His wide eyes – pupils so large that the iris has almost been swallowed completely by the black center - look at the small heart-shaped piece of wood that frames her casual greeting, like they saw each other just the other day, when in fact they barely greeted each other even when they did actually see each other any other day.

It feels thrilling, the way his life is going back on track: getting drunk, drinking blood, hiding things from Elena, looking for trouble and finding Bonnie. Just the way he likes it.

His mouth curves into a smile, and there's a light in his forever-mocking blue eyes, which makes it unbearable to watch, like it could cut her heart in two. Maybe she did something very stupid, by giving in to him.

"Hello yourself, stranger," he says, his voice dried up from the unexpected turn of luck. "Did you miss me?" he asks, relived to have a counterpart to play this game with. He knows he should put himself to work right now, but the instinct to resume their routine kicks in like a knee jerk and he can't resist it.

She can't either, it seems, for the planchette stops on No.

Damon grins, and winks in the direction of the board, feeling only slightly ridiculous at the fact that he's basically flirting with air. "That's good, keep it up, I like the restive type, it makes the conquest all the more exciting."

"You're an ass," she says, forgetting to form the words with the planchette.

"No need to write down the insult, sweetheart," he clarifies, throwing his hands up like he wants to reassure her and get on with more important things, "I'll just pick one. Feel free to feel better," he says, but just when she thinks he's letting the argument go he adds, "But really, once you're back you'll have to find another way to release all that sexual tension. I volunteer."

"You're-"

"Disgusting. I know," he says, rolling his eyes.

"I think you're psychotic," she breathes, "Why do you even need me when you can carry on a conversation so well on your own?" she asks, ironically, propping herself on the table, legs crossed next to the Ouija board.

"I'm just trying to motivate you," he defends himself candidly; "I'm setting a prize to encourage you."

She thinks about it for a moment and makes a face, turning to compose the words not a dog.

"As always, you're biased. I wasn't implying anything…" he protests, way too light-hearted, "and by the way, they are noble creatures, very loyal…"

Bonnie sighs and rolls her eyes, trying to ignore his poor attempt at fixing his error, when he finishes his sentence, "And they really know something about sexual positions."

She's indignant, outraged and before she can think straight she's standing again, her fingers are already wrapped around the piece of wood –which appears floating above the table - and she's throwing it in the air, aiming at his face.

Damon catches it in his hand, just a few inches away from his nose, and smiles. She wants to smack it away so bad.

"I think we 'd better go back at working on our plan before my blood starts dangerously rushing to south and you make the ceiling fall on me," he says casually, walking to the table and putting the planchette down again.

"I think our first option is to try and find your dear-dear cousin Lucy, so that we can-"

Before he had the time the piece of wood is already on the word No.

"Okay," he concedes, "Then option two. We find Silas and we try and see if there's something his evil self might want-"

But as he speaks the planchette travels along the line of numbers and stop on the number 3.

He arches an eyebrow and grimaces, "I don't have an option 3, do you have an option 3?" he asks, redundant and ready to hear her out.

Let me go is her answer. And, "Absolutely not. No. You can't ask me that. Do you hear me? No," is his, as he shakes his head looking at the floor instead of the board, like he can avoid her will and her decision just by doing that.

She indicates the word yes and he passes his hands through his hair and turns around, fingers laced at the back of his head.

"I'm not having this conversation with you," he insists.

"You are, and by your choice so you must hear me out now."

"Don't you miss your friends?" he asks, turning around, hopeful he found a good argument to convince her, "Don't you miss your life?" he presses her, "Don't you miss-" he stops, unable to put himself in the list, because he needs to try and find something important to her and he is not "your future?"

The planchette does not move from her last answer. Yes.

"So why can't you come back?"

Balance.

"Balance can go fuck itself!" he yells in frustration. A nerve under his jaw pulls so much that she thinks it might break.

Language, she scolds him, and he bends his head, chuckling with teary eyes.

"If you really had to go and die couldn't you at least pick someone else to resuscitate?" he asks, trying to change the mood, trying to look like he can take her decision with a shrug and go on with his life "You could have screwed balance for Marilyn Monroe, for example. My eyes aren't grateful for your arguable choice."

He's letting someone else make a decision, trying to respect her even though he doesn't agree, and – she realizes - it's pretty much the most kind thing he's ever done since she met him.

Damon holds his lips together as he reads the letters she circles. Sorry.

He chuckles bitterly staring at the immobile piece of wood, frozen on the last letter. This is the first time she ever said sorry to him, and probably it will be her last word.

He's unaware of her presence next to him. If he could see her he would know that her breast is inches from his chest and her mouth is dangerously close to his face, and he would not turn around in the exact moment her lips try to leave a kiss on his pale cheek, and she would not be forced to face her own emotions.

It happens in an instant. He turns and she's left there, ready to fall off the edge of a cliff she didn't know she walked to. How did she come to this? Why would she think to comfort him with a kiss?

If she could at least reassure herself that that kiss was to make him feel better, she would not feel like she's been cornered by her worse nightmare.

Bonnie swallows, tries to stop the waves of thoughts and memories washing over her, she doesn't hear Elena asking him who he's talking to, doesn't see her walking through the room, up to him, she just wants to go away, run, disappear into thin air and hide; so she turns around, desperate to leave, put space between her and him and whatever it is that is happening even though she's dead and nothing can happen to her ever again. And runs into Elena.

It's dizzying, she was going in one direction and suddenly she's walking to the other, unstable on her feet which seem to stumble on themselves, completely uncoordinated. The colors have a different intensity, the air is warm, almost scented and when she falls forward she can't look away from Damon's blue eyes, as she feels his hand close around her waist and her own hands grip at his biceps by reflex.

"Hey," his voice seems to vibrate into her stomach. It's an unsettling sensation, one that easily gets warm in places where it should not.

Her heartbeat accelerates, her breasts brush his chest in the precarious position and she can feel the contact so real through the clothes. Bonnie gasps, can feel the sound of her broken breath, the movement of her eyelids, his fingers gripping flesh, tightly. It sends a shiver down her spine, so much so that she must fight to make her legs respond to her commands to stand properly. She cannot understand how this has happened, just knows it did, and he's looking into her eyes and actually seeing her and something is melting inside.

He smells like shower gel and something she recognizes as him.

"Damon," she's breathless in saying his name, feels stupid for how funny it sounds to her own ears.

He looks startled, seems to study her, like suddenly he's not really sure who he is talking to. "I think you're the least coordinated vampire I've ever known," he says, hesitantly.

Vampire?

"The color of your eyes-" he continues, eyes fixed into hers. He realizes that there are splinters of green where only chocolate should be.

But she does not listen to him, because she's just understood; Bonnie pushes herself back, watching Elena's body tremble and fall again in Damon's arms.

He looks lost for a moment, helps her sit down and pushes her face up to look at her eyes.

"They were green one moment ago," he says, as Bonnie takes one step back, and then another. Still, her emotions seem to follow her. She shakes her head, because it's wrong, and it's just a misunderstanding, that was Elena's heartbeat, not hers. Her heart would never, ever race for Damon Salvatore.

"It did not happen," she tells herself, "It wasn't my body and those weren't my emotions," she repeats, desperate to believe it.

"Bonnie," and her head snaps up when Elena says her name. "I felt Bonnie. She was here," she says, "And she felt-"

She cannot hear that - she thinks as she's walking backwards - cannot bear to hear what she's going to say, because she thinks she might die – again – out of shame. Isn't her time over yet? Why she must be tortured so? Like her life wasn't enough of a joke, now even in death she must endure it, and this time, of all people, it's Damon Salvatore yanking her chain, and she follows. And she wants to kiss him. And Elena might know, and Elena might tell him.

Another step back and she falls through a wall. It has never happened before, that things – animated or not – would suck her in like this. Still, she's on her back, and for a moment it's so dark she feels like suffocating. Bonnie reaches out, forces herself to see and under her outstretched hands a bubble comes up and breaks with a snap that leaves her on the floor of the Salvatore boardinghouse.

Bonnie gasps, rolls on the floor to look around and understand what has happened, but there's no one around. Only Stefan's things lying around like they're waiting for their owner to come back. He's never been a neat freak, but his dusty guitars look strangely sad, there, untouched.

He was there during her funerals and for a few days later, but was distant and distracted. She's hurt thinking he never called her like the others did, never thought of her hard enough to actually summon her presence. Maybe he's got to keep his sanity, she thinks, standing up to walk around the room. Maybe he found a way to start over, leave behind the betrayal, the losses, maybe he is happy now, as he should have always been.

She turns around, looking about herself and when Damon's call begins to pull at her, her eyes freeze on the center of Stefan's bed. She cocks her head to the side, realizing that there's a dark spot in the middle. At the beginning she thinks she's hallucinating, but the stain – for how slowly – starts to grow and grow until the bed-clothes are dripping with water and the floor starts to get flooded. She can see rivulets of murky water stretching like the branches of a tree against the parquet, filling up the veins of the wood made homogenous by its oxidation, making more evident the spaces between the wood boards until the point they disconnect and are pushed up.

Shadows settle on the place, that you left.
Our minds are troubled by the emptiness.

"What the hell-" but as soon as she looks back at the bed she finds it perfectly tidy and dry. The parquet is still in place and there's nothing but dust on it.

"What was that?" she asks again in whisper. It is a taste of what's waiting for her on the other side? Is Charon coming to take her?

She curls up on the floor, trying to still her thoughts, the pull of people thinking of her. She hides in her room, which is untouched and dusty, like it's still waiting for her to come back. It doesn't occur to her, the similarity with Stefan's place, not immediately, but eventually she thinks of him. She thinks of his room, which is the only thing that seems to be missing him, because Elena is too busy having the time of her life with her new, reformed serial-killer of a boyfriend, and Caroline is too busy trying to fulfill her vision of her own future even if she always thought she would be in it, and Damon is doing ridiculous things and fighting with her, as usual, and no one is with him now.

Destroy the middle, it's a waste of time.
From the perfect start to the finish line.

And in that moment she hears it, that muffled sound of deepness, so familiar, which should soothe her but doesn't. She tries to calm herself down, think back on that sound and the moments connected to it, and with a little effort she remembers her and Matt's challenge to see who would swim faster, who could hold their breath longer. She remembers the blue water of the pool and the splashes when they launched themselves in the lake, while Caroline and Elena roasted themselves in the sun - colorful bikini almost blinding, the smell of burned skin, the warmth which she could sometimes feel radiating from the inside, like the sun was nothing else but a happy coincidence.

But it's nothing like that. In the muffled sound in the air she can almost hear a lament, a strangled whining, and anguish clouds her mind. Why is she feeling like this? Is it her version of hell? Her happiest memories turning into her eternal torment?

"I don't understand," she protests, pressing the heels of her hands against her temples.

Is that lament what's waiting for her when her time will be definitely over? She has pity for whoever that voice belongs to. They should be comforted, even if only for a moment, because eternity is too long to pass without the faintest sign of sympathy. And when she will be forgotten and lost, when everyone who has ever met her will forget her and she will be a blurry, nameless memory buried by years and stones, her own lament will be muffled and unable to be touched by anyone.

And if you're still breathing, you're the lucky ones.
'Cause most of us are heaving through corrupted lungs.
Setting fire to our insides for fun
Collecting names of the lovers that went wrong
The lovers that went wrong.

She's suddenly scared to look around and see the murky water circling her, the anxiety to put an end to the fear gripping her makes her turn her eyes. No matter how many times she blinks, how hard she tries, the water will not appear again. The lament is mute in her ears.

A ghost scared of the water, isn't it ridiculous? She thinks, turning on her heels prudent and wary. She went from occasional, uncontrolled touches to possessing bodies, and now she sees what's not there. And she has no idea how she did any of that.

"They should make a manual or something," she says, reflecting aloud. If only she could connect the dots and find the mechanism of this, maybe she would know. She needs to think, and thanks God that Damon has stopped thinking of her – so she supposes - because she can control it now. Or maybe, she realizes after a few moments, it is not the way he thinks of her that changed, but it's her.

"I changed," she says, "I changed. How did I change? It's not like I can be any deader than before. How long has it been since I died?" she asks, to no one. Bonnie looks out the window, the leaves are changing colors. And she's somewhere in the graveyard fertilizing the earth and feeding worms. She cannot shudder at that thought, still it's unpleasant.

We are the reckless,
We are the wild youth
Chasing visions of our futures
One day we'll reveal the truth
That one will die before he gets there.

She tries to focus on this, turns around once more looking for water, which she can't find. Bonnie tries to remember what she was feeling – because there's not really much she can actually do – when she was able to connect to the living word. There was Damon, and panic, and desperation, and then the urge to hide, which she kind of did – inside Elena's body. But the visions of water are inexplicable to her.

"I didn't want her to tell him…" she stops her loud recall, trying to remember exactly how things went, "I fell back," she says, and pushed herself to fall on her back. The impact doesn't hurt her. Above her she can see her ceiling and the shadows projected on it.

"It happened in a blink," she says, before rolling on the floor. "I turned over and I saw Stefan's things." Her mouth curves into a light smile thinking of him. And then it happens, the water starts trickling from under the walls and she stands up in panic. The moment her mind rushes back from it, it disappears again.

"Stefan?" she asks, unable to see the connection.

Bonnie closes her eyes and takes a breath, which her inconsistent projection cannot hold, and thinks of him. When she opens them again she can see him, struggling for air in a box, his hair fluttering in the water, air leaving his mouth and he trashes with no sound in the cramped space.

"Stefan…?" her eyes are wide and her voice hoarse from horror. "How—what's happened? Stefan? Can you hear me?"

She floats above him but his eyes cannot see her as he rebels against his impassive enemy. Only as his lungs fill up with water and mud, and his muscles contract in the last strain of resistance and his body inevitably succumbs, do his eyes catch hers.

Well I've lost it all, I'm just a silhouette,
A lifeless face that you'll soon forget,
My eyes are damp from the words you left,
Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest.
Ringing in my head, when you broke my chest.

"Stefan?" she calls, but his eyelid slowly close, leaving her to stare at his face, emptied of any trace of his bleeding humanity. "No-no-no-no-no!"

She can't help but stare at him in the deafening silence, in the dark water. With a gasp, he opens his eyes, again, and his jerking body scares her away from there, sending her back to her room.

It doesn't take long to her to understand what's going on, to understand that in another minute he's going to die, again, only to come back to life and die still.

"God," she moans in pain, "Why him—no."

But what can she do? She can barely do anything for herself, only look at Damon and touch him in the most bizarre, fragile moments of all. Damon, yes.

He's in the shower again and she cannot touch him, for how many times she reaches out, and tries to hit him. She can only go through him now.

"Listen to me, you idiot! You can save him!" she says, in a rush, "Stefan is dying, he keeps dying while you waste time, sharing your bed with the love of his damn life!" But he's calmly washing his hair, thinking of her – no less – but unable to hear a single word.

And if you're in love, then you are the lucky one,
'Cause most of us are bitter over someone.
Setting fire to our insides for fun,

She feels like stomping her feet on the ground, which will not do any good, anyway. She can still see Stefan's face as life abandons him, cannot even begin to imagine how it is to be trapped – God, for how long? – in such a tiny space, with nothing else but obsession to keep him company.

Where's the damn board when she needs it? She needs to write it down for him, but holding a pen seems to hard even for her improved ghost self.

"Damon, I need to talk to you," she protests weakly, so desperate that even his nudity does not upset her. But when she turns around she sees the mirror covered in stream. Her Gram always scolded her when she wrote with her fingers on windows and mirrors because they're hard to clean up after, and for once she's happy about it.

She tries her best, must try a few letters more than once, but when Damon finally comes out of the shower she's in the corner, looking at his face for any trace of recognition. He dries up his head with a towel, keeps his head inclined to the side to clean his left ear as he stands naked, his eyes travel along the mirror and she thinks that the stream has covered her effort until his eyes move again, having cached her message.

His mouth opens, his pupils shrink and his eyes go wide as he bends forward to read what she wrote.

Stefan.

He makes a face, which she supposes should have been an amused one but turns out to be quite irritated.

To distract our hearts from ever missing them.
But I'm forever missing him.

"Are you fucking kidding me?"

#

Note The song I used in this chapter is "Youth" by Daughter.