Damon clutched at his head, his mind was swimming and he was drowning at the hands of its power. He couldn't control himself and it was repulsing him. Bonnie was breathing evenly now, her steady rise and fall of the chest brought Damon no comfort. He was suffering from excruciating pain, and he was pinned to the corner of the room. He could not bring himself to move through the haze of his consuming mind.
Night had bled into the day and the entire room was plunged in darkness save for the fire that survived in the hearth.
The vampire felt his body succumbing to the bond but he fought to resist it. If he let her in, if her emotions bled into him, Damon would not survive. She would take hold of him completely, and Damon was not one to give up power so easily.
He'd been so foolish, so reckless that he'd damned himself. He'd damned himself straight from his living hell and into Bonnie's everything. He'd fed from her, and had given her his blood. Then like the idiot he was he'd snapped her neck. She should have either died and stayed dead, or come back as a vampire.
She wasn't supposed to come back like this. Human. Witch.
She'd somehow survived and because they had both had each other's bloods coursing through their systems at the time of her untimely near death, they'd been bonded. She was surviving, living, because he was still here. If someone staked him now, not only would he die, she would as well.
Grace had explained it to him years ago, the same witch that had helped him obscure Bonnie from any magical locator spells. He'd heard of the blood bond but it had, at the time, been akin to a myth. Damon had never known anyone who had been bonded by blood; the sire bond was a lot more common.
"If a vampire has the blood of another and the same other has the blood of the vampire, then upon the near death or actual death of either the mortal or the vampire, they will be bonded. It is rare because death is death, and no one survives it. But on the rare occasion a soul fights its way back in the mortal, or if a vampire is just too damn stubborn, even in the face of the inevitable, the blood bond is forged. It's like a life source; one cannot survive without the other. If one is dead, then so is the other. In addition to this, they are able to sense or feel what the other is feeling. There is no invasion of thoughts, just of emotions. It's not like the sire bond though. The sire bond can be manipulative and controlling, but the blood bond is just a palpable bond. It does not manipulate or control, it just feels."
Now he was going to feel all right, he was going to feel every emotion the tiny witch contained inside her. He'd feel her anger and her disgust and her ugly dismissals of him.
As if for more than a century he hadn't felt enough of it himself. Self-loathing was the one thing Damon excelled at. He knew himself better than anyone else knew him and it was why he refused himself to feel anything at all. He'd locked his emotions, guarded them with a thousand walls in his mind. He had no need of them, he wouldn't need them until he got Katherine back, and that was what he'd convinced himself of.
Vampires did not carry humanity. They were dead. They had no soul, and they had no heart.
To believe anything else was a betrayal to the thing he was now.
Damon, however, missed being human, and it wasn't a truth he took lightly. He went out of his way to ensure that no one would ever believe that of him. It was why he killed without so much as flinching. It had become so easy, convincing himself of his own capacity to be evil, to kill.
He was so empty, he had been so empty for so long that the course of emotions fighting to run through him now, paralyzed him. He growled from the taste of anger and then his eyes would glaze over in tears from the hint of sadness. It was too much, his senses were hitting overload. To be empty for a hundred plus years and then to be filled up so suddenly was driving Damon insane. If he could kill Bonnie he would have, but it wasn't that simple.
The night stretched on, and his mind did not relent. He could not stop from feeling. Bonnie stirred softly in her bed, and Damon growled from the intensity of her emotions wreaking havoc on him. It would be a very long night.
Stefan paced the width of his room. He'd found nothing on the witch that had helped Damon in escaping with Bonnie. They could have been anywhere and the thought of Bonnie being alone in Damon's clutches, unnerved Stefan. Stefan knew his brother, knew that he could be a horrible monster but when it came to getting Katherine he would exhaust all options.
Damon wouldn't kill Bonnie. Of this Stefan was sure. Damon still needed Bonnie, and the young witch would live because of it. It was a small consolation to the otherwise grand scale nightmare Damon had unleashed. Stefan fell back on his bed, and stared up at his ceiling.
There was a relief because of the fact that Damon was no longer in Mystic Falls, and in that knowledge Stefan allowed himself the small joy of safety. Though it soon paled in comparison to not knowing where he was now, especially if he was creating a mess elsewhere. With an unwilling kidnapped Bennett witch in tow.
Stefan heard his phone rang and reached for it.
"Hello?"
"Hey, any news on Bonnie yet?" Elena asked from the other end.
Elena had a calming effect on him, it was in her presence that he felt more human than he allowed himself to be. His worries subsided slightly but he hated the sound of concern in her voice.
"No, no news as of yet. Elena, we will find her. Just believe that."
There was silence on the other end until he heard Elena sigh; she built her resolve and responded, "Yes, of course. We're going to find her. We have too. For Grams."
She changed the subject quickly, telling him that she'd told Caroline that Bonnie was visiting her father for a couple of weeks. Caroline hadn't second-guessed the cover story at all. Elena visited Grams every day after school, keeping her company for a couple of hours alongside Caroline. Stefan smiled and let Elena talk her emotions to exhaustion; she needed the outlet more than him.
As the conversation winded down Elena asked him, "Do you think Bonnie is safe?"
Physically yes, having her dead was out of the question. But Damon knew how to break someone down, how to strip them of their sanity. His older brother had a disturbing talent for getting people to do what he wanted.
Stefan sighed and replied honestly, "I don't know."
It was when the first peak of light spilled through the windows and into Bonnie's room, when the witch finally awoke. She woke in fear, shivering from the impact of it, and her panic rippled through Damon. He was still crouched in the corner of the room, he had become accustomed to the erratic flux of her emotions through out the night, but her being awake sent a piercing sword through him. What he'd felt before was nothing like he felt now; her being aware made the emotions infinitely worse.
Damon couldn't handle it. He couldn't handle her.
Her fear tasted like bile in his mouth and she was screaming to the point where he could feel his lungs itching to echo the sound as well.
Bonnie on the other hand could not feel anything. There was an emptiness inside her that was growing and she wanted desperately to make it stop. The slight glimpse of it she had felt before she'd blacked out in the snow, was nothing in comparison to what she felt now. She felt dead. Her beating heart was thunderous but it was void of every emotion she'd carried for sixteen years of her life. How was it possible to feel this way? To feel so dead when you were alive? There was a throbbing ache at the pit of her stomach and it was becoming sharper with every scream and sob she could wretch out of her body, because those sounds were the only things reminding her that she was in fact alive.
Damon couldn't bring himself to move. The trembling uncertainty and palpable fear that he was feeling because of Bonnie had rooted him to the wooden floor. He groaned but the sound disappeared in Bonnie's hoarse screams. He couldn't even hear her anymore, mostly because he didn't need to. He could feel her everywhere. Not just inside him, because her screams were surrounding him. The sound pierced through the air around him and it was buzzing with life.
"STOP!"
His growl met her with an impact he hadn't thought possible and her tear stricken face met his. He was shrouded in darkness, seated behind the fireplace. Bonnie's sudden halting of screams numbed her body. Why was this happening to her? Why couldn't she feel anything?
"What's happening to me?! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO ME?" her wretched scream echoed in the space between them.
She started kicking in the bed, her hands clutched at the sheets she'd been cocooned in and her knuckles turned white from her death grip. Bonnie was falling into an abyss and she couldn't stop herself.
"Why can't I feel anything?! Why is th-there th-this emp… emptiness?"
Her sobs had taken over the anger and she started to stutter inconsolably.
"Bonnie." Her name was all Damon could muster from the exhaustion of her emotions.
She could hear the strain in his voice and it finally dawned on her that he hadn't moved from where he had been sitting. As if he couldn't move.
She spoke quietly then and when she did something broke inside Damon.
"Make it stop Damon. Please, pleas make it stop."
Bonnie's pleas snapped inside him and the restraint Damon had been holding onto so viciously for the past couple of torturous hours broke. He let go. Let go of the gnawing feeling in his stomach, and destroyed the wall he'd built in his mind.
Something inexplicable happened then. He felt the intensity of her emotions leave him, and in their place he felt the familiar numbing emptiness he'd been so accustomed to for more than century. He looked up at Bonnie and saw her eyes close in small bliss. Her hands were limp to her sides, no longer tightened around her sheets, and her tears had stopped.
The blood bond had gone both ways. He'd been holding back the entire night, putting Bonnie through the emptiness of his vampire state, and receiving the heightened flux of her emotions. They'd both only been subjected to what the other had been feeling, but as soon as Damon had let go their connection flooded between them. He was feeling some of his emptiness back, and she was clearly feeling the fullness of her emotions.
The emptiness inside of Bonnie had dulled and when she opened her eyes again Damon was seated at the end of her bed. Through the onslaught of the sickening void she's been put through she hadn't even registered that she was still alive.
She'd cheated death yet again and the blue-eyed devil before her was staring at her with increased concern. It would have been touching if not for the part that the monster had kidnapped her and brought her to a near abandoned place so no one would find her. Bonnie felt a rush of anger slide over her fear and she glared at Damon with her hazel eyes narrowed.
"What did you do to me?" Her voice was small, and quiet enough that for a second Damon thought he hadn't heard her at all.
He lay on her bed facing the ceiling, as rigid as stone, and didn't bother turning around to face Bonnie.
"We're bonded." The obvious tired in his voice hit Bonnie and she moved back from him, burying herself into her sheets.
"What does that mean?"
Damon sighed and he turned his head to her, putting an arm under his hair to hold him up at angle. Her eyes looked too bright after having cried for so long, and her lips were set in a grim line. He had the fleeting thought that he preferred her when she was more alive but then suppressed it.
"It means witch, that whatever you feel I feel. And whatever I feel, you feel."
His explanation did nothing to ease the tension in her muscles and she let out a hard breath before shakily asking, "How?"
"When I snapped your neck you nearly died, but didn't truly die. I don't know what happened, and I don't know how you managed to not become a vampire. Even with my ring on you, my blood was still in your system. You should have turned but you didn't. My great deductive skills have led me to the conclusion that it has something to do with your dead ancestors protecting you. There's no way that you woke up still human, still a witch. They must have done some witchy juju from the other side and kept your body alive long enough so my blood died in your system."
"I would never have let myself become something like you," she spat.
"Never say never my witch," Damon taunted.
"This doesn't make sense! How does this mean we're bonded?!" Bonnie screamed again.
"Look. You had my blood in your system. I had your blood in mine. We both had each other's blood in our bodies. When you nearly died, something stupid happened and it created a blood bond. It means that because our blood is tied to the other, we are tied to the other. It's why our emotions are passing between us so easily now. Although I'm quite sure you felt nothing."
The way he bit out the last word made Bonnie tremble and she closed her eyes shut from not wanting to remember what it had felt like. As though she was dead but still breathing.
"So it just means we feel what the other is feeling? Is that it? You can't control me but you can feel me?" she asked hurriedly, her eyes fluttering open.
"I can't control you. And yes the emotions are what we both feel to some capacity. But that's not entirely it."
Bonnie saw something fierce in Damon's eyes and the sensation sent a jolt through her. Something was very off and Damon seemed to revel in the knowledge he was about to share with her.
"You see it's not only our emotions that are tied," he started, a slow drawl in his words, "Since we're bonded by our blood, we are bonded by the other's mortality. Or in my case immortality."
Confusion swam in Bonnie's head and she looked at him with a vacant expression. Damon got up from the bed and sat close to her without touching any part of her. He smiled and the harshness of it contorted his features into something demonic. He was breathtaking, anyone with eyes could see it, but Bonnie could no longer look past the evident evil that resided in him. When she looked at him now all she could see was a force of hell desperate on plunging her into damnation.
"It means that the blood bond is so much more than just feeling the person you're bonded too. The blood bond is like a life force. If I die Bonnie, so do you."
His words echoed around her and she thought briefly that they should've been met with a strike of lightning and a thunderous clap, like in the old movies her Grams and her watched on the weekend. There should have been more than just the silence that stretched between them after the life altering impact of his words.
Bonnie felt as though she was suffocating every inch of space closed in around her. If she died, he did. And if he died, so did she. She could never kill him, and if anyone else did, which she gathered the entire town would after learning the truth about him, she would die as well.
"One can't live without the other." Damon's words were soft but his voice was laced in something else. Something more akin to relief.
"Is there anyway of undoing this?"
Damon searched her eyes, trying to gather a reaction but Bonnie remained vacant. She would not let him see the truth.
"You look as resilient as you wish to feel little bird, but you forget that I can taste every emotion you have now. Your heart will betray you to me every time."
Bonnie wanted to kill him.
"Can't kill me, can't inflict pain on me. Whatever will you do with me little bird?" Damon asked, his voice void of mercy and full of mockery.
"But to answer your question, I highly doubt there is anyway to undo this, seeing as it's so rare. But you're welcome to look for a way out, although I'm sure this will only add to the list of advantages I already have."
His smile turned menacing and Bonnie moved her head to look at the bare wall to her left.
"I can still have a suicide wish."
Her words made Damon's flushing body run cold.
"The only way to get yourself killed is to kill me. And I'm immortal darling," he bit out, a jabbing malice apparent in his tone.
She finally turned her head to look at him and said, "Everything dies Damon. Everything. It is the way of nature."
Damon narrowed his eyes. "Spoken like a true witch."
"Don't worry, I won't kill myself, or you."
Damon cocked his head to the side and stared at her, his eyes widening.
"No. You wouldn't would you? You treasure being alive too much."
"No. Because I'm going to figure out a way to fix this and get you out from inside me, and the second I do I'll kill you."
Damon laughed. "Don't hold your breath sweetheart."
"I wonder what the feeling of driving a stake through your black heart will feel like?" she mused softly.
"Will it hurt? Will you shrivel up and die like the scum that you are? Will you become as inconsequential as you feel?"
Her words were a slow knife in his gut and he sprang at her. The impact of his hands on her shoulders sent her head flying back and she hit the wall hard. A shooting pain ran across Damon's scull and he cursed. Bonnie groaned and Damon caught her by the hair, pulling her head back so she could see him when he spoke to her.
"Speak very carefully to me witch."
Bonnie's mirthless and dead laugh hit Damon. "Or what? You'll kill me?"
Damon said nothing and rubbed the back of his head with his free hand. So pain counted in the blood bond. Any pain he inflicted on her, he felt, and he assumed it would be likewise.
"You forget Damon. I can feel you. I feel your emptiness and it's like a heavy weight I can't remove. Like a fucking tumour. Have you felt like this forever, so small and unimportant for as long as you've been a vampire? The emptiness isn't because you have no humanity, it's because you're pathetic. You're a fucking coward," she spat.
"Shut up!" Damon's hands were at her throat now and he wanted to snap her neck and get this over with.
"Do you think Katherine will choose you? After seeing you like this? No one could love someone as pathetic as you; someone who's so afraid of feeling that they've detached themselves from everything around them. You're disgusting. You don't love Katherine. You're obsessed with her. So obsessed that you've become a monster. Look at yourself! You've pinned a sixteen-year-old girl to the bed in the middle of fucking Siberia all so you can get a reckless vampire out of the tomb!"
Her words were driving a wedge in his mind and he realized he had to step away from her. If he didn't move he would kill her and he wouldn't even have the time to regret it because he'd be dead too. He moved away from her, leaving the warmth of her pulsing body and stepped back off the bed. She was flushed from anger and her hair was a mess from where he'd held it.
"This isn't a walk in the fucking park for me either witch."
"I bet. I bet it's like having your heart scream and scream and wanting to silence it so hard only to find every inch of you is drowning. I feel the same way. I feel it right now, except I'm covered in your black tar of a soul that's only filled with emptiness. My heart is screaming in silence. How do you stop a soundless heart? I hate you. I hate that you've done this to me. And I wish that someone stops you, even if it's not me, I don't care," Bonnie whispered.
He felt her exhaustion, her weakness and it pinched in his veins. It was a physical ache that overcame him like a sickness. He was never going to get used to this. He was never going to get used to the feeling of her inside of him.
Damon stepped away from the room just as Bonnie slid down the bed, resting her head onto a pillow.
As he walked down the stairs, he could feel her sobs constrict his lungs.
Damon arrived in Mystic Falls the next day. The town remained unchanged and there were, much to his delight, no missing posters of the witch. The sun was harsh on his skin and he was reminded for the umpteenth time that Bonnie was locked away in his house in Siberia.
His first stop was Bonnie's house. He'd gotten in simple enough, Sheila wasn't home and she hadn't even thought of the possibility that Damon had been invited. Good. The more advantages he had the easier this entire situation would be for him.
Bonnie's room had been cleaned. Nothing was out of place and her sheets and clothes were completely orderly. Her schoolbooks were stacked neatly on her desk and he saw the picture of her and the blonde and wannabe Katherine. After hesitating he decided to take it, use it as possible leverage when he got back to her.
He grabbed a bag by her closet and started to fill it with clothes she would need. He picked the warmer ones and placed them into her bag alongside the picture of her and her friends. He packed everything he could without making the bag look suspicious; he'd even gotten some of her undergarments. He'd tried to remain as disinterested as possible but had gagged at her choices. Everything was covered in hearts or something ridiculously feminine; after all she was only sixteen. Everything screamed little girl and not apparent womanhood.
Drudging down he stairs he walked into the living room to look for the grimoire. He scoped the entire house and found nothing. Maybe Sheila carried it with her in paranoia now that Bonnie was gone. Damon cursed and threw Bonnie's bag on the ground. He had to find the damned spell book or nothing would get done, he would have kidnapped Bonnie and risked his insanity for nothing.
Damon saw the basement door, beside the kitchen, and dove for it. The basement was dark and dingy and he saw a pentagram painted onto the cement floor. There was a shelf to the right, in the otherwise empty level, and the shelf was completely full of books. They had Latin words on the spine and some had symbols. He recognized the grimoire at the very end and smiled triumphantly. Sheila Bennett had thoroughly underestimated how safe her home truly was. Damon picked up the spell book and added it to the bag. In seconds he left the house, leaving no sign that he was ever there at all.
His second stop was the Salvatore Manor. He figured it would be empty since Stefan would most likely keep up with his pretense of a high school student instead of a century old vampire.
The house was in fact empty. He heard nothing and the tranquility was music to his ears. He gathered a bunch of things for himself; clothes he would need, books for if he got bored. Although he figured if he truly got bored he could just return home and wreak a little havoc.
Damon dumped a bit of bourbon in an empty cup and drank in peace. There was nothing to irritate him here and for the most part the blood bond hadn't bothered him since he'd gone out of his way to keep Bonnie's emotions in check. They couldn't flood him and he had a feeling that the long distance between them was helping. Or at least he hoped it was.
He got up abruptly wondering what Bonnie was doing at the moment. He couldn't feel anything except her anxiety and he had been feeling it for the past five hours. She should have been sleeping. The time difference ensured that it was night there and Bonnie should have been in bed but Damon knew she was wide-awake, most likely wondering where he was. After all he'd left without saying a word to her in the dead of the night.
Damon sighed and gathered his suitcase along with her bag. He took in one last sight of his house and left.
"Stefan, he was in my home! He took the grimoire and some of Bonnie's things. I know it was him it couldn't have been anyone else!"
Sheila sat opposite Stefan in the manor's living room where only hours before Damon had been enjoying a drink. Stefan closed his eyes from frustration. His older brother had come as well. His empty bourbon glass was sitting on the glass table between Stefan and Sheila.
"Could it be possible that Bonnie invited him in? There is no other way he could've gotten into the house Sheila," Stefan explained.
"Don't you think I know that," the older woman snapped at him, "I just don't understand how that's possible."
Stefan raised his hand and pinched the skin at the top of his nose. He couldn't understand either. Bonnie was well aware of the danger that Damon brought and there was no possible way she would allow him entry into her home. Unless he hadn't appeared as himself when she'd invited him in.
"He was a crow," Stefan whispered in realization.
Sheila went still and said, "What did you say?"
"The only way Bonnie could have invited Damon into the house is if was a crow when she invited him. She wouldn't have recognized it was him at all," Stefan clarified.
"I'm going to kill the bastard when I get my hands on him Stefan, your brother be damned," Sheila growled.
Stefan had seen Sheila breakdown a week before from the grief of having not been able to help her grandchild, but her demeanour had changed in the past couple of days. There was a hard-set look in her eyes and she was more determined than ever to get Bonnie back, especially now that she knew that her granddaughter was alive.
"I know." Stefan couldn't bring himself to say anything else, he was in no position to argue with the powerful witch, and in their long history he had never won in an argument with her.
Sheila was quiet until she saw the defeated look on Stefan's face. "I just want my baby back Stefan."
The vampire leaned forward and took hold of his friend's hand and gathered it in his. He looked fierce to Sheila and she had to shake off the uneasy feeling he gave her when he had this look in his eyes.
"We're going to get her back Sheila. Bonnie is going to be back. I promise you."
AN: OH MY LOVELY DARLINGS! I know this is a later than usual update but I hope you all enjoyed it! And once again thank you to EVERY ONE OF YOU who has either followed/favourited/reviewed my story! It truly, truly, means a lot so thank you SO MUCH, for taking the time to do any one of or all of those things(:
ANON REVIEWS
Guest: I hope this cleared it up for you hun! Not exactly anything special but as Emily explained in the previous chapter as well, she had been the one keeping Bonnie's body alive but she hadn't realized that in doing so she would create the blood bond. Pretty ironic. And Damon IS crazy, pretty crazy indeed, but as you said also very smart!
bamonXOXO: THANK YOU(:
Guest: OH it will be VERY interesting xD
boomkarakaraka05: AND THERE WILL ONLY BE MORE BAMON TO COME MY DEAR! And I apologize for the late update but I really hope you enjoyed this!
ONCE AGAIN thank you to everyone for reading! Happy reading!
