A/N: This is a birthday fic for my friend Cana, who's been shipping Tonnie since season 1. Happy birthday!
And to those who are reading Of Beating Hearts, an update is upcoming! I took a break from chapter 8 to write this fic, but (teaser) Bon and Jer are in the middle of discussing the Anna/cheating situation :).
I hope you all enjoy this alternate take on where Tyler went after he got shot! I still don't know why he'd run to the Salvatore mansion.
I changed some details to suit what I felt made more sense than what JP did.
Supermassive Black Holes
Bonnie flipped her pillow over for the second time and rested her cheek on cool satin cloth. It wasn't going to be enough to make her fall asleep, she knew. She wondered how much time had passed since she last checked her phone. Five minutes? Ten? Fifteen, max? She thought about how great it would be if she'd actually fallen asleep without knowing it and she just didn't feel it in her eyes because she was that tired and stressed out, so really an hour had passed.
She reached over to the nightstand and picked up her charging phone. She didn't squint against the bright light. That's how awake she was.
1:01 am, in bold, white script. Eight minutes had passed.
She unplugged the charger and saw that the battery was almost full. Perfect. Pretty soon the phone was going to ring loud enough to wake her, if she managed to fall asleep, signaling that it was time to unplug the charger and maintain the battery's shelf life.
The bed sheets rustled as she shifted onto her back. She folded her arms on top of the comforters; she stared at the ceiling, but she couldn't see anything. Her bedroom was pitch black. So she imagined that her ceiling twinkled with stars: bright stars, blue lights, distant lights, constellations, and galaxies. She smiled. The Sombrero Galaxy was in her bedroom. Who needed the Hubble telescope? She didn't feel like turning her head, but the Large Magellanic Cloud slowly spun where the ceiling met the wall that led out of her bedroom. Where the ceiling met her window, a yet to be discovered elliptical galaxy exploded into existence.
And she was the supermassive black hole at the center, the one who somehow held all of these galaxies and constellations together.
She pursed her lips as she wondered what her quasar was. Her magic? That made the most sense. Quasars are extremely far, relative to the earth, which means they appeared very early in the universe's formation. And well...magic is ancient. It's been around since before humans, just waiting for dedication and discipline, waiting to be tapped into.
Quasars are exceptionally luminous.
So if her magic is her quasar, if her magic is her inner light, then she is a pitch black supermassive black hole right now.
Pitch black like her room.
/
Bonnie's eyes flew open, and she sprang out of bed. She didn't know when she'd turned on her right side. She didn't know when she'd fallen asleep. Or for how long. But something had woken her up.
She touched her chest. Her heart had thumped as if someone had come up behind her and scared her.
What had she been thinking about?
Trying to slow her breath, she looked at her ceiling. Oh yeah. Supermassive black holes and quasars. She had no quasar. Her quasar was malfunctioning.
Can quasars be destroyed? Do they simply go out? Do they disappear?
She should ask her teacher on Wednesday. That's when she planned on dragging herself back to Mystic Falls High.
No sooner had her heart resumed it's normal beat than she heard a thump near her window. She moved to throw away the comforter when loud knocks rang out in succession.
What time was it?
Grabbing her phone, she checked: 1:37am. She'd slept through her phone's alarm. That almost never happened. But no wonder she'd jolted awake; she'd been asleep for around thirty minutes. She was in the middle of falling into the REM state.
She unplugged the charger and bolted down the stairs. There was no point in looking out her window. It didn't face the front of the house.
The knocking stopped by the time she made it down, but someone was grunting on the other side of the door. She didn't realize she had brought her phone with her until she heard the material creak in her hand. Forcing herself to relax, she ventured closer to the door and turned on the light switches next to it.
"Hello?"
"Bonnie."
"Hello?" The person had sputtered, but she knew her name when she heard it.
"BONNIE!"
So much for sputtering. The yelling left him with a coughing fit.
She quickly unlatched and opened the door. "Tyler?"
"Please," he wheezed.
"What's wrong?"
He was crumpled on the floor, but he chose that moment to turn on his back. In doing so, he let out a grunt that was so loud that Bonnie looked up at the street to see if her neighbors had stepped outside to investigate the ruckus.
She couldn't see what was wrong with him. Her porch light was off, and he wore a dark-colored shirt. They weren't getting anywhere, and he didn't sound like he could answer any question she could throw at him, so she hooked her wrists under his arms and pulled him inside. She took two steps back before his head and shoulders bumped against the barrier that protected her house from vampires not named Caroline Forbes.
"Come in," she gritted, "And help me!" She could not possibly drag him all the way inside her house with her brute force alone.
Tyler braced his heels on the floor and pushed as she pulled. It was hell on his abdomen and he made no bones about that fact.
"Shhh! I have neighbors!" She whispered. She didn't live in a mansion surrounded by nothing but acres of green, well-maintained grass and trees.
"Fuck!" Tyler coughed.
"Damn it!" She non-too-gently let him fall, and he yelled again.
"What is the matter with you?" She got down on her knees and set the phone next to her. And she saw it. His grey shirt was wet, but her mind couldn't figure out what the liquid was. This kind of thing wasn't supposed to be possible for Tyler anymore. "What is that?"
She lifted his shirt and saw four nasty wounds, all with rivulets of blood trailing out. Her blood ran hot in her veins, and her body slackened with shock, confusion, and disgust. Meanwhile, Tyler suffered on the floor. She snapped out of it when he jabbed his fingers into one of the wounds.
"What are you doing?!" Panic made her adrenaline kick in.
"I'm digging them out," he spat out between clenched teeth.
"Stop it! Stop!" His hand was taunt against her own, but she managed to pry it away from his chest.
"It fucking hurts," he coughed.
One look at his contorted face, and she saw beads of sweat. The muscles in his neck strained.
"Okay, okay. Okay. Okay."
"I need them out!"
She used her magic to block his claws from reaching for his skin again. He'd already mangled it enough for her stomach.
"I can get them out. Just tell me what they are."
"Bullets!"
"Fine," she breathed calmly. She sat on her shins and held her right hand over the wound above his right nipple. Whoever had shot him had almost obliterated his nipple. She couldn't close her eyes because his cries were a distraction, so she pictured a general bullet and willed her magic to connect with it. There was something, several things, in him that did not belong. That was what she wanted. That was what she willed to her hand. It took seconds to work, but that was longer than was comfortable for Tyler. She almost wondered if her telekinesis had gone away, too, but she felt her magic start to pull on something, and she called it to the center of her palm.
Tyler screamed.
"Please, Tyler," Bonnie begged. She got that he was in pain, but he was going to make someone knock on her door before she could even finish rescuing him.
Tyler thought he was in pain; he thought he'd suffered when he was shifting to break the sire bond, but getting shot and turning felt like nothing compared to the bullet traveling through his innards to again break through his skin.
"I'm gonna need you to do it faster than that Bonnie," he exhaled once the intrusive object was out.
"I've never done this before, pulled at something that I can't see, so unless you want me to rip your spleen out along with these bullets, then I have to do them one by one. Please, try to keep your voice down. I'm going as fast as I can."
And she did go faster. After the third bullet, she got the hang of it. It was easy to connect to the fourth. But it didn't matter how fast she could force them to pierce Tyler's insides for a second time on a reverse trajectory, he seethed and groaned and forced his teeth together so hard that she was sure they would've broken if he was human.
"Done," she announced as the last bullet shot out of the lower left side of his ribcage.
His sigh relaxed her, too. The taunt muscles in his neck smoothed over, and he finally let his head fall on the floor.
She watched the last wound repair itself, and she let the fourth bullet fall in the pile she'd created with the other three.
/
She stared at him with her mouth open until he gave her his attention.
"What the hell was that?"
"I don't know," he answered. He started to get up but stopped at an unfamiliar sensation.
"What is it?" she asked when he looked down at his chest.
"I'm sore," he said, confused. "My...my chest is sore." He poked at the wounds and found they were tender. He wiped the bloody finger on his gym shorts.
Bonnie knew she wasn't seeing things: amidst the blood, there were red patches where his wounds had been. He was bruised. "What happened, Tyler?"
He swallowed. "Someone shot me."
"Where?"
"At home." At her lost look, he continued, "I was home, and this guy came over to talk to my mom, and I knew it was late, so I went down to see what was going on. He introduced himself, and shook my hand, and then he shot me."
"With a gun."
"Yeah," he affirmed, looking like he couldn't believe it himself. "But those aren't normal bullets," he said. He looked at the slugs as if they were going to jump back into his body.
Bonnie realized that the thud she'd assumed was her heart hadn't been her heart at all. She'd jolted awake at the sound of Tyler throwing himself against her door.
"Those things knocked me out," he continued. "Cold. But it was weird." He was talking more to himself now than her, "I was out, but my brain wasn't gone. My body-I couldn't move, but I think I could still hear everything."
"Were you paralyzed?"
"Not really." He looked up at her. "It was like my body had fallen unconscious but my brain hadn't gotten the memo." He knew that his brain was the thing that was supposed to send out memos, which is why the experience left him perturbed.
Bonnie looked at the pile of wooden bullets and used her telekinesis to pick one up. Unfortunately, it was covered in blood and...she swallowed to keep her stomach stable...there was a piece of flesh on the one she held.
Tyler noticed the door was still open, and he got up to close it. He winced on the way there. He waited for the pain to ebb and go away, but it stayed.
Bonnie did her best to shut her brain off to what she was about to do. She grabbed the bullet in midair and quickly dropped it in her night shirt and wiped away the blood and flesh. While doing so, she realized that she could've used her telekinesis to drag Tyler into her house. She mentally rolled her eyes at herself.
"Well, you were right on these not being normal bullets." Just to make sure, she grabbed all of the others and wiped them as clean as she could and then mercilessly wiped her hands free of the blood. The area where she sat stank of copper.
"Wooden bullets are typical for shooting a vampire." He winced as he sat in front of her.
"But these markings are not."
Tyler craned his neck to see before he realized that he could just pick up a slug and examine it. He dropped the slug as soon as he picked it up.
"Vervain?" Bonnie asked with a grimace as he shook his hand to alleviate the pain.
"No. Doesn't feel like it," though it didn't feel as painful as when the things were inside of him. "What are they?"
"I don't know."
"This guy knew what he was doing. He was wearing a vervain glove."
"A glove made of vervain?"
"A glove dipped in vervain," he said.
She heard the eye roll in his voice, and if this was another situation, she would take offense.
"He introduced himself: Connor Jordan," he remembered. "I shook his hand, reacted to the vervain; he whipped out his gun fast as fuck, and he shot me cold, close-range."
Bonnie now understood why the bullets had had so far to travel. "Was he looking for you?"
"I have no idea. He chased me. I heard him, but he doesn't know where I am now," he assured her when she looked at the front door. "I sped out of there, broke one of the windows."
"Well, he was looking for a vampire. Who is he?"
"Don't know. He didn't look familiar. I left my mom at the house with Caroline."
"Are they-did he hurt them? Caroline?"
"No," he shook his head. "They're fine. Caroline was in my room when it happened."
Bonnie sighed and looked at the slug again. "They look like runes, markings of some kind. And it's the same mark on all of them. I've never seen them before, though. Are you sure you don't have an enemy, maybe someone who followed you from...wherever you were?"
"I was in the Appalachians. I didn't see a soul up there."
"So we've got a guy who is fast, a great shot, armed with marked wooden bullets strong enough to knock you unconscious and leave you in pain, and he's got a glove dipped in vervain."
"Sounds like a vampire hunter," Tyler said gravely.
They stared at each other, and Bonnie remembered how quiet it had been in her room. A different, more eerie, quiet blessed her and Tyler now, and it was enough to raise the hair on her arms.
"Okay," she said in an attempt to make the ominous cloud go away.
/
"I wanna invite you to sit, but I don't want the furniture to smell."
A small frown covered Tyler's face.
Bonnie supposed she should go up to her room, to her grimoires, and research the bullets, however fruitless that might be, but she didn't feel like it, and Tyler Lockwood wasn't part of the crew that made her feel pressured to try.
Tyler cocked his head and said, "I thought you lost your powers. That's what Caroline said-"
"I can't cast spells. I still have my physical powers. Talking is what got me in trouble in the first place, so now my words mean nothing. I say a spell and...nothing happens. Like I'm mortal."
Tyler nodded. He felt like he should apologize since she'd lost her powers as a result of doing a spell to save him.
"Do you want to put your shirt in the washer or something, or are you heading home?"
He should head home and check on his mom and Caroline. "Am I bothering you, or...?"
"It's one thirty in the morning. But if you want to stay, then it's fine. I mean the guy might be scouring the streets of Mystic Falls for you."
"I don't know where he came from."
"Or why you. I mean...usually the Salvatores deal with stuff like this. I thought Klaus was the only bane of your existence," she said and switched from sitting on her shins to sitting on her bottom. She crossed her legs to mirror Tyler.
Tyler sighed. "I really hope this guy's not thinking of adding himself. He got the drop on me tonight, but I can kill him. He's only mortal."
"Or so you think. You don't know how stupid or not stupid he is yet."
"I don't think he expected me."
"But he was prepared," Bonnie pointed out.
She didn't sound worried at all. Unlike how Caroline would sound if he was talking to her right now, but he supposed Bonnie had a bigger problem to worry about: her downsized abilities.
Bonnie suddenly felt very sleepy. Her eyes felt tight, and she put her head in her hands.
"I'm sorry...about your powers."
She lifted her head and smiled. "It's not your fault. It's mine. Completely mine. I messed up. I've been messing up a lot lately. And the spirits love to come in at the end to tell me that I've messed up. And now I'm a supermassive black hole without her quasar."
Tyler raised his eyebrows when she titled her head to the left. She wasn't looking at him, but he was pretty sure she was still talking about her powers. "How exactly did you mess up?"
He looked at her straight when she looked at him; he didn't blink.
Bonnie thought he picked a strange time to ask her what happened. She'd taken Klaus out of his body four days ago, and she hadn't heard a word from him, which wasn't unusual considering their less than casual relationship. But he was choosing the night when some vampire hunter had shot him to ask?
"Uh. I used Dark magic. That's a no-no. You know what happened to Alaric, right? Like, why he was killing all those people?"
"His ring drove him crazy."
"Yeah. Well according to my mom, something similar happens to witches who use Dark magic."
"They go crazy?"
"I'm...not really sure. I didn't ask for details. I kind of just...took it. And then I had to use Dark magic to desiccate Klaus. She had a huge problem with that, told me that my magic was pure and of the earth. I'm not too sure what that means either."
"Didn't ask?"
"No. So me using magic to desiccate Klaus was strike one, I guess. Then I used it to make him possess you. Used it again to stop my heart and travel to the OtherSide. And strike four was me using it to dispossess you."
Forced starvation, forced possession, and suicide. For the first time, Bonnie thought about the link between all of the spells for which she'd used Dark magic. Those spells weren't exactly strictly defensive. One was self-destructive, the other two invasive.
Tyler didn't need to ask why transferring Klaus into his body was dark. It had been painful as hell. He'd felt Klaus' invasion, struggled against it, not consciously but naturally. His body was already occupied, and Klaus' spirit was shoving in, slamming him aside, squashing him down so that it would dominate.
"It might be uncomfortable," Bonnie said.
"Why?"
"Well, I was possessed once. By a ghost. And it was uncomfortable."
Tyler's possession hadn't been uncomfortable. It had been painful. Klaus' spirit was different from Emily's. Emily was dead, so her spirit was lighter. Emily's spirit lacked a certain something; her spirit belonged on the OtherSide. Klaus' spirit was heavier, weightier. It was on the realm of the living. And Tyler's body had recognized that.
He'd been on his knees inside Bonnie's pentagram. Five candles stood on each point, and they hadn't lit up until Klaus' spirit had been stolen from his body and rushed to the pentagram. Then, the candles had lit, creating a barrier, trapping it. Klaus' spirit wasn't going to go anywhere but inside Tyler's body.
As Bonnie's words had drifted out of the witch house to go squeeze Klaus' spirit out of his body, Tyler had grown increasingly nervous. Candles and a pentagram; a house that creaked; a part of him had expected Bonnie to stop chanting and say, "Sike! Just kidding. This isn't real; that's just a shape I drew on the floor."
But the hairs on his neck had stood up, his flesh had pimpled, and for the first time he'd smelled power. Literally smelled power. It had tickled his nose, but before he'd had a chance to wrinkle it, something had slammed against his back. Klaus. He'd ascertained his presence one second before it happened.
He'd fallen on his hands, a position he'd gotten used to when he'd been forcing himself to change. This time, however, instead of feeling his body shift, instead of feeling like he needed to let something out, something was shoving its way in, and was completely foreign to him. The wolf came from him. He felt completely connected to that change, something he'd never thought about until after he'd been possessed by Klaus. Transitioning into a werewolf was all him. Klaus hadn't belonged. And he'd felt that right until he'd blacked out.
As Tyler had writhed and screamed, flipping onto his back and coiling on the ground, Bonnie had chanted. She hadn't been surprised, alarmed, almost like she wasn't completely taking into account what was happening to Tyler. She was working a spell, and she was waiting for it to work. That had been her focus. So her voice had been steady, hard, confident.
Tyler remembered it now. Her voice. It hadn't exactly been rhythmic. It hadn't been a melody. It had been constant, sturdy, something he could grab and pull on, and it wouldn't snap. He'd been too busy screaming and panicking to latch on to it, but now he wondered at how constant her voice had been, a strong point in the middle of a maelstrom.
It was different from when Caroline had been there during his transitions. The first time, she had been just as freaked out as he was, and that was good. It had been comforting. It had stayed a comfort. The next two months, she'd been calmer, but he'd focused on the worry on her face, in her eyes, because it mirrored the worry in his heart. Her face looked like how his heart shuddered, jumped, and fell. He'd remembered that face on the fourth month when he'd changed in front of his mother.
It was different because Bonnie had been causing the maelstrom. She had been the root of it, the architect. Of course she hadn't flinched. Of course she'd had no fear. The fear and panic had been his alone to claim. They hadn't shared anything in that moment. Klaus was his problem; he was finally literally taking over his life; and Bonnie hadn't pretended to understand anything about that, hadn't even thought to.
He'd glanced at the pentagram when he'd come to in the witch house, after Bonnie had slashed his body open and peeled Klaus' spirit out and before he'd stumbled out of the house, supported by Caroline.
"Do you have it?" he asked suddenly.
"What?"
"The spell. The one you used to put Klaus in my body."
Bonnie sighed as she kept up with the change in topic. "Uh, it's crumpled up in one of my grimoires." She'd almost ripped it, the evidence of her going overboard with her magic.
"Can I see it? I just...I want to see what it says."
"You won't understand it."
"Then you can translate it."
Bonnie considered him a moment and then silently went up to her room and looked for the grimoire. She'd stuff the spell into one of the ones she's yet to pick up. She had no trouble finding it since it kept the book from fully closing. She'd stuffed it into the book as a ball and pressed down on it. She put the book back and opened the paper. It was badly wrinkled, but her handwriting looped and cut over the humps on the paper.
She read the words in her mind, and she was careful about that. Not reading a spell aloud didn't mean a witch was not casting a spell. Reading it internally could transform it into a wish. She wasn't sure when her spell-casting ability would come back, so she was cautious.
She remembered saying the spell. But she doesn't remember how it had felt. She'd hadn't felt a rush or a tingle, hadn't felt the power. She didn't try to remember how it felt. She tried to figure out why Tyler's immense distress inside the pentagram had washed over her. It had been as unremarkable as the words that had been marching out of her mouth.
Dropping the paper from her sight, she went back to the first floor. As she rounded Tyler on the floor, she dangled the paper in her hand, and he took it.
Bonnie reclaimed her post and looked at Tyler's haunched shoulders, the way he held the paper a little too close to his face.
Respondeo dicendum sacram doctrinam per sanguinis Bennett ab anima, et viribus, et ille vocabit. Relinquunt corpus, et intrant pentagrammon. Et veni conchae stillabunt pentagrammon meo. Per carnem, et lapidei, per arbores ventum, invoco Klaus Mikaelson. Ad hoc vas possidere. Mutent carnis formam. Et non est transmutatio, nihil impedire. Neque obstabit quod vis, et volo. Intra pentagrammon est mutatio. Bennett per sanguinis, viribus, vita et mors, invoco Klaus Mikaelson. Nihil spatii usque ad conteram hoc unctum mutatio fiat.
"What does it say?" he asked after he was done. "I only recognize Bennett and Klaus Mikaelson. And corpus. That's body, right?"
"Right. Hold on." Bonnie stood up and went to rummage through one of the small bookstands in the living room. Finding a loose leaf sheet of paper, she searched for a pen. She found a pencil and decided that was good enough. She walked to the coffee table between the couches and sat in front of it and waited for Tyler to join her.
He winced when he got up.
"It still hurts?"
"Still," he affirmed as he walked slowly. It almost felt like the soreness of a good exercise. He carefully lowered himself on the opposite side of the coffee table and grunted when he settled on his shins, his chest and abdomen protesting.
Bonnie took the piece of paper from him and translated the spell. She underlined the words on which she had put emphasis. Afterward, she handed the English version to Tyler. He read it aloud.
"By the Bennett bloodline, by the forces of life and death, I call on this spirit. Leave the body and enter the pentagram. Drop the shell and come to my pentagram. Through flesh and stone, through trees, on wind, I callKlaus Mikaelson. Enter this vessel, possess it."
He paused and nodded. And then continued.
"Take new flesh, new form. Let nothing and no one impede this transmutation. Let no force or will bar it, for it is my will. Inside the pentagram is change. By the Bennett bloodline, by the forces of life and death, I call Klaus Mikaelson. Let nothing break this anointed space until the change is done."
He folded the paper, neat and crisp.
"Is that why you came over here? To see the spell?"
"Can I keep both?"
"Can you answer my question? You could've gone anywhere, but you get shot...and you come here. At one-thirty in the morning. You wanted the spell, didn't you?"
"I wanted to know...what you did. You didn't exactly give an explanation before."
"You didn't ask."
"I didn't expect it to be like that. I didn't know what I was expecting. What was it like when you were possessed?"
"It was like...no time passed at all? One minute I was freaking out and screaming in my bathroom, feeling like something was crawling into me, and the next I was being attacked. By Damon."
"Yeah. One minute I was screaming in your little circle-"
"Pentagram."
"Pentagram. And the next I was waking up in that house."
"Are you okay?" she asked when he looked down at the folded paper.
He smiled and looked up and shrugged. "I just wanted to know how exactly it happened."
She nodded. "You haven't seen Klaus since, have you?"
"Nah. Caroline's barely told me what he did while he was in my body. All she'll say is that he was gross and Klaus. I don't think she wants to talk about it."
"Isn't gross and Klaus enough?"
"Not when he was in my body, no. But whatever." He had the spells. That was more important now. "Why did you choose me?" he asked as he looked down at the paper. "I mean out of everybody," he specified, looking at her. "I mean was it like word association? What's the first word that comes to mind when you hear Klaus? Tyler."
Bonnie smiled. "I thought about asking Jeremy to do it. He would've been up for it." Immediately she wished she hadn't said that. Because:
"Then why didn't you ask him?"
She wished she didn't have to answer. She slowly ran her right hand up her left arm as a stall tactic, but Tyler was waiting. "I didn't know that he could handle it. His body. Something could've gone wrong; I wasn't sure that he'd be okay afterward; if he'd get sick or die. I wasn't sure-"
"That it was safe."
"For him. Your body can handle a lot more than his can," she justified.
"Right." How much pain had his body gone through in the last two months alone? And he'd just gotten shot. He thought again about the constant of her voice when she'd said the spell. She probably would have lost her mind if it had been Jeremy. But he was invincible. So he could scream his head off, and it wasn't a big deal.
"I didn't mean anything by it."
"Don't worry about it. Facts are facts, right? Gilbert probably would've died," he said nonchalantly and Bonnie smiled at the fact that he made it sound like Jeremy was weak for that. It reminded her of a middle school rivalry.
"He's been through a lot. A lot of invasion. But you've been through a lot, too."
"Yeah, we don't need to do this."
"Fine," Bonnie said with a shrug.
"So what are you gonna do about your quasar?"
She sighed. "I don't know."
She'd been running herself ragged using her powers, and now that she was missing half of it, an important half, she was running herself ragged trying to get them back. Jeremy was on board, having promised to be by her side while she worked to get them back, but...talking to Tyler now, having re-read the spell that was part of the reason she couldn't cast anymore, and remembering how disconnected she'd been when she'd been chanting...maybe she didn't need to be in a hurry to be one hundred percent functional.
"I'm blocked. I don't even know how it happened. My grams warned me about being on the OtherSide; she warned me about continuing to use Dark magic...She warned me about continuing to help Elena. I think Jeremy was right. We should've called Klaus' bluff. He wasn't going to kill himself; he's not suicidal. Scratching your heart out would've killed him, too. There's nothing halfway about possession. But...it just felt so urgent at the time."
She was looking beyond him again.
"It felt like doing the spell was the right thing; it felt like...I felt like my hands were tied. So I did it." Her stomach quivered as she thought back. "And suddenly my hands felt really heavy; there were these black vines on my arms, and I felt like they were attacking me. My grams' warnings kept playing in my head, and..."
And...the witch house. She'd been threatened there, almost died there; Abby had died there. She could remember how silent it had been afterward. In an instant, everything had quieted down. She'd rushed back up to the first floor, and there had been no candles lit, not inside, not outside. She couldn't hear Esther's voice, or Klaus', or Kol's. Even Stefan's slow footsteps behind her were muffled. There was only Abby's body slumped on the floor.
And with the blessing of her ancestors, her body had been hijacked by Esther and she'd been fed on to the point of death by her old history teacher. She'd been relegated to an offering.
Yet she had been back in that house, back among those spirits, to put Klaus' soul in Tyler's body. The pentagram she'd drawn hadn't been too far from where she'd found Abby's body.
"The last time I was blocked, it was because I was scared. My grams told me that I needed to figure out why I was scared, confront it."
"And what is it this time?" Tyler asked.
"I don't know. And until I figure it out, confront it, feel better about it, I'm not going to get my full powers back." She didn't know one could be blocked from half of their powers. She hadn't expected to ever be blocked again.
"At least Gilbert's helping you," Tyler said.
"Yeah." But maybe she wouldn't mind a little less help.
"And, you know, if there's...anything I can do..."
They both knew there wasn't anything he could do, but it was a polite thing to say, so Bonnie smiled and said, "Thanks. And...same...if...Klaus comes back and bothers you or something...I mean I can't do any spells right now, but..."
Tyler nodded. "Got it. So, uh, I guess I should go."
"If you feel the need. Um, so," she said, as they stood. "I guess I should keep the bullets and see if I find something in the grimoires."
"I think I'll take one. Or two. Caroline will probably want to show them to Stefan. Maybe he'll know."
When Tyler started to bend toward the pile of four bullets like his bones were rusty, Bonnie said, "Here," and chose two for him.
"Thanks."
"Do you want me to drive you home or something?"
"Nah. I need to force myself to move."
"I kind of think you're getting worse."
"I'm not," he chuckled. "I just stayed in that one position for too long."
Bonnie nodded and pursed her lips and let him lead the way to the door. Once he had it open and turned to her, Bonnie cut off what he was about to say. "Why did you do it? You asked me why I chose you. Why did you say yes?"
Tyler pressed his thumb into the spells. Bonnie calling his phone had been strange enough. What she'd said after he'd picked up...she hadn't greeted him back. She'd chosen instead to grab his attention.
"I have a plan to save Klaus."
"What? Bonnie?"
He'd paused from stuffing his duffel bag and looked behind him as if he wasn't already alone.
"Alaric is on the war path, and he's making a beeline for Klaus. He's going to find him. I'm not interested in stopping him. I'm interested in saving Klaus."
"Why would you-?"
"If he dies, you all do. My mom, Caroline, you?"
He wanted to say, "So what?" Would it be such a bad thing if Klaus died? Klaus dying seemed to matter more than what would happen as a consequence of that death. He had thrown the idea out there during the twenties decade dance, but Caroline and Stefan had shut him down. Now Bonnie was bringing it up.
"I need your help to save him."
"My help? What the hell can I do?"
"I can save his spirit. As long as his spirit is unharmed, you'll all be fine; it won't matter what happens to his body."
"Okay?"
"I need somewhere to put his spirit. It can't just be floating out there: that's death. I need another body."
He still hadn't gotten it.
"What's that got to do with me?"
That was the only point at which Bonnie had hesitated. It had been so imperceptible that he hadn't realized she'd hesitated at the time.
"I need your body."
"Woah. Woah."
He'd needed to sit down.
"We don't have a lot of time. If you agree, if you want to do this, then you need to meet me at the Witches' House. I'll give you the address."
"He didn't see it coming," he answered on Bonnie's threshold. When she frowned, he shrugged. "He didn't see it coming. He had no idea that it was going to happen."
He'd surprised Klaus. It was as simple as that. He'd had the chance to be a part of something that Klaus had not predicted. For once, he'd had the advantage, the upper hand, and Klaus the "Alpha male" had been stolen from his body.
It had been a quick moment, but it had been an important one. Because, yes, afterward Klaus had regained control, and he'd been shut out of his own body. Klaus had been about to claw his heart out, and he'd had no idea. But just for one glorious moment he'd been in control of Klaus' fate, of his life. As soon as he'd said yes to Bonnie, he'd had an advantage over Klaus, and that had lasted during his drive to the Witches' House, when he'd walked up the steps, when he'd entered the house, when he'd seen Bonnie, when he'd stepped into the pentagram, when she'd started chanting.
His hand twitched when Bonnie gently grabbed hold of his wrist to snap him out of it. His eyes widened a fraction, and if his heart still beat, it would've skipped. He was the undead, but her hand felt ice cold.
"Sorry," he apologized.
"It's fine," Bonnie assured and swallowed thickly. He didn't see it coming sounded like such...desperate reasoning. Was he feeling that bad? She felt bad, but she realized that she didn't feel so bad to the point where she'd do something risky for the sole reason of he didn't know I was going to do it.
"Be safe," Bonnie said. "Don't let the Boogeyman catch you again. This isn't Bennett Medical Center or Hopkins General."
Tyler smiled. "I'll keep that in mind."
As he stepped out onto the porch and then onto the street, he thought about the boogeymen that had lined up in his life: first the moon, then Klaus, and now this hunter. When did it end? Once upon a time, his parents' expectations and his father's moods were what put him on edge.
He looked back to Bonnie as he walked. Light shown on her shoulder and down, but her head was shrouded in darkness. Looking forward, he ran home.
Bonnie closed and locked the door. She leaned against it and stared at the two small bullets on the ground. Such small, powerful things. Kicking off from the door, she grabbed a rag, water, laundry detergent, and clorox and set to cleaning the blood splatter.
When she went to bed after changing her clothes, she fell asleep faster than she had before Tyler's visit. She easily fell into the REM state, and she dreamed.
The black of her room got darker, darker and deeper until it pulsed with energy and turned into a living nothing. It was intangible yet she walked on it. She couldn't see her feet. It was so black, she couldn't tell what color her clothes were, but she made out Tyler. He lay on the black hole. She was intrigued because he was at ease. He wasn't afraid of falling into it. On the contrary, he was smiling, on his back, his arms stretched out from his shoulders, and he rolled his head from side to side. There was brilliant, vibrating light under him, a stunning yellow-orange she had never seen before but with which she was familiar.
She walked to Tyler and slowly sank on one knee. She cupped his cheek and watched his face, intrigued. When he opened her eyes, she saw that they were a paler yellow than the light beneath him, closer to a blunt gold. It was beautiful, though not as breathtaking as what was under him.
"What are you going to do about your quasar?" he asked.
She smiled wide, excited, and she relaxed her hand on his cheek. "It's here."
The End