A/N: Here's to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently…I hope you enjoy this chapter!

Summary: Tensions rise in a small town in Georgia when a little girl's rape alters the lives of its townsfolk.

A/U: Bonnie Bennett is a sixteen year old who has been friends with Tyler Lockwood since that time they had mumps together. This friendship is tested when Tyler's brother-ah shucks, just read the fic lol. Emily is Bonnie's little sister, Marcel and Jamie are her brothers. Damon is eighteen and a senior who's preparing for college and Stefan is also sixteen. Giuseppe Salvatore features as the father and Silas is their grandfather. This fic is loosely based on 'A Time to Kill'/ 'To Kill a Mockingbird' /'What's eating Gilbert Grape'

Disclaimer: There might be scenes of violence, sex and strong language in this fic…

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The Carnage of Butterflies

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It was always hot in Georgia but Mystic falls simmered; it grew so hot that even the hissing air caused blisters, sores all over your flesh from the cloying heat. It burned so much that the heat just about turned your innards out.

Bonnie took a long pull from her Coca-Cola, and then cradled the bottle tracing the perspiration running down the glass with her bruised thumb. Her thumb still hurt from her last fishing injury with the boys. She'd snagged it around a hook when she tried to haul up a monster catfish two weeks back.

Wiping an oily hand across her mouth, Bonnie screwed her eyes to the shimmering horizon. She tugged the denim straps of her dungaree, toying with the notion of noodling with Tyler Lockwood but swiftly decided against it. Tyler had been acting mighty strange since his father was let off work. The mill plant was closing down, something about some big cooperation buying it out and turning the place into some big resort for rich townsfolk. They were going to give all their employees nice hefty packages and Bonnie figured that Tyler would be happy, after all the Lockwood's needed the money. They might even buy a nice house with all that money and finally move out of the trailer park Tyler hated.

Bonnie sighed, rocking in her chair before taking another gulp of her coke.

She'd been fighting with Tyler Lockwood ever since they were little, seemed all they did was fight and make up. Marcel liked to tease that she'd been adopted cause she was black on the outside but all red on the inside. Redneck like them Lockwood's, he'd say. The last fight she'd had with Tyler was something brutal though, he'd sat on the rusty hood of his old battered truck, sipping a big ol' can of beer and called her daddy a coward. He'd called Rudy Hopkins a coward for being discharged from the army because of an injury. What the heck did Tyler Lockwood know about being a hero, all him and his brothers ever did was run amok around town shooting beer bottles off trash cans or running up to the creek to fire at innocent squirrels.

This particular insult toward her father was even worse than Tyler's previous lie about her momma being locked up in a mental hospital somewhere in Savannah. Abby Bennett was off in Hollywood somewhere, trying to make a name for herself. Bonnie had the postcards to prove it and as soon as her momma came right, she'd leave this drenched old town and join her in glamorous Hollywood. Bonnie could scarcely remember her mother but she remembered the idea of her and that idea had grown into a memory, a strong work of fiction. She would never allow him to take that away from her. She loathed Tyler Lockwood worse than pigs in a muddy pen.

As far as she was concerned their friendship was finished, dead and buried.

"Bonnie, is Emily back yet?"

"Is she lost?" she asked, nonchalant as she swatted a whining mosquito. Her grams liked to fret and make mountains out of moles, spin fables from thin air and at sixteen, Bonnie was past the charm.

"She went down to the grocery store to buy some of that liquorice she likes"

"I aint seen her"

Grams hesitated, latching on to the torn screen door and looking out toward the supine vista with its stuttering heat.

"Where are the boys?"

"Jamie's out in the henhouse huntin for snakes, don't know about Marcel, probably playing ball by himself again" Bonnie replied, inspecting as the last of the ice dissolved inside the steamed bottle. She shook it once before chugging it down again. Marcel was obsessed with football, fixated on getting a scholarship to Alabama the following year. Their father didn't have the heart to tell him they only picked three blacks a season and that his chances were slim to none.

Everyone was leaving, everybody wanted to run away.

"Have you fed them pigs?" her grams asked, dusting flour off her weathered green apron.

"Yeah, I fed 'em" she flung the words, wiping her mouth on her greasy arm.

"Miss Bennett?"

"Yes mam, I fed 'em hogs"

"Thank you"

"I'll get the boys to go out there and look for Emily"

"I'm comin with, "Bonnie yelled, bouncing from her chair. Being stationary in all that heat was beginning to drive her crazy.

The three of them loaded up into the truck, Marcel driving, Jamie perched up in the passenger seat while Bonnie slouched down in the backseat. The old pick up, rocked and bounced along the old dirt road peppered with gravel. They drove along a labyrinth of red dust roads, past whitewash houses and the old Mikaelson grocery store. Bonnie sighed in the backseat, dropping deeper into the scratched leather seat while she watched the town from the car's murky window. They passed a two mile long mudhole with big serpentine trees rising out of its muddled water, green moss casing its surface like a ratty blanket.

She loved Mystic Falls with its big oak trees sprouting from the ground up like the corpses of former slaves, as her grams would say and the Spanish moss that bloomed and draped over them was their spirits. Sometimes she'd watch as the tendrils of weeping moss swayed in the hot July breeze, she'd imagine they were humming, reciting some old folktale to her. Their ghosts were still tied to this world by the roots running deep down into the fat soil, still tied to Georgia and never wanting to let her go. When Bonnie was younger the idea spooked her, the dead were always watching, they never left.

xXx

Everything burned, the heat breathed into his face before eating him alive, spitting him out and leaving him a wilted thing. Damon was sapped from the sagging heat and draining his father's single malt seemed to only aggravate the problem. He couldn't wait for the ensuing year, couldn't wait to escape Mystic Falls and head off to India. His father was still under the assumption that he was heading off to Harvard to study law. Damon didn't have the belly to disappoint him, to tell him that he would never be part of the Salvatore line of prestigious attorney's.

Damon dropped on the bench beside his brother, Stefan Salvatore, the great white hope. They sat under a canopy of thick, twisted branches with obscure rays of golden sunshine dripping through its cracks.

"How about this heat?"

"Yeah"

Stefan slid a piece of blotting paper under his scrawling hand to stop his sweat from smudging his sketch of the plantation.

"It's enough to make a man do anything" Damon said tossing his head back to see the birds perched higher up the thicker branches. They startled in the distilled air, breaking off into a loud clatter. Damon would not miss all these lifeless afternoons.

At sixteen, Stefan envisioned himself as an artist but Damon knew that his younger brother was more like his father, though he would never admit to it. Damon could read Stefan's future and he didn't even need tea leaves to do it. Stefan was going to become a fine attorney, marry a nice blonde girl and have a million babies to replicate the Salvatore formula. Damon's dream was far simpler, India and breathing.

He breathed everything in for a moment, swirling the whiskey around his mouth and grinding the cool ice with his teeth. His eyes sailed over the antebellum plantation, tangled moss dipping into the silvery water of the lake.

"You ever considered this place could be haunted?" Damon asked.

"What, Wildwind?"

"No, Stefan, I'm talking about Arizona" he said, rolling his blue eyes "Yes, Wildwind, the estate. Have you ever wondered if it could be haunted?"

"Lord knows how many confederate army soldiers must be buried out there," Damon continued with a shrug before adding, "not to mention the slaves"

Stefan's brows furrowed and he narrowed his green eyes at Damon. Heat hung motionless, seething moist over the vast green estate.

"Early signs of psychosis, Doctor Salvatore?"

Damon smirked; shrugging his shoulder before taking a swig of whisky.

"It's an interesting theory; I mean momma's buried out there too"

Stefan shifted uncomfortably in his seat, tossing a sodden tissue and plunging his hand inside his pocket for a fresh one. Again, he placed it under his sketching hand and began drawing again. Stefan disliked talking about their momma, her death or her life. He liked to keep the memory of her buried deep inside his alabaster box, buried inside with all his secrets.

"Have you told daddy that you want to study medicine, not law?"

"I haven't even told daddy my name, I scarcely think he cares to know what it is" Damon replied, running a sweaty hand through his raven hair. Stefan raised a quirky eyebrow at him then shook his head. Damon knew how stark raving mad he sounded, most days he didn't make sense and sometimes he barely made sense even to himself.

"You're running away" Stefan said softly, his eyes fixed on the paper.

"It's not running away when you're running toward something brother, "he toyed with his drink "black sheep never run Stefan, they simply fade. This time next year, I'll be tucked away in your pretty box. Right next to momma"

A breeze startled Stefan's papers, a whirl of flying paper ripping the torpid air as Stefan raced after the sheets. Damon looked up to find their grandfather, Silas, standing still by an open window observing them.

He jerked up from the bench and without much thought, he raised his glass to salute the old man.

xXx

Bonnie's heart knocked hard against her chest when the truck turned onto their rutted gravel driveway, a pounding that roared in her ears as Marcel wheeled them closer to the patrol car. A small crowd littered the front steps, huddled, a cacophony of hushed voices ringing in Bonnie's ears. Her brothers bounded up the stairs while she sought each step, feeling the weight of her shoes on the concrete. Her toes creaked inside the leather, new shoes she was still breaking in for church.

When Bonnie opened the screen door she heard the cries, hushed wails inside the house, a shuttered lounge that was as hot as a furnace. Kinsfolk and neighbours scattered around the room, everyone breathing into each other and breathing for each other. It felt like a tomb. Faint dust rose sluggishly around her feet, spinning with slow motes in a gash of sunlight and Bonnie crept closer to the room's focal point.

"What happened?" she whispered with a wobbly voice, Jamie was screaming something awful and Marcel was somewhere hidden in the crowd, rigid and stifling all his rage inside. Grams was caught between wiping the blood from Emily's face and fanning her with the sopping cloth and so she did both. Then Bonnie noticed her father bent over her younger sister, hand shakily brushing Emily's swollen face. The urgent beating of Bonnie's heart only hastened as she crouched down beside the couch next to her father.

"Daddy" Bonnie cried, listening to her father's panting, breathing and sniffling. Emily was bloody to her feet, greasy and bloodied and smelling of urine and beer. Someone murmured that Emily had been found sprawling in the middle of some dirt road next to a fishing spot, bleeding and hurt.

The ambulance came sometime before dusk, high pitched sirens that shattered the brittle air. Everyone was tense from waiting and emotions were beginning their lofty spirals, hurt, sorrow but pulsating rage was the liveliest of them all. Bonnie clung to Marcel's overalls as they carried Emily out on a stretcher. Emily stirred under the blanket, reaching out for Rudy's hand and he snatched her thin wrist and held on to her. Bonnie grabbed her father's coat off the coat hanger and rushed out toward the door where the crowd was beginning to pour out of the house.

"No" Marcel cried, fastening his hand around Bonnie's elbow but she jerked her arm free, wrenching the screen door open. She ran, weaving and staggering through the crowd.

"Daddy, Daddy!" she shouted, crossing the rutted driveway.

"Stay here, Bonnie" he motioned toward the house while he took the coat she gave him "We'll be back soon" he assured her. Bonnie looked over his shoulder, her grams was softly tucking Emily's hair behind her ears, talking quietly to her and Emily's eyes were wet and swollen shut.

"We'll be back soon" her father repeated before the paramedics closed the ambulance doors.

xXx

The ceiling fan stirred above the table, doing nothing to elevate the stale rancid air hanging above them. The house was a pretty cage with heavy burgundy drapes, lamps that came alive only in the evenings to sputter and sway in comradery with the clanking of decorated silver cutlery. Their grandfather called it tradition, Damon called in dinner in hell.

"The Lockwood boy and his friend have been arrested -"Alaric paused, swallowing his crawfish "raped a little black girl up there near Demon's creek"

"Jesus, is she okay?"

"She's still in hospital, " Alaric sipped his red wine "critical, they say"

"How old is she?"

"Ten"

"It's that Bennett girl, the young one" Alaric said chewing slowly.

"Rudy Hopkins's girl?" Giuseppe asked, shaggy brows springing up "I know Rudy, he's a good man" he finally affirmed, eating steadily, careful not to grind his chicken bones.

"Are you a nigger-lover, boy?" Silas slurred, blundering into the table before mopping his face with a monogramed napkin "I never raised no nigger-lover" he snapped. Damon boldly watched as his grandfather staggered like an uncoordinated skeleton, stiff, white and highly intoxicated.

"I just said I knew the man, and I do feel sorry for him" Giuseppe quickly defended himself, reclaiming his manhood from his father.

"Jesus, its rape of a minor" Damon's voice cracked, eyes glaring at the clots in the peppered tomato soup with meatballs bobbing inside the brass bowl.

"Rape is rape; don't matter if she a forty year old black woman or white woman!" Caroline, Stefan's special friend suddenly spoke up, the pink ribbons in her flaxen hair fluttering.

"It takes a whole new meaning when it's a child though, doesn't it?"

"Takes a whole new meaning if the girl dies too"

"Capital murder" Giuseppe confirmed with a nod, stripping the cellophane off his packet of cigarettes. He lit one and began to cough.

"Can they get bond for Capital murder?" Stefan blinked at his father.

"This is Mystic Falls son, anything can happen"

"I tell you what, if 'em boys post bond, we could have another civil war in our hands"

"Good, I'll be right there to remind them niggers that this is the damn south!"

"Y'all are forgettin what this is about, " Caroline pounced again, " that family must be goin through somethin awful." She said, the glint in her blue eyes regarded by the rest of the party. Damon liked this one, Stefan had been involved with countless faces, all interchangeable ever since he was fourteen and Damon had reckoned that they were partial to his artistic demeanour. He really liked this one, he liked her tenacity and enduring spirit. Most importantly, Damon liked her because Silas detested her.

Damon guzzled his entire glass of wine before slamming it on the table. Godammit, he wished something would happen, something to yank them all out of the tediousness of their laborious days. He prayed for something to happen, something to toss him upside down, burn him deep from the inside and quench his deep need for adventure.

"I wish somethin would happen" he heard himself say, his voice sounding recklessly mirthful.