part 1/7: litany
in the dark/ in the dark / baby, you and me/
in the dark /
- Brenda Marie Osbey, speaking of trains
The taste of her own blood confirms the spell's failure. Bonnie surveys the makeshift altar before her in weary frustration, wiping her nose and shutting her Grimoire before making her way slowly to the kitchen at the Gilbert house. She pours herself a glass of water with shaky hands, fighting the wave of dizziness that nearly flattens her.
She can't let Jeremy or the others see her like this.
They had enough on their plate with Silas was running around town trying to snatch Elena for god only knew what dark purpose. While Damon and Stefan spent nearly every hour of the day safeguarding the doppelganger, she, Bonnie, had been charged with discovering Silas' origins and weaknesses. And when the Grimoires yielded little to nothing, she'd had to resort to sending message after message to the Spirits in the hope that some hand would reach back and deliver the knowledge they all needed. But communing with the Spirits was taxing magic, especially when they're being taciturn.
Sometimes she wonders if they're still angry at her for failing her appointed task two years ago to kill-
"Klaus," she starts a little as the hybrid strolls casually into the kitchen as though materialized from her thoughts. The idea of him being their reluctant ally against Silas, and therefore invited into spaces he had no business being, is still a new one. Bonnie doesn't think she'll ever get accustomed to turning corners and finding him there, alive and immortal and coolly arrogant, reminding her how she'd once yielded the power of a hundred witches and still failed.
"Why are you here?" she asks, feeling a hum of panic beneath her fingers. "Did something happen to-,"
He eyes the decor around him with mild distaste. "Calm your witchy nerves, love. Last I saw her the doppelgänger was safe and sound in her natural habitat."
She raises an eyebrow.
"Between two brothers," he says, with a blithe smile. His eyes flick lightly over her, making her hasten to be anywhere but in his line of sight.
"Thanks for the intel," she says dryly before turning to leave, only to have his question arrest her.
"And how was your little spell?"
His tone is casual, like he's asking about the weather or what she had for lunch. But she knows better. He's playing nice with everyone at the moment because he, like the others, believes she'll find a magical solution to their problem. At the first sign of weakness the mask would drop, and he would be the same Klaus whose very name had once struck them blind with fear. There would be no telling what he'd do.
"It went fine," she says, keeping her voice light.
"The Spirits were talkative, I presume?" he asks, making her grind her teeth. "Gave you access to Encyclopedia Killing Silas perhaps?"
She turns slowly to face him, determined to show no sign of weakness. "I'll find a way to defeat Silas, with or without their help. I'm resourceful," she adds archly, bidding him remember the time she'd nearly melted the flesh off his bones. "You should know that by now."
He closes the distance between them in a slow, sauntering way that makes her tense up, ready for fight or flight. She's alone in this house with her magic depleted. And there's a wolf in the kitchen.
Klaus comes to a stop in front of her, his voice becoming a murmur, as though they're sharing a secret. "And resources can become extinguished with time. You should know that by now, little witch." His fingers tug lightly at the sleeve of her sweater, close to her wrist, where telltale drops of blood stain the pink wool.
His large hand, so close to hers, emanates a faint electricity that causes her magic to stand at attention, sensing something it can cleave to, something to feed on. Klaus is watching her closely, an unreadable look on his face.
"Bonnie?" Jeremy's voice, piqued with concern, breaks the moment. She hastens to distance herself from the hybrid as Jeremy crosses the living room in quick strides. She feels inexplicably guilty.
Her boyfriend puts a protective arm around her, all muscle and warmth and a familiarity she turns gratefully into as he peers down at her with concern. "What's he doing here? Are you ok?"
"I'm fine," she says, managing a smile. "Klaus just stopped by to see how the spell went."
"I'm sure she'll regale you with the details of her success," the hybrid drawls, eyeing her briefly before retracting his steps and disappearing out the kitchen door. His knowing smile, however, lingers in her mind even after he's gone.
Jeremy cups her face in both hands. "You sure you're okay?"
She nods quickly but firmly, extricating herself. "Hey, wanna heat up some leftovers?"
"Sure...," he says, rubbing the back of his neck. "I'll get started."
Pecking him on the cheek, Bonnie hastens into the bathroom and splashes cold water on her face, reorienting herself and compelling her wayward magic to settle itself. Her hand still tingles where it almost touched Klaus.
With near obsessive fervor, she sticks her sleeve under the faucet and scrubs away the small marks of her blood.
Katherine Petrova is dead.
Stefan brings him the news while he's midway through a new painting, making his brush halt in a puddle of violet.
Silas had found her, Stefan tells him. He'd caught her, and separated her head from her body before dropping it in the waters beneath Wickery Bridge. The rest of her he'd pulled apart into pieces and deposited them in front of various auspicious buildings - city hall, the church, the bell tower - in a ritualistic spree that reminds Klaus of decapitating the body of an enemy so they could never receive a burial rite, so they could never return to wholeness.
He almost admires the man.
But Stefan's troubled face tells him this is the wrong reaction, so he smooths his own countenance into a placid, inquiring kind of look. In any case, he can't have someone else running about painting the town red with doppelgänger blood. That's his job.
Stefan continues, outlining their plan to use all the vampire strength they can marshall between him, Damon and Klaus to capture Silas while he's in Shane's body and then expel his Spirit, leaving him bereft of a physical form with which to hunt Elena while they looked for a more permanent solution.
"That latter part will require quite a bit of magic," Klaus says with a sidelong glance, thinking of a small hand, and a sweater sleeve flecked with blood.
"Bonnie will find a way. She always does."
Klaus shrugs, hiding a smile before filling a glass with Stefan's favored cognac. The liquid glow reflects in the younger vampire's eyes.
Stefan shifts his feet. "I should get going. Elena's pretty freaked out-,"
"I would imagine," the hybrid says, coolly. In his opinion, the doppelgänger could benefit from a few more healthy bouts of existential terror. Klaus keeps the sarcasm in his voice to a dignified minimum."The Ripper of Monterey, indoors and retiring before eleven o'clock. How novel."
He relishes the little flash in the younger vampire's eyes. He wonders how often Elena watches for that same flash with fear.
"So you'll help us catch him for the exorcism? Like we agreed?"
"Wouldn't miss it for the world," Klaus says, raising the glass to sip the cognac himself. He'd developed a taste for the liquor in Chicago after crossing paths with the Ripper, and for years after he could barely catch a whiff without being assailed with sharp, sensual memory. It tastes the same now, unperturbed by time. But the allure of history turns briefly sour, and Klaus sets the glass down to return to his canvas with its streaks of bleeding violet. "You can see yourself out I'm sure."
The illustrations on the Grimoire leave little do the imagination.
Bonnie stares mutely. Caroline's eyebrows are trying to disappear into her hairline. Elena looks slightly ill.
The three of them are shut up in Elena's bedroom, burning some sage for quiet while Stefan and Damon keep watch downstairs. In the basement, trapped in Shane's body, Silas is chained to the wall, awaiting his exorcism. But the ritual requires at least twice the magical energy Bonnie currently carried and she knew, with a sinking stomach, that they only had one option.
She would have to channel Klaus.
Elena is the first to speak. "There has to be another way."
"Discharging this amount of energy would kill a human in under a minute. Regular vampires could last an hour maybe," Bonnie points out, keeping her voice calm and practical to avoid the quiet screaming inside her own head. "But Klaus -"
"It's Klaus," Caroline interjects, gesturing at a particularly graphic drawing of a witch straddling her vampire consort while little silver lines of energy glowed under her skin. "You'd have to do this with Klaus."
Bonnie snatches the book and turns to another page only to be greeted by a similar drawing, this time of a warlock and a male vampire very robustly getting each other off. She tosses the Grimoire aside with a sigh. "I don't have to screw Klaus to channel him, that's for really huge spells, like breaking a sire line or undoing ancient spells. For this...," she tries to sound casual, "he'd barely have to hold my hand."
"Isn't there someone else you could channel?" Elena asks, sitting down beside her, brown eyes earnest and troubled.
"Another vampire-werewolf hybrid over a thousand years old?" Bonnie says dryly. Besides, even if there were, there's no telling if her magic will want to channel them. Elena and Caroline don't know that it's the magic itself that chooses certain sources over others, and for some reason hers has chosen Klaus. How could she explain something to them she didn't understand herself?
"But he'd have to...be inside you, wouldn't he?" Elena asks with a shudder. "His energy I mean. What if it affects you somehow?" she says, looking to Caroline for support. The blonde nods vigorously.
"Then we'll deal with that after we deal with Silas," Bonnie says, rising to her feet. "Look, we can sit here and speculate all we want, or we can take our best shot against the guy who decapitated Katherine Petrova and is probably coming for you next."
It's Caroline who poses the quiet question. "What about Jeremy?"
Bonnie twitches a little, her hand curling into itself. "What about him?"
"Channelling someone sounds like a pretty intimate experience," Caroline continues, exchanging a glance with Elena. "You sure Jeremy's gonna be okay watching you siphon Klaus' mystical essence or whatever?"
"Considering our relationship survived him kissing his ex-girlfriend's ghost, I'm pretty sure we can handle me standing close to another guy to save his sister's life."
This has the desired effect of silencing any further protests.
A year later and she's still uncomfortable discussing Jeremy around them, largely because she knows they both disapproved of her rekindling her relationship with the young hunter. In their eyes, his transgression with Anna had forever marked him unworthy of her affection. But they didn't know - how could they? - what it's like to always be the afterthought, the collateral damage. For despite the losses they'd endured Elena and Caroline always had a flurry of loving arms to hold them in the land of the living. They didn't know what it was like to crave a ghost's touch after the white-hot loneliness of another day without someone you loved.
Bonnie tosses her Grimoire into her backpack and slings it over her shoulder. "Come on, let's get this over with so we can actually graduate high school this year."
Despite her bravado, a frisson of fear travels her spine as she comes face to face with Silas in the shadowy basement. Shane's face is twisted into a cold mask as he watches her pour salt around him before taking her position.
Can she do it? Tear a soul from flesh and fling it naked into the ether?
"If you lot don't mind, Bonnie and I would appreciate some privacy." His drawling voice precedes him. Sauntering to her side, Klaus drapes an arm around her waist and draws her close. "Go on, clear out," he commands the others with a dimpled grin. She wants terribly to scratch the pleased smirk off his face, but the sparks already dancing along her skin where his arm touches her is a reminder enough.
She offers Jeremy a comforting smile that does little to ease the tension in his frame. Stefan puts a hand on his shoulder, while Elena huddles close to her brother with some inaudible, placating words. In the corner of the room, Damon drinks heavily from a small flask, his eyes hard as ice as he surveys the chained man. She'd heard from Elena that Katherine's murder had shaken him more than he cared to admit. A few feet away, Caroline stands with folded arms, and though her forehead wears a frown of deep worry she manages a hesitant smile of encouragement when Bonnie catches her eye.
Bonnie feels that hot, heavy weight on her chest that's become familiar whenever she performs important magic. For better or worse the people gathered in this basement, this ill-assorted crew of humans and supernaturals with their grudges and quirks and passions, were the only home she's ever known. For them, she could put herself in the crossfire over and over, could summon courage from the deepest, darkest pit to fling at their enemies.
("Where do you want me, love?" Klaus' breath tickles her ear, inducing a shiver she can't seem to shake.)
Could even, when the need arose, collaborate with one enemy to destroy another.
Bonnie shifts out of his grasp and indicates a spot just outside the circle of salt. "Stand there until I need you."
He obeys lazily, but his eyes stay fixed on her as she begins.
The candles come to life, the wind howls, and the spell takes shape.
The consequence of having lived a thousand years is that Time itself begins to feel like ritual, a recurring motif of agony and sacrifice and blood, a spiral of desires and consequences that repeats without any inkling of an end. A thousand years ago, under his father's command, his brothers had chained him between two trees they used to climb as boys, so his mother could reach inside him with magic and chain the half of his soul that reflected her transgression.
And a thousand years later, his soul restored with blood and fire, Klaus finds himself returned to ritual. They're all here, the players transmuted and restored: Elena, a mirror for Esther's self-indulgence. Stefan the self-flagellating monster, an iteration of Elijah. Caroline, so much like Rebekah, naive and easily bruised by the world; Damon, half-Kol and half-Mikael, the shadow in the corner poised to remind them all of their true nature. And Silas, the monster, shackled to the wall, trying to keep his soul intact.
In the candlelight, history revives. But there's one, small difference:
Bonnie Bennett.
Try as he might he can't place her in the retinue. She'd nearly killed him: a feat that no other could boast except his own father. And yet, unlike Mikael, it wasn't hatred for him that had driven her rage, but love. A stormy, blinding love for the people she called her own. A love that spent itself over and over, without question or hesitation.
His history, his life, have retained no words with which to define her.
It's what makes her equal parts dangerous and compelling.
"Give me your hand," she says, with a prim little gesture. He obliges, noting the warmth that blooms in her face with satisfaction. Her magic feeds and feeds, all teeth and eagerness, an amusing contrast to her usual facade.
His amusement melts swiftly when she begins to chant, digging magical hooks into Shane's flesh to pry forth the invading soul.
He's not blind to the tense glares and suspicious fear - spearheaded by Gilbert Jr - directed at him by the other people in the room that seem to form a bubble around the witch. They understand her perhaps even less than he does, and so they contain her and corral her, starve her of things only they can provide. They don't see the hunger in her that only shows itself in magic, that calls to him so clearly it's unfathomable how they don't hear it.
And so when he sees her faltering mere seconds from the spell's completion, he closes the distance between them and takes her face in his hands.
She's so close, she can feel it. Silas' soul is coming untethered, she just needs a few more minutes.
Bonnie muffles a cry of frustration, staggering a little as the soul tries to writhe from her grasp and bury back inside Shane's body.
Then Klaus is standing before her, between her and Silas. She can't quite read the hybrid's face but his eyes are alight, focused so keenly on her that were it not for the concerned murmurs she hears behind her she would think they were alone in the room.
Before she can move, his mouth touches hers in a soft, lingering kiss. The tenderness of the gesture turns her feet to stone. Klaus brushes a tendril of hair from her face, his voice a murmur. "Finish it."
When he pulls away, the last bit of power she needs is flaring up her spine.
He returns to his spot, and Bonnie tightens the spell.
With an animal cry, the soul is torn from flesh. Shane sags against the wall.
She catches a glimpse of Klaus' face, not smiling, not smirking, but simply regarding her as though he understands something she doesn't need to relay. Then, Elena and Caroline and Jeremy are rushing to surround her, the Hunter drawing her into a bear hug, and when they move aside Klaus is gone.
Two Weeks Later
Bonnie glances at her phone, frowning a little at the time. The text from Elena insists she meet her at the Salvatore boarding house, and that it concerns Silas.
Two weeks, two precious weeks of quiet had elapsed since the exorcism and her life had almost regained a semblance of routine. Just a few seconds ago, she'd been comfortably dozing in Jeremy's arms to the sound of their Law & Order marathon. Her boyfriend's head rests against the back of the couch, eyes closed, while his t-shirt covered chest rises and falls in deep, even breaths. She'd stolen his sweatshirt for herself hours ago.
The sight of him causes a troubled pang as she debates whether to wake him.
She'd tried to bring up what happened with Klaus a few times, but Jeremy had stopped her, telling her it wasn't worth talking about, and that all that mattered was that she'd ejected Silas and emerged unscathed. It wasn't even really a kiss, he'd pointed out. It was the equivalent of someone reloading a gun. Why should they turn it into a bigger deal than it really was?
The analogy was a poor one: a gun being cold metal, not responsive skin. And magic was no bullet, it was akin to breathing. But realizing that Jeremy was determined to put the incident behind them, she relented, and stifled the nagging desire to make him understand - she was hardly sure what. She needed him to know - something. About herself, the burning sense of duty she felt towards him, towards all of them. The weight of her powers. About the relief, in a moment when she was about to buckle under, of being able to reach out her hand and find strength and safety. Yes, even if they were wrapped up in Klaus.
Jeremy won't hear any of it. And, sometimes in the dark corners of her mind, she wonders if he'd even understand if he did. But he's her boyfriend, he's one of the few things she can call hers, and she wants so desperately for that to remain so.
It's why in the end she decides not to wake him, but simply covers him with a blanket and kisses him lightly on the lips before putting on her coat.
The boarding house is empty except for Elena and, surprisingly, Shane. Bonnie's still uneasy around the man who's carried Silas' soul in his body, but she proffers him a smile and asks awkwardly about his day as they draw near the coffee table.
"Shane thinks he knows how to make Silas go away once and for all," Elena begins, with a peculiar, fervent glow to her face that Bonnie's never seen. She clasps her hands together, her brown eyes almost feverish. "But...it's going to need magic. Lots of magic."
Bonnie's sits heavily down on the couch. "I'm listening."
A/N: I know what you're thinking: this bish doesn't update any of her ongoing stories for months and then drops a brand new multichapter? Look, life's been a bit crazy. My computer broke, and my girlfriend got really sick for a while which caused me lots of stress and sadness. Additionally, academia is a hellhole and the new semester is taking a huge toll on my mental health. To deal with all that, I've been nursing this AU for weeks now and (you'll be relieved to know) have written practically the entire story. In fact I'm working on Part 6 and the Epilogue right now. So don't worry, you won't be left hanging! And if editing goes smoothly, I'm aiming for weekly updates on this. In the meantime, I'll also be working on updates for "a case of you" and other WIPs.
I say this is a post-S3 AU in the loosest sense possible. But basically, like most of my canon-based stories, it's AU after TVD 3X18 when Bonnie unlinks the Mikaelson siblings. This story is set roughly a year after, give or take. It originally began as a drabble I wrote as a birthday gift for the wonderful cheleonrage on Tumblr, and the story just demanded expansion so here we are.
Thank you for bearing with me, and please do let me know your thoughts in the reviews!