged edges of her wound gingerly. “You did kill me.”

The stake was in his hand. Rebekah understood that he must have pulled it from her heart—he had just saved her from dying. But the sight of it chilled her, and for a moment it was as if time might run backward as easily as forward. Rebekah couldn’t tear her eyes away from the broken branch in Luc’s hand.

- The Originals: The Resurrection, Chapter 11