Chapter 1, Never Going Back To Ok.

Five minutes ago, she sat down and she stretched her arms out in front of her, so that she could look at her hands. Five minutes later, she's still looking at her hands, and she's still expecting to find a reasonable answer as to why her magic suddenly came back.

While she has thought of possible reasons, they've all led her to the same conclusion, and that conclusion, she's not happy with. Never mind happy with, she can't accept it to begin with.

The thing is, her relationship with Damon has always been clear from the beginning; she couldn't stand him, just like he couldn't stand her. And while they did work well together when the circumstances forced them to, that was as deep as their tolerance of each other went. Which is why, the sudden appearance of her magic needs to have any other explanation, than the idea that it came back –ultimately- to save Damon from being hurt.

Sure, she got used to Damon being around in the four months that they've been here in this world. And sure, she's put up with him and he with her, but she doesn't believe that there's an actual part of her that is that concerned about Damon, that it would spark her magic to come back just like that. She refuses to believe that, but sadly, it's the only conclusion that she keeps giving herself, no matter which angle she tries to reason from.

It simply can't be that her magic came back for Damon's sake, because the mere implication behind that, does the very foundation of her relationship with Damon, injustice.

There has to be another explanation, she tells herself yet again, keeping her eyes on her hands.

She doesn't know why exactly she's staring at her hands as if they have the answers, or even as if they are the culprits for lighting that candle in the store, but she can't look away from them either.

'Don't tell me…'

Even if she didn't know his voice, and even if he wasn't the second of the only three people that are currently in this repetitive world, she would still know his voice from the sarcastic yet curious tone that he uses when he wants to know something.

Because of his presence -that his voice alerts her of-, she pulls her arms back to fold across her chest. For an unknown reason, she doesn't want him to know that she's mentally busy, and she feels that if she keeps her hands in front of her like she had been doing, he'll figure out what she's conflicted with.

Fortunately, Damon doesn't seem to catch on to what she'd been doing, which is a relief for her. On top of not finding a reasonable explanation for the sudden return of her magic, she doesn't need Damon to wonder about it too. It's part of the reason that she fled from the store to the back, after Damon hit the stalker guy.

'You feel bad for the annoying guy,' he finishes as he plants his feet next to her seated form.

It sounds to her, like he's concluding an accurate observation, which makes no sense to her, because he can't know what she's struggling with at the moment.

Confused by his sense of confidence, she angles her head in his direction to look up at him. 'What?'

She thought, she even expected that he would remain standing and just make her continue looking up at him while he speaks, but he surprises her -almost to speechlessness- when he sits down beside her.

'You're sitting here by yourself,' he answers with a shrug, slightly brushing an upper part of him against her shoulder, 'looking like you're deeply regretting something.'

She was wrong, she realises in an unpleasant way. The way she realises her mistake is unpleasant, because it feels uncomfortable, almost as if she feels the pang of lack of faith on Damon's behalf. His previous sentences, weren't really an incorrect observation as she thought they were; his recent explanation –added on to the fact that he just sat down beside her- tell her that much. Apparently, in his own confusing way, he's showing her something that she interprets as genuine care.

That can't be right, she quickly counters in her head. But then, she responds, if Damon isn't showing her concern, why does she feel unpleasant about the fact that she was wrong?

Something's not right about the fact that she feels bad on Damon's behalf, and so to distract herself from the feeling, she looks away from him to answer, 'I'm thinking.'

Following her looking away, is a silence that distinctly highlights the feeling of Damon's eyes on her. The feeling is so thick, as though his eyes are physically attached to the parts of her face that they can see, that she sharply turns back his way in a little time. At the same time that she turns to him, she catches him hastily avert his eyes and she would swear that his expression changes too. Only, since she hurriedly faced him, she can't really trust what she thinks she saw, so she dismisses whatever she thinks she may have seen.

'What are you thinking about?' Damon casually poses in his usual tone, 'Are you bummed that you aren't the most annoying person in the world anymore?'

She's sure that it's not true, but she somehow has the feeling that Damon's covering something up. She has the feeling that he'd been one person a second ago when she looked away, only to hide behind a mask when she looked back at him. But of course, that can't be right, because Damon is Damon and that's just who he is.

'Come on Bonnie,' he says, adding a deliberate smirk, 'there are worse things in the world. Like the fact that the most annoying guy in the world is currently in the trunk of my car!'

The way he says it, makes it really seem like it's the worst thing in the world. And thankfully, she breathes in, it shuts her previous feeling down. There are no two sides to Damon, or even hiding behind masks in his world, there's just Damon Conceited Salvatore and no one else.

She looks at him with a confused face, wondering, 'And?'

'Do you know how much that goes against my undying love for my car?' he answers as if it's the most obvious thing in the world.

It's so typical Damon to give her an answer like that, she thinks, but oddly, she doesn't hate it. She must've built up a threshold during the last four months, that escaped her notice. But why is it suddenly occurring to her now, on the same day that her magic suddenly comes back? What is wrong with her today anyway? All this, is too much for her right now. She needs a distraction from it all.

She slowly gets up from her position, telling him, 'I'm sure your car will live. Let's just go-'

Just in time, she stops herself before she completes the sentence with the word, 'home', because it suddenly occurs to her that if she says it, she'll be admitting that living with him doesn't feel as bad as she's repeatedly told him it is.

Seriously, what is wrong with her today?

Without getting up, Damon looks up at her carefully, a frown developing on his face, and then deepening with each passing second in the silence. If she could read his expression, she would know what he means by it, except that she can't and thus, she doesn't know what he means when he looks at her like that.

'I don't know why I expected that sentence to end differently,' he mumbles to himself, shifting his eyes away from her face.

Because she genuinely didn't hear what he said, she asks, 'What?'

'Get in the car,' he announces, as he springs up on his feet, 'We need to lock him in the dungeon before he wakes up.'

As Damon makes off, she takes a brief moment to wonder what in the world is going on with her. Why does she feel like she's in a confrontation box with opponents that she doesn't know?

26Chapters

'I know what you're thinking.'

Bonnie immediately shoots up in internal panic. It's not just the fact that Damon's presence is sudden, it's also what he said.

How does he know what she's thinking about? He can't really know that, can he? Even if his tone suggested that he is sure of what he said, he can't know what she's thinking.

'You don't know what I'm thinking,' she replies, refusing to turn her eyes away from the fireplace.

If she thought it safe to sigh in front of him, she would do it to express her current state. If he only knew what she's been thinking about since she came up from the dungeon.

First emitting a soft chuckle, Damon goes on to surprise her into facing him with the gentleness in his tone mostly.

'You're doing that thing where your lips are trying to hide in your teeth, without being obvious about it,' he tells her, 'so I know that you're thinking about something that's…' he trails off as though to think better of what he wants to say, and then after a second, picks up with, 'worth thinking about it.'

Any other time, her immediate thought to that, would be trying to figure out if he's insulting her or trying to make fun of her. Now, however, she isn't thinking any of those things, because all that she can think about, is that she's not sure if he's wrong about the end of his sentence exactly, but she does know that he's right to a degree. She is thinking about something that deserves a lot of thought.

Instead of telling him that, though, she finds that she's more interested in what he opted not to say. It's very unlike Damon to not say what he wants to say.

'What were you going to say?' she wants to know from him. It's curious that he changed his mind after some thought.

His answer, is a slight frown.

'You weren't originally going to say 'something worth thinking about',' she explains, 'So what were you going to say?'

'It doesn't matter,' he dismisses, looking away from her.

And there it comes again, Bonnie feels within her as she fixes her eyes on Damon's turned away face. There is that feeling from earlier about Damon covering himself behind a mask, except now, it's a little stronger than it was earlier. Which is why she decides to change the subject altogether.

'Do you really think I can get us out of here?'

It isn't just a question that she's posing to Damon. It isn't a way of asking for motivation either. Her question represents her at this very moment. It represents her thoughts as they are.

The truth is, after what happened at the supermarket today, and then what Kai said in the dungeon, especially the part where he said that she always comes back to Damon… her thoughts are in knot on top of knot in her mind.

She's in denial of the fact that Damon has such an influence on her, that she awakened her powers to save him. But more than that, she's confused about her feelings; she's wanted to go back home for so long, but now that she's faced with the actual possibility of going back, she can't say that she's as thrilled as she thought she would be. Something's definitely not right about that.

So, she needs an answer from him that she hopes will untie her thoughts, so that she can spread them out for proper examination and consideration.

'Well,' Damon looks back at her, 'I know that if you don't, I'll kill that guy.'

More because his answer doesn't produce the desired result, she only looks at him. Apparently, Damon is offended by her looking at him, because he pulls a face to say;

'I'm not really going to kill him, you know that, right?'

Why is he asking her that, she wonders. With Damon's tolerance, she doesn't expect that Kai will last five days with them if he continues to be the way he is. Of course, she'd love for him not to kill Kai, because Kai technically did nothing wrong, but she really wouldn't be surprised if she woke up one day and Kai was dead. It's just a reality that she has to accept when it eventually happens.

Her silence, she notices as she continues to look at Damon, is apparently not something that Damon is comfortable with.

'Bonnie,' he says with a seriously set face, 'I won't kill him.'

Although he doesn't say it in an urgent way, Bonnie picks up his urgency for her to understand that he won't kill Kai. If she was sure that she was right, she would think that it's important to him, that she believes what he won't do. She doesn't believe it, of course, because he's never cared about what she or anyone else thinks of him.

'I'm not saying that you will,' she tells him, 'but I'm not saying that you won't either.'

'I'm telling you,' he stresses, going as far as to close his hand around her wrist, 'that I won't.'

Not noticing the hold on her wrist, she draws her eyebrows together to take a good look at him. Where is all this coming from? Why does it matter to him, whether she believes him or not? It's not like he listens to her anyway. Why is he trying to make something out of-

'I need a drink,' he heavily announces, like he's releasing away tension that way.

She barely has a full minute to realise that Damon has left and to digest it, when a new voice sounds as Kai takes the place where Damon had stood.

'You should really pay attention to the things he says to you Bonnie,' Kai advises her. 'Or no, wait… actually, it's the things he doesn't say that you should pay attention to.'

Already in a terrible state and then Damon just now, she doesn't need more. Least of all in the form of Kai.

'You're so annoying,' she says as she tries to get away from there, but he stands in her way.

'Okay, fine,' he begins to apologise, 'I'm sorry. I haven't had any human interactions in twenty years. I'm going to screw up here and there, but can you just give me a chance?'

His face looks innocent enough, she decides, but mostly, she'll agree only because she doesn't want him to annoy her all night to give him a chance.

'Fine,' she agrees and then leaves him behind, to hear a childlike, 'Yippee,' come from him.

26Chapters

Food will make her sleep, Bonnie thinks when she makes her way into the kitchen.

It's this late at night, and she's probably the only person who hasn't been able to sleep since she went to bed. She's sure that Kai and Damon have no trouble with sleep tonight, she is the only one who's out of herself in a way that she can't understand.

Upon entering the kitchen and seeing the little flood of light, she's a little startled to find that she's not the only one who's awake at the moment.

Bonnie squints in the dim light coming from the partly open fridge to see who is blocking most of the light out, before she gets any closer.

'Damon?' she wonders.

Leisurely, he moves out of the fridge and for the second that he spends closing the fridge, she recognises that it's Damon. The only problem is, they are in complete darkness now that he's closed the fridge.

'What are you doing up?' Bonnie asks instead of asking him to open the fridge for light again.

'Asked the heavy sleeper,' is Damon's tired reply.

Honestly, she doesn't have time for this. Her whole day has been a series of revelations to her, and that's not even touching on her unfamiliar feelings and her tangled thoughts, thus resulting in her inability to sleep. The absolute last thing that she needs, is to have an exchange of words with Damon in an argumentative way.

'You know what,' she decides, turning on her heel, 'never mind. I'm going back to bed.'

Not that she had been hungry, but she's not hungry anymore, she only wants to get away from the kitchen and away from Damon as fast as she can. Feeling that she's quite familiar with the house and where to go, she starts taking her first steps away from her spot, when he stops her.

'Bonnie...'

It's more the way that he pronounces her name, than the soft tone, that gets her to stop and turn back. Although it's dark and she can't see him, he (being a vampire) can somewhat see her and the decent thing to do, would be to face him when he talks to her.

'Earlier,' he says, 'what were you thinking?'

'I thought you said you knew,' she answers, though not in a hostile way.

'I do,' Damon tells her, a smile audible in his voice, 'but I was just trying to find a way to get into that specific conversation.'

Oddly, in the darkness like this, she finds it easier to relax. Maybe it's the fact that she can't see him, that makes her feel like she's not vulnerable. She can't really say how it feels, she can only say that it's relaxing to feel like this.

'Why?' she prods for his reason. There must be a reason that he wants to talk about earlier.

'I guess,' he begins, sounding unsure of himself, 'I don't know... I think this place has finally gotten to me, because I would never in my right mind compliment you, but... –and I'm putting a disclaimer on this- I have faith in you. I wanted to tell you that before.'

She can be shocked, and she can even ask him to repeat what he said, but she actively chooses to feel touched. Of all the things that she imagined Damon would say to her, she didn't even consider that one.

'And uh...' he continues through her silence, 'I'm not going to give you hell if you fail.'

If she's ever been relieved to hear something, it's that. It's not that she can't handle Damon giving her hell, it's that she can, but she won't have to handle it, because he won't give her hell. That touches her too. In fact, it's overly suspicious how touched she is by it. It's like earlier today all over again, just different.

She has to get away from here, her fleeing mentality kicks in. The longer she stays here, the more she'll be faced with confusing things that she can't put together, like how easily a sentence from Damon appealed to her emotions.

'Goodnight Damon,' she decides on.

It's like he said, this world has definitely gotten to them, because she for one, doesn't recognise anything about herself. The longer this day stretches on, the more she feels like a stranger to herself.

'Bonnie,' he stops her, and she obeys without hesitation.

'Thank you for coming back.'

She's had countless people tell and say 'Thank you,' to her, but in her experience, it's only when Damon thanks her, that she feels like she did something worth it. She's never been able to admit that before today, but she can admit it now, because his gratitude travels from her ears, right down to the base of her heart, causing a little flutter there.

'Okay,' she lets out hoarsely, not sure what's wrong with her voice. And her heart for that matter.

'I just wanted you to know,' Damon concludes.

Then only, does she piece together, that that's what he's been trying to tell her all the times that he approached her today. All those failed attempts that went sideways from the go, have all been acts of goodwill on his part... and... she doesn't know how to feel about that.

'Okay,' she says again, deciding then and there to take a chance. 'So I know that vampires don't really need sleep, and I can't sleep tonight, so... do you maybe want to watch something?'

'With you?' he asks in a tone that she can't interpret.

'Yeah,' she answers, holding her breath, 'I mean, if you want to. I don't really mind.' She doesn't mind if he doesn't want to, but if he refuses her, she's not going to like it.

'I pick what we're watching,' Damon bargains.

Chapter 2, Now Or Never.