So. A bit of an explanation. This is my first vampire diaries fanfiction and was made solely because the last season both entertained and disappointed me so much that I just had to fiddle around with it. This whole story is just me having fun. The canon will be only loosely followed, The Originals will be completely ignored, and I will basically keep my own continuity goes Lord knows the actual show is shit at it.
She remembered once watching Thor with Caroline, cuddled up together on the couch (and she was under about five blankets and casting warmth charms every ten minutes because it was about thirty-eight degrees and Caroline didn't believe in turning the thermostat above sixty-five and insisted on draping her cold-as-the-grave top half all over Bonnie – "it's bonding, Bon! Ha! Bonding with Bon. We should do a cable show."- So Care had been a little trashed, hushing Bonnie and talking over the movie all in the same breath and ridiculously fixated on Chris Hemsworth's arms.)
Wait. Stop. She doesn't want to think about Caroline.
But in between the spells and in between the chatter she caught a line Thor said to his little scientist girlfriend – about how magic and science were both the same on his world. She had scoffed at it at the time, thinking of how little regular people understood magic, the give and the take of it, emotions and willpower in the place of numbers and measurements.
Now she could almost see his point.
A spell was a formula, and every word was a variable, evolved from thousands of years of testing and experiments. Thousands of years. Bonnie didn't have that kind of time.
The ascendant lay in one palm, a knife in the other, as she watched the sky overhead for her eclipse, the words of the spells looping in an endless circle around her brain. Formula. Variables. All accounted for. She was going home.
Thousands of years. The eclipse begins, her chant begins, knife across her palms and blood everywhere – 'I'm gonna smell like blood forever,' is her first thought when the knife goes in. It's inane, but not as dumb as gaping up at Kai and thinking 'why does he always go for the stomach?' – and there is whirring and noise and wind. There is a pull in her head in a direction that she couldn't name but knows is not where she should be headed.
Bonnie's head swims a little and she tries to focus. She thinks of home, home. Matt at lifeguard training with her, the growl that ripples under her skin when she touches Tyler, Stefan's voice so gentle as he rescues her from the tomb, Jeremy's palms, Jeremy's laughs, Elena at Christmas time, vampire pancakes and too much bourbon in the glass Damon pours for her.
That couch and Caroline draped all over her. Bonding.
Home. It is her one consistent thought, behind all the Latin. Home. She thinks of her Grams and says the spell through a smile and then-
"I can fix it!" Grams' body is so cold.
No, Bonnie jolts, trying to block it out. Think of home. Red and white pom-poms. Friday night lights.
8. 14. 22. Bonnie keeps saying she doesn't want to be a witch but she looks at the numbers and looks at the blood from Tanner's body and she feels for the first time down to her bones. I don't want this.
All the dances, all the dresses. Prom Queen with Matt by her side.
She is breaking every bone in Alaric's body, hoping against hope that she can do this without Damon's plan and kill the Original within. She looks back at Elena, she tastes blood in her mouth, then everything spasms and everything's white.
She is still looking at Elena, but it's the shell of her best friend's bones she's breaking this time. And Bonnie hasn't felt this happy in such a long time.
She is losing the spell, stumbling over the words. Her skin feels slick beneath her nose, a trickling feeling over her lips and down her chin. The tug in her head grows even more insistent, spreading down through her neck, pulling at her heartstrings. Home, she thinks insistently, but it is home she sees, her empty house full of dead people and her. She takes up even less space than the ghosts.
They burn Jeremy's body without letting her see it.
Bonnie's grip tightens on the ascendant and she speaks slower. She's losing time. Please, she begs. The tugging sensation pulls at every muscle of her body. She thinks of sleepovers at Caroline's, curled between her and Elena. Thinks of Abby dead on that same bed as Bonnie waits for her to reawaken as a vampire. Home.
She sees a house, tall and Gothic with one too many spires, and she knows in her gut that it is not a home. She also knows it's not hers. She's never seen it before.
She stops chanting. Tries to drop the ascendant. The pull does not disappear, but she does.
Everything is blindingly white for a moment and then she is stumbling forward on ground far less stable than what she had been standing on before. Her shoes sink into it, then her knees as she falls, then her hands, her bleeding empty hands.
This is not her home. She has spent hours in the forests surrounding Mystic Falls and knows every plant that grows within them. She can even list off their latin names, if she was so pressed. The trees around her are willowy and smooth, the sparse grass beneath her fingers thin-bladed and sharp. This is not her home. This is not a home at all.
There's a certain echo to emptiness that Bonnie has grown to understand intimately in the past few months. Like a hole in the world where all the life fell to the bottom. Everything she does is like tossing a piece of her and listening for the thud when it hits the bottom. It never comes. She could hear it in Kai's head whenever he grabbed at her.
The same echo is here.
She cries until she laughs – or maybe it's the other way around? She'd done everything right, just as she always has, and she still lost. Just as she always has.
Bonnie struggles to her feet, then starts laughing again and sinks back down. A few minutes later, when the laughter has cycled back around to tears and the tears have dried, she tries again. She can't give up. It's not even that she won't, not anymore, she just cannot. She cannot let the universe win like this. Magic has been tossing Bonnie around since the moment she woke up on the cold ground after Emily's spirit hijacked her body when she was sixteen. She can't let it win again. She's a Bennett. She'll find this world's ascendant. She'll find whatever celestial event she need to. She'll gather up all the ingredients and try again.
But as she trudges on the trees grow sparse and something dark looms beyond them. Vast and black and truly a ridiculous amount of spires; the house from before. Her foot cracks a twig when she rears back in surprise and then there is the distinctive whoosh of a body racing through the air way too quickly.
Vampire, she thinks dimly, hands rising far too late to stop whoever's coming.
Between one heartbeat and the next, hands appear on either side of her face, framing it. There is a boy in front of her, dark hair and dark eyes and for one paralyzing second all she can see is Kai but this is not that face. The hair is lighter, the eyes aren't empty, the mouth permanently quirked.
She thinks the same thought she had when she first saw this face. He looks so much like his brother.
"Kol?" she asks like she doesn't know, because she knows this face, but Kol is dead. She met his ghost. She didn't save him from the other side, she didn't even look for him. Kol is not just dead, Kol is gone.
His eyebrows raise and his nostrils flare. His grip grows what is probably only marginally tighter to him but makes her wince in pain.
"I don't understand," she says. Kol wasn't part of the spell, the formula, he was never a variable. Ascendant, blood, celestial event, spell. That was all she needed. Why is she here? Why isn't she home? "What did I do wrong?" Her voice sounds so small, even to her own ears. She takes up less space than ghosts. She is barely there under Kol's fingertips.
She and Damon had done the spell, and he had gone home. Why hadn't she? The only difference – the only difference was her.
"Bonnie Bennett," Kol whispers. His voice is right, and she is startled by how accurately she remembered it. "I hear you. I hear you." The echo of an empty world, the noise of Kai's head, is in his voice.
"I shouldn't be here." She is no more talking to him than he is actually listening to her. "You shouldn't be here." The Prison World was made for Kai, wasn't it?
Thousands of years, she thinks. Science and magic. Her grimoire, some of the writing ancient, with fresher ink scrawled in the margins, improvements and corrections. A theorem, tweaked and perfected until the human race could turn on a light bulb. To achieve the pinnacle of achievement took eons of trial and error and experimentation. Kai's couldn't have been the first.
Kai's clearly wasn't the last.