It was as dark as in a hell pit in that cave. It smelled of faint decay and dampness, and his uneven footfalls echoed around as though Kai was trying to hammer his way through a wall instead of limping. And damn, it hurt to walk. Every step sent a lightning of pain from each stab wound to zap through his body, making it harder to keep his breathing in order. The lantern did little to light the way and only made a creepy shadow out of him to stalk across the walls and ground.

His shirt clung to his back soaked in blood, so did the jeans leg where Bonnie's knife had struck next. Kai was torn between a bitter feeling of irony, as though he knew she would do something like that, and hurt, profoundly deep and encompassing. She didn't even make an effort to truly listen to him, not once. Not fucking once.

He failed to notice he was in a room rather than a cave before he ran into something solid with his hip and groaned a curse. It was a table, Kai saw with growing wonder. And when he limped around it and carried his pathetic lantern to the right, an ashen face jumped out of the dark. Kai's heart stopped, and for the next terrifying second he thought it wouldn't restart. It did, and Kai took a better look.

The thing's skin was wrinkly and grey, veins dark and saturated under it. There were other figures outlined by the shadows; they were sitting in a semi-circle.

What are they, mummies?

Kai scrutinized the first one, momentarily forgetting his pains as curiosity took over. "What the hell are you…" he murmured, and the mummy's eyes snapped open.

The world tumbled over around and under Kai, and he heard his own cry before a bolt of pain ripped into his neck and leaked further through his shoulder and arm and chest, swift like quicksilver. The mummy's eyes – colorless and dead – flashed on his mind's screen as he jerked…

There was a strangled groan Kai sluggishly recognized as his as he stirred and winced. His neck was nagging as if he had been sleeping with it bent in the wrong way for a day or two. His whole body was stiff and sore, especially the right side he was lying on. He couldn't feel his hands as though he no longer had them, but his wrists screamed in pain. The poorly lit room slowly came into vision, blurry but familiar. The thick stench of smoke was the biggest clue Kai would have smiled at if not for the cough that tightened his throat.

He smelled her, too.

Bonnie was busy with her phone, scrolling through section after section of random newsfeed tweets, attempting to take her mind off things for a while, when a groan filled the air. She glanced down at the figure before her on the floor, locked her phone, and swung her legs off the cot.

"Though I do love that trick," Kai said in a husky voice that sold out his horrible thirst, "it really sucks you did it. I thought we were talking! But never mind." He rolled onto his back, wincing as the burning in his wrists neared the teeth-grinding level, and looked at Bonnie with a weary, dry amusement. "Let me guess: I'm still alive because you wanna force me to undo the spell on you and Elena. I really can't – not even sorry to disappoint you on that." He thought of tearing the ropes, but there was no familiar surge of magical energy. There was something wrong with him, and he did feel much weaker than he normally would. A lazy smirk of wicked knowing touched the corners of his mouth as he locked his eyes on hers. "I see you took precautions. I'm a little impressed, you brave little witchling. It might help for a few minutes, all right. Don't waste them, for they can become your last."

"The safety measures weren't my first choice, but with your newfound feeding habits and desire to rip my friends' throats out, it makes it hard to trust you," Bonnie responded, sliding off the cot, squatting beside him to take a hold of his shoulder, easing the pressure off his bound arms to help him into a sitting position. The first step in signifying her means for truce. She released his shoulder once she was sure he was good, and walked out of the cell to retrieve a blood pack.

Kai shifted a bit towards the wall and leaned back against it, taking a small moment to assess his aches and control his breathing, taking a deeper one in and releasing a longer one out. The smoke ate at his airways, adding to the hunger dry-out.

Slowly unwinding the plastic tube around it to act as a makeshift straw, Bonnie crouched before him. "Thirsty?"

Kai gave her a long searching look, the smallest of curious smiles playing over his mouth. He couldn't decide whether she was really that confident or really that stupid. And it bugged him, like a mosquito's high-pitched whining somewhere in the same room with him would. Vervain on his ropes didn't please him, either, and he needed blood to fix things he didn't like. He opted for a nod, never taking his probing eyes off her.

Bonnie held his gaze for as long as was necessary for him to trust that she wasn't trying to wangle an angle, not one that was a detriment to either of them, anyway, otherwise she would have killed him, right? Just like he could have killed her a couple of dozens' times tonight. A light smile played upon her mouth at his approving nod; she guided the plastic to his parted lips without hesitation, trusting that he wasn't stupid enough to bite her and that maybe he didn't want to. Who knew with this guy? Bonnie kept a firm hold on the blood pack, letting him feed at his leisure or at least until he'd managed enough to feel more settled.

Kai's lips parted obediently as she offered him the blood and helping the plastic tube between them. It was too cold and so much different from the live and warm kind you got directly from the vein, but, for that moment, it was a liquid ambrosia that coated his sore throat and muffled the ache. He had three quarters of the pack down when Damon's voice called for Bonnie from somewhere outside the cell – Kai figured Salvatore couldn't even get down the stairs, and it made him smile a little. Bonnie didn't trust them around each other and was right, since Damon didn't have it in him to think before he acted. Kai, however, felt no fixation on killing him unless provoked. Not when Damon's plans for the next hundred years or so included pining after an eternally snoozing girl.

"Bonnie?!" Damon yelled, hovering at the door and in front of the barrier she had cast. "Bonnie, what the hell?!"

Bonnie knew that, as soon as he was conscious and smelt the smoke in the air, there would be severe damage control. She cringed and involuntarily made to remove the plastic 'straw' from Kai's mouth.

"Excuse a second," she said as if they were having a civil everyday conversation, leisurely walked out the cell, leaving the door open to purposely let Kai know he wasn't a prisoner – at least not in the bars sense.

Kai surveyed the open door, wondering once more what her intentions might be. Confidence and ignorance looked very alike at times.

"What the hell are you doing?" Damon raged. "Why can't I get down—"

"What's wrong?" Bonnie asked, ignoring his blazing blue eyes and questions.

"What do you mean what's wrong? My gut was slashed open, there is smoke in the house and—"

"Have you been upstairs?" she chipped in, once again cutting short his mention of the basement and the barrier spell – she didn't want that revealed too soon.

He frowned, looking peeved. "Upstairs?" he echoed, his right hand clutching an empty blood pack, clearly wanting more and wrestling with his next plan of action: Bonnie, the pack, or the looming mystery of what lay in wait upstairs.

"Your room," Bonnie added to help speed along his indecision, his eyes widening with fear and what she knew would be rage by the time he saw his bed, books and bathroom.

He took off without a word, leaving her to stare after him for a second or two and hear as he released a pent-up roar of distress like an injured animal.

Kai listened half-heartedly while most of his attention coursed through his system like an intelligent computer scanning program in search of flaws and running diagnostics. The blood was gradually doing its job and he could feel the charges of renewed energy collecting in his muscles and cells, smoothening the soreness away. Kai pulled his legs to his chest and slid the loop of his arms up along them, ending up with his tied hands on his lap. The hands resembled those of a corpse with the blood flow cut off by the ropes; his skin around the wrists burnt and bloody. He closed his eyes, concentrating, assessing his resources. He could sense it more distinctly now – whatever Bonnie injected him with to bind his magic. Kai strained his bound hands as if intending to tear the ropes apart, wincing at the pain bursting across the damaged skin and saturating the flesh beneath. Blood oozed, soaking the ropes and eventually dripping to the floor while he sat with his eyes closed, guiding the foul potion out of his system.

Bonnie traipsed back downstairs and into the cell again, knowing Damon would be away a couple more minutes and that priority one of his was trying to see what survived the unexpected fire. "I'm guessing the fire was you?"

He looked at her and simpered. "Probably." Then added, "Fraktus," under his breath, parting his feet and hands once the ropes ripped and flew sideways in shreds as though he tore them with a flourish of a Hulk.

Bonnie gasped and automatically stepped back as he tore free of his ropes. How the hell did he even do that? She swallowed, taking another step back, rapidly weighing up her options, trying to decide whether or not she should make a run for the basement stairs or if she should stay. Running would be the smart thing to do—especially in light of his earlier threat—but it was also the most efficient way of provoking him to attack her, or red-flagging her detoxing plans.

Kai hissed softly, rubbing at his healing wrists, and gave her a faint smile. "That's much better. Now tell me, Bons: do you ever think your plans through thoroughly or just go with the flow and thus screw up every time?" He meticulously registered every spark of fear and mild panic that blinked across her face once she saw the ropes fly off his ankles and wrists. She fell back a few steps and stopped just behind the threshold of the cell, her fingers unwittingly tightening on his unfinished blood pack. She made a huge effort to contain her emotions and appear cool, and he found himself liking that about her yet again.

"I find the flow works a lot more efficiently," Bonnie responded, having thought that this would be a bit easier, that vervain ropes and a magic nuke would be the thing needed to put him on time-out for at least an hour. "Especially in this case. Otherwise, I probably would have foregone the illusion and staked you while you were out cold." She beckoned to the open canister of salt sitting at the wall in the corridor. It tipped over, salt crawling across the floor like white ants within seconds, lining the entranceway of the cell like dutiful little soldiers in need of a singular word to seal him in. Bonnie only hoped it wouldn't be necessary and that a bluff would be enough.

Kai squinted pensively, thinking about it. Illusion, she said. He let on a slow smile of a dawning recognition as some pieces of this puzzle crawled towards each other to create a picture in his mind. She pulled off an illusion of staking him for some reason – which he was yet to find since he was hardly a total secret sitting in the Salvatores' house, of all places.

Her gaze flicked down, and as his followed, Kai saw a white line of salt crawling along the doorstep. He nearly spilled a laugh over it, but restrained it instead, raising a mock reprimanding stare to meet hers. In an instant, he was hovering before her, his hands propped on the doorframe, the tops of his boots a hair shy of the salt border.

Bonnie locked her gaze upon his, her heart skipping a transitory beat as he appeared so close. Too close. He'd been doing that particular trick long before he even became a vampire – it unnerved her. She forced herself to not look down, to not break eye contact and broadcast her alarm – though, by now and with all his fancy new senses in place, it was only a matter of time before he recognized it. Unless he already did.

Kai was still smiling his faint, inscrutable smile, regarding her. "Why didn't you stake me for real? Did my little revelation shock you into pity? That'd be funny given how late the reaction is for this party. Haven't I said that? I think I did. And I think you're not as good at listening as you are when it's Damon yapping about his sorrows and failures."

"I wouldn't call it pity as much as it is enlightenment," she said in a calm voice, surprisingly good at maintaining that confident air while her pulse and scent gave out a different kind of vibes. "As for Damon, he's had his trials. All of which he formerly failed miserably, time and time again. But he's changed, he's trying to be better and less a psycho killer. At least to some degree and as far as I was aware." She paused briefly as if revising it in her mind. "He's a work in progress," she concluded. "Like you."

Kai screwed up his eyes a little in an automatic expression of ironic distrust, registered her heartbeat quickening a notch. It usually happened to people who ventured a phrase unsure of the other person's reaction and expecting the worst. It made him ponder whether she was trying to lie to him again.

"The only difference is, he's stopped fighting it, stopped trying to blame the world and has taken a little responsibility for his actions. Like me. I've made mistakes. And I could be making one right now. Probably my second biggest this month." There was a note of morose humor in her voice, the awareness that if he wanted to follow through with his threat, it would take no more than a second and a certified flick of a wrist to do so.

Kai cracked a wider smile that said she might be on point here.

"Yet, for some reason, I don't believe that I am," she continued. "If anything, your speech tonight has made me realize that. I know that it sounds hollow coming from me now, that you believe I'm trying to pacify you for some substantial gain." She thought of how a few weeks ago he begged her to trust him, to believe he'd changed overnight, and how she refused to take in an idea so unfathomable. Their roles seemed ironically switched. "But I'm going to need you to take a leap of faith and trust that I'm not and that unlike who you were two weeks ago, forgiveness doesn't come easy to me. I'm trying to step out of my comfort zone, I'm trying—" she searched for a better word, went for it: "I want to help you."

For a lengthy moment, they merely stared at each other – Kai with a curious attention and Bonnie with a wary one.

Silence stretched for what felt like an eternity for Bonnie, and his face was absent of even a hint of his thinking or if she managed to break through his uncompromising defenses. She chose to take it as a good sign. A negligible second of optimism that rushed through her, positivity he eradicated within moments as if to punish her for it. She should have been ready for it, she should have uttered the word before he struck, but there had been no time.

Kai gave a soft hem of acknowledgment and shared a sardonic look with her before his hand darted forth like a striking viper and yanked her back to his cell by the throat. The blood pack dropped on the floor like a dead piece of meat; the salt line was swept across the floor by her feet. Kai had her pinned to the wall, much like in the barn earlier that night, before a gasp escaped her mouth. Heat of magic warmed up his palm, seeping from her skin through his before she could spit a spell out; he leaned in to her as though for a kiss, but not quite. A smile so amiable formed on his face it was out of place in their current roles. Kai could see her grimace at the ache of his siphoning, probably cursing herself for stupidity of trusting she was safe with him.

"God, you're so plucky, Banzai, it beats me how Damon stays immune to a turn-on like that."

Bonnie's mouth fell open faintly, restrained gasp after aching gasp tumbling from her lips, eyelids fluttering, threatening to close as a means to ward off the blaze of magic being pilfered from her body and to do away with his smiling face.

Kai's smile widened a tad, releasing a pleased hem, then his eyes took on a keener look relying it was a random remark in an actual talk of business. "Help implies I've asked for it, Bonsy. That there's something I want or desire, while, to be honest, right now, I come to realize there's hardly anything I want or desire. I think I just… am, pretty much. Like a force of nature. And a force of nature doesn't want. I got all I wanted, so what is it that you, little presumptuous witchling, wanna help me with? Do enlighten me in your turn." Nudged by a sudden playful curiosity, Kai released her gently to see what she was going to do. The borrowed magic hummed in the fibers of his body like electricity in high-voltage wires. It quickened his own pulse, and added a subtle touch of arousal.

Bonnie stayed rooted where she was when he let her go, handling her with far more care than he started off with. She was angry, every square inch of her body stinging with defeat, longing to punch him out of mere need for justice. She exhaled through her nose, taking a few seconds to calm down, to remember that he was doing this on purpose and that this was as nasty a test as any. She should have expected it. And a part of her did.

She chuckled, a sound that held little mirth and came across as more of a scoff, and lifted a hand to the phantom imprint left behind by his unexpected siphoning. "Presumptuous?" she echoed. "Maybe. But it's been my experience that those that fear rejection or think themselves beyond repair seldom ask for help, Kai. You know why? Because they've been doing it their whole lives and all they know is to run. They're ashamed of facing themselves, petrified of confronting what they've done to cope and scared to feel anything remotely real because they don't know what to do with it. You've been seeking recognition from your family for eighteen years. Forty, if we really want to dive into it. You think that feeling up and poofs out of existence because they're dead? It doesn't. And it's only going to get harder for you from here. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow, but down the line, another eighteen years for now, you're still not going to have gotten what you wanted, you'll still just be the assumed abomination his family up and scratched from existence. Is that who you want to be known as for the rest of your very long life?" She didn't believe so, not after what he'd shared and the hurt that clearly started all of this. He wanted to belong, she was sure.

Her speech put a damper on that playful spark twinkling in Kai, fueled by her closeness and the magic he took, and now there was an acrimonious frustration like a drop of poison spreading its deadly strings through the clear waters of the well. She was trying to read him and never quite hit it, and while she refused to stop poking around, it was getting to a point of irritation that bordered with ire.

"Answer me this," she added, scrutinizing him, "if you were given the chance, if you by some means possessed the power to go back, to hold off from stabbing your sister in the gut and starting world war three. Would you? Or would you simply do it all over again?"

A somewhat morose smile of resignation tugged at Kai's mouth as the same bile-bitter feeling rose from within like a bloated corpse rises up from the bottom of the river. She was stubbornly pulling at the strings he had deliberately cut because all they did was give him more trouble instead of the liberation he sought.

Kai looked at her like one would look at a child that struggles with understanding and yet demands answers to questions she's not supposed to worry about at this age. "Would I kill my family if I had a chance to change it? I would, in a heartbeat."

Bonnie stared at him in wonder and with something like a flicker of disenchantment, incapable of processing how quickly he tore her hope to shreds.

"Because it's always been like that between me and them: they never stopped trying to put me away. They not just intended to rob me of my birthright, but of my life as well, and I couldn't let them. It was always me or them, Bonnie. And like it happens in the wilderness of nature, the strongest survives. I chose to be that, and it is my responsibility – I'm fully aware of it and state it here and now: it was indeed my choice to survive them. Jo – she was carrying another threat to my powers in her, and I couldn't let them live."

It's not that Bonnie anticipated he would become a turncoat or start handing out food parcels at a shelter or adopt stray puppies from the SPCA. She wasn't trying to make him good, she didn't hold that power, and frankly, she didn't want that kind of responsibility. What she did need and sought was a true hint of remorse in Kai. She wanted to know that after all the horror they bore tonight and over the last few months wasn't for nothing, and wouldn't end up with any more people dead.

Kai squinted cunningly as though warning of a major hint to come. "Not after you left me in nineteen-o-three, a bloody breakfast for a bunch of desiccated heretics. Funny enough, it even made me think my own prison wasn't so bad, after all – and that's the biggest blasphemy ever, I tell ya. I left her in peace after she gave me her powers. And I guess I could've figured out a way to solve that problem with her twins, but then – plot twist! – I end up in a prison world to feed a pack of bloodsuckers not all of which knew how to be gentle."

Her heart seemed to stop, that nauseating feeling returning at full force, tears burning behind her eyes for a second. She forced herself to blink away the swelling anguish, to stop it dead in its tracks before it fully manifested or coursed down my cheeks. She wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of winning – not again, not in this department. It didn't matter how many times tonight Kai spitefully attempted to make it clear that Bonnie was as accountable for the death of Jo's family – it would never stop hurting her. She knew that as well as that the sky was blue. And in this moment, she, too, wished she never made it out of that prison world, that she was still back there and this was another of the many frightening nightmares she invented for herself.

In a fracture of a second, Kai had her in the same grip, his palm heating up with her magic readily flowing in. Her fingers dug in his wrist, desperate to remove his vice grip and cut short by his siphoning power. This was as efficient as any neck snap in her book.

He smiled a smile of a cat playing with a mouse. It was coming back again, the arousal of power. "You wanna know if I'm sorry? I was very damn sorry when I told you so – and I did many times. You didn't listen. And now we both can be sorry – you for not listening, I for killing my sister who could have been the only one of them I actually felt anything for, because being twins has its effect even on a senseless bastards like me – and it won't change anything. I did what I did because I wanted to do it, because I chose to do it after things that happened to me. It's not the blame you think I put on others – those are simple, dry facts that brought me to where I am now. And right now, it's too late to tell me how I crave for understanding of my family – I killed them because I stopped wanting it a long time ago. I'm not scared to feel what's real – there's just nothing worth feeling."

Bonnie's mind kept working, tossing more into the guilt pile. Unlike Damon, who made shitty life choices and continued to make them when things weren't going a particular way or, more importantly, his way, Kai, for even a second, had tried to stay on track, to give the merge a refined attempt. And yes, he'd been manipulative, pushy and his unpredictable self in his efforts, but not once in the two days that Bonnie mingled with him had he possessed the same sneer or grade of chaos in his eyes. She cynically believed it was an act—and now the roles were reversed, and this time Kai didn't care to see it anymore since that kind of happiness and self-acceptance had been snatched from him too many times. Years of continual conditioning provided by his family and himself. And now, her.

He yanked her from the wall to him, her back lined up with his front as he held her to him with an arm across her chest, his cheek against her temple. Kai simpered pensively as if a sudden idea came into his head, and traced a finger of his free hand down the side of her neck. He saw the vein pulsing rapidly, and began getting hard. "Except for the only real thing a vampire can feel… that you can still give me."

Bonnie's eyes widened at the implication, preoccupied by his hard-on and misleadingly gentle attention provided by his touches. An uncontrolled gasp spilled from her lips in anticipation of his bite, evoking to memory how viciously Damon ripped into her neck all those years ago. She squeezed her eyes shut, endeavoring to blot out the image, and forced herself to relax, to accept that there was nothing she could do to prevent it – and that this was it.

Eyes closing, Kai nuzzled into her skin, taking in that scent that made him waver on the edge of self-control, and skimmed his parted lips over the beating vein, testing himself. He wanted it so badly it scared him deep down. And it also excited him too much to step back. Now he could no longer backtrack, and that thought coaxed his fangs to elongate and his mouth water, like an approval from beyond reason. Vaguely, Kai was aware how his own heart hammered away against her shoulder-blade, as frantic as hers but for all the different reasons. He snaked his other arm around her waist, tender as a lover before planting a kiss, and scraped his teeth against her skin, as if teasing himself. A bead of crimson swelled on the small scratch and he picked it up with the tip of his tongue.

"You're gonna be more than I even expected," he whispered against her neck. "Exquisite."