Okay, I think that there's at LEAST one more chapter after this one. The bunny bit me really hard with this one. I listened to a lot of Bowie for this. Specifically his rock stuff, spanning the period he's been active as a songwriter and musician.

There was a modern ballad on the radio—Damon could hear it blaring in tiny speakers from the first floor of the building, drifting up six flights of stairs to the roof access he was situated on. It was about a tragic youth—and a wall of sound to separate. Struggling for reality. At least that's what the ballad termed it—and that was only what Damon could hear. He wanted to dance to it—but that wasn't an option right now.

Bonnie, draped over his shoulder and enchanted with the parade below, had left the radio on again in their apartment. It wasn't really their apartment—more the apartment of a well-to-do bachelor lawyer who never noticed his two roommates. Damon was training Bonnie by having her change how the man perceived them—Damon took care of the rest of the tenants who might see the odd comings and goings of two wan young people.

It was nearly time, he knew, his hand pressed over hers over his collarbone. Stefan was going to look up from the crowd on the street in a minute or so—when the psychic energy of the humans pressed around him had quieted. Elena wouldn't think to look until Stefan gasped—the flurry of red curls cascading over the ledge and two pale faces emerging out of the darkness would be hard to miss with a vampire's eyes.

Bonnie giggled.

Damon had chosen her favorite city in the UK for this reunion—he'd fallen severely ill during the plane trip nearly a decade before, and had decided to remain confined to Europe, Asia, and Africa rather than endure that pain again. Bath was a nice sort of place—quaint and boring. On every trip to Britain he thanked human engineering and the Chunnel.

"We just have to go, Damon. It's a celebration of Jane Austen, and there will be movies and reenactments and it will be just dreadful and romantic." Damon had fiercely tamped down on the urge to hiss in frustration at her—that was something he'd only just barely trained her out of, if barely counted as eight years ago, and he didn't of all things want a relapse in her by doing it himself.

The ease at which his Bonnie, with the skill of a mostly grown (but not) tabby cat—slitted eyes open wide into ovals so rounded they were nearly circular; hardened dagger claws tucked softly and sweetly into silent feet—inserted the suggestions into the minds of her former friends, had pride swelling up in him as an embarrassing show of affection. He'd caught a poetic looking street performer just for her as a reward and pat on the back.

"Elena—Bo—Damon—L'k!" Stefan's strangled panic rose only barely above the clutter of machinated noise—but both Damon and Bonnie caught it.

"He's gonna have a fit, Damon, look," Bonnie pointed with the hand not captured by Damon. She didn't point at Stefan, but at Matt. Matt who stood with shoulders tensed, human anger and jealousy convincing his muscles of the possibility of the six storey climb—Matt whose eyes burned with hatred, betrayal, and another vaguely lost notion. Of course that was only Damon projecting those feelings on the man—he had no way of knowing for sure without looking…

Ah, yes, indeed, his affinity for emotion was dead on.

"Don't kill him, Damon, he'll haunt you forever," Bonnie whispered into his ear, lips brushing the cartilage with every syllable, and Damon's own shoulders relaxed. He didn't need jealousy to tell him what he was and wasn't capable of. Bonnie's laughing warning also rung true—she was psychic after all. And she'd grown strong under his care of her and from his care about her.

Exponentially so.

Elena's accusing eyes rarely accomplished what she probably wanted them to do. Luckily for her she had caught one of the most obliging and weak-willed vampires to have ever lived, and she held him under her thrall easily. She and Stefan were happy—and Damon couldn't laugh his way into having either of them understand that Bonnie had him under that same thrall. No—most definitely not—not the same thrall, he'd be damned again if he were as lovesick and idiotic as his saintly brother.

Damon couldn't—and moreover wouldn't—explain to them: a vicious desire to have her and protect her from death, a want so deep and painful that at turns he'd hated her for it and so strong that he'd killed her to fulfill it. Bonnie was hurt by the group's inability to accept that Damon wasn't going to be loving and attentive in the same way that Alaric was to Meredith or Stefan was to Elena. She didn't show that hurt—but Damon knew, and it made him angry.

"We thought you'd killed yourself—" "You left so suddenly, without any note. We…" "I blamed myself, I," "She and I fought over whether we had driven you away," "we thought you were dead."

Damon coolly observed their self-centered conversation, swirling around Bonnie like an emptying toilet—or a whirlpool, if he were being poetic and not a misanthrope. As her eyes misted over, glassy and distant—Damon-like—he watched as she cried vampire tears that Stefan never knew how to cry (he had clung to his humanity for so long that he didn't know how to truly be a vampire properly). Damon was about to grab her and make a run for it—it had worked in years past, why not now?—when Matt brought up the one subject he should have known not to.

"But don't you know he's a monster?"

And the room was very still. And very quiet.

Except, that is, for the panicked breathing of Matt as Bonnie was forcibly restrained by Damon. Her eyes were full of demon madness and righteous anger, her fingers—tipped by trimmed and elegant nails—straining at the end of tendons which stretched and contorted all the way up her bare arms; she was reaching as far forward as she possibly could. Damon noted that she would have done well in the attack, going for the eyes with one hand and the throat with the other. It was a pose he'd taught her after she'd accidentally (i.e. on purpose) killed a vampire hunter rather clumsily. She got points for an excellent form, but he had to dock her some for poor timing--it was B+ in his estimation.

Bonnie.

The sharp tang of fury answered his query.

Yep, and that is promptly where the bunny let go of my brainstem.

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