the prettiest urgent problem you've ever seen

"It's... complicated," she admitted. She knew she had tried a few times now but her mind seemed to get fuzz and cause her to go into a daze, and appear back in the town itself. "Though if you take the bridge, you end up in New Orleans. Which is clearly is not possible," she said, motioning to the road. She turned to look up at Rebekah with wide eyes. The only person that Penelope looked to for help, knowing she wouldn't fail her. "I am concerned."

"New Orleans." Rebekah repeated, her face scrunching for a moment as she tried to process it. One of her favorite places in the world, linked to Mystic Falls. There were no coincidences, but she didn't have to like it. "That is concerning." She mused quietly, sighing softly to herself at the sight of Penelope's face. "We will figure something out. I promise." Perhaps it wasn't wise, but when had Rebekah ever failed a promise to her children? She made it a point not to. "You say it was complicated. You didn't get hurt, did you?"

❝ Auntie Bex, hey. ❞ Hope softly smiled as she looked toward her Aunt Rebekah who was approaching her, using her head to motion to take a seat. ❝ Go ahead. ❞

"Hi, sweetheart." Rebekah said with a soft smile of her own as she took a seat beside her niece. Her fingers grazed over the engraving on the bench, letting out a sigh before she looked to Hope. "You're quite the sight for sore eyes."

"So is the fact we can't leave down public knowledge or are people just pretending they don't know what's happening?" Penelope asked. There was a third option in Penelope, though honestly it was worse than both the others, the idea the whole town thought this was the best place to be in the world and they simply hadn't noticed they couldn't leave or that the bridge out of town was now magically connected with New Orleans of all places. "And more importantly are people actually going to start doing something about it?" She asked, after all, Penelope was not one for sitting on her hands.

"We had damn well better be able to leave." But even as Rebekah said it, she had the intuition to know better. That text she and Marcel had received was proof of that, though admittedly it was annoying to think any threat against them actually followed through in any way. Not only against her, but her children, for Penelope, especially. She hadn't tried to leave herself, but she knew her daughter, and Penelope wouldn't lie to her. They had come too far for that. "Of course we'll do something, I'm not going to be stuck here." She continued, her face scrunching for a moment before she paused. "How do you know we can't leave? What happened?"

↳ @newbornfallsstarter

The death of Matt Donovan was an inevitability that Rebekah had always known would happen someday. But it didn't make it less painful; no matter how many decades had passed or how happily married she was, Matt had been the cornerstone of everything Rebekah knew as the beauty of humanity. She was sad, no matter how natural it was. A small, sad smile crossed her face as she caught sight of her niece and the name on the bench she was beside. "Do you mind if I join you?"