Disclaimer: This story is a creative exercise using characters from The Vampire Diaries.

Author's Notes: The Vampire Diaries has sucked me in recently, and the Kol x Bonnie bug has bitten me hard. This is a loosely-structured story told chronologically in single-scene chapters of varying lengths.

Part I

The Other Side

xxx

Grams told her that it wasn't smart to linger amongst the living.

You fall back into old habits that way. You go to school. Lay down to sleep. Talk to friends, even if they don't talk back. You make excuses. They're mad because you forgot to call them back. You can't feel things because your hands are numb from the cold, even though the fall chill has yet to arrive.

Sometimes you get so good at making excuses that you honestly forget what happened, that it wasn't just a bad dream.

And when you reach for that hug and get no reaction, the heartbreak is enough to kill you all over again.

It's lonely here. Dwelling on the other side will do nothing but make it fester.

At least, that's what Grams had told her.

Bonnie doesn't listen. It's her fatal flaw. She knows Grams is right, that she's been right all along about so many things. If only Bonnie had listened, then she wouldn't be where she was, what she was.

But she is now, and thinks, What could possibly happen to me now that I'm dead?

So she follows Jeremy home and watches his reunion from the sidelines.

"Jeremy?" Caroline gasps.

"Hi Caroline," he says with a sad smile.

Caroline rushes over and hugs him hard enough to bend his ribs. "Elena! Come down here now!" she calls out, voice cracking.

Footsteps gallop down the stairs. "What happened?" Elena asks, her long brown hair swinging around her tense face. She sees her brother and stops, body trembling. "Jere?"

He smiles brightly, happiness warming his cool expression at the sight of his sister. "Hey Elena."

"Oh my god. Jere!" Elena cries out, grabbing fistfuls of his clothes to bring him closer to her. "Is it really you?"

He wraps his arms around her, heavy and warm as he soothes the doubt from her mind. "I'm really back, Sis," he murmurs.

Elena lets out a high-pitched wail, shaking her head against his shoulder, as if unwilling to believe it. It wasn't real. Nothing good ever happened to her. Nothing good ever came back, at least not permanently. Her brother would be ripped away again and surely this time it would kill her.

"How? I thought Bonnie raised the Veil," Elena asks through her tears.

The question snuffs out whatever warmth he had just felt. "She did," Jeremy replies, staring at Bonnie with an anguished expression. He hugs Elena tighter. "She found a spell to bring me back."

Caroline practically bounces on her feet with joy. She turns her head to the front door, looks straight at Bonnie with her clear blue eyes, and asks, "Well, where is she?"

Bonnie closes her eyes as tears spilled down her face, devastated.

This is what Grams warned me about.

xxx

Jeremy swallows thickly. He braces himself to tell them the lie Bonnie made him promise to say, when a movement by the staircase catches his attention.

He steps in front of his sister, muscles tensing up for a fight.

Elena shifts behind him. "What is it?"

Jeremy keeps his eyes trained on the stairs. "Kol."

xxx

Kol doesn't know what angers him more: the fact that Jeremy Gilbert was somehow alive, or the fact that Elena Gilbert was happy when she deserved nothing but misery.

"Fancy seeing you here, Mate," he greets with a smile as sharp as his fangs. "I never knew you were a Medium."

Elena zips around Jeremy with her vampire speed. "I don't see him," she says, eyes darting around the room. "He's dead Jere. It doesn't matter if he's around. He can't do anything to us now."

Kol crosses the room in the blink of an eye, towering over her with a hand wrap tightly around her neck. "How very fortunate for you, dear Elena," he snarls. Despite his white-knuckled grip, Elena easily turns to face Jeremy as if nothing had touched her in the first place.

He steps back and reins in his fury. Kol knows that it can't be helped, that he should move on. If he's sentenced to this purgatory, he might as well follow his brothers back to New Orleans. But he's always been relentless when he wanted something. Like a rabid wolf after a bone, his mother had affectionately said to him a millennia ago. And there's nothing he wants more now than to see this wretched doppelganger suffer for the rest of her undead life.

Kol shifts his focus to Jeremy, and notices him glancing worriedly at the front door. He looks too, but see nothing. "What are you staring at?"

When Jeremy doesn't respond, Kol walks over to the door, keeping his eyes on the boy for clues. Jeremy's face tightens with every step he takes. Interesting.

"Get away from her!" Jeremy shouts, unable to hide his panic.

Caroline spins around on high alert. "Is he coming near me?"

Curious. He wasn't near the girls. Carefully, Kol reaches his hand out—

"Move out of the way, Bonnie!"

—and grasps a forearm.

xxx

Kol's here?

Bonnie looks around, but doesn't see anyone other than her friends in the room.

"Move out of the way, Bonnie!" Jeremy shouts, breaking away from Elena in a desperate bid to get to her side.

Caroline and Elena freeze up at Jeremy's slip.

Before Bonnie can react, she feels a cool hand grab hold of her arm and tug her with enough force to upset her balance. She falls against a firm body. Lifting her head, she sees Kol, his face alight with unholy glee.

"We meet again, little witch," he breathed.