part 4/7: ritual


six months later

The local cemetery is bereft of visitors at this hour, the city being under an unofficial curfew for weeks now. Bonnie walks between the graves undeterred. She can find her way through this place with her eyes closed if she wants to. She supposes there's something tragic in that, but nothing she wants to dissect.

The moon shines on Elena's headstone: spotless marble mounted by an angel with wings spread wide and one hand reaching for heaven. The imposing piece had been paid for by the Founder's Council.

Bonnie walks past it hurriedly.

She can't bear to look at her friend's smooth face preserved in stone. She thinks she might drown in her shadow if she does.

It's graduation day at Mystic Falls High. She and Elena and Caroline should be celebrating with their friends and boyfriends, toasting to their new, happier lives.


Two months ago

The guidance counselor is polite but firm. Bonnie sits beside her father while Ms Gordon's words skim over her without leaving a mark. She's missed too many classes, Mrs Gordon says, glancing furtively between father and daughter, and her grades have plummeted beyond a semester's reprieve. She understands that Bonnie was very close to Elena Gilbert - such a tragedy, and sure to cause a traumatic change in any young person's stability - but there's really nothing she can do at this late stage.

"I'm afraid Bonnie won't be able to graduate next month, Mr Bennett," Mrs Gordon says with a pinched look on her face. "But she can enroll in the summer and-,"

"Thank you," Rudy says curtly, shaking her hand. "We'll be in touch. Bonnie?"

Bonnie mumbles her own thanks and follows him out to the car. Like Mrs Gordon's words, the strange, skittering looks directed at her by other students no longer make any impression. Inside her is a deep core of numbness that holds her in place, that keeps her walking, while the rest of her floats, suspended, like a balloon.

They drive home in strained silence, and Bonnie hurries up to her room before Rudy can initiate any conversation. Although the warmth of a Virginia summer is already encroaching, there's a chill in her bones she can't shake. It takes three cigarettes for her nerves to settle and the throbbing headache to recede. She'd never really wanted to smoke, and Grams cautioning her about the effect of narcotics on a witch's magic had stifled any flicker of curiosity she may have had. But two weeks after Elena's funeral she'd lain in bed unable to sleep, unable to cry, unable to do anything but lie trapped and helpless within a prison of her own thoughts, before stealing down to the study and removing two cigarettes for herself from Rudy's secret stash. The nicotine soothed her nerves like cool water, but it also made the magic spark and flare in her veins. It made her feel alive, like living could be good and sweet instead of bitter and empty.

Turning the smoke detector back on and spritzing the air with Febreze, Bonnie washes her hands and opens the bathroom door, only to find Rudy leaning against her desk with a deep frown on his face. She's never seen her father look at her this way, like he's wary of her. But no, that's not quite right. Like he recognizes something, or someone else.

"We need to talk, Bonnie."


Her path takes her to the very end of the cemetery, where the weeds are overgrown and only a single, withered willow tree keeps vigil.

Shane had been buried here, without a marker, without candles, without grace. And Bonnie feels keenly that it's her fault. If she had paid attention, if she hadn't let herself get swept up in the fantasy of a whole new life, if she'd been a better more capable witch and sensed the difference between Silas' soul and the soul of an innocent man - all of this might have been prevented.

But even these thoughts no longer crush her underfoot like they once did. Instead they drift over her like clouds while she's untouched and turning to stone. She kneels, her hand hovering over the unmarked earth until, one by one, a small crop of daisies rise to adorn it.

She should cry, she should apologize, she should do something to accompany this little offering. But there's only the hum of magic and the gleam of white petals under the moon. She's not even sure why she's doing this, except that it feels wrong not to. It feels like someone has to.

A voice clicks softly behind her. "Out after curfew again?"


Rudy lays out the summer plans, watching her hesitantly as he does so. She can't understand why everyone stares at her like a cornered animal. She's already done the worst. Torn an innocent soul from a man's body. Let her best friend bleed to death a few feet from her. She's rudderless, there's nothing left. Nothing to give, nothing to fear.

She is to stay with her Uncle Ralph and his wife Leona indefinitely, attend summer school during the day and help them out with church activities on the evenings and weekends. It'll be good for her, Rudy says. Routine, discipline, distance from Mystic Falls, getting away from all this occult stuff.

She almost laughs at her father's innocent but shallow perspective. He thinks what the police think, what the newspapers and all other official outlets had been told: that Shane was a murderous creep who'd fixated on Elena and killed her in some satanic ritual in her own house before committing suicide, leaving their bodies to be discovered by Bonnie. Rudy has no idea of her own part in that tragedy or how she got there, how some nights she still hears Silas commending her strength while he stands over Elena's corpse.

"Bonnie? Are you listening?" Rudy asks, peering at her in concern.

"Yup, yup...," she says, clasping her twitchy hands and wishing she were holding a cigarette.

Rudy pauses, his brow furrowed a little. "I know your Uncle Ralph can be...stern. But he just wants what's best for you, honey. We all do."

Memory makes her knees itch a little and she has to stem a flood of childish panic that wants to scream at her father. If you send me there I'll die. I'll lie down in the grass next to Uncle Ralph's hydrangeas and he'll find my corpse in the morning.

But she swallows down the turmoil, smiles when Rudy kisses her forehead before leaving for work. She calls Jeremy that night and tells him her plan. They can pool their meagre savings from part time jobs and head out of Mystic Falls together. She's turning eighteen in a few weeks, so Rudy wouldn't be able to tell the police she'd been kidnapped. Bonnie grasps eagerly at the thought of speeding down a highway, Jeremy's hand in hers, into a kind of oblivion where they could remake themselves. And once she'd built another life, become someone else, once she knew what it was to feel alive again, she told herself she'd come back, visit her father, apologize for running away, make him understand.

But even this small hope flickers and dies with the reality of how little money they have between them. For nearly a week she languishes as though stricken with an illness, until Rudy's concern grows and he makes mention of visiting the psychiatrist. So when, out of the blue, one of Sheila's former colleagues at the local college, John Wilkes, an occult enthusiast as he calls himself, approaches her and asks to purchase her Grimoire for a small but vital sum, she leaps at the opportunity.

Afterwards, she tucks the money in an envelope that she bids Jeremy hide in his room until they're ready to leave. She tells herself the small empty ache inside her is just the residue of her old life falling away.


It's him of course. The hybrid is wearing his trademark Henley beneath a leather jacket, and holding a bottle of whiskey. He doesn't stagger like a drunkard should, but his edge, that customary alert grace feels chipped. In the months after Elena's death they'd fallen into an unspoken custom of meeting at the cemetery. His presence steals over her like nicotine, but warmer, ineffable.

"Is a graveyard not an odd choice to celebrate graduation?" he asks, coming to sit beside her. "Unless of course there's nothing to celebrate."

Her silence is all the answer he needs.

"I would say I'm sorry, but I've never been much of a liar."

She snorts.

"In any case, your gifts were wasted on that sad excuse for a school."

It's not the remark that catches her off guard - she knows by now that he regards most things in Mystic Falls with contempt - but his tone. He's watching her with raised eyebrows, as though challenging her to disagree. Like he wants her to hear it.

Bonnie shifts a little. "Thanks...? My dad doesn't think so but-,"

"He's human, and what he knows inconsequential."

"If you want an education that matches your talent as a witch," Klaus continues, "there are entire cities, entire worlds you might explore. New Orleans, for example."

She frowns. Her Grams had mentioned the Crescent City to her in passing, but Bonnie had always felt too intimidated by her inexperience to venture into those seasoned crowds. And, when she wasn't intimidated, she was busy putting last minute spells together to help her friends. She quickly squashes a faint spark of curiosity that threatens to resurface.

"I think I've seen enough of the supernatural world already," she says, quietly.

"Ghosts and werewolves, doppelgängers and their lap dogs," he sneers.

"Originals, murderous hybrids" she adds, arching her brow at him.

"And in New Orleans are Shapeshifters, and Seers, and covens of witches who trace their lineage to the dawn of humanity."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Wouldn't you like to be somewhere else? Somewhere no one knows, or cares, about your part in ending the doppelgängers?" he asks, blithely. "You can tell the truth, love. One pariah to another."

His eyes are coals in the dark, they seem to burn in the pit of her stomach with that same naked feeling of recognition in which she'd lost herself for a moment the night they -

"Jeremy and I are leaving." she adds, not sure why she feels flustered. "We have enough money saved, and I turn eighteen soon-,"

"When?"

"We're thinking about leaving a week from now. My dad's out of town that day and-"

Klaus makes an impatient sound. "I was referring to your birthday."

"Oh- that's on Friday," she says, taken aback again. "Why, are you getting me a card?"

"Come with me," Klaus says, without breaking his stare. "Come with me to New Orleans."

Her head spins a little, his request prying open a part of her she's determined to lock away. A part of her she knows has to die.

Bonnie tries to keep her voice light, "What am I going to do in New Orleans?"

"You would want for nothing." His voice is a soft challenge, daring her to test the limits of what he could give her. His proximity makes her fingertips tingle with the knowledge that like cigarettes, he's become a secret craving. She could touch his lips and inhale more magic than she has in months.

"I can't," she says, looking down at her hands. "I'm done being a witch. It's too much to figure out...and when I try to help them people just get hurt."

"Magic is who you are, not a tool you can put away when you choose," he argues, his voice clipped.

"Well being me hurts, okay?" she blurts. Her face burns and there's a thickness in her throat.

His hand seizes her wrist, preventing her from rising. Before she can stop him, his mouth is ghosting over her palm, brushing her fingers, trailing down her wrist bone. He presses none too gently on her pulse, and magic wells up inside her. "You will miss it," he says, his voice gone dark. "And on long nights you will yearn until you bleed, for the rush, the joy. Even the pain."

His words fall on her like pin-pricks, magnifying the swirl of voices in her own head that she'd thought well-smothered into a core of numbness. Being around him has never stopped being dangerous. In his presence she feels the comfort of shared blame. She can breathe freer, want things she has no right to want.

But magic had proven a treacherous, addictive force. And wasn't it her wanting that had got Shane and Elena killed?

"I would," he adds.

She bites the inside of her cheek. "I'm not like you."

Her words freeze the air between them. They're a lie. She fears she might be too much like him. That the common ground they share might swallow her whole.

Klaus releases her hand, remaining seated while she stands and brushes dirt off her jeans. It's strange to look down at him, at the outline of his head and profile and shoulders, and think this might be the last time she sees him.

"Goodbye, Klaus," she says, almost to herself, before hurrying away without looking back. She tamps down the ball of strange, fluttery disquiet inside her, willing it to choke.

Klaus remains where she left him, beside the flowers on an unmarked grave.


Four months ago

He listens with something between boredom and despair as Elijah very carefully explains why he'd asked to meet here, at the foot of the doppelganger's grave.

His older brother folds a handwritten note about the importance of compassion and tucks it between the fresh flowers always plentiful at her headstone, and informs him that he's leaving for good this time. He isn't sure where to, but he intends to disappear into a quiet crowd somewhere and watch the years go by. There's nothing left to hold him there, Elijah says, now that Rebekah has already made off to parts unknown with Kol in tow.

"It's strange," Elijah muses, gazing up at the stone angel's face. "But sometimes I wonder...was it our blood that held us together all these years, or hers?"

This statement makes Klaus long to pull the statue down with his bare hands and crush it to dust, but instead he settles for smashing his bottle of whiskey against the marble.

Elijah only smiles, watching the dark libation pour down into the earth.

"Goodbye, Niklaus."


There's something to be said for history's definitive power. A thousand years he's hunted and hated the doppelgängers, scorning and manipulating those who loved them, and now, suddenly, it's no more. Nothing to hunt, nothing to hate, no repeating pattern against which to define himself in the rupturing. It's a bit like a blow to the head, a perpetual sense of dull disorientation that's had him lingering aimlessly in Mystic Falls for the past few months, that now finds him staggering into his own house after getting himself properly drunk.

He's mildly surprised to find Stefan there, cognac in hand, feet propped on a stool, waiting for him. He hasn't seen the younger vampire in weeks.

"Damon left town yesterday," Stefan says, holding his glass up to the light. "I don't think he's coming back."

"I'll fetch the champagne," Klaus says, shuffling to the minibar.

"You smell like dirt," Stefan observes, sniffing the air before rising lithely to his feet. Klaus hears the Ripper in his voice. Not the blood-crazed monster that left a trail of dead in Monterrey, but the other side of him, when the savagery is steady and precise as blade. The side more true to Stefan's everyday nature. The side Klaus had once longed to draw forth in spite of Elena Gilbert.

"I was at the cemetery," Klaus informs him. "It's a popular haunt these days." Briefly, he thinks of the little witch with her scarred knees, her jagged edges of magic ready to cut him open. I'm not like you. Somehow, maddeningly, she remained inviolate in her convictions while he himself...he himself is suddenly a relic without a past, a creature out of place and time.

"I haven't gone in months." Stefan sets his glass down and draws closer. "It doesn't feel right. That statue isn't Elena, could never be Elena."

"But it is," Klaus snaps. "She's dead, and her likeness will never appear again. Now, if you came here to wax poetic about your grief for the doppelgänger-,"

"I didn't," Stefan says, and his eyes turn the color of licorice.

Klaus watches the younger vampire close the distance between them, his hands sweeping down his chest and beneath his shirt. Stefan moves with a quiet fury that burns where skin touches skin. They've been playing this game on and off since the doppelgänger's death. It should be beneath him, for Stefan is one of those who blames him for Elena's demise.

But the blame is comforting. Familiar even. It grounds him in...something. Stefan's fangs bury in his' neck while his hand slips past Klaus' belt to take hold of his cock. Klaus laughs without sound, half contemplates shoving the other vampire off him and telling him to go embrace the dirt that covers his precious Elena.

He doesn't.

He lets his body go languid and supple. He lets himself be molded and seized in the moment. There's no tenderness in Stefan's touch, there's not even hunger - he's running from ghosts, falling through the void of loss into the first thing his hands can hold.

And in that dead gesture there's history,- God, just enough history to ache.


It's almost two am when Jeremy responds to her text.

He's at Mystic Grille with some friends, he says, and she should come by. He's missed her, he says. It feels like he hasn't seen her in forever. It's eight days in fact, Bonnie's counted them. Ever since Elena died, Jeremy's taken to spending a lot of time with his old crowd, most of whom were now art majors at Whitmore. Bonnie had met one or two of them briefly and...it hadn't gone well. They were older, with cutting eyes and tongues and a disdain for anything they termed "provincial". They adored Jeremy because of his drawing skills and sensitive nature, but they had no frame of reference for her. Really she suspected it was because they'd all been friends with Anna, who had apparently been quite the artist herself. But when she, Bonnie, was around, they grew quiet and bored. The only difference after Elena's death is that their stiffness is now occasionally interspersed with a kind of morbid gawking that makes her restless. Like she's a curiosity, or something in a zoo. Truthfully, she hates them, and finds herself longing for the days when their social circle consisted of stolen interludes with Caroline and Tyler and Elena, along with the Salvatores, in between dances and classes as they strategized on how to escape the newest threat to their safety.

It was as though Elena was a magnetic core that held them together and, when that core was extinguished, they'd all scattered to the winds. Sheriff Forbes had moved herself and her daughter out to El Paso months ago, and Tyler followed soon after. The family Bonnie had thrown herself against the world for had vanished like a mirage.

While she hesitates to respond, Jeremy sends back a selfie. He's flanked by a group of friends, one of whom is a girl Bonnie recognizes as Anna's close friend, Lea. Her blue-streaked hair spills down Jeremy's shoulder as she tilts her face up for the photo. In the dim light, Bonnie can see their eyes gone soft and glowing, their smiles lopsided. Empty glasses gleam in both their hands.

Bonnie feels her stomach drop a little. She tells herself it's nothing. Jeremy's just having fun with his friends, as he's entitled to. And besides, she never told him what happened between her and Klaus all those months ago. Nor about their graveyard conversations. Nor how she'd shivered when he kissed magic into her fingers, how she'd let herself feel a pang of curiosity about the world he spoke of.

Since Elena's death their relationship has lingered in a strange limbo, neither moving forward nor dissipating. Leaving together, Bonnie feels certain, would propel them into motion. But they needed something to set them on their course. Something to seal the deal, as it were.

She types back, her mind made up.

B: I'll see you on Friday, and we can celebrate my birthday. Just the two of us xoxo

There's power in two bodies joining, she knows that all too well now. And it's what she and Jeremy need, what would bind them together so they can stand firm in their commitment, so they can face the future undaunted, hand in hand.

Bonnie huddles into her covers and slides her phone under the pillow so she can listen for his reply.

Her hand still burns where it touched Klaus' mouth.


A/N: This fic is gonna skip an update next week because I have some family coming to town, but I'll be back on schedule after that. I know this chapter was more contemplative and bridge-like compared to the action-oriented previous one, and I also didn't have time to edit it as much as I would have liked, but I hope it was still enjoyable! Thank you everyone for your amazing reviews and support for this fic, and I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts xoxox