I believe there is scarcely a corner in me that is safe from you.
— Henrik Ibsen
She's cold.
It's the cusp of summer in Virginia but a veil of winter hangs over Mystic Falls. The others don't feel it. Inside the school, girls in yellow and pink and bluebell-colored silks are dancing with their chosen dates. Somewhere, Elena and Caroline and Rebekah are swaying to the music, sated and blissful. Vampires wouldn't feel this unseasonable chill, this foreboding bite in the air she's grown accustomed to. Alone at the edge of the forest, her dress drinks the light, layers of dark blue crepe clinging to her like shadows. Nobody else feels this cold, this encroaching, insidious, ice. This blight in the eye of spring.
She could make it stop. Expression licks at the corners of her mind, reminding her she could give in, embrace the cold and enter it completely. Let it hold her.
It's what Silas wanted, what he hoped for. She knew that now. To wear on her body and spirit until she grew increasingly untethered from the earth magic she was born with, that was also the magic of her Grams and her ancestors, and yielded to the swirling vortex of Expression.
Bonnie Bennett, too moons shy of eighteen, a silver tiara perched lopsidedly atop tousled, black hair and a sash that declares Prom Queen draped across her body, is not weak. But sometimes, in her darkest moments, she longs for something else. To be soft and swept up and die. To lay her head down on living, like it were a pillow.
She shivers in the moonlight, knowing she should return inside, to the music and the lights and the corsages, yet unable to do so, when the slow sound of clapping draws her eye and Klaus Mikaelson appears out of the woods, chuckling to himself, collared shirt gleaming white in the moon. He pretends to bow before her with a rakish grin. "My queen."
Caught off guard, a laugh bubbles up inside her she can't quite suppress. It breaks into a smile, a sweet, searing relief. Better the Devil you know.
"My how the trappings of high school royalty become you," he adds, drawing close to her, his fingers flicking her rhinestone tiara. "How many nubile hopefuls did you crush underfoot to gain this?"
Bonnie swats away his hand and readjusts her little crown. "None, actually. They voted for me."
"An elected monarch. How dreadfully modern," he said, eyes gleaming in amusement. "Would the queen deign to dance with a humble subject?"
"Tell me if you see one," she quipped. She wanted to ask him a dozen questions about where he'd been these past weeks, if Silas had reached him too, if he'd had any luck finding the Hunters. But these queries swam, suspended, in a haze of warm trepidation when his arm came around her waist, when his hand clasped hers and his feet willed hers to move, to dance.
They wove silently through the blue and silver night, deeper into the clutch of trees, his silent gaze holding her close.
She had danced with him once before, at the Mikaelson ball, their eyes daggering each other with every step, every sweep of music. She had wanted nothing more than to singe the skin off his flesh, turn his cravat to ashes and sprinkle them over his charred remains. Bonnie no longer wanted to incinerate him - he had proven himself a useful, if unpredictable ally. But his presence still conjured the feel of a small blade, buried between her ribs, that he could twist and deepen at will. A sickening, familiar ache.
She gave a startled gasp when he spun her, out, out into the shadows, anchored only by his hand, and Bonnie laughed despite herself. Klaus drew her close again. She'd lost her crown, and the sash was slipping off her shoulders. She saw his eyes skate along the expanse of her collarbone, the soft hollow at the base of her throat.
"I have missed you, witch," he murmured against her cheek. Bonnie let her eyes drift close. She couldn't say, I missed you too. Tomorrow, she would burn with regret and self-doubt. Tomorrow, she would fight Silas off by herself. But tonight she let the blade sink deeper. Tonight she laid her head upon his chest, wrapped in the dizzying silence of the mutually wounded, who know that the wounding is a reprieve, a moment to breathe.
Their dance slowed to a gentle sway and the world with its colors and distant music faded, grew dull and quiet.
"You're trembling, love," Klaus spoke into her hair. "I suppose I should rejoice in still being capable of rousing your fear."
She gave a muffled laugh. "For once, it's not you I'm afraid of."
His eyes bore into hers, dark and glinting.
"Brave little witch," he said softly, and captured her mouth in a kiss. Disarmed, Bonnie kissed him back, yielded to the knife. It felt a natural extension of their former enmity. No one knows you better than the ones you've tried to destroy. "I have waited for this moment," Klaus breathed against her lips, claiming them hungrily once more. "Longed and dreamed-," His kiss grew vicious, his hands gripping her like talons. By the time Bonnie realized the truth, it was too late. Icy darkness poured from his mouth to hers, filled her veins like pitch, hollowed out the heat of her magic.
Silas laughed, he laughed and he kissed her and his kiss savaged her lips. Blood dribbled down her chin.
Bonnie struggled in vain against his hold as Klaus' face split into a wide, white grin.
"Oh my dear witch, my luminous child," Silas purred, cradling her bloody mouth between his fingers. "I'm going to enjoy myself with the two of you," he promised with a wink before vanishing like smoke.
The soft peals of his laughter still echoed in the moonlight while she staggered, sick to her stomach and wretched with shame.
Bonnie Bennett, two moons shy of eighteen, crownless and bleeding at the mouth, did not replace her tiara, nor wipe her bloody chin, nor retrace her steps. Behind her, a world of flowering silk dresses and sweet dances, and before her no end in sight, but a long road embattled with new enemies each time. There was no soul she could cry to and confess her momentary lapse, her terrible spill of weakness, no soft place in those dark woods to lay her head. But groping in the shadows she found at last, at the foot of an oak tree, a small space she could huddle into and let the tears come.
The bourbon is smoke and muted fire on his tongue. His parlor in Mystic Falls smells like kindling, that deep rich, wooden scent he loved in childhood when the deeps of winter made flame and wood more precious than rubies. When keeping warm was cause for blood.
Niklaus Mikaelson, a hybrid now with ten moonless centuries behind him, understands why his mother went to such lengths to keep the wolf in him contained. The animal was privy to knowledge that escaped the vampire. He could smell magic, sense it pulsing through the earth like veins.
Which is why when Silas' magic crept into the room like tentacles, Klaus didn't flinch, nor turn his head. The sorcerer had no physical form - yet, a foreboding instinct nagged - but if he exerted his powers enough he could summon illusions, shape air into the sound of words, touch and mark flesh, fill a room briefly with his presence.
"So, Silas. It was you slithering across the grounds and not rodents as I feared."
"Niklaus," came the disembodied, rasping voice. "Old friend. Your hospitality is much diminished these days."
"Surely you didn't go to all this trouble to lecture me on my manners?" he inquired, refilling his glass. But his hand froze around the decanter when another scent, the scent of a witch's blood, found his nose, and the air rippled with the coy sound of Silas' laughter.
"You noticed my perfume. Quite entrancing, wouldn't you say?"
Klaus schooled his features quickly, tamping down a volley of sudden questions. Had Silas got to Bonnie Bennett? Claimed her as an acolyte even? In the old days, the sorcerer loved to collect gullible young witches for his retinue, draining them of magic as a vampire fed on blood. Bonnie was young, perhaps even gullible when it came to her loyalties, but surely - surely Silas could not have taken her as easily as he had others. She was stubborn to a fault, too righteous to give him her blood willingly. So what -
When he glanced up, the room was emptied of Silas, a curtain drifting from an open window where the sorcerer's essence had slipped away.
Training his senses around the house yielded no trace of the spirit, but the sound of light footsteps grew closer, followed by frantic knocking on the front door.
Bonnie Bennett stood there, wild-eyed in a dark-blue evening dress with leaves dusting her dark curls and a bloodstained sash dangling from one shoulder. Klaus took quick measure of her as he drew her inside. She was shaken but unharmed, her skin damp and cold.
"Silas paid you a visit," he noted.
Bonnie nodded, suppressing a small sob, and Klaus cupped her shoulder, waiting for the tears to pass. But the witch only shuddered and huddled close to him, small hands twisting in his shirt
"Come now, love," he murmured, tracing her spine with a feather touch. "These jitters are unbecoming of the witch who nearly burned me alive"
She gave a muffled laugh.
"Silas is a relic, one that you and I shall return to history. Where it belongs."
Her eyes shone like lamps in a window and he drew her flush against him, a dark exultance filling his chest, recalling a dusty street in Rome, a young girl's blood on the cobblestones and Silas roaring vengeance. He had bested the old sorcerer once, fulfilled a destiny his own mother had tried to curse him out of. He would do it again. The witch he held was proof of that. His former enemy, nestled like a bird into his chest. This triumph, this relief - he floated upon it, sank inside it. It was headier than wine.
They were in his room, where the fire burned low. He felt pillows beneath him and above, instead of the vaulted ceilings of his mansion, rafters full of shadows, low and heavy, built by his father's hands -
Mikael.
The old terror gripped his bones, freezing him like the long winter nights of his childhood. He was cold, colder than the death he'd walked with for centuries.
"Klaus?"
Bonnie Bennett spoke his name in the dark, riveting him. She stood at the foot of his bed now, her shoulders bare and sloping in the soft firelight. If he could touch her, he could dispel this cold. If he could reach her - gods, he needed to reach her. She edged closer but still remained tantalizingly far.
"Come here," he growled, and his voice was thick with fever. She glided shyly above him and Klaus grasped her with brutish, needy hands, with a child's savagery. He bit her, kissed her, rent her prim blue bodice in half and feasted on her breasts. He drank her mewls and moans like blood, seeking that place, that cut-open clarity with which she'd faced him at the quarry and nearly erased him from existence. He longed to live there, as he longed for nothing else. The edge of annihilation, where life is fiercest, sweetest. The thin landscape he had scoured for one thousand years.
"I wanted this," she breathed into his mouth while his hands gathered her warm, dark hair and exposed the curve of her neck. He could not answer, hunger had stolen his voice.
She giggled, and in that tinkling, silver sound, Klaus felt the ice return.
"Oh, you darling boy," Silas crooned, and Bonnie's mouth glistened with blood. His blood. "Darling, foolish boy. I never dreamed it would be so easy."
Pain raced through Klaus, like virulent frost spreading from every place his skin had touched Bonnie. He roared, the wolf risen to fight off a threat, and slashed the dark with clawed hands. But Silas was already gone, melted into air that escaped between the floorboards.
Bourbon, pooled around the shattered decanter, exuded a sweet, acrid smell of smoke. Klaus Mikaelson came to in the body of his wolf, shaking, growling, sniffing out the only trace Silas had left behind - a scrap of white silk, the words Prom Queen visible between tiny splatters of a witch's blood, thrown like a gauntlet at his feet.
A/N: Someone on Tumblr asked me how I would've written the prom episode with Silas if Klonnie were a thing, and I meant to do a short, 500 word drabble. ANYWAY. I'm leaving this unmarked for now because I'm sorely tempted to add a bit more and make it a short fic, but I'm still mired in dissertation work and other fic projects so I don't wanna make promises. I shouldn't be writing anything new at all but the prompt was too tempting and I'd missed my Trauma Babies TM. Let me know your thoughts!