A/N: It's official: I am a Stefonnist. An angsty one-shot. Enjoy.
Disclaimer: I disclaim everything save the computer and the angst.
Stefan saw her moving through the house, turning off the lights. White sheets covered the furniture. They reminded him of ghosts. The picture frames were backed away, the vases full of flowers, the posters of Ella Fitzgerald and the desert in bloom. The walls were bare and the wood floor dark and glossy like placid black water. He walked around the house, keeping her in sight. The dead grass crunched and twigs snapped with every footfall. They sounded loud in his ears but he knew in this wind, with all the ghosts in the house, she wouldn't hear him.
He watched her climb the stairs and stepped back to see her appear in the windows. She looked out, searching, and if he had a heart capable of beating, it would burst from the cry he would make. He would make so much noise it would scare winter off. But he didn't. She disappeared into darkness. He followed her footsteps, soft and dry, down the stairs to the last lighted room, the living room. She went to the fireplace and knelt before the hearth. Her back was one smooth curve of pale gray. Her dry lips moved as her hands hovered above the wood. Firelight brightened better than candlelight. It grew like the sunrise. But only to a point. Shadows pooled in the corners of the room and around the edges of her. The glow stained her neck and cheeks and forehead and turned her hair into strands of malt.
The temptation proved to be too much. He drew up and closed his eyes and thought of her, thought of her heated touch, thought of her green eyes.
He went to the door. He knocked. He waited. The lock turned, the doorknob twisted, a crack appeared, then it grew wide, and she filled the space.
She stared at him, shocked. Her lips parted and she sucked in air. The door swayed as she leaned on it. The glow was on her throat and in her cheeks and on her forehead. He sank his hands into his coat pockets, afraid to touch her. Touching meant falling further into perdition.
"Stefan," she breathed. "Come in."
She led him to the living room. They sat in front of the fire. She offered him what was left in her thermos. When he declined, she poured the rest into a tea cup and sat back against an ottoman. Her closeness produced more heat than the flames. This was always true of Bonnie. She was flame embodied. Healing. Destructive. He listened to her breathe. It put him in a daze. He wanted her nearness to remind him of her, of the life they had, of the warmth between them, but it destroyed the fully realized lies they lived. It destroyed his belief in what he wanted.
"How are you?" she asked.
He gathered himself, despite the cracking, and tried to answer. But he couldn't. Words seemed inadequate yet his mind scrolled furiously through all the fabricated sentences, the trite responses, the rote answers. He gave up. He couldn't lie to her, not when the fundamental bind between them was probity.
"I feel haunted."
The tea cup clinked as she set it down. "Haunted?"
The firelight filled his eyes. "I didn't find her. Did you know that? Damon found her. He found her out on the balcony. She must have gone out there to enjoy the morning. She used to wake up before sunrise just to see it."
He heard her slide closer, but couldn't see her fully in his periphery. She took a breath, held it, and let it out. He continued.
"I was hunting in the Appalachians when something dropped inside. It fell dead away. Evening arrived before I did. I went up and I found them there. He was still holding her. When he looked at me, it was like it became true. I thought," Stefan paused, "I thought he had fed on her because of all the blood, but he had bitten himself and bled himself until all his blood covered them both. I had to break his neck in order to take her."
Stefan touched his head. Damon was still in the cellar, asleep, desiccating. Whatever blood he got he tried to give to Elena, who was dead. And when he had a moment of lucidity, he would try to impale himself. So he kept his brother in the cellar in a medicated stupor. Damon would never be himself. He was gone.
Stefan glanced at her. "My brother went insane in a matter of seconds, Bonnie."
She stared at him with her green eyes like marbles. She looked into the fire. Her features were unreadable. It was gruesome. Grief. It turned beautiful things into ugly spectacles. It left everyone mired in the mud of moving on, living. Everything changed under grief, everything fell away, dissembled, became shambles. Grief had hollowed him, tore him asunder. It made him a monster. She saw it before. She saw the thing moving in his eyes, beneath the muscles of his face.
"She told me she loved both of you. She cried like I've never seen anyone cry when she told me how much she loved Damon, how much she wanted him, how it hurt to turn you away. She cried because freedom to love is not freedom at all. It is a burden." Bonnie dropped her head back. "You tell me this, and it breaks my heart all over again. I don't want to feel for you, or Damon. My sister is gone and here I am, packing up the house where she started to make a life with Damon." Her voice broke.
He saw tears vanish into her hair and bead her eyelashes. Her face shook, crumpled, and she jumped up and went to a window. The sobs she gulped down sounded like agony itself. He stood but did not go to her. She quickly wiped her face and returned to the glow of the fire. They stood looking at the floor, unable to broach the rest of it. He appealed to the top of her head to lift and for her eyes to bore into his and drain out all he needed to say. He sensed she was close to giving up, to shutting him down and driving him out, when her head picked up and her green eyes glittered at him.
"I stared at the back of your head the entire service. I hoped you would come to the wake, I even stayed up well after everyone went home, but no vampire darkened the doorway."
Stefan rubbed his eyes. "I know. I stayed outside the house all night."
"Like you were going to do tonight."
"I couldn't."
He stepped towards her. Was this the moment? How did he do this before? He never did this before. He never looked at a person and felt like a heart beating, never felt like sinking and ascending every other breath.
"This isn't fair, I know it isn't fair. It's not fair for every word or touch or look to ramble around my head and haunt my dreams. It's not fair that I've had to lie and keep my distance. It's not fair for you to not know, to think that it has always been Elena when for me it's been you."
She blinked and started. "We've always been friends."
"At least we've always been friends. At least you've been in my life in that capacity. I'm grateful for that, but I've been living on at least for some time. I'm tired of it, Bonnie. I'm tired of pretending to be the martyr."
The smoothness of her face rippled, disturbed. Disbelief shone from her eyes. "Why didn't you come to me when you left? Why didn't you say something? After all this time, after everything that has happened—" Bonnie broke off. She shook her head. "I had to play that role too, Stefan. Do you understand that? And now you're telling me," she threw up her hands, "I don't even know what you're—"
"I love you," Stefan said. He said it plain, said it soft, said it with the same kind of conviction as a man telling his blinded lover that the sky was blue and the grass was green and the crow's wing was black.
She stared at him. The disbelief wavered. Stefan reached out and caught the wool shawl draped across her shoulder. It fell away and his hand slipped down her arm, feeling the muscles and ridges of bone. He pushed back the sleeves at her wrist to brush her wrist bones. It was one touch, one rather subdued touch, and yet it dissolved a façade crafted by years of purposeful separation.
The barrier of circumstance melted away and they surged against each other, lips on lips, hands pushing aside clothes to feel skin, bodies colliding, igniting. The dream of her vanished as he tasted her mouth and inhaled her air into his lungs. She kissed him on her toes and they laughed when he lifted her a few inches. They laughed and she kissed his eyes and his cheeks and his jawline and the inside of his neck. They laughed as they held each other tight.
The shadows of the night grew long and deep, but they remained fastened in an embrace, enshrined by the firelight.