"Bonnie?"
Her body twitches, awareness lapping at her toes like waves on a beach. She feels fingers touch her, sees familiar blue eyes look into her own, searching, waiting for something. She doesn't know what.
She had to say something. She had—
"It was—"
Her throat gurgles as the words catch in her throat.
"It was Kai."
To his credit, Matt seems unsurprised. His lips draw a tight line, something akin to resigned anger gracing his features. He places his hand behind her head and delicately lifts her up into a seated position. His eyes catch hers as he slowly moves to brace her against the wall, his tone, business, his voice raspy from his injury.
"We need to get you—"
"I can't believe he's out…" The words sounds screechy even to her own ears. The cellar is silent as a grave, one that could have easily been theirs, and she can feel her panic filling up the room. It breaches her ears, her throat and threatens to spill out of her eyes. "I knew this would happen, I knew it, I KNEW—"
"Bonnie calm down." She hears him say it softly, but it is edged with frustration. She doesn't know at what. Spots start to graze the edge of her vision, the panic fading as the weakness began to overcome her. She feels his palm grasp the back of her head.
"We need to get you to a hospital, you lost a lot of blood." He seems more present now, as though he had gained some sort of momentum. Her eyes close. "Stay awake, Bonnie." When she doesn't respond he gets up, coughing. She forgets he had gotten choked too.
"You should—" she began, having difficulty summoning the breath and energy to speak. "—get that checked out.."
She feels his arms grasp and lift her up, a quick, sudden movement that leaves her even more breathless.
"You first."
Her eyes open slightly, his face a blond blur. She feels, rather than sees him adjust her briefly before beginning to walk, his pace picking up when she remains silent. He sweeps up the stairs quickly, his grunt marking the top step. When they reach the car he lays her in the backseat. The last thing she sees before she blacks out is the battered ceiling of his old car.
"—nie!" She jolts awake, her arms flying up, flailing until she remembers where she is.
"Bonnie!" Matt barks again. She catches his eyes in the mirror and he looks at her pointedly, almost angrily, and she doesn't understand why. "You have to stay awake until we get to the hospital." A pause. "Talk to me."
She leans against the window rather than lay back down, certain that she will fall asleep the second her head touches the seat.
"How do you know it was Kai?" Matt asks. She tenses, staying silent. Her eyes examine the Mystic Fall greenery careening by through the backseat window.
"Did you call Elena?" she asks instead. Matt doesn't answer.
"Bonnie?" His use of her name is pointed and she knows he wants an answer.
"Did you see him?" he prods.
"No." It is an honest answer.
"Then how do you know it was him?"
She laughs. "I remember what his hands around my throat feel like."
She glances at his reflection through the mirror and he looks taken aback. She forgets that only Damon knows the true extent of Kai's reign of terror on her, and only because she forced it on him. She swallows her sadness that no one else really thought to ask.
He doesn't say anything, and she knows he feels awkward. Even as she is bleeding out in the backseat of an old, worn car she is reminded of the distance that remains between herself and those she calls her friends.
So she doesn't tell him. She doesn't tell him that she woke up.
Before she passed out, she recalled the distinct feeling of hands clutching her throat—not an amorphous pressure forcing itself around her windpipe, but actual, physical hands subduing her into unconsciousness. When her eyes open moments later, she is still in the cellar, the cold stone floor having completely numbed her legs. She moves to crane her neck upwards to look for an intruder when she realizes that it is already lifted. Her entire torso is, in fact, her back leaning against something solid. When she turns she sees nothing. She moves to get up, summoning up an ancient hymn of protection, just in case, but feels nothing materialize at her fingertips. She flexes her fingertips again, summoning her power with all the strength she has. Nothing. Again. Nothing. She moves to do it one more time when she hears—
A chuckle. "Hm. Still adorable."
She freezes. She can't believe what she is hearing and she is suddenly certain that this has all been a strange dream. When he says nothing further she gathers up the sense and lunges to get away from him, but he immediately grasps her, his arm curving around her shoulders in a way that is becoming sickeningly familiar.
She is completely still, too afraid to make a move. Her eyes are wide open and later she thinks she may have been in shock. Her eyes open and close. She expects her surroundings to morph. She is back in that other world, powerless against his brute strength and endless persistence.
"This is a dream…" She isn't speaking to him, she is telling herself. All you have to do is wake up…
When she hears him chuckle she tries once again to escape his grasp, using all of her core and leg strength to maneuver out of his grasp. Her hands flail to his, digging in and scratching thoroughly. She hears him grunt and her heart soars when his arms loosen reflexively. Taking her moment she lunges her body once more, but it isn't a second later when his arms close around her again, in a tighter more painful embrace than before.
"Ah, ah, ah, that wasn't a very nice way to greet an old friend…" He says, breathless from the struggle.
She didn't even make it into a standing position. Didn't even travel a foot. She feels tears well up in her eyes. She knows then that she will never escape her time in the prison world. Or him.
"Let me go!" she screams, desperately trying to hold in the sobs threatening to overtake her body. She risks a glance at him, craning her neck at an unnatural angle to watch his expression before she remembers he is invisible.
She turns her head back, staring ahead, biting her lip to keep from crying. When she speaks again, there she thinks there is barely a trace of emotion. "Let me go."
"Let me think about it." A pause. "No." He says gleefully.
"What do you want?" she asks, hoping she sounds exasperated rather than terrified.
She feels his face pressed against the back of her head. She can feel his lips stretch into a grin and her heart drops. "What I wanted last time, Bon Bon."
Suddenly she feels something cold and sharp against her neck. Her blood runs cold. She struggles instinctually, but stops when she feels the blade move. She can feel the sting of it as he moves it back and forth across her collarbone, before resting it at her pulse point.
When he speaks again, his voice is reminiscent of the Kai Parker that revealed himself to her when she sent her magic away. The Kai of her nightmares asking her how she thought she could get away screwing him over.
Cold. Furious. Lethal.
"Don't think for a second that you don't deserve this."
She thinks he's probably right but she doesn't want to die. "Kai, I—"
She feels something smack against her lips, and she knows it's the flat of the blade, instantly silencing her.
"Not a word."
He is breathing heavily, she can both hear his breaths and feel his chest rising and falling.
They stay like that for a long while, Bonnie too frightened to speak. She feels his labored breathing recede and the blade remove itself from her lips. The cold metal lands on her jugular and moves down her neck. Her breathing intensifies and she shifts instinctually to avoid it. It moves down the curve of her neck, across her shoulder blades and down her right arm. He body is tense and the pressure of the blade increases on her skin.
"Kai—" she starts.
He slices her wrist open. She screams. Her head snaps to look at her wrist. Blood is flowing freely onto her arm, the floor, him.
Dear God, she thinks. She is going to die in this dank cellar, magicless, powerless, and in the arms of a sociopath.
Her vision is quickly blurring, her limbs numbing with that pins-and-needles feeling she knows can't be good. His grasp on her loosens with her grasp on consciousness.
She turns her head weakly. She looks down at her wrist and suddenly she can see his hands. They are collecting her blood in a vial. She moves to look at him, but his arms on her tighten, preventing her. He moves the vial from her view, but his hands return, pausing in midair before lifting her wrist to bring it closer their faces. She sees the damage and knows that she is not long for this world. For some reason this makes her relax. Her left hand drops from grasping the arm that was holding her in place.
He grunts, maneuvering her wrist left and right, upside down, the blood streaming down onto the floor. He drops it mercilessly, her wrist bone smacking painfully against the stone. She is going to die. Her limbs completely lose feeling, the world spins, her eyes close. The last thing she hears is—
"Wow, you are really bad at listening."
She opens her eyes and she is back in the car, her head leaning against the window.
"We're close," Matt says, tense. He is driving faster than she has ever seen him drive.
"That guy's fucking crazy," he adds and she can only nod in agreement. She briefly notes that he never curses. He is silent for a few beats. "Why didn't he kill me?"
She turns her head to look at him. If she weren't dying, she would be embarrassed that it never crossed her mind. "I don't know..." If there is a logical reason, she can't think of it. "Maybe he ran out of time? Maybe he likes his victims conscious when he kills them?"
She sees him nod. "Maybe."
They are stopped at a light. Matt's fingers drum the steering wheel in impatience. He mumbles something but she doesn't hear it. "What?" she asks.
"I said that if he was going to bandage you up he might as well have dropped you off at the hospital."
"What are you—" she begins before glancing down at her hand, noticing a silvery-gray patch where he sliced her wrist open. "Oh my god…" she said under her breath. "He—he—"
"What is it?"
"The bastard, he duck taped my mortal wound."
She glances up at Matt, appalled, and notices some tension leave his shoulders as a smile edges at his lips. "Like I said, what a psycho."
Her head leans back against the window, her mind alight with thoughts. He could have taken his revenge on her, but he didn't. She would have…she already did, in fact. But he didn't. Instead he taped her up and let Matt live, he let Matt—
He let Matt take her to the hospital.
The thought is so ludicrous, so beyond comprehension that her mind immediately counters the notion—maybe he needs your blood Bonnie, she thinks. And yet…and he had already taken her blood anyway and if he didn't want to permanently injure her to preserve Bennett blood, he never would have sliced so close to a major artery and left her there. She doesn't understand, why he took the actions he took, why he didn't just stab her and be done with it or kidnap her and use her as a blood bag or even just save her altogether.
She hears Matt's resentful voice in her ears. Pscyho. Her breath catches as she is hit with the realization that he granted her mercy when she could not. She is dizzy. This time she leans back against the window, not intending to wake up in the near future. Her eyes close, the breeze from the window lapping at her skin. The last thing she recalls before succumbing is the feeling of his fingers smearing blood from her wrist across her palm.
A/N: This is the result of my bonkai angst not being properly represented on television and JP's tweets. Also as a thank you to all of the bonkai writers whose work I read and await for with bated breath. Anyway, let me know what you think please! I didn't beta it or anything. Would love to hear your thoughts on it, whatever they may be. Just getting back into writing.