Unfortunately, 1.5–2 weeks between chapters may well be the schedule I end up settling into. Doing my best to garner more inspiration and energy for my writing. I hope everyone is well and enjoying Bonnie's adventures as much as I am.

Soundtrack:
The Beach Boys – "Sloop John B" from Pet Sounds
Animal Collective – "In the Flowers" from Merriweather Post Pavilion
Olivia Rodrigo – "enough for you" from SOUR (doesn't fit the context exactly but I am obsessed with this album and had to include something from it, plus I feel like it could have been used in the show, probably for a sadder scene but whatever)

Search fanfic title on Spotify or Apple Music for full playlist

February 5, 2016

"Did you make this?"

"Bonnie, did you seriously just ask me that? You know I can't cook."

"Yeah."

"I mean, I feel like saying 'I can't cook' doesn't even do my profound lack of culinary skills justice."

"Yeah."

"Are you going to blow out the candles?"

"Look, I get what you're doing. Cheer me up with a recreation of our little friend parties, get me drunk, coax me into having fun... Believe when I say I've tried. I've tried to make every individual ounce of my being 'move on' and I just can't. I can't. I loved her too much. You of all people should understand that."

"I guess I can't argue with you there."

"What am I supposed to say? Happy birthday to me. 23 years on this bleak-ass earth with nothing to show for it. More than two decades of failing, suffering, losing people I care about. How is that something to celebrate?"

"Because you do have something to show for it, Bonnie. You're the most amazing person I have ever known, and that's only gotten more true the longer you've been in my life. You are kinder, wiser, and braver than people who have been around ten times as long. You have the rest of your life ahead of you, and no matter what you decide to do with it—magic, anthropology, bartending even, whatever—you are going to change the world in your own special way. To have loved so deeply is a gift... that is too often disguised as a curse. Believe me, I get it. Nora made you a better person, and this new person isn't really sure who she is without her. But you'll rediscover yourself again, just like you did then. And I am honored to be by your side the whole way."

"Thanks. Deep down I know you're right. But it hurts."

"Well here comes Damon with that Salvatore-storage bourbon. Might help a bit."

"Elena."

"Yeah?"

"I'm still so happy you're here."

"So am I."

December 31, 2013

Dear Elena,

It's only been a week since my last letter, but nonetheless so much has happened. Long story short, Damon had the vampire equivalent of a psychotic break and went AWOL for a few days. Thankfully I can follow that horrifying sentence with some much better news: he's now home and safe, drained out in the basement cell. He's been in and out of consciousness… we can't get anything out of him about where he's been. No suspicious headlines or police investigations that we can find, so that's promising at least. Stefan told me it sounds like he's been dreaming about you, so there's that.

In other news, today's the next in my list of firsts without you: New Year's Eve. I know we didn't spend the last one together either, but at least that time I had hope for years and years of make-ups. And now... to be honest I just want to spend the whole night getting way too drunk with you and Caroline and doing dumb girly stuff and playing Twister and watching the ball drop on TV before we pass out. What do "adults" even do to celebrate New Year's these days? Am I supposed to go out to a club or something? Get shitfaced and wrap my car around a telephone pole at 3 a.m.? Stay in my dorm room and eat ice cream and cry? None of those options sound appealing to me. That's why I need you, so you can make the decision for me and force me to have fun. I think being forced to have fun is the only way I CAN have fun anymore. Okay, that's an exaggeration. But it feels like that sometimes.

How literally psychic is this life-link between us? Because if you can hear me at all right now, do your best to telepathically transmit me some advice: how do you think your best friend should spend her holiday night?

At risk of filling the majority of these with my relationship drama that will probably be completely irrelevant to you whenever you wake up, I have some updates on my Nora situation. I'm sure this is going to look even more nonsensical written out than it sounds in my head, but things with her are so so so SO good, and yet I can't shake the feeling that there's something wrong. I don't even know if it's specific to her or it's a problem with me, but when I'm with her it's like I can feel this amazing, warm balloon filling up inside me, and it's what I've always imagined love to be like, but there's also this tiny hole somewhere on the balloon, and so it can never fill up completely because all of the warmth is leaking out, but when I try to figure out what exactly the hole is, it gets bigger and bigger, winding itself into my thoughts like ivy, explaining nothing and everything at once, and the only way it stops is if I just stop thinking. It's so frustrating because being with Nora helps take my mind off it, but then I have that awful almost-but-not-quite-complete feeling and the cycle starts all over again. You're the first person I've told about this, and right now I only feel capable of writing it down for someone who won't even see it for the rest of my life because everyone's going to think I'm crazy, or at least worry about me too much. Part of me believes I'm just trying to find the tiniest of flaws in my life because for the first time in a while things are actually going okay and I'm not really used to that, but when I met with that witch Freya (who sent me the dress) she mentioned that it might be some sort of psychic connection to a dark afterlife dimension that used to be concealed by the Other Side and may or may not be literal, biblical hell. So yeah, I'm not really feeling equipped to take that on right now.

But like I said, aside from all that everything is going pretty well. I applied for some research programs for the summer, Stefan's trying to win Matt back over by working with him on a plan to reintegrate the population of Mystic Falls after the new year hits, Nora's building her memorial and helping clean up the town (although it snowed a lot the other day, so not much progress on that front recently), Care and Alaric are getting better and better at the "expecting parents with an extremely unusual relationship" thing... at this point it seems like I'm constantly bracing myself for when the other shoe drops. I mean, it's kind of a thing with us that every time life doesn't suck for a while and we let our guard down, we end up deeply regretting it later. So I'm trying to stay both optimistic and realistic. No harm in preparing for the inevitable future, right?

Well, this ended up being my longest letter yet. Right now I'm smiling at the mental image of you finally waking up in that coffin, stretching your arms and yawning, before Caroline immediately sets down a giant trunk full of all our letters and says, "Okay, study up!" Anyway. See you... never.

Love always,
Bonnie

She sets her pen down and exhales—half sigh, half yawn. Was her closing line too morbid? Bonnie's noticed her humor, and temperament in general, becoming much darker. But if I can't find humor in it, what else is there? Plus, Elena will have sixty-odd years' worth of letters to work through—If I even live that long—so this will just seem like a passing phase to her. Right?

She decides not to twist her brain up any further thinking about it and leans back in her desk chair, stretching her arms above her head and rolling out her stiff shoulders.

Bonnie's been spending most of her time indoors the past few days; as she wrote in the letter the roads and roofs of Whitmore and most of the surrounding area have been heaped in white drifts yet again. Though it's not nearly as much as the arctic tundra by which she and Nora found themselves stranded in Cincinnati, the initial furious snowfall has tapered into an almost completely consistent lazy flurry. That, along with the bitterly cold temperatures, has kept most areas from being anywhere close to cleared away, and thus the particularly intense homebody-ness that so-called winter wonderlands always seem to bring has remained steadfast within Bonnie as well. She whiles away her most of her days in the comfort of her dorm, which seems to only get cozier during the colder months, and it's been quite nice—she plays music softly over speakers sometimes, and usually has a decent-sized fire crackling in the hearth, but she's also become entranced by how quiet it can get: not a soul in the building with her, the dull roar of the outdoors muffled to a breathless whisper by quilts of white, just that complete, swathing silence (which always reminds her of Nora and what she said in the motel room) and the sound of her breath and her beating heart and her whirling thoughts, often softly accompanied by recent memories of magical nights spent with the beautiful brunette, intimate dinners by warm amber candlelight and late-night moonlit walks in the snow.

But it's not all peaceful; ever since Freya talked to her about it, the bizarre "hole" in Bonnie's mind has become much more difficult to ignore; sometimes it seems as though it's something as concrete as a voice trying to tell her something, and other times it's more like a gravitational singularity inside her head, pulling anything else she thinks into a cascading descent of doom, and she has to steady her breathing and completely focus her attention on something else, something tangible and real, for it to go away. In addition to making copious amounts of tea and coffee, finally cleaning and rearranging things she'd been putting off for months, and occasionally venturing to Scull wrapped in three jackets and twice as many pairs of pants, she's been talking on the phone with Damon, who remains drained and weak in the Salvatore cellar. They hadn't even done anything to find him; he just showed up not long after Bonnie briefly talked with Stefan at Scull, seeming to be in a temporary state of lucidity and wanting help. He'd gone somewhere up north intending to dessicate himself, he later told them, but his rational mind eventually won out and he made his way back home. He refuses to let anyone consider letting him out until they figured out a solution that would guarantee he wouldn't hurt anyone. Bonnie doesn't even know where to start. She's waiting to hear back from Freya for help.

Bonnie hasn't told Damon exactly what's going on with her, but they mainly talk about the stuff going on in his head, which often helps her think about her own issues. Though, according to Damon, the hallucinations have become easier to distinguish from reality or outright dismiss, he still feels his mind being pulled toward the conclusion the Stone wants him to come to: that he's a monster with no potential for finding humanity or redemption. It's funny to think that just four short years ago, Bonnie would have wholeheartedly agreed with that designation, yet now she can't really imagine life without the elder Salvatore brother at all—or the younger one, for that matter.

"Is this, like, too much for you to hear about right now?" Damon asked her a few days ago in the midst of a detailed account of an especially disturbing sequence of hallucinations. "Because that would be totally fine. I feel bad dumping all this fucked-up shit on you. And when I feel bad about something, that's usually a sign that it's pretty goddamn bad."

Bonnie sighed. "Well I'd be lying if I said it wasn't hard to hear some of these things. But talking about it makes you feel better, right?"

"Yeah, definitely." She hears him cough as he holds the phone at a distance, but it does little to mask the sound of the grating pain he's in.

"Are you sure you still want to stay dried up in that dusty cell for New Year's Eve?" She asked quizzically.

"Bon, I almost killed you last week. Hell, I did kill you, it seemed that real. Realer than any of this other shit. And it scared me to death. In that moment, thinking I'd lost you and that it was all my fault... I can't remember another time I've felt agony worse than that."

Bonnie put an open hand on her chest, feeling the spot where her heart beat the strongest against her ribcage, remembering the bizarre, inexplicable events of that evening. If things were different, she might speculate about what really did happen, but the last thing Damon needed to hear was that there was a possibility he actually killed her. And he didn't, anyway, because she's alive now. Right?

"Well I'm still here," she finally said.

"And I couldn't be more thankful for it."

Now she paces around her room, absentmindedly putting away loose clothes and knickknacks as she mulls everything over. Servants of the Devil, ancient magical bells, psychic energy, and possibly a clandestine resurrection? None of this makes any sense. All of a sudden, as if a certain thought process had led her mind straight up a cliff and off the edge, Bonnie sees and feels her surroundings detach from reality; she becomes an anchored point of isolated consciousness among tangible facsimiles and façades. Her breath and heart rate increase and she starts to panic, gasping as she grabs for the edge of her bed and comes in physical contact with its cold artificiality.

In a brief moment of clarity Bonnie remembers her anchor point. She rolls up her shirt and passes a few of her fingers over the scar from where Kai stabbed her. The smooth, raised fold of scar tissue brings her back to earth. I'm here, I'm alive... I'm me. She repeats the words over and over in her head like a mantra until she's once again submerged in the realness of her feet on the ground, her arms at her sides, her eyes closed.

She's just finished fully calming down when she hears muffled voices in the hall and then a key turning in the lock. Bonnie just about jumps out of her skin and starts to re-panic until she realizes it's probably just Caroline and that she is fully dressed and doesn't have anything else to hide anyway. But the new arrival is still a surprise, for the bubble-vest-bundled blonde vampire is accompanied by Nora, who looks understatedly stunning in her knee-length deep violet coat and black felt beret. Both of the girls are toting several reusable shopping bags on each arm, with the exception of a small, white paper sack in the brunette's left hand. They're giggling together at something that was said right before the opening of the door before they notice Bonnie, and it's almost impossible to tell whose face breaks out into the biggest smile.

"Bonnie! We didn't know if you'd be here! I texted you a bit ago…" Caroline's pale cheeks are red from the cold, but as always she looks immaculate, the rosiness easily passing for perfect rouge.

Bonnie starts and just now fully notices what's happening, before her lips slide into a grin of their own when she takes in the sight of two of her favorite people, her gaze lingering in intersection with Nora's emerald irises, which glow and dance with a loving playfulness. The heretic's tongue briefly flicks out to wet her lips and Bonnie swears her heart skips a beat.

"Well? Are you going to keep looking at Nora the way I looked at the blood-infused peanut butter and marshmallow fluff casserole I made myself this morning, or are you going to answer me?"

The witch finally snaps fully back into the moment and belatedly registers her friend's question. She glances across the room at her phone, which rests on the corner of her desk, where it's been for the past few hours since she set it down the last time she checked it. "Sorry, I was writing a letter to Elena and I guess I just zoned out big time." She scans over the pair again. "Since when are you two shopping buddies?"

"Since Caroline taught me the wondrous art of exploiting ludicrous holiday sales," Nora answers, setting her arsenal of bags on the floor one by one before handing the small paper one to Bonnie. "This was supposed to be another one of your Christmas gifts, but it took longer for it to be completed than I'd thought."

Bonnie looks down at the surprisingly heavy item and then at Caroline, who is obviously trying to hold in tremendous excitement by putting on a false neutral posture. Nora has a similar expression, although she's not trying to hide hers as much. Bonnie reaches into the bag and pulls out a snowglobe with a worked metal base about the size of her palm. Inside the sphere of thick glass is a facsimile of the trees and parking lot on the west side of Mystic Falls High, which was empty except for a blanket of "snow," a gorgeous, glowing little Christmas tree, and three tiny figures standing next to it, which look suspiciously like…

"Is that... Elena, Caroline, and me?" Bonnie asks in disbelief, still staring at the perfect, peaceful scene immortalized in miniature. She shakes the globe and watches the fat, fuzzy flakes drift down onto the branches of the skeletal trees.

"You've told both of us the story about how you celebrated 'Christmas' alone in the prison world. And neither of us have been able to get it out of our heads. So I thought, well, you know…" Nora shuffles her feet.

"She commissioned the damn thing from some specialty snow globe maker in Richmond. Us, together on Christmas in there forever…" Caroline looks simultaneously giddy and angry at how good the gift is. She turns to the heretic and says, "If you ever get a chance you need to slip Stefan some tips. Oh my God. He is the sweetest, but he would never…" She trails off again. "Ugh. You two are goals."

"I have to agree," Bonnie replies, even though her eyes are fixed on Nora's. She sets the globe in the middle of Caroline's bed and sort of half-skips toward the brunette and wraps her sweatered arms around the girl's slim neck and pulls her into a deep kiss, not really an overtly seductive one but more of a simple, pure act of melding together, melting together.

"So I take it you like it?" Nora says with a slight smirk after they reluctantly pull apart.

"Of course she does," Caroline says, probably just to remind them that there was another person in the room. Bonnie blushes furiously and she steps back from Nora a bit.

"Yes, yes, I love it," she breathily agrees. Her mind is racing with a million thoughts, but for once they're all good. Among many, many other things, for the first time ever Bonnie feels chosen, truly valued, loved—in the simplest, yet most important sense of the word. There is nothing that can stop her from being 100% happy with Nora because her whole body finally resonates with the truth that she is worth it, that she deserves someone who cares about her this much, who treasures her and empowers her and chooses her again and again and again. "Thank you, Nora. I don't really have words."

"That's okay. You've said plenty without them. You're welcome."

There's a moment of not-so-awkward silence in the wake of the emotional exchange—well, a Caroline moment, which tend to be on the shorter side. "So what are we doing for New Year's Eve?"

"I hope you're not planning on getting trashed," Bonnie says dryly.

"What are you gonna do, stop me?" The blonde's eyes twinkle with mischief. "But I still want to have fun! Alaric and Stefan are both having bro drinks with Damon in the wonderful venue that is the Salvatore gulag, but I'm not about to spend my night being painfully sober while my boyfriend, his brother, and the father of the children I carry get embarrassingly drunk trying to outdo each other." She takes a deep breath and places her hands on her swollen belly. "Is a nice holiday night in with my best albeit only friends too much to ask for?"

Bonnie smiles. As much as she'd like to kill the hours before midnight alone with Nora, swapping a bottle of wine or two or three between them, talking about everything under the sun and making each other laugh until both of their stomachs hurt, breathlessly pulling off clothes and pressing hands and lips and tongues against alright, brain, settle the fuck down. She shakes off her merciless horniness and is just about to suggest they pound some junk food and watch a few romcoms in the room when Nora speaks up. "How about our house? Neither Valerie nor Beau have any plans either and they'd be happy to have guests. We've furnished the place quite nicely, there's a rather large television and a system of sound amplifiers—"

"Speakers," Bonnie interjects without hesitation. Helping Nora acclimate to the new century has become second nature for both of them.

"—right, speakers, and there's a lovely kitchen and furniture and—"

"Food?" Now it's Caroline who interrupts. She has a look on her face like a ravenous lioness.

"Beau has always been an excellent chef and he's obsessed with trying every single ingredient he never had access to in the 1800s, and Valerie's become quite fond of packaged snack food. So yes, I believe we have more food, and blood, than even you could devour."

Now Caroline's countenance is competitive. "We'll see about that."

Nora laughs. "So that's a yes?" She looks at Bonnie, who smiles and nods. The witch has a good feeling, a distant but radiant certainty that tonight will be much better than the last time so many of them gathered in one place.

"So it's settled then," Caroline summarizes, hands on her hips. "You're sure we don't need to bring anything with us?"

"Let someone else be the host for once, Care," Bonnie says with exaggerated exhaustion.

"Because that always ends up so well," she answers with a scoff before stepping toward the bathroom. "Okay, just give me a few minutes to get ready."

The door shuts behind her as Bonnie takes stock of her own current clothing situation: oversized forest-green sweater with a large black witch's hat design sewn on the front (one of her last gifts from Grams), candycane-striped pajama pants, fluffy slippers. "I guess I should change and stuff too," she sheepishly remarks.

Nora tilts her head to listen for the flow of the sink behind her before speeding to Bonnie in a flash and resting her strong, delicate hands on either side of the witch's hips, as always fitting them perfectly as if they were made to do so. "On one condition," the brunette says softly, pressing their bodies together in glorious unison.

"And what would that be?" Bonnie asks in an equally husky whisper, doing her best to reciprocate the sexiness even though her neurons are dissolving into hot pink mush and dripping down to her core.

"Firstly, because it brings out your incredible eyes." Nora brings her right hand up and gently runs her thumb over Bonnie's burning left cheek as she pulls them into a brief kiss. "And secondly," she says even more quietly, their foreheads and noses together, "because I cannot stop thinking about how much I'll love taking it off."

They both just breathe heavily in silence for a moment, eyes locked and only centimeters apart, but Nora steps back with a flirtatious smirk just before Caroline rejoins them in the main room, somehow having done her makeup in mere minutes, presumably with the same technique as her super-speed knitting. "Um, Bonnie? Weren't you going to change?"

"Yeah, yeah, just give me a minute," she responds, shaking off her lustful languor and walking to her dresser to pick out some clothes. She hugs herself as if wracked with a shiver, but she's actually just feeling the fullness in her body: complete, perfect... and entirely free of leaks.

For now.