Title: the moon is the only light we see
Notes: Title from the classic song "Stand by Me". Pick a version you like if you want to listen. Mine was the cover by Mona.
Summary: When Bonnie learned that the veil between worlds was thinnest on Halloween, she didn't think it meant all the worlds. AU post-6x17. (BooKai Day 1: Samhain - the dead can walk among the living)
With a grunt, Bonnie heaves the last pumpkin into place on the boarding house entryway. From his perch on the ladder just inside the door, Damon offers a half-hearted hurrah and raises his tumbler of bourbon in cheers.
"You could help, you know?" Bonnie grouses. "This would go much faster with vamp speed and super strength."
"And miss," - the not-so-sober vampire indicates the paper spiders and faux-cobwebs hanging around his head - "all of this? Risk ruining my Varvatos tee with pumpkin guts? Nope. Besides, you can levitate things. Just hocus pocus this shit into being done already, Spellman."
"I can't," Bonnie corrects. "You know why."
Damon pauses, seeming to have genuinely forgotten why Bonnie hasn't been using her powers much lately.
"Right," he grumbles. "Whose great idea was it to turn the boarding house into a haunted house for Halloween again? I'll kill 'em."
"Your girlfriend," the witch reminds him, adjusting one of the plastic jack-'o-lanterns and flipping the switch on to test the battery. "And you agreed, because Elena."
"Right," Damon grumbles again. "Because Elena."
Personally, Bonnie thinks a haunted house is a little on the nose considering the bloody history contained within these walls. She would have made the place like the hotel from The Shining, but whatever. Not her charity event.
"Did you find Stefan's straw doll?" Caroline's voice yells out from somewhere deeper in the house.
"It's on the couch, Blondie," Damon yells back.
"No, it's not!"
"Did you even look?" Damon mutters. He slides down the ladder. "Dolls don't just get up and walk away."
"Or do they?" Bonnie responds ominously. Damon shoots her a reproachful look before stalking off to scorn Caroline, leaving the witch to her own devices.
Standing back, the young woman peruses the porch. A mix of several varieties of pumpkins and fake jack-'o-lanterns, along with half melted black candles all covered in a thin layer of cobweb screams a campy Halloween welcome. Bonnie toes one of the smaller white-and-green pumpkins into a different position, then nods in satisfaction.
It's nice to see she can still do things like this. Get into a holiday spirit, decorate a fucking front porch without having a meltdown. Not worry about her magic going haywire and slipping out of her control. Normal things.
Raised voices distract her from the path her thoughts were beginning to turn. Bonnie follows the noise to the foyer, eyebrows raising at the image of Caroline and Damon both gesticulating angrily at each other.
"What's up?" she asks warily.
"Did you move it?" Damon rounds on her. "You cracked that dumb joke."
Bonnie blinks at him, brows furrowed. "What?"
"The doll," he clarifies. "Stefan's old straw doll from when he was like five. It's creepy and ugly and has no arms and is the size of a damn toddler, so there's no way I misplaced it."
The last part of his sentence is addressed at Caroline, who just folds her arms and quirks a brow.
"Then where is it?" she challenges.
Before another argument - or worse, a brawl - can start between the two, Bonnie suggests they split up to find it. She's seen it, she knows exactly how big. hideous, and armless it is, and she needs to get away from her friends before her unstable temperament shifts in the wrong direction and she accidentally causes a localized earthquake.
"It's gotta be around the house," she says. "And if it's really so important that we find it, I can do a simple locator spell."
The last part isn't exactly a lie, but before either of her friends can address the spike in her heart rate, she spins on her heels and heads towards the stairs.
"I'll look upstairs. Damon, look around the storage places, and Caroline, check down here again," she calls. Not waiting for a response - all she'll get is a snarky reply anyway - she takes the steps two at a time then starts looking through the empty guest rooms.
It doesn't actually matter to her where the dumb doll is. She just needs a breather.
The upstairs landing is eerily quiet as she walks from room to room. The silence has heft to it, like a creature holding its breath and it makes Bonnie anxious to finish and go home. The witch is done with this entire day; so much time has been spent around other people and Damon's missing doll theatrics is enough to fray her last nerve.
She opens one door and sticks her head in, doing a quick scan. This room has a large, weathered beechwood armoire rather than a dresser or open closet, so she steps inside to check it out. It's a nice room, big and airy, with a masculine feel to it. The bed is neatly made, heather grey sheets, puffy white pillows, and a quilt made of hues of soft, watery blue patterns folded at the foot. Above the low headboard is an abstract watercolor of grey and blue on a white canvas. Next to the bed, a beechwood nightstand has a few books on its shelf and a single reading lamp on its surface. A small table and blue armchair with a white pillow take up space before a window. The armoire beside them is, shocker, empty of anything aside from a few wooden hangers.
"Where the hell could it have gone?" Bonnie asks herself, closing the armoire and turning to leave. Stepping back in the hall, she pauses right before she closes the door all the way. The hair on the back of her neck stands up and a feeling of unease boils in her stomach. She frowns and once more pushes the door fully open, observing the room again.
There, in the middle of the still neatly made bed, is Stefan's doll. Armless, ugly, the size of a toddler. Utterly out of place in the calmly themed room and entirely unmissable in it's dirty, faded red train conductor uniform.
Swallowing back the disquiet in her chest, Bonnie takes a breath and hollers that she found it.
Making her way towards the bed, the witch frowns down at the doll before picking it up. There's nothing conspicuous about it. There isn't anything supernatural to it, no energy for her to feel. Tucking it under her arm, she makes to leave again when a soft thud nearly makes her leap from her skin.
Eyes darting around, her magic, as unpredictable as it's been, is ready to be wielded Bonnie as searches for the source of the sound. She sees nothing, and it's only when she takes another step to get the fuck out of that room that she notices the ring that must have fallen from the doll when she moved.
Moving her boot, Bonnie picks it up as well, shoving it her jeans pocket. Then she scurries out, no wanting to linger anymore.
"Here," she shoves the doll in Damon's arms on her way out. "I'm gonna head home and get ready for tonight. I need a minute alone."
Not giving him a chance to respond, Bonnie goes straight to her Prius.
Her head is pounding. It's still too much to be out around people too long and the histrionics of today is irritating.
At least we don't have to fake all the ghosts tonight, she thinks.
No doubt, this Halloween will be the sort only Mystic Falls can offer. Some playful spirit probably got a hold of the ugly as sin toy and decided to fuck with her. Bonnie decides then and there that she hates all people, dead or alive.
It's not until after she's home, stripped to skin in the shower, that she remembers the ring she picked up. She decides to look it once she's clean and calm and less likely to have her magic explode a mirror in her face.
-o0o-
The ring is a man's ring, a simple silver circle with a flat, square face. It's sleek and modern-looking, the weight of it warm in Bonnie's palm as she stares down at it. Water droplets fall from the tips of her wet hair, sliding down her shoulders into the towel covering her body. THe young woman pays the chills no mind, fascinated by the silver in her hand. She moves it around, then slides it onto her right thumb: even though it's the only finger the ring fits, it still spins easily, allowing her to imagine how it must have fit the hand of the man who might've worn it.
Bonnie folds her fingers of her thumb, suppressing the shudder that wants to run through her. Don't think on it, she tells herself. She needs to get dressed. Dry off. Get ready to work a haunted house she put a lot of time and effort into.
Yes. There are things to do. Bonnie has no time to dwell.
Donning her costume, it doesn't ever occur to her to take the ring off.
-o0o-
Her "job" for the night is to track donations and visitors - basically, make sure that everyone who goes in pays the door fee and makes it out by the end of their touring time. No freebies, no stragglers, and no victims of Damon's stank eye with holes in their necks. So when she does a headcount at the end of one of Matt's tours and comes up two short, her first instinct is check with the eldest local Salvatore.
He's with Stefan and Caroline at the Kiddie Crypt, the area of the haunted house cordoned off for children too young to go inside the haunted house. With his pinched face and glazed eyes, he seems, Bonnie thinks sardonically, to be having a blast.
Damon catches sight of her and his face lights up. He's at her side in an instant.
"Well, jinkies," he greets. "You look groovy."
"Thanks," she murmurs. "Tyler's Shaggy with Scooby and Matt's Fred."
"Wha- who's Daphne? Daphne is the hot one."
"She got kidnapped by the monster," she replies dryly, somewhat annoyed by his oversight of her in her chosen costume. "Have you been here the whole night?" she continues before he can side-track her again.
"Yeaaaah - dot, dot, dot - why?" Normally, his little quirks in speech and mannerism are a mild annoyance, but tonight Bonnie finds them aggravating. She thinks back to Stefan's hideous, hide-and-seek playing doll and the chill she got when she found it.
Samhain is a special night, she hears Grams' voice echo in her brain. The veil between worlds, between the living and the dead, is at its weakest.
"Some stupid kids are missing," she snaps, turning around to head back to the entrance of the haunted house. She doesn't need to see Damon to know how his face must twist into a scowl when he realizes why she sought him out.
"I take offense," he growls in her ear, catching pace with her. Bonnie glances back at him.
"What are you doing?" the witch asks.
"Going with you to clear my name," the vampire snips. "And besides, it's Halloween in Mystic Falls in the boarding house. I don't trust that some hanky shit isn't going to happen to my best friend."
For a moment, Bonnie's heart softens of the irrational exacerbation she'd held for him. It comes rushing back when he adds:
"Besides, you're all helpless with your magic useless and uncontrollable."
Bonnie's smile is more of a snarl. "Thanks."
There's a ten-minute reprieve between each tour, but Bonnie tells Elena to let her next group know there's a technical delay to be fixed before sweeping through the dense curtain of cobwebs that covered the arched entrance to the haunted house.
"If I never see a damn spider in my life again it will be too soon," Damon mutters as he draws close behind her. His hand settles on her lower back as they walk deeper into the foggy, red-lit hall and she soon finds herself ill at ease again, walking a little faster to avoid his thoughtless affection.
"Arachnophobic?" she quips in response. The fog machines must have been well-made: Bonnie can barely see a foot in front of her for the thickness of it.
"Do you see anyone in this?" she asks Damon. He squints ahead.
"No one's in the hallway," he observes, turning to her. "We could check the rooms for the strag- hey!" His head whips back down the end of the hallway. "Your tour's over, time to leave!"
"You see someone?" Bonnie asks, trying - and failing - to peek at the person he sees. Damn vampire vision.
"Yeah," he mutters. Raising his voice again, he directs. "Stay there, I'll come get you! Hey!"
The last hey is an annoyed shout.
"Fucking prick ran off," he utters. Turning to Bonnie, he says. "Stay here. I'm gonna go grab that asshole and then we'll find the other kid and get the fuck out of this cloud."
Before Bonnie can protest that they should stick together, Damon zips off into the fog, briefly leaving a red outline of his silhouette that is quickly swallowed up by the so-called fog.
Alone, Bonnie fidgets uneasily, torn between what to do. It will be easier for Damon to find her if she stays put, but Bonnie's also never been one for inaction. And maybe it goes to show for their decor skills at making an atmosphere, but she feels like a sitting duck in the middle of the foggy haunted house, unable to see her hand in front of her face if she held out.
"Jinkies," she murmurs to herself. "I can't see without my glasses."
Deciding that Damon is a grown-ass vampire who can damn well find her in an amateur haunted house, she decides to look for the other dawdler while Damon chases down his. Following the length of the hall, Bonnie comes to the first twist of the haunted house, hanging back as Stefan's old doll swoops down from the ceiling.
"Do you want to play with me?" a recorded voice asks. The question repeats since the motion sensor player was on a loop. Bonnie knows all this, helped set it up, but seeing the doll again still stirs up unease in her gut.
"No thanks," Bonnie replies when the question loops again. "We did hide-and-seek earlier." She steps past the doll, knowing that was all for that scare, some ugly, creepy old doll asking visitors to play with him.
"Let's play again! This time you hide and I seek!" Bonnie's heart leaps into her chest at that and she whirls around to see the doll still hanging from its hook, motionless. The recording loops normally again and Bonnie's dreadful feeling grows.
"What the fu-?"
And Bonnie knows, better than anyone, that ghosts are real, understands their mechanics of interacting with the physical world, she really does. But in that instant, her knowledge flees from her and she's irrationally afraid of what a weakened veil means when the boarding house is so irrevocably soaked in blood.
So she runs.
There's no particular direction, it's not like she can see, but when Bonnie comes to a stop, she's in a part of the haunted house she didn't help set up and she curses herself for her stupidity and her friends for the outrageous willingness to go above and beyond the call of good e-fucking-nough.
She's outright creeped out by the area she finds herself in, a simple hallway of still figures, dark under the glow of the red lights and indistinguishable by the fog machines' work.
"Oh my god, why?" she whines to herself, deciding to just finish the tour course and see if she finds someone who got lost along the way.
Unfortunately, her plan means going through the room of mannequins, and so Bonnie braces herself to get through it as quickly as possible.
She'd seen the mannequins as they'd been brought in earlier. Most were just blank-faced, standard fashion mannequins, all in different sizes - men, women, children, and plus. Some of them were made extra creepy by the FX art and makeup done to them. The problem with that is that the fog hid which ones were normal and which ones were nightmares. As Bonnie picks her way through them, she keeps an eye for if maybe one of the dawdlers is a prankster that decided to hang around to add to the effects of the house.
At least, Bonnie hopes that's the case, which is better than the kidnapped-by-a-ghost alternative.
She's starting to think she might just be paranoid when she gets to the end of Mannequin Manor or whatever Caroline called it. But then, in the corner of her eyes, is a twitch of movement and Bonnie looks.
A tall men's fashion mannequin stands not two yards away in the direction the motion caught her eye. Bonnie squints at it, trying to remember if either of the missing strays was six-foot teenaged boy.
The fog drifts for moment and Bonnie can see the figure is just a plain mannequin.
Bonnie tsks and turns to continue her way. And as she does, a chill runs down her spine, similar to how it did just before she reopened the bedroom door to find Stefan's doll where it wasn't before.
She turns back and the tall mannequin is in front of her. Only it isn't a mannequin anymore and when cold hands cover her mouth and drag her forward, when a ripping, burning sensation crashes over her body as her magic is yanked from under her skin, a familiar voice chimes in her ear, more frightening than anything she dared to imagine.
"Found you, Bonster."
-o0o-
AN: Happy Halloween! I wish a ghost as hot as Kai Parker would haunt me. I'm just saying...Bonnie, my dude - get your freak on.
Anyway, I'm happy this BooKai week thing is really two weeks because I definitely wasn't going to be able to post before today. See you tomorrow with the leftover candy!