NECESSARY
Disclaimer: I couldn't help myself, and just had to write another little one-shot. Takes place after Kai stabs Bonnie outside his parents' house in Oregon. I own nothing from The Vampire Diaries. Enjoy!
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It took Bonnie over two hours to walk to the nearest town from Kai's old house.
But it only took her fifteen minutes to break into a car and hotwire it.
She had Damon to thank for that. In fact, it had been one of the first things that they had shared without either of them walking away in anger after yelling at one another. It had been a long time before they had found Damon's car, and neither had fancied walking into town every other week for groceries and then lugging it all back on foot.
Damon had told her emphatically that vampire speed did not make him a pack mule.
She had called him a selfish bastard.
And it had all degenerated from there until Damon suggested that they "borrow" a car. She had agreed somewhat hesitantly, but finding no real reason against it, considering the fact that they were the only people here, and thus the cars did not belong to anyone. He had turned it into an impromptu lecture during which he told her how to choose the cars without alarms – although he claimed to be able to bypass those without a problem given enough time – and how to both break into the car, and to start it without the key.
She had called him a delinquent but had listened carefully, because you never knew when such information would come in handy, and Bonnie loved information in all its forms.
And come in handy it did.
Bonnie silently thanked Damon, and swore never to tell him about this, as she drove back from Oregon to Mystic Falls. Not that she would ever get a chance to tell him anything again…
She sang loudly to drown out the silence, refusing to admit that she missed his sarcastic, irreverent presence.
At all.
When she ran out of songs she recited Socrates and Sun-Tzu and Shakespeare.
She ran through Fermat's Last Theorem.
She named the planets and their moons, and their relative positions in the sky at this time of year.
In this fake world.
Where she was.
Alone.
Except for that murderous bastard, Kai.
It took several days for Bonnie to make her way across the country. She made sure to stop at motels and take food from stores whenever she got hungry. She even tried to sightsee a bit, because she'd never been to this part of the country. But everything was silent and still and empty, and she couldn't enjoy it. She even ran out of things to recite.
She took CDs and listened to them.
She tried learning French.
Nothing helped.
She got back to Mystic Falls around midnight on the fourth day. She hadn't felt like stopping for dinner or a rest and had just kept going until the familiar sight of Elena's old house convinced her that she was almost home. She did stop to pick up Damon's car from the woods where Kai had left it.
The sociopathic murderer himself was nowhere to be found.
Bonnie pulled up to the Salvatore Boarding House at last. The lights were on in the main room because Damon had left them on a timer. He was obsessed with a well-run and orderly house. He'd told her once that it drove Stefan mad – which was part of the reason he did it – because his brother was more of a pack-rat.
Bonnie didn't even bother changing her blood-stained shirt or drinking a glass of water. She went right up to Damon's room, curled up on the bed, and tried to convince herself that she wasn't crying.
Or that she didn't miss him.
Bonnie Bennett did not cry for herself.
She had cried for her Grans, and for her mother, and for her father. And for Jeremy.
But she did not cry for herself. She was strong, and she was used to being on her own. She only cried when she lost those she had deemed to be necessary to her.
She wondered when Damon Salvatore had become essential to her; when he had become necessary. She didn't think it was just in the past few months they had spent together, all alone, although that had been the final nail in the coffin. So to speak. If you could use that pun about vampires. Bonnie gave a weak laugh at her questionable humor and then looked around furtively in case anyone had noticed that, but of course there was no one there.
Luckily actually, because Bonnie had no desire to deal with Kai at the moment.
If she was being completely honest with herself, it had probably started all the way back when Damon had first arrived in town and was looking for Emily's necklace. He had waited for her outside the school and had half-threatened her and half offered her help. Bonnie had been afraid, but she had also noticed how incredibly blue his eyes were.
She had cursed herself for finding him attractive.
Emily's journal had described both Salvatore brothers back in 1864; Stefan, the quiet, studious one, and Damon, the charming, rebellious, rapscallion who was the despair of his father. Emily had loved both brothers – in an older sister kind of way – and Bonnie knew that was the real reason she had made them their daylight rings, not because she owed a debt to Katherine Pierce. But reading between the lines, Bonnie noticed that Emily had felt for Damon more. There had been care and empathy in her words, still powerful and fresh over a century and a half later, and Bonnie had felt them.
It was why she could never kill Damon Salvatore, even when she knew that he deserved it.
And then Elena had fallen in love with him.
If there was one thing Bonnie was sure of, it was that Elena Gilbert would always come first in Damon's world. The way he had talked about her, the fact that he had never been able to hurt her – except through his own impetuosity – even while his humanity was mostly turned off, had told Bonnie all she had needed to know about her own little crush on him.
So she had moved on. She had dated Jeremy, and fallen in love with him. She had convinced herself – and the rest of the world – that she hated Damon Salvatore.
But there were times when she couldn't convince herself. She had held onto him on that island in Canada. She had reached for his hand as they were both about to die. She had fallen asleep on his shoulder one night in this very house.
He hadn't mentioned it and neither had she. But it had happened.
And sometimes the way he had looked at her – as though he wasn't quite sure what to make of her, mixed in with a shy uncertainty that she thought was maybe a remnant of the human Damon, mixed in with something she couldn't name – had given her hope.
They had cooked together and fought together and lived together. They argued with each other constantly, but Bonnie kind of thought that she challenged him as much as he challenged her. And she could feel it during those long slow days…..
She was falling for him.
But she never said a word. She listened to him talk about Elena. She smiled and encouraged him to go back to her, and when the chance presented itself, she hadn't even hesitated.
Sometimes she wished she wasn't so god-awful righteous, because if she had been even a little bit selfish she would have kept Damon here, with her. But she wasn't, and she had made her choice. And there was no use crying over it.
So Bonnie curled up tighter on Damon's bed, and breathed in the scent of him, and tried to convince herself that she didn't miss him, and that she wasn't half in love with him.
Because it would only make the loneliness worse.
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