A/N: First draft of this was written in May, but real-life and all that... Partially beta'ed along the way, huge thanks to leidi-bonny-zivah, unicornsince88 and slayerkitty on Tumblr. This fic is already completed, will be posted in three parts, second part will be up in a few days. Enjoy!

I.

Her satisfaction is short-lived.

His blood on her knife hasn't even dried before Elena tells her. Kai.

"Why didn't you tell me before I-"

"I didn't know Damon was going to come up with the idea to leave him here! It's like you guys… You and Damon, you talk- you talk about stuff, just you two, scheming, and I- Damon didn't tell me." Elena looks dejected, her brown eyes all doe-eyed and tearful. As though considering there's a part of Damon's life that's not about her leads to many a sleepless nights and profound agony.

For once, however, Bonnie doesn't feel it. It doesn't hit her in that sweet spot, that Elena spot, the one that makes her want to give Elena everything. Maybe it's the cold snow seeping through the cracks of her boots. Or maybe the spot is hidden underneath her rage now, her now permanent state of rage. Like her grandmother's necklace underneath piles and piles of coats at Vicky Donovan's birthday party that one time. She'd spent so long trying to find it. 1994 must have robbed her of it, of her need to provide comfort and reassurance to anyone but herself. Add it to the list of things 1994 took from her. Gave her, she thinks for a second, but she pushes the thought away.

"Well, Damon should have told me about Kai being linked to his damn coven-,"Her voice cracks, silencing her. A part of her is grateful for it. It isn't of Elena's concern how much it hurts. Damon lied to her, again. He's been doing that a lot since she came back. And it hurts like hell. Bonnie predicts another aneurysm in his near future. Like she caused after he'd brought Kai to see her at the rave. Kai, the last person she'd wanted to see. And it took one day, just one, for her to be back from 1994 and for Damon to take advantage of what they'd come to mean to each other because of it.

Damn him.

"Damon should have told me, because now Kai could be anywhere," she finally states.

"I know, but I guess he wanted to help Stefan and get his mom back. And I love Damon- God, I love him so much I can't breathe, but… This is what he does, he's so reckless. Once he wants something, he doesn't stop, you know?"She does, she knows, but she doesn't say it. She can't tell Elena that she knows exactly what Damon does. She was alone with him for four months, after all. So completely isolated, and now she even knows him better than she ever knew Elena.

"Okay, so, what now? Damon is still in there trying to convince Lily to leave without her family of vampires- which Damon also conveniently forgot to mention."

"We have to find him. If Kai dies in here, then so do Liv and Jo. Bonnie, I know that he hurt you, but…" Bonnie scoffs. Hurt is such a small word. "I can't lose Stefan and watch Alaric lose another woman he loves. Not after Isobel and Jenna- he loves Jo so much already." Elena reaches out to her, pulls her in for a hug. Bonnie resists rolling her eyes. "Look, I'll go and find him, okay? You stay here with Damon. I think Kai will be a little more inclined to listen to someone who didn't just… stab him."

Bonnie can't argue with that. Nor does she trust herself not to try again.

-XXXXXXXX-

When Elena returns, Damon has managed to convince Lily that they'll come back for her family. Kai is right behind Elena. Bonnie feels a small shiver run down her spine when she sees him wincing in pain at the wounds she's caused. When he finally lays eyes on her, just for a moment, his gaze is stoic and cold; there's not even a hint of the fake brightness she saw in his eyes earlier. She's woken him up, she thinks. The him underneath, the animal, the one she knows. He has to be in there, she insists, he just has to be. But when they approach her, he doesn't say a word. There's no snark, no biting comment, no witty joke. She's never known him to be silent.

He doesn't look at her again, not even when she pulls out the knife again for her blood, or as she holds out the ascendant. Even as they begin to cast the spell, his eyes avoid hers, look at anything but her, while hers unwittingly seek his out. It sparks her rage like only he can. She doesn't know why, but she needs him to look at her. She needs him to see it, her lack of remorse, the power which courses through her at the sight of his pain. In a way, it excites her.

The words of the spell escape from her lips, repeatedly like a mantra, without even having to think of it. At the last word, right before that blinding white light, his eyes finally find hers for a moment and she feels it. That rush. Power. Adrenaline. Perhaps even pleasure, like a high that hardens her nipples.

It's a familiar feeling, admittedly. It's not the first time she's felt that high around him, this euphoric state after bringing him down to his knees. Like in 1994 when she'd outsmarted him in the cave and had sent away her magic, or when she'd blown him up at the hospital and ran. Despite her fear, it had made her feel so good, so strong and energized. Powerful. But there couldn't be a high without a low and each one came with everything inside of her screaming to call it fury, hatred and the rush of her wrath bestowed upon him instead.

Moments later, when they step foot on the soil of their own world, he vanishes into thin air. It's almost as if she's dreamed it, as though Kai was never there at all.

-XXXXXXXX-

"Are you okay?"

No, she thinks.

"I'm fine," she's met with apparent disbelief, "Why?"

"Nothing, just… You've barely touched your plate, like, at all. I specifically asked the waiter for curly fries, I thought you loved those?"

Three days after 1903, Stefan's brooding hero hair has returned to its former glory. One look at his mother was apparently all it took. Caroline, on the other hand, is still humanity free and slightly bitchier. Occasionally, she drops by at their dorm when she knows she won't run into Stefan or Elena. Or anyone but Bonnie, really.

The diner is nearly empty, with only three filled booths of customers enjoying an early dinner. It's the same place where she met up with Kai before their trip to 1903. Come on, it'll be fun, he'd said.

Bonnie looks down at it, at her plate still full of cold fries. She'd tried to stuff a fry - or two - in her mouth about ten minutes ago. But like everything else since she's been back, the taste of it was bland and unsatisfying. Everything in her fridge might as well be laced with cyanide, given how she's come to avoid it all.

She can't help but wonder if it's because of him that her food tastes differently, if he is watching her now, messing with her, planning something for her. The suspense builds with each day. Kai is every shadow and movement in the corner of her eye. Every sound is one that he could have made and one that startles her. Not to mention how every gush of wind makes her skin crawl as though it's his cloaked breath on her skin.

"I'm just not that hungry," she lies.

"When's the last time you ate anything?"

"What are you implying, Elena?"

"I mean, I know my eating habits aren't exactly normal, because, well, I'm not human. But you, on the other hand, though a human of the witchy variety, don't have a habit of gorging on blood bags. And you're not acting like yourself."

"Well, I was technically dead for months-"

"I know, but-"

"And maybe if one of you had told me about that link- how do you expect me to act like myself when he could be around the corner to make sure I actually stay dead this time?!"

"I'm just worried about you, Bonnie! How can I not be?" Elena's cold hands cover her warm ones, squeezing them lightly, "If he does try to hurt you, then I'm here, and there's Damon, and we got Stefan back, too, and we're working on Caroline… Plus, if you need more witchy back-up, then I bet Jo and Liv are more than eager to take him down a notch, too. We'll all keep you safe, I promise."

"Because that's worked wonderfully in the past," she mutters underneath her breath.

Loaded silence follows. And relief. For a second she longs for the days of having the world all to herself. Elena gets back to her own plate, eyeing Bonnie carefully every now and then. Elena's gaze is unbearable to her, as is her presence. Just about anyone's presence, in fact. Nothing feels right anymore. Strangely enough, No-Humanity Caroline has become one of the only people Bonnie doesn't mind being around, the only one whose presence doesn't make her feel like she's drowning.

They've come to some sort of understanding now, an unspoken agreement to leave the other be. The first two times Bonnie caught Caroline sneaking into the dorm, she tried to convince her to turn on her humanity. She talked of pain needing to be felt and how it would get better. On her third try, right after Caroline had forced her to listen to a rendition of an old song she'd never heard of and never wanted to hear again, Bonnie realized she didn't even believe her own words.

"You were locked up for months and you're here lecturing me about pain?! Stop worrying about little ol' me, I've never felt better. Not giving a damn is all the rage these days. You should try it."

Somehow, though, No-Humanity Caroline reminds her of Kai, triggers thoughts of how he was in 1994. His absence unnerves her more than his presence in his prison. The memory of that euphoric high when she hurt him taunts her like a hangnail or a loose thread in a piece of fabric that she can't help but pull. It's like a ticking clock, like a countdown for demolition. And ever since they got back, she's felt it. Flutters in her gut and knots in her stomach. The knots feel like an unmet need, a constant reminder like a crying, hungry infant. It feels as though she's lacking something.

Him?

She kills the thought with her rage.

-XXXXXXXX-

Day four, day five, her head is filled with him.

One thought lights a fuse that sets it in motion. Is Kai inside of her, somehow, like a parasite? Would she wither away, eventually? Would there be anything left of her but a hollow shell? A drained human carcass?

Bonnie wonders if it's not the world around her but the world within. In a sense, it feels as though Kai's ruining her beyond repair. Has already ruined her. Has he? Ruined, crushed… killed. Maybe Kai's killed her, the old Bonnie. Jeremy Gilbert's Bonnie. Kai had lured that Bonnie in despite her wariness and killed her. Curiously, she'd consumed him as though he was foreign candy and he'd turned out to be nothing but poison. Something for her to choke on in eternal solitude.

But she'd picked herself up, put herself first. She'd resurrected herself with her rage, now scorching like a fire strong enough to burn down the world. And him with it. Her rage surges through her like electricity and lights up everything around her, smashes glasses into walls and sets fire to her possessions. But Bonnie likes it, relishes in it. She lets it. Magic runs through her veins like never before.

And, still, Kai eats away at her, incessantly gnaws at her brain like a famished beast.

She's never felt this unsettled. Her magic feels unstable and uncontrolled. As if the source of her magic is tainted now, as if she herself is tainted at her core. Rotten, she thinks. There's a new fear of herself and her own power that she can't shake. Dark, untapped power just out of reach; a sweet, sweet promise of pure bliss. With each chomp at her insides, the parasite feeds a new craving that's stuck to her like a ball and chain around her neck. Along with bitter, crippling shame.

This is why she'd smothered it.

When it presented itself after the rave, that dark rage like a band aid to cover the bullet hole he'd left, Bonnie had welcomed it a smile of relief. Bonnie had wanted it more than anything, longed to be consumed by it. There was no internal war in her mind, no battle to hold on to the light inside of her. To that bravery, that loyalty, that patience. She'd exchanged it all for that dark hatred in her heart.

And yet… it lives. It cries out in starved agony. And it's more frightening than any loss of light. So, desperately, she clings to hating him. She can't stop. It's as good of a medicine as any. It dulls the senses, masks the thought of how the worst- the worst part of what he did was leave her alone and how it makes her sick that she ever trusted him to stay. That trust was even there at all. It kills the thought of how she fell into his trap because he'd looked at her like that… and it'd sparked enough to make her wonder if, perhaps…

He's ruining her.

Even in the darkness, he's still under her skin.

Her hatred is valid, she knows that, she does. He's provided her with a lifetime of material. But it serves as nothing but a thin veil, the appetizer she fools herself into thinking is a grand, seven course meal. Underneath it all, underneath the scars and scabs and layers of hardened skin, all she finds is that, that hunger, the parasite at her core. Naked, sick, hollow, and hungry. Starved.

Her parasite. Hers and hers alone.

His? She crushes the thought like it's Kai himself.

-XXXXXXXX-

Somewhere along the way, it shifts.

It evolves.

Later, she'll tell herself it must have started on day six. That she was sane before then. Healthy. Struggling and furious, but okay.

The knots and flutters start to feel like tight rubber bands stretching farther with each passing minute. Tick, tick, tick- Snap. The suspense reveals its hidden nature. When she finally finds the word for it, when Bonnie realizes her suspense has transformed into perverse anticipation, it becomes nausea. Sickness. She must be sick, she thinks. The parasite fights her with all his might, burns like acid in her throat before she rids herself of it. But the anticipation remains, makes her stomach growl as soon as it's out of her system. Her parasite regenerates, she realizes. Cut it off, throw it up, and a new part of it, of him, grows back.

She refuses to call it anything but that, a parasite.

Desire, it is not.

Bonnie knows what desire means, and this… This is not it. To desire Kai seems like an impossibility. A conundrum, if there ever was any. To her, desire implies want and longing, and voluntary submission. Not a parasitic urge, not an ache, not an anxious need that makes her want to crawl out of her skin and seek out her very own destruction. Desire implies love, she thinks. Past love and sweetness, safety and warmth. Something good. Wishful. Clean. Not a scar on her chest in the shape of Kai Parker. There's no goodness in him, she thinks. He's a monstrous void, she thinks. Depravity she can't submit to. Won't.

But whatever it is, it's there. It pulls at her limbs to drag her down. This unmet need, the parasite, is a beast inside of her that craves his filth and the taste of his skin.

On day six, almost seven, on her bed at night, she doesn't kill the thought before it can sink in. Him. His. Them. The cry that escapes her lips sounds harrowing. A corrupted cry from airless lungs. Strangled, familiar. She hears it every night when it drowns out the call of her weeping, hungry parasite, and the throbbing of her flesh. When she lies awake, resisting, fighting the urge for relief when all she sees is him. Drenched, soaking wet, untouched but overstimulated as though one simple brush of her palm could set her off.

And every night, her eyes close and she slips. Her resilience falters for a split second, but it's enough. Bonnie imagines nothing but Kai. She imagines his hard cock filling her up, imagines scratching open his shoulder blades until the blood gushes down his back and drips onto her thighs. Flashes fill her mind and tight tension coils low in her belly, as she imagines feeling his teeth sink into her breasts as she comes, and slicing open his neck with the same knife he used to stab her. She tosses and turns in her bed, writhing in her sheets, aching for the taste of his sweat. She envisions the look in his eyes when the life leaves his body and her fingers running through his dark brown hair as he sucks on her clit, parts her folds and drinks her juices.

Her own moans escaping from her lips wake her up and her next cry is as agonizing as the first. Flesh still throbbing, she runs her nails over her scar, digs them into her sensitive skin to remind herself. It stings, hurts like a bitch, hurts like Kai's knife.

Good, she thinks. This is why I run.

Every time, Bonnie runs from it, runs as fast as she can, and finds comfort in the darkness to repress it and him and his bloodstained hands. Dark, blind hatred embraces her like its weeping infant, and it keeps her focused and righteous. In its embrace, she's not thinking of the warmth of his cock buried deep inside of her and the marks of his teeth on the insides of her thighs.

But even when she hates him, it's there.

-XXXXXXXX-

He hates her even when he doesn't, even when he can't. He can't hate her. Yet, he does. Does he? He should, he thinks. He struggles with it, honestly. She stabbed him in the back, then once in his leg, left him to rot and only begrudgingly took him back with them. He should hate her for that. But they- those feelings, those pesky new emotions, thoughts, aches and pains, they won't let him. They just won't let him hate her.

Bonnie Bennett.

Bonnie.

Bon.

Her.

When he opened his eyes after the merge and got them- those feelings, she quickly appeared right at the center of them. And she's stayed put ever since, like a permanent fixture, something stuck to his brain like a spit out ball of chewing gum. She tore at his insides, ate away at him and haunted him wherever he went. He couldn't stop thinking of her, of what he did to her, how he hurt her and how he needed her forgiveness. And, finally, he just needed to see her.

But now he hates that he needed – needs - any part of her at all. Does he? He thinks he hates it. But he's new at this and he has no how-to manual at his disposal. No one gave him a guide to figuring out his feelings, and there's only so much Google can tell him. But he feels as though she makes him weak, turns him into a fool. A stammering idiot whose heart both drops and flutters at the sight of her. Dependent on her, even after he's felt her knife in his back.

Needing anything of her without it being a means to an end is excruciating, really. It distracts him from himself and what he needs and that annoys him - or the part of him that's still him - greatly. And he still can't stop thinking about her, even now. Especially now. He might even crave her now, he thinks. Somehow, his hands itch at the mere thought of her.

Figuring out the new him is confusing and agonizing; he's now unsure of everything, including the way he ties his shoes. The part of Luke inside of him feels like a new organ that his body wants to reject, like a Trojan horse he's let inside of his city walls only to be taken over. That part of Luke bothers him, pains him, has taken ownership of him in a way that reminds him of a virus or a nasty infection.

And maybe Luke is just that, an infection. A sickness. A poison, a foreign object in his body that doesn't belong but he can't get rid of. He's felt sick since the merge, ruined. Luke created a burden he never wanted, infected him with them- those feelings that became his, but yet weren't.

Are they his?

He thinks they are. His physical reactions, like the gallons of water exuding from his own eyes, indicate that they are. But, again, he's unsure of everything.

At first, when he'd looked at Jo and Liv after the merge, he'd hear Luke's voice, screaming at him and crying out in pain. He'd feel lumps in his throat, faint headaches and the sting of unshed tears in his eyes. He'd feel his own new guilt over his actions towards them, carried the weight of it on his back with each step in his now heavy, remorseful boots. But the attachment and care that came with it, his new need to protect them despite his own urges underneath… That had come from Luke, because it had been Luke's in the first place. After the merge that was somehow his, yet it still wasn't. Not entirely, anyway.

Every feeling towards them that wasn't his guilt and his remorse had been foreign to him and he'd seen that in the way Jo and Liv looked back at him, too. The way they'd regarded him as though he was a thief. That not-so-subtle look which said I wish you'd died instead. They saw what he'd taken from them, what he'd stolen from Luke, and if he were honest, he saw that, too. He wasn't really their caring, protective brother, nor had he really felt like it; he was the body that hosted their actual one. So there'd been a distance, a gap, something that had belonged more to Luke than to him.

But when he'd looked at her, it had been all him, all his.

His turned stomach, his dry throat, his aching limbs and his anxious need to hear her voice. He'd felt no gap, no internal war, hadn't heard Luke's screaming voice in the back of his mind. Looking at her, everything about her was his. She hadn't looked at him and seen Luke; she'd seen him, just him, everything he'd done to her and everything in 1994 that had been theirs, in a sense. A part of him had been grateful for it, for that anger and pure loathing. He might have even needed it in that moment. Even if he'd just wanted her forgiveness and even if he'd imagined it going differently.

Somehow, it was the one thing that still reminded him of himself, his old self. And for that he'd wanted to do better, try harder, make her see the rest of him, too. Not just the part of him that had hurt her, but the part of him that didn't want to anymore, the part that couldn't. The part that fought, despite his urges, despite the fact that everything about her also awoke the parts in him that were dormant, the sick and twisted and familiar parts of him she already knew.

Before she left him, he'd been determined to make her see him. But in his determination he'd become foolish, so stupid. He'd miscalculated. He'd mistaken her for someone else, someone forgetful and easily swayed. It hadn't been until she was hovering over him, her fists clenched tightly around that knife and her eyes wild and full of darkness, that he'd realized his mistake and fled. Later, he'd avoided her, even as he'd felt her eyes on him as though she was daring him. Was she? She must have been. The split second their eyes did meet told him she must have been.

Her betrayal had been maddening. But, somehow, it had made him think of her even more. Because there'd been something about it, about the way she'd said she almost killed herself because of him, and how she'd looked at him before he'd cloaked himself. And as he'd dressed his wounds, it had hit him. A nagging thought. It was like a scab he couldn't leave alone.

Was he hers?

He'd started to wonder if he was hers, too. Hers, like how when looking at her, everything about her was his and not Luke's. If the sharp pain he felt in his back and leg were hers, too. If they weren't his wounds, but hers, because he owed her his pain and she needed to have it. He'd wondered if the others saw her like he did, the new her. If her friends saw that there was a new darkness in her, or if they couldn't see it or even understand it, because it was only for him to see.

Was her darkness his?

And was his physical pain hers?

Now that thought won't let him go.

He knows it is.

He knows it's his.

It has to be.

Because it had sparked an ache, ignited a craving that had nothing to do with Luke and everything with that, that something he'd always felt right below the surface in her presence. It has to be his, all about him, because that, that something, that was his.

Her darkness draws him in because it's drenched in hatred but laced with that, with hunger. And he's used to hatred, so accustomed to it that even his earliest memories are marked by it. People have hated him all his life. Yet, her hatred is different. It's hers that he seeks out, that excites him, pains him and hardens him.

Even in his sociopathy, it was there.

Even then he wanted more of it, because he'd never been hated like that before, so fiercely, as if deep down she knew hating him said more about her than him. As though hating him was a lifeline. She was a feisty, frustrating ball of anger towards him with that, that something underneath and he wanted to tear her apart to get to that, absorb her, completely destroy every inch and take her, corrupt her, and taint her, ruin her, wreck her.

And most of all, he wanted her to let him, ask him, beg him. To have her writhing underneath him, spreading her legs wider, begging for his filth, as he opened her up. Filled her up. He wanted her to let him drag her into his depravity, the black void that was him, into every single thing her parents must have warned her about as a child.

And even now she awakes that in him, that craving to corrupt her, feed her, still her hunger and make her feel his. To inhale her darkness, consume it like a drug and share the high. Could they? He thinks so. But then there is the other part of him, that new part, that screams at him to drag her out of it instead. To take it from her, carry it on his own back and let her force it down his throat. Because she doesn't deserve to live with it, but he does. Could he? He should, right? Either way, he's hungry.

Starved, even.

He needs to see her.

When she opens the door and he lays eyes on her, his heart does that thing. That weird thing that makes his heart feel like a heavy brick inside of his chest. He's still not sure if he hates it. It's not pleasant, feels like a reminder of his mortality and vulnerability and his new loss of sensibility around her. But at the same time it's not enough, not by a long shot, and he wants more of it if it means more of her. More of him, too.

He feels it in his abdomen as well. That strain, anticipated tension that builds and builds each time.

This is a feeling he's sure of, this one he definitely does not hate.

"Hi."