Babysitting Damon. That's what Bonnie's life had amounted to. She had wanted to go to college, get an education, get married, have children, and actually do something important with her like, but no. There was no time for that. There was never any time for Bonnie to think about herself. She had to clean up after Damon. She had to listen to his problems. She had to do what everyone else refused to do. If you had asked her a few years ago if she ever saw herself helping Damon, she would have laughed. But now that's all she seemed to do.
It was the guilt that got her. She wouldn't do it, and sometimes she thought about stopping, but the guilt ate away at her. The guilt wouldn't let her leave. She was the reason that Damon was like this now. She had taken away everything that meant anything to him. It was her fault Elena and Stefan were dead. It was her fault that Damon had been sunk in a daze of anger and depression for the last two years. So, she had to stay with him. Even though they didn't like each other now any more than they did before, she couldn't leave him alone.
If Damon was alone, God only knows what he would do. Some nights he would go out, and not come back until late the next day, and the on the news later, Bonnie would see about how people were murdered. There were some times when Bonnie would ask him why he did it, but he never remembered when he did. Eventually she just stopped asking him, but that didn't mean that he didn't do it. After the murders would get too large, they would pack up and move to another town. Suspicious, but if they stayed, Damon would probably kill the whole town.
She wanted to stop him, she really did, but she couldn't. She couldn't kill him. She already had too much blood on her hands. Everyone's blood was on her hands; she couldn't have Damon's there too. In a lot of ways, he was driving her toward insanity, but in others, he was the only thing keeping her from it. She didn't even pretend to understand half of the things she did and why she did them. If Bonnie thought about it too much, she would just end up with a headache and no explanation. All she knew was that Damon was alive, and she intended to keep it that way. Even though she knew sometimes it would be better if he were gone, and even though there were times when he begged her to end his life because he couldn't take the pain any longer, she'd been selfish in the way that she couldn't let him go.
She hated herself for that. Well, she hated herself for a lot of things, but that was one of the reasons. Mostly, she hated herself because it was her fault that everyone was dead. She was sure that Damon thought the same thing, but he didn't know the whole truth. He only knew what she had told him, and she hadn't told him everything. He knew that she had been holding out on him, and at first he tried to get her to talk, but eventually he backed off. Bonnie sometimes wondered if she would ever talk about what really happened. She didn't even like to think about it. She knew that if she told Damon, he'd hate her. Might even kill her. There had been a time where she had entertained that idea, but it didn't last long.
Damon wouldn't kill her because, like she needed him to keep her sane, he needed her to do the same. But, she knew that he wasn't really sane right now. He was barely living. He drank every day to the point where he was drunk, which was a lot for a vampire. He killed people and rarely remembered doing it. There were times when he would just sit on the couch for hours and stare at absolutely nothing. Bonnie would sometimes try to bring him out of that bad place he went to, but it never seemed to work, so she just let him be.
Even though he didn't need her to keep him sane, didn't mean that he didn't need her. He needed her to protect him from the police when they began to notice the strange, distant man that moved into town when the murders started. He needed her to go searching for him only to find him passed out somewhere and drag him back. He needed her because without her he'd be completely alone, and she knew that he could never take that. So, he couldn't kill her. Bonnie knew that. She couldn't kill him, he couldn't kill her, they could barely stand each other, but they needed each other. So they struggled through life together because it was easier than doing it alone.
Now, Bonnie sat with a book propped on her knees. Time to time, she would glance up at Damon to see if he'd come out of his dark place, but it didn't seem like he was coming out any time soon. She sighed heavily. Loneliness was something that she was used to. A person would think that those episodes would dwindle after time, but they hadn't. In fact, they seemed like they were getting worse. More and more frequent. There was nothing she could do about it, of course. She had tried so many things, but only Damon could bring Damon out of that place he went to. And he took his time doing that.
She was suddenly very tired. Being alone made her tired. Tired and sad, but the sad had passed in the first year, so now she was usually just tired. She glanced at the vampire who was staring at the wall with an angry expression. "Damon?" She tried, knowing that her attempts were futile. Bonnie waited some time for a response, but she didn't get anything but a heavy silence. The witch closed her book and sat it on the end table. She looked at Damon again. "I'm going to bed." She said, waiting another beat before she stood, and stalked out of the room.
This house was very small. It just had two bedrooms and one tiny bathroom. There was a living room, with a conjoining kitchen. That was it, though. There was nothing special about this house. Of course, there wasn't anything special about any of the houses they'd occupied over the years. Bonnie earned a meager living from working odd jobs here and there, and Damon only brought in what he stole, which was never much. So, they could never afford anything fancy. When she went to bed freezing on uncomfortable beds, she would wish for her bed back in Mystic Falls. For her house. Or even for the Boarding House. Anywhere but where they were.
But she knew that she could never go back. Damon could never go back. If there was anything to go back to now. When they left, the town was in ruins from the battle. She had heard rumors about the people rebuilding things, but she wasn't sure if those were true or not. That wasn't the only reason that they couldn't go back. Even is the town was back to normal, that would just hide the physical damage. There would be nothing to hide the emotional and mental damaged that both Bonnie and Damon gained from what happened there. It would be so raw, and neither of they could do it. She doubted that they'd ever be able to do it.
Bonnie wiped some dust off of the bathroom mirror, and stared at her reflection. She looks sad, she looked broken, and she looked hopeless. Most of all, though, she looked old. She looked like she had aged a hundred years since the final battle, when really it was just three years ago. There were worry lines on her forehead, and around her mouth. There were bags under her eyes from how little sleep she got. She had never been really, really beautiful like Elena and Caroline, but she had always been a pretty girl. Now, that seemed to have all faded.
She didn't look twenty. She looked forty. She was no longer a pretty, innocent girl who hadn't seen enough of the world; she was a broken, weathered woman who had seen too much of it. The worst of it was her eyes. Her eyes looked so tired, and so sad. They had faded from a green to a brown. They contained so much hatred, and resentment. But also so much sadness, and depression. There was no trace of life anywhere in her face. Actually, there was no trace of life anywhere in her body. She was limp, lifeless, like a corpse except so much worse because corpses didn't have to live, and she did.
The witch tore her gaze away from herself. She couldn't do this to herself. She could stand there all night and contemplate how old and ugly she looked, which she had done before, but that would not do her any good now. She had to work tomorrow, and she needed her rest. Bonnie pushed the tears out of her eyes. That wouldn't do her any good either. If she started crying, she would never stop. She had found that out on more than one occasion. Quickly, she scrubbed her face, brushed her teeth, and pulled her hair out of her face. Don't think about it, don't think about it, don't think about it. She repeated over and over to herself as she went into her bedroom.
About halfway there, she noticed Damon standing in front of her door. He looked at her, and his face consorted into a look of uncertainty. She stopped in her tracks. She had seen that look before, and it could mean one of two things. One, he was confused as to where he was, or two, he was confused as to who she was. There was one time where he didn't recognizing her, and he had almost bit her. She had managed to make him remember before he did, though. More often than not, it was the first one, but it was better to be safe than sorry. So, she kept her distance from him just in case.
"Damon…" She ventured carefully.
He blinked twice, but she could see recognition crossed his face. "Bonnie." He said, and then pursed his lips. At least he knew who she was. "What…." He began to say something, but then he trailed off. His too-blue eyes seemed to look right through her. "Where's Stefan? And Elena?" Damon's voice wasn't strong. It was weak and hoarse, and held a tone of cold dread.
This had happened once or twice. The first time, she had told him that they were dead, but that upset him. He got really angry at her, and shouted obscenities at her; something that the Damon before wouldn't have done, but he was very different than before. He then left for three exhausting days in which Bonnie spent every hour trying to find him. She had found him in an abandoned house, starving and disoriented. Slowly, she got him to come back to her, but it was a tiring process. She did not want a repeat of that. "They went out."
He thought about this for a long time before he nodded. Then, in a trance like state, he walked past her and to his own bedroom. She stared after him for a moment, but then went into her bedroom, and crawled into the creaky bed. Sleep didn't come easily. It never seemed to these days. When sleep did come, it was nightmares of violent noises and distorted images. There were no real shapes, or no real voices. Nothing really made sense. But they were frightening, all in the same. They sometimes woke her up. They usually always came. Bonnie couldn't actually remember the last time she had slept without a nightmare.
Slowly, she drifted into a light, and restless sleep that was filled with the usual horrific images and dark noises.