A/N: IDK WHAT THIS IS. J/k, it's a fic tribute to thefudge's sinful marcel x hope fic "they say i'm too young to love you", but with klonnie. This was also inspired by a Florence and the Machine song ( y'all know which one!), a beautiful Tamil song named "Pachai Nirame" which everyone should check out right now, and pictures of Kat Graham looking absolutely divine in a black bikini on a Jamaican beach. Kat pls take beach pictures all the time kthx bye.
P.S: Idk anything about Jamaica, its topography or its oceans or marine life, so this is all pure conjecture.
Runaway Bay, Jamaica
i: green
She's seven years old and determined to conquer her fear of the sea. Too young to swim, too old to be carried around, she wanders the shore with her bucket and spade snatching coral from the breaking waves.
Her sandals slip in the sand but she keeps them on anyway. They're seaglass green with a picture of Ariel on each corner. The little mermaid's hair gleams with sequin corals, making Bonnie skip and twirl to catch the light in them. Aunt Lucy had bought them for her even though Abby had clucked about how soon she'd outgrow them. They make her feel like she could turn her feet into fins. So much so that, when she loses one to a wily wave, Bonnie drops her bucket and runs into the sea. Her magic is still raw, untaught, and does little more than bounce off the water. The waves tug at her ankles and she rolls under with a little shriek.
She swallows green and salt and light, too shocked to be afraid, until a pair of hands pull her up and out, carrying her coughing back to shore. A man she's never seen before, blond haired with a strange heavy brow that makes his eyes look like they're peering out from a shell.
"Looking for this?" he dangles her Ariel shoe in one hand. His smile adds to the strangeness of his face. Bonnie tries to snatch it back only to have him dodge her.
"Give it back," she pants, "It's mine."
He raises an eyebrow. "Barely old enough to walk and yet brazen as the day is long. Undoubtedly a Bennett."
He's a vampire, she realizes with a pulse of terror. No one had warned her vampires liked the sea too. "Give me back my shoe," she scowls, aiming a spell at his head she's seen Abby and Sheila use to bring creatures like him to their knees. The vampire only smiles some more. She tries harder. Why wasn't he collapsing in agony and begging for mercy? He throws his head back and the smile grows into a laugh, all dimples and white teeth and those drowning eyes. Her fear becomes something pointed, something curious. She wants to laugh like that, like the flash of a knife's edge.
His hands take hold of her once more and set her upright, lifting her foot into the sandal and tightening the clasp. "Off you go, little witch."
"My aunts are gonna kill you," she sniffs.
"Wouldn't you rather do it yourself?" he asks, with a wink.
Bonnie stamps her foot, and the magic jolts him back a little. He vanishes mere moments before her mother rushes out stumbling over sand to scoop her up.
She feels a knife's corner in her smile.
ii: red
She's fourteen and no longer afraid, not of water, not of anything. She steals away at dawn to pose on the rocks so he can sketch her, angling her neck and crossing her ankles like the little mermaid in Copenhagen.
(You're not a mermaid, you're a witch. Your power is bound to the earth) This is what her aunts say to her, over and over. Her grandmother indulges her. Her mother couldn't care either way. But the annual Bennett family trip to Jamaica, their ancestral home, is also the time her aunts are most lax, when she can wander off on her own and forget her name, for a little while.
"Family is destiny, little witch. You cannot have one without the other," he says lightly, squinting at her in the dawnlight.
"So what's your destiny? Sitting on a beach alone?" she rebuffs with all the arrogance of youth.
"I have heard the mermaids singing," he murmurs, distracted, fingers moving rapidly over the sketchpad.
"Whatever." She slides off the rock, earning a frown. There's a jellyfish washed up from the storm last night, sad pulsing translucence at her feet. Bonnie scoops up the creature and throws it back in the sea. When he looks up from his work her hands run red.
"What am I going to do with you, hmm?" he admonishes gently, grasping her wrists. She's dizzy from the stinging in her palms.
"Make it go away," she whispers, gazing at him under her lashes. She's always been curious about vampire blood, how it tastes, how it feels spreading through your body like jellyfish hair.
Nik grins. "Clever little witch," he says, bending to her blistered hands.
But her triumph is short lived. He leaves them with a kiss, and a reminder to practice her healing spells more.
She doesn't see him again the rest of the summer.
iii: yellow
She's seventeen and dancing on the right side of tipsy. Her magic floats and pops in her veins like bubbles of champagne. The yellow sundress she stole from Aunt Lucy flares around her legs.
As she moves from boy to boy, swaying in the little shack by the beach that can barely contain this much reckless youth, this much careless want, she feels radiant as Ostara herself.
Soon, her aunts would teach her battle magic and how to channel the ancestors. Soon, she would be their greatest weapon in the war against vampires. Bringing death to the undead. Sending their souls screaming into Qetsiyah's grasp.
"A mermaid on shore," he murmurs into her shoulder, large hands descending around her waist. "What a curious thing."
Bonnie arches her neck by way of greeting, her body rippling into his. The way his fingers count her ribs makes her weak in the knees. "Maybe I'm a jellyfish," she giggles, reaching up to touch his neck with a little sting of magic, a little hello. Almost a kiss, really. "Are you going to throw me back?"
She shudders at the point of his fangs, breaks the skin of her throat against his mouth. He drinks, they dance. In a throng of drunken bodies, they ride a different kind of storm.
iv: blue
She's nineteen and swimming naked in the sea. This is the closest she'll ever come to being a mermaid. The closest she'll ever come to free.
The moon is so full and bright, she wants to kiss her glowing face.
In the morning, she'll leave Jamaica with her family. In the morning, she'll be a Bennett witch again and he'll be the Original Hybrid. In the morning, in the morning-
"I'm still sketching, love," he replies when she demands attention. So Bonnie climbs into his lap naked as the day she was born, dripping sand and water across his drawings.
Nik sighs and swears and calls her incorrigible. "I was trying to preserve something like a memory you know," he growls, hands clutching crumpled paper along her back.
"You'll have your drawings, but what do I have?" she asks, draping her arms around his neck. "I want something too."
The night is blue but his eyes are black. He traces the vein at her throat like it's part of a puzzle.
"What am I going to do with you, little witch?"
She takes his hand and kisses the inside of his wrist. "I want a memory."
Something that lives in the body, something she can taste.
He opens his vein for her that night and she suckles like a newborn, her tongue catching every drop, every rivulet that tries to escape. He calls her all kinds of names. She takes her fill, toes curling into the sand.
v: black
She's the witch who almost killed the Original Hybrid. She's lost her grandmother and her mother too, and she's engaged to Luka Martin. She's the pride and fear of the Bennett family.
She's twenty one years old.
The beach is different than she remembers. More tourists, more clubs, more vampires. Their eyes follow her but have no effect, like a drug she's used too long.
"Congratulations on your engagement, Miss Bennett."
"Is that why you wanted to meet?" she asks, crossing her arms and turning to face him. "To congratulate me?"
His eyes skim her body with amusement. She's in a black bikini and nothing else. Her aunts don't like her to wear black but she defies them in this small way. She feels she's earned the color.
"I want to make an offer," he replies, hopping off his bar stool. He's dressed in slacks and a ridiculous white Hawaiian shirt in an effort to blend in. Not a very good effort, she thinks. It takes only a second glance to notice how the indolence of immortality casually makes a mockery of his human clothes. "Come with me."
She laughs in his face. "Goodbye, Nik."
He sweeps her up like a wave, carries her outside to press her against the wooden wall. "You don't want to be a 'Bennett witch', any more than I want to be the 'Original Hybrid'." He whispers into her neck, into the fluttering memory of her pulse. "Titles and labels, like trying to pour the ocean into a teapot."
Her hands bunch in his flowered shirt. She rips the fabric a little. "I'm getting married."
"That's easily remedied."
"I won't let you harm Luka-,"
"You don't care about Luka."
"How would you know?" she challenges. "I'm going to give him my virginity tonight." It was the right thing to do, the only thing she could give Luka that came close to something like a promise, something like love. Because she isn't the girl he wants her to be, the daughter her aunts desire.
"No you're not."
She's the girl who broke every bone in Niklaus Mikaelson's body and hungered for more. A mermaid with knives at her feet. Something that doesn't belong, doesn't quite fit. A hybrid maybe, in her own way.
"They'll hunt us down," she whispers as he lifts her against the wall, as her legs twine around his waist and his hands make short work of her bikini. "My aunts, your family. Everyone."
"We can outrun them," he replies, leaving a bite mark on the curve of her neck, her favorite spot. "You and me and the sea."
"We - we can't outrun who we are, Nik."
She can't think, can barely breathe. He's making her magic ebb and swell with each stroke.
"Can't we?"
vi: white
She's twenty two and fleeing her own wedding. Her veil streams behind her, the wind catches the flowers in her hair and keeps them. Her wedding dress is bunched up in her hands like so much seafoam. She's a ghost under the moon.
He's there with a boat, just like he promised.
They fuck on the deck with her wedding gown still on. He tears through tulle and silk and lace. She wraps the veil around his throat and makes his fangs descend, crawls atop him and rides his mouth like a wave.
They don't say, I love you. They don't say, be with me forever. They don't say, you are the knife that cuts me free.
They swim in their bodies, each to each.
They leave the shores behind.