"There are darknesses in life and there are lights, and you are one of the lights, the light of all lights."
- Bram Stoker
London, Whitechapel District, 1888
"Be sure to take the tincture twice daily at least," Bonnie instructs the young mother happily nursing her child. Susan had had a difficult pregnancy and an even more trying birth, but with the help of well-brewed herbs and homespun magic, mother and child are the picture of health. She allows herself to smile as she drinks in the sight of them, for not all her clients in Whitechapel are so fortunate.
"Thank you kindly, Miss Bennett," Susan says, beaming as she rocks her little boy. "Won't you stay for supper? Mary's making soup out those carrots you gave us."
Sisters Mary and Susan had been orphaned at a young age and, after escaping the workhouse and the brutality of a drunkard uncle, had found themselves in Whitechapel doing what most women in Whitechapel found it necessary to do to survive.
"No, thank you Susie. I must be getting home. Have a few more tinctures to get started," she replies, gathering her things and tying the ribbons of her hat. She pauses to touch a gloved finger to the baby's round pink cheek, murmuring a few words in Latin under her breath.
"Is that a Christian prayer, miss?" Susan inquires with a touch of hesitance.
Bonnie hears the questions she won't ask. Is it true what they say, that you're a witch? Do you worship the Devil?
She takes her leave with another smile. "I will visit in a fortnight. Remember, no working until then."
Susan nods her head meekly. "Mary said I'm not to worry myself, she's got herself some regulars now. Enough to pay the rent until I can work again."
Bonnie glances at the young mother once more and fishes a small blue handkerchief out of her bag.
"Here," she says, pressing it into her palm. "Give this to Mary. For good luck." And protection. She had several such small tokens into which she whispered simple guardian spells; nothing powerful enough to transform them into magick objects that would be dangerous in the hands of non-witches, but enough to bring little amounts of luck and safety.
For as soon as she steps outside, she feels it again, the same feeling that had her restless all day: a strange, watchful awareness swirling in the night air. Whitechapel is hardly peaceful to walk through- what with the poor and the immigrants and supernaturals all jostling each other within an overcrowded and overlooked corner of London - but this is different. She pulls her cloak close and navigates the broken, muddy streets swiftly, eager to be indoors.
A glance at the sky reveals a sickle moon.
"Spare a coin, miss?" an old beggar lurches into her path, hand thrust out. She reaches into her bag when another preempts her, placing a sovereign in the old man's palm.
"Nik," she sighs, pursing her lips at the tall, blond man in his coat and top hat. "What do you want?"
"Hello, little light," he smiles, using the pet name he had devised for her many years ago, when they were young and living in the small country neighborhood named, almost absurdly, Mystic Falls. "And what keeps you abroad so late?"
"I could ask you the same thing," she says archly, walking around him. He of course falls into step easily beside her. "Looking for some company for the night?"
He laughs easily, for there's few other reasons for wealthy Londoners to frequent Whitechapel, even if they were werewolves. Or hybrids, in his case. "What other company would I require besides you, love?"
She snorts, repeating her earlier question. "What do you want, Nik?"
"Why, to see you of course," he replies, taking hold of her elbow and pulling her close as a carriage rattles by. His voice softens, becomes more serious. "I am not fond of you walking unaccompanied after nightfall. We've discussed this before: my coachman is at your disposal-,"
"We have discussed this before," she reminds him, pulling her arm away. "And my answer remains the same: I need neither your help nor your protection."
"Ah, so you don't sense what I do in the air this night?" he asks, coolly.
This gives her pause, and she meets the knowing look on his face. "I don't have time for games, Nik-,"
"I assure you, little light, your safety is far from a game to me."
Bonnie feels the familiar, aching conflict within her. A part of her - perhaps a larger one that she would like to admit - belongs to Nik and would do so forever. But they had chosen different ways of moving through the world as supernatural beings, and each time they came together, that choice invariably pushed them apart again.
"And what about the safety of the other residents of Whitechapel?" she argues, in a quiet voice. "There are women here, Nik, and children whom London already wishes dead. If some fresh danger is about to befall them, then as a witch my place is with them, protecting them."
It's an argument they've had many times, and never fails to darken his countenance.
"Don't look so put out," she says with a wry smile, patting his cheek. "I have no doubt Genevieve or Olivia would be glad of your company tonight."
His arm curves around her waist, pulling her close so she's pressed to his chest. His nearness envelops her in a cloud of yearning that's she's all too acquainted with.
"Join me for supper," he murmurs.
"I can't," she says, mustering her resolve. "I have some tinctures to make. There's been an outbreak of fever among the dock workers and no doctor will see them."
"You know I do resent sharing you with these people under your wing," he says, softly, and a memory over a decade old unfurls between them.
She'd been fourteen, he sixteen.
"He hates me because of my father," he said while they watched the fire together in Lord Gilbert's library. She had a book of fairy tales open on her lap to a story about a princess who lived atop a glass mountain full of treasure, cursed to watch every suitor who tried to reach her slip and fall to their deaths. Niklaus had a glass of sherry between his fingers that they'd both been sipping from. "He died before I was born; in a military campaign in the Americas. Mikael says he was an animal, that I've inherited his beastly nature. It's why he must discipline me he says, more harshly than his other sons."
"Sometimes," she said softly, "I wish we could be animals. Their lives seem to me so much freer than ours."
He gave her a strange look, then asked, "And what would you be, little light? A meadowlark perhaps, or a fish?"
She clicked her tongue. "Neither, for I should like to live and walk in the forest. Among the trees, under the stars. To run in the night with only the wind upon my skin-," she trailed off, feeling his gaze on her. There was in his eyes something that made heat rise to her cheeks, warmth spread down to her neck and pulse deep in her heart.
"I do not think I should like sharing my little light with all the birds and beasts of the forest," he said, touching a stray curl of her hair.
She smiled, taking his hand in her own and stroking the long fingers she loved. "And I do not like that your stepfather uses you so cruelly. What are we to do?"
They sat there without words while the flames crackled on, until it was time for him to take his leave with the rest of his family. This time, he kissed her temple, and cupped her face like a jewel.
"I am not yours to share or keep," Bonnie reminds him, touching a spark of magic to his chest. Not enough to even ruffle a hair on his head, but a small, sharp reminder that she is quite able to fend for herself. "And I can see myself home."
He neither contradicts nor accepts her statement, but he relents nonetheless. For now. "Be careful, little light," he says, pushing a wayward lock of hair behind her ear. "There are worse things than me abroad in the dark."
He melts into the shadows before she can ask him for an explanation. And yet, for the rest for her walk home, she can sense him watching her, making certain she reaches her destination. She doesn't spare that any more thought; Nik is free to do as he pleases, just as she is.
Still, his warning echoes in her mind for hours after, mingling with a peculiar sense of dread she can't seem to shake, not even after she whispers protection spells over all the windows and sweeps the front door with rosemary. Sophie Devereaux, her fellow witch and co-inhabitant of the tiny flat above their shop, watches her move from room to room, whispering the spells over and over.
"I feel it too," Sophie says, pulling her shawl close around her. "It's like feeling a cold draft, but all the windows are closed."
Bonnie nods, continuing to rub a fine powder made of crushed eggshells across their kitchen window when Sophie gasps. "Look!" she points at the sky. "Look at the moon."
A cold chill travels down her spine. In a troubled sky, red coats the sickle moon like fresh blood.
Mystic Falls, England, 1876
"I have felt this way for half a year now, and always when the moon is full," Nik revealed, taking her hands in his. His skin, Bonnie noted, was hot like with a fever.
Sitting by the small creek not far from the Gilbert estate, Bonnie looked at him with concern. She had sensed it also, something changing about Niklaus she can't quite fathom. Something that causes her burgeoning magic to flare in his presence until she could scarcely breathe. And now, holding his hands, the heat beneath his skin seeped into hers until she flushed warmly from head to toe.
"What else do you feel, besides restlessness and fever? Perhaps...," she bit her lip, thinking carefully. "Perhaps it is nothing more than growth and change."
Niklaus gazed at her in the moonlight. She wore a plain white dress, her hair tied up with some bits of ribbon handed down from her cousin. He wanted to press the pads of his fingers along her soft brown skin and watch imprints form, to kiss the nape of her neck where the escaping curls of dark hair tantalized him daily. He did not confess the other facet of his ailment: that when the moon was full he felt drawn to her almost irresistibly, like an ache that nothing could satiate.
"Nik," she said with a soft smile, trying to extrictate her hands. He had tightenemd his grip on them almost enough to hurt her.
"Perhaps Mikael is right," he said, pulling his hands away. "And there is something...unnatural inside me."
"No," she said with a fierce vehemence that startled him. "If you're unnatural, then so am I. Now come on." She pulled him close to the water and started removing her shoes and stockings. "The water shall help you feel better. It always does."
She paused to give him a curious look when he made no move to remove his shoes. "What, do you mean to swim in your trousers and shirtsleeves?"
He swallowed thickly as she stepped out of her dress to stand before him in petticoats and corset. He should protest, really. For though these summer night swims, stolen when Lord and Lady Gilbert travelled to the city, had become one of their rituals, he didn't trust himself, not tonight. The way he felt when he looked at her -
And yet, he could not move. Selfish and hungry creature that he was, he wanted her. Any of her. Even stolen, even piecemeal.
The water did little to soothe the fever in his bones, and her silvery laughter, the gleam of her skin as she swam lithely beside him, her playful smile - these only fanned the flames. At last his hands reached for her of their own volition.
Bonnie glided into his arms, against the heat of his body. Her fingers traced the line of his jaw before drifting to his mouth. When he kissed her, a wave of relief shuddered through her and she wondered why they had waited so long.
Her lips were the balm for his fever, and he tasted them greedily, clutching her to him and relishing in the soft sounds of delight she made. They carried on in this fashion for some time, all roving hands and mouths and panted, stolen breaths.
He wanted to tell her things, reassure her that he loved her as he perhaps loved nothing else, that someday he would marry her. Yet somehow the platitudes of love rang hollow, could not encompass all that was between them.
It was only a fortnight later when, after neither seeing nor hearing from her his instincts had sounded an alarm that bade him climb up through her bedroom window where he found her eating a sorry supper of bread and gruel as punishment for playing truant by the creek, and saw also the bruises upon her arms from where Lady Isobel had grasped her in rage, that he vowed he would someday take her far from here, that he would cut down those who hurt her, that he would keep her safe always. She did not point out how he lived under his stepfather's tyranny, how his back and arms were scarred from Sir Mikael's crop. She only pressed her damp cheek to his shirt and nodded while he spoke.
And he thought perhaps that was all love could ever be. A promise of safety stolen under the shadow of terror, dreamed up between two hearts.
Mystic Falls, England, 1872
They met in refuge, running and hiding. She was twelve, and reading by herself in Lord Gilbert's enormous library that was hardly used, while the Gilberts entertained their dinner guests, the Mikaelsons, below. Bonnie had heard they were a family newly arrived from London: Sir Mikael and his wife, along with their sons and a single daughter.
For all that she'd lived under the Gilbert's roof since she was a child, she'd never attended such an event, never danced beside her cousins, Elena and Jeremy, or her friend, Caroline.
"It's a matter of propriety, you see," Lady Isobel had said one afternoon when Bonnie was eleven years old, with a look upon her face like she'd pricked her finger on a needle. "You understand, don't you my dear?"
But while as a child she already knew her complexion set her apart from others, this edict - that she should never join Elena and Caroline at balls, that she must remain in her room when company was present - had seemed cruel beyond her capacity to understand. She spent a night soaking her pillow in helpless tears before one of the maids, taking pity on her and knowing of her love of reading, had led her by the hand to Lord Gilbert's library and set her there with a blanket and a cup of cocoa and a gentle warning to be careful how she handled the books. Soon, the pinch of longing to join Elena and Caroline, to dance and wear pretty dresses, receded. For here among the tomes that Lord Gilbert rarely touched, she read of witches, women with ungovernable powers who could heal the sick and poison the living in equal measure. Women who were different, feared, and often burned alive. Her hands would tremble, beads of sweat gathering on her brow, and she would feel something unfurl inside her like a vine climbing into light. For she'd heard the whispers among her aunt and uncle's friends, among the crueler servants of the household. The child is a witch. Have you seen her eyes in the dark? Green like a cat's they are. Is it true her mother worshipped the Devil?
The night before she met Niklaus she dreamed of wolves, shadowy creatures loping in the night, their gold eyes, their red teeth.
The next evening, ensconced in the library, she'd been startled by a strange interruption. A boy, his cravat askew and a cut on his forehead, had rushed in looking for a place to hide. She was frozen in place until she heard the heavy footsteps down the hall, and bolstered by the story she'd been reading of brave Elise who'd saved her brothers from a curse, she gestured for him to follow her.
"Quickly!" she urged, pulling him by his sleeve. Over the years she'd perfected a route for getting to and from the library without being noticed. A small door led into a hallway that forked left to the kitchen and right to a second staircase leading to the bedrooms. They hurried in the semi darkness until they were safely inside her room.
His name, she learned, is Niklaus Mikaelson, stepson to Sir Mikael. And though she had guessed his age closer to her own, he's taller than she, his frame all awkward, adolescent lines contained in a suit.
"Who are you hiding from?" she asked, emboldened now that she'd appointed herself rescuer.
"Why were you in the library, and not the dining room?" he returned, archly.
"I'll ask the questions, if you don't mind," she retorted, crossing her arms and raising her chin the way she'd seen Lady Isobel do when she means to remind someone of their place. "Since you are in my room."
He looked at said room, the small bed, the single window. "Is this where you sleep?" He turned to her again. "But you're not a servant."
"No," she said, summoning as authoritative a tone as she can muster. Seeking a more noble reason for her treatment than the simple cruelty of her family, she seized on the first, and most natural, claim. "I'm...a witch."
To her surprise, he appeared neither afraid nor amused. Instead, a look of wonder bathed his face, followed quickly by a bitter smirk. "Prove it."
"I hardly think-," but her words were cut off when he pulled her into the shadows, a hand covering her mouth.
"Someone's coming."
She heard the march of footsteps again, like drums. They sheltered there in the darkness, hearts thudding together. His hand slipped down to her waist, his breath warmed her ear. She experienced somehow both a thrill of recognition and a wave of safety. Him and her and the shadows, she felt, could outlast the pursuers outside.
"You're afraid," she whispered.
"I am not."
"Then why is your heart going like a rabbit's?" she asked, placing her hand there.
He scowled, and could form no reply.
Later, she would learn from the servants that Sir Mikael had grown angry at some small impudence on Niklaus' part, that he had struck him across the head in full view of his hosts, and that when the boy ran he had followed, enraged as a madman.
"I suppose I should return," Niklaus said, removing himself from her. "It was stupid to think I could escape."
"What is it you want to escape?"
His mouth twisted bitterly again. "My stepfather."
Bonnie had no memory of her own father. He had perished in a shipwreck shortly after bringing her to the Gilbert home. She found it a terribly sad thing that any kind of father should cause such terror.
She thought quickly.
"There's a way you can get to the gardens. David, the coachman, he's kind. He'll let you borrow a horse, if you like."
The idea of defying Sir Mikael and riding off home, that such a thing was even possible, hadn't occurred to him. "And how am I to get to the gardens unseen? Fly out your window on a broomstick?"
"Don't be ridiculous," she sniffed, before picking up a small stub of candle from her bedside table. "Here. There's an empty passageway to the left of the stairs that no one uses. It leads to the back of the gardens."
He peered down at her, his face unreadable. "I have no matches."
"Oh."
"No matter. I am accustomed to the dark," he said, taking her hand. A proper smile curved his lips this time, and she had cause to note it was a very winning smile indeed, with dimples on either side that gave him an air of both mischief and charm. "Thank you, 'witch'."
She was about to protest, deny her earlier claim. She was not a witch, only a girl who loved books and the shadows of her own mind. But there it was, glowing between them: the candle come to life.
She had watched him vanish down the corridor with that little light, and he'd called her that ever since. "My little light." And for the next few years, whenever the Gilberts would invite the Mikaelsons for supper, Niklaus would slip away and come find her in the library, and she would read him pages of her favorite book, and sometimes he would secret macarons and biscuits in his waistcoat to give her. His stepfather never pursued him under the Gilbert's roof again, but Bonnie would notice things - a bruise on his forehead, a cut on his hand, a soreness in the ribs that would make him wince even as he laughed at some silly thing she said - that evinced Sir Mikael's unabated cruelty.
Mystic Falls, England, 1876
A few months after they went swimming in the creek, Bonnie saw him bloodstained from a whipping more cruel than any he'd thus endured. It was David the coachman who brought her a message that young Master Niklaus was in the stables, and had asked to see her at any cost. She stole out of the house and rushed to his side, trying to dab at the smears of blood on his face with her handkerchief while he gathered her in his arms. A sob burst from her lips.
"Don't weep, little light," he murmured, when her tears wet his shirt. "It looks worse than it is."
"He is a brute," she cried. "It is he who's the beast. I wish - I wish he would be struck dead."
He held her for a long moment, like he was afraid she would melt away.
"I must go away, love. For a time. Until I can learn to be stronger than him. Stronger than all of them."
She clung to him even tighter, feeling a deep loneliness well up inside and threaten to drown her. Rising on her tiptoes, she took his face in her hands and kissed his mouth. His arms tightened around her and he returned her kiss passionately, a hunger long-nurtured sweeping over them both. He kissed her so long and with such ardor she grew dizzy, and trembled.
"My little light," he breathed against her neck, "I love you."
And then he wrenched himself from her and vanished into the dark. It would be three years before she saw him again. And when she did, everything changed.
Mystic Falls, England, 1879
She'd woken up that morning with a strange, fevered heat in her flesh. Woken up from dreams of wolves. The Gilberts' ball was a grander affair than any they'd hosted, a display of wealth and prominence unlike any Bonnie had witnessed thus far. This, despite the fact that parts of the manor were falling into decay, Lord Gilbert having gambled away most of the family fortune. She heard their whispers and plans to expropriate the small monies left to her by her father. Lady Isobel had mentioned once or twice how much Jeremy doted on her, and how fine a husband he would make, certainly finer than any girl with her particular prospects could hope for. Bonnie had lived with the Gilberts long enough to know that their single-minded instincts of self-preservation would soon compel them to force her hand.
She could picture the scene in the ballroom below: Elena, the cousin whose hair she combed and whose stockings she washed, in a dress of black and liquid gold, holding court between the brothers Salvatore. Elena would choose one for her husband soon enough, and there would be a duel, of this Bonnie was certain. For Stefan despite his gentle manners was hot-headed in matters of the heart, and Damon's ardor hid a cold, callous cruelty. It was these propensities, Bonnie suspected, that Elena delighted in more than their passionate courtship; Caroline, her sweet friend, in her favored blue and silver gown, no doubt beaming happily on Matthew Donovan's arm; and Jeremy, mooning in the corner as was his wont, still sullen about having to return early from his French tour.
Bonnie closed her eyes and, just this once, imagined herself dancing among them, beholden to none. She followed the strains of the waltz across the library carpet. Her book slipped from her hand and she picked up her skirts. Her feet skipped and sailed to the music and the images turned madly in her mind. She saw people lying dead, and stains of blood on the fine carpets and tapestries, staining Elena's gown. Blood staining the floors and curtains and windows. Bonnie swirled above it all, like she'd grown wings. She spun and turned and then, she was in his arms.
"Hello, little light," Niklaus murmured, continuing to move them across the floor.
Her eyes fluttered open and she thought she must be dreaming.
"Nik," she breathed. He was dressed in a suit and cravat, impeccably so. He'd grown taller over the years, and towered over her now. But in his arms she felt, wordlessly, the same rush of thrill and safety she remembered from the night they met.
And yet, although the man before her wore Nik's facsimile, he was also different. There was, in his movements, an animalic alertness and grace she couldn't remember from their adolescence. He held her with an ease of strength that was dizzying. His jaw was stronger, golden with stubble. She put her palm there, savoring a feeling like rough silk.
"Is it really you?"
He took her hand by way of reply and placed something soft and crumpled there. She found her handkerchief, the same one she had pressed to his chest that night in the stables.
Joy and fear rushed over in equal measure, for it was common knowledge that Sir Mikael had disowned his stepson, forbidding him to return and forfeiting his inheritance. His children abandoned him one by one after Nik's departure, and he lived now a cruel old man with his ailing wife, terrorizing the servants and shunning his neighbors. "But...how? Your stepfather-,"
"Will trouble me no more after tonight."
"Oh," she looked down to hide her dismay. "You are leaving again."
"No, little light." He pulled her close by a window and lifted her chin. The moon, full and burning in the sky, seemed to fill his eyes until they appeared yellow, like the wolves in her dreams. "I have learned much on my travels. You and I shall have no more cause to fear."
He kissed her then, his mouth crushing hers and tasting of wine and heat. The fever that she'd carried all day unfurled with every pass of their lips, bubbling and throbbing inside her until she moaned, until she felt as though she could light every candle, every torch within miles with just a spark of desire. Beneath his crisp white shirt, she felt his heart sure and strong, its rhythm pulsing up her arm to flood her mind with images. She saw blood cover the moon's face like a veil, heard the gurgles of the dying as wolf-teeth opened their throats. Blood and blood and blood, great rivers of it staining the fine lawns of the Gilberts and the Mikaelsons, and wolves running swift as shadows.
His lips travelled to her neck, and she saw herself walking among the dead, the hem of her dress trailing crimson, a wolf beside her and a candle glowing in her palm. With a startled breath, her eyes flew open.
"Nik -," the words seemed to stick in her throat. Perhaps it was some instinctual knowledge that it was too late to avert the course of his actions, too late to prevent what was coming for all of them: Gilberts, Mikaelsons, and anyone else caught in the fray. And in that moment she felt a hot, sharp feeling take hold of her, something that saw her pull him close for another, fierce kiss. And when they parted she only said, "Come back to me."
It would be years before she understood her feelings that night: the reckless selfishness of a child long denied, the heady pull of magic and power, and the naive hope of a young girl who wanted her love to remain untouched - and above all unscathed - by darkness.
His smile flashed like a wolf's teeth before he stole another kiss. "Lock your door. Do not leave your room no matter what you hear, do you understand?"
He caressed her face once more.
"I will find you in the morning, little light."
London, England, 1886
She and Nik found themselves in bed together again.
Even after years apart and her promises to herself, even though they both remained stubbornly committed to their choices, even though she knew it always ended in frustration and anguish, when he'd asked her to accompany him to see La Traviata she'd agreed, and when he pulled her aside during the intermission, removing her gloves to claim the soft skin of her arm as though he would suffer no barriers between them, as though it was foolish to imagine any such existed, her reservations melted and she led him to his carriage where, after dismissing the coachman with a sovereign, she let him peel her stockings off and wrap her legs around him.
They never saw the the rest of Verdi's opera.
Hours later, she awoke in his bed in the middle of the night and found him gone. Candle in hand she padded through the house and found no trace of him. She knew he often liked to walk out at night - the wolf in him craved nightime air - but still she went from room to room until at last she found herself in his study. And there, lying open next to his papers, was a small box containing vials of blood with an unused syringe beside it.
The blood, she knew, was not human, for it absorbed the light around it and left no residue on the glass. It was vampire blood, and the syringe augmented with magic.
They argued, hotly. He wanted power that would render him unassailable, she feared being led by their powers instead of their souls. He argued that their powers could not be separated from their souls, from who they were.
"And who are we, Nik?" she asked, tiredly. "If we think only of ourselves and accruing more and more, how are we any different than the very people we despised in our youth? What's to stop us from wielding these powers over humans, from becoming tyrants?"
"If it's tyranny to protect what I love at any price, then I will be a tyrant," he said, in a soft yet heated voice. "Vampires can overrule both witches and wolves if they so choose. They've already infiltrated Parliament and the Freemasons, and I will not stand aside while they Compel their way to more power."
"So you would become one of them?" she retorted. "In your...your recklessness! You would become something you hate!"
"Never," he said with a sudden vehemence. "I will become my own creature, with the strengths of both and the weaknesses of none: a hybrid, the first in the world." He crossed the room to stand before her and cup her cheek in his hand. "Before I met you my life was a series of intolerable days and pitiful nights. I had never imagined any escape was possible until you. And I will suffer none to threaten us now, little light."
She shook her head, stepping away from him and clutching her robe close to her. "I was not born a witch so I could hide behind high walls and surround myself with power while the less fortunate starve and die in the streets. To amuse myself by lighting candles and growing flowers when there are people who don't have the means to buy firewood in the winter -,"
"And yet they would scorn you if they knew the truth," he returned, his eyes glittering. "These same people of whom you speak with such fervor would see you hanged or worse, should they ever learn why your tinctures and potions have such power."
"I am careful-,"
"You accuse me of recklessness, and yet it is not I who harbors illusions about the goodness of human nature despite a lifetime of evidence to the contrary!"
"You feel guilt," he continued after a moment, drawing close to her again. "Because long ago you did not protest when I killed our oppressors - my stepfather, your aunt and uncle, those that aided them. And so you blame yourself for their fate, for Elena's unhappy marriage, for Caroline's broken heart." His voice was rough with anger. "You are not ministering to the sick and poor because of an overabundance of compassion. No, you do so as an act of penance."
His words seemed to echo off the walls, little ghostly ripples of sound.
"No matter my reasons," she said in as cold a tone as she could muster, "I am using my powers to make a difference in this world, Nik. To protect those who need protection. And I don't need to become anything more than what I am, than what I was born, to do so."
"And who protects us, little light?" he said, his face grown shuttered. "What will you do when something stronger than you or I steps out of the shadows?"
"That," she gestured at the vials of blood on his desk, "is not protection, it is hubris!"
"Call it what you will, love. And know that whatsoever I become, what powers I may gain, they are at your disposal."
She returned to Whitechapel the next morning and did not see him for half a year. She threw herself into her craft and tucked away the stubborn longing that flared at the slightest thought of him. When spring came around and she and Sophie opened their little shop, he had the good sense not to make a monetary donation, knowing how swiftly she would spurn it. Instead she received a wreath of wildflowers that smelled sweet and sharp with nostalgia. She recognized the blooms that grew along the creek in Mystic Falls, under the trees where they had so often sheltered.
They sweetened the air by her window for many days before, when she noticed them wilting, she dried and pressed them between the pages of her Grimoire.
London, Whitechapel District, 1888
Morning dawns sickly pale, like the tattered yellow of an old wedding gown. Bonnie is gathering her tinctures for the dock-workers when the shop door opens to admit Nik.
Despite everything, after the crawling dread that had robbed her of sleep for most of the night the familiar warmth of his presence is a comfort.
"You've caught me on my way out," she says lightly.
"Allow me to join you then-,"
His sentence is cut off by the dark haired woman with a heavy-set brow who bustles in, and Bonnie recognizes the flower seller Annie Chapman who was also Mary and Susan's neighbor. To her alarm, Annie's usually stoic countenance is awash in horror and grief.
"You better come, Miss."
Exchanging a glance with Nik, they both follow Annie outside. It doesn't take them long to reach the small, milling crowd and the snarling constable trying in vain to disperse them. She feels a terrible hollowness in her stomach as they draw close. Instinctively, she reaches for Nik's hand and she sees the same troubled look on his face as the unfortunate source of public fascination becomes visible.
A sudden, heart-rending cry pierces the air, and there's Susan sinking to her knees, her baby clutched to her chest. Lying on the ground, throat slit and gut emptied, is the corpse of her sister Mary.
Annie rushes forward to take the infant from Susan and the other woman wails loud as a child, doubling over in her grief.
Bonnie feels Nik's arm come around her waist as she sways on her feet. The last thing she sees before her vision darkens is the corner of a small blue handkerchief, clutched like a talisman in the dead woman's hand.
A/N: So I know what you're thinking: why did this bish mark this story "Complete" when it's obviously just beginning? Well, it's because this part of the story is complete. Please bear with me lol. I first sat down to write for Gothic Klonnie 2k17 planning to do a drabble each day inspired by the prompts. That plan almost immediately went out the window when I started writing Bonnie and Klaus in Victorian England and a whole backstory tumbled out. I couldn't in good conscience confine that backstory to just a drabble, but I also couldn't commit to a new multi chapter fic at the moment. So instead I thought I would flesh out that backstory into a oneshot that not only gives y'all lovely readers more bang for your proverbial buck, but also gets Bonnie and Klaus to where I need them should I eventually decide to write the fic: at the beginning of the infamous Whitechapel murders. Klonnie vs Jack the Ripper is an AU I've wanted to delve into for some time, and when I began sketching out their history and life in London, everything fell into place organically. Gothic Victoriana is quite possibly one of my favorite things in the world, and I hope you enjoyed this little slice of story until I can hopefully do more with it once I've finished "a case of you" and a couple other multi chapter fics I have going. In the meantime, please share your thoughts and comments in the reviews. I would, as always, love to hear them!
And Happy Halloween!