TW/CW: I don't want to spoil anything, but this is by far the bloodiest and most disturbing chapter I've posted to date. If you have triggers related to depictions of violence, trauma, etc., please feel encouraged to reach out (PM me) for more specific warnings.
I also want to again thank everyone for reading, and to express my appreciation for this fic reaching 2k views on and 1.4k on AO3. I know these are measly numbers compared to a lot of other stories, but for me and this random shower thought that I never could have imagined would become what it is today, it means more than I could ever say. Much love to you all.
Sorry this one took so long. I really wanted to get it right so I actually had a trusted second pair of eyes look over it. I hope the wait was worth it! See you in hell!
Soundtrack:
Portishead – "Deep Water" from Third (I'm just giving up on the no-repeated-artists rule at this point)
Poppy - "BLOODMONEY" from I Disagree
Methodic Doubt - "Carrie/Lucas Theme" from Banshee soundtrack (watch the show, it's good!)
December 24, 2013
"Yeah, well… the Stone does a number on you.
"Yeah. Yeah, it does. Well, I'm here. And it's real. I'm ready for my bro hug."
"Damon…"
"I'm patient. I'll wait until you've unchained me, brother."
"Here's the thing. Hell messes with you. But post-hell... is much worse."
When Nora wakes, her eyelids retracting in that ever-so-sluggish way that concludes a long and satisfying slumber, sun streams through the giant living room window and warms her pajama-clad skin, birds chirp in the muffled distance, the smell of something delicious wafts over from the kitchen. Nora smiles contentedly, but as soon as she starts to move her limbs to shift positions it all floods back at once: running from and then right into Rayna, the tense conversation, Damon's timely arrival, and then…
"No, no, ɴᴏ, NO!" She brings her hands to her face, runs her fingers over every contour, trying to find some inconsistency, some glitch, some indicator of unreality. This can't be happening, this can't be happening, this—
"Nora, hey! You're okay, you're okay. Look at me. Hey, look at me."
The heretic slowly unscrews her eyes and waits for her blurred vision to refocus, bringing into view the one face she needs to see the most. Bonnie's gorgeous green irises are breathtaking even in their tragic current role in her concerned frown, and through the panic whirling in Nora's chest a spire of comfort rises. "Bonnie, what—"
"You're not in the Stone. Okay? Don't be scared. You've just been out for a bit. Somehow Rayna came back from the dead and stabbed you, but it must not have worked since her heart wasn't beating; you woke up soon after and have been in and out the past few days. Have you been having crazy dreams or something?"
"I…" Nora racks her brain, searching back through her memory and finding… nothing. She remembers the Sword going in, the fear, the pain, collapsing to the ground, and then... "Nothing. I remember nothing." She's starting to panic again. "How do I know I'm not really in the Stone? It mucks about in your head, right? Makes you see the things it wants you to see? How can I be— how do I know you're real?"
Bonnie looks taken aback, and even a little hurt. Nora feels a spike of ice in her chest. "I... I mean, I don't know how to convince someone of that. Is there anything I could say that would make you certain?" She takes Nora's hand in both of hers, tracing the lines of the veins and joints with her deft fingers, looking directly at the brunette as she does it, savoring the little tremors in her face and body at the soft touches. "Doesn't this feel real?"
"I hope so," Nora answers softly, closing her eyes again, reveling in the sensation until another scent overpowers the spiced currents emanating from the kitchen. "Do I smell blood?"
Bonnie smiles. "Yeah. Go look in your room. I thought you might be hungry when you woke up so I got you something to eat."
Nora looks at her quizzically. "Did the refrigerator break and spoil all the blood bags while I was out?"
"No, silly," Bonnie responds, standing up from where she was kneeling next to the couch and flourishing the large knife she'd apparently brought with her from the kitchen. Wait, that doesn't— "Just go look. Trust me, you're gonna love it."
Something's off, but Nora can't quite put her finger on what. Maybe it's just her brain getting reacclimated to being fully conscious. And she is starving...
She gets up from the couch and pads down the hallway, the sweet copper filling more and more of her nostrils as she gets closer to the door of her room, which is slightly cracked, and when swung open reveals—
"Oh, my... what the… what…" The words slowly get more and more incoherent until they trail off into a series of bewildered, terrified mumbles as Nora takes in more and more of the scene before her. Copious amounts of blood are smeared across the walls and ceiling, in swathes and spatters and deformed handprints, leading the eye to the floor where there's so much pooled on the carpet that the door makes a quiet squelching noise as it swings over a puddle. It's still fresh and uncongealed, but flies and gnats have already begun to buzz around the wettest parts, their pestilent chorus the only sound amidst the otherwise silent spectacle of slaughter. Matt's is the first face she recognizes, his blue eyes contorted in horror but glazed over with the cold unseeingness of death. The severed head is perched precariously on the nightstand, the jagged neck stump dripping down to the floor where the decapitated body lies half-slumped against the base of the wall. Next to Matt's body is Alaric's, which is being held upright like a grotesque marionette by a long metal spike impaled through his eye into the wall behind, arms dangling and slightly swinging as the rotting mush inside the skull shifts around the bolt. Nora's brought her hands to her mouth in shock as her gaze pans across the room, but they don't much muffle the shriek that tears from her lips when she sees a corpse with its blonde-haired head gruesomely split in two like a piece of firewood, some of the chopped capillaries still spurting minuscule jets of blood across the gap, and her stomach— the children, are—
It's too much. Vampires don't vomit but Nora feels about it as close to it as one can get. Her eyes are streaming with tears, red with the desperate inflammation of total despair. Did I do this? When—
She's about to stumble back out of the door when she senses someone behind her. She whips around and sees Bonnie, her usually beautiful mouth still stitched up in that uncanny grin, knife still ominously twirling in her hand. "Where are you off to?"
"Bonnie, did— did I do this?" Nora's head feels hot, swollen, like it's about to explode. The room is suddenly 15 degrees too warm; she tugs at her sleeve, which sticks to her skin.
"No, of course not! I already told you, I did."
"What?"
"Are you always this ungrateful when someone does something nice for you? I mean, look at this, it's practically a bloodsucker buffet!" Nora looks on in complete and utter terror as Bonnie walks nonchalantly over to the nightstand, picks up Matt's head by the gore-matted hair, and holds it toward Nora as if offering a bowl of mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving, blood still leaking out the bottom. "Look, it's like a coconut," she says brightly, flipping it over so the remnants of the neck are facing upward. "You could drink out of it with one of those cute tropical straws. And a little umbrella."
Nora feels like the ground itself is about warp and twist and all of reality with it. She feels at least three feet removed from her body as she watches Bonnie callously, apathetically handle her childhood friend's mutilated body. "...why? Why, Bonnie?"
"Wow, your nap must have fucked with your brain more than I thought." Bonnie drops the head and walks back toward her. "I've told you twice already. I did it for you. Aren't you hungry? I can see your true face on the edge of breaking through. You want this. And I'm giving it to you."
"No, that's not true, I—"
"Or would you prefer something fresher? I should've known. Shame to waste all this perfectly drinkable blood, but anything for you." Without hesitation, Bonnie brings the blade of the knife to just below her jaw and starts ruthlessly sawing through it, slicing a bubbling crimson fountain that adds to the macabre excess of the room.
"NO! WHAT ARE YOU—"
Bonnie takes her other hand and raises it, and suddenly Nora can feel the blood vessels in her brain popping one after the other, unimaginable pain and a piercing, high-pitched ringing in her ears, forcing her immobile as she watches Bonnie somehow cut through the entire length of her neck, the horrible noises of snapping tendons and metal grinding against bone finding their way to Nora's ears even over the overwhelming tinnitus, seemingly getting louder and louder until the blade gets far enough in and the witch's head tips off her body like a knocked-over vase, still bearing the same blank, emotionless expression as it rolls to the floor.
The last wall of hardiness inside Nora breaks and she collapses to her knees, sobbing and screaming unintelligibly. She takes Bonnie's head in her hands, feeling the limp hair she had once run her fingers through so affectionately, and…
Wait.
This isn't real.
This can't be real.
"Oh, but it is. Or at least, it will be" a familiar voice says, seemingly in response to Nora's internal monologue. She turns her head and gasps.
"Surprised to see me?" Mary Louise asks with a smirk, her impeccable cream button-down coat creating a stark contrast against the grisly reds of the massacre. "I would be, if I were you. Maybe even a little frightened. You did desiccate me against my will and stuff me away in a coffin. Or do you even remember?"
"Of course I remember." Nora stands up to face her, wiping some of the tears from her cheeks. "Do you think it was easy for me?"
"Can I be blamed for surmising as much?" Mary Louise struts around the room with her signature "I own this place" gait, completely disregarding the mass of bodily fluids, entrails, and limbs she's stepping on and over. "You siphoned all of my magic and shut me away in a box and then ran right to perfect little Bonnie. Your girlfriend, who you've been with for 133 years, you just cast me away like it was nothing. Helped kill Julian, the man who saved our lives countless times, who gave us our lives to begin with, like it was nothing. You—"
"You can't know that."
"I beg your pardon?"
"There's no way you could know that Julian's dead. We took you out before they put him down. This isn't real. You aren't real, so I don't have to listen to you."
Nora's fragile impression of a defiant expression falters when the edges of Mary Louise's body blur and melt and suddenly Julian stands before her, very much alive, skin-crawling slime grin plastered across his face. Her eyes narrow in contempt as he brings his hands together in mocking applause. "Well, look at you, my astute little Nora. Your razor-sharp wit was always what I hated most about you. And oh, there were so many things." He looks down at the blood his shoes are half-submerged in and smiles again. "You see, whether or not you believe this is 'real' is of absolute inconsequence. You are trapped in the Phoenix Stone, and you cannot fight it. You cannot stop it. It will make you see what you need to see. It will make you see the truth. And the truth, my dear, sweet Nora, is that around vampires—around you, around me—there will always be awful, senseless bloodshed. Whether you directly cause it or not, it is still your fault, for you are a creature of violence, destruction, and cruelty, and wherever you go you spread those perverse values like a foul plague, corrupting anyone foolish enough to be manipulated by you beyond repair. That is what you're doing to Bonnie. How long before you kill someone again? How long until you realize that there's no amount of good deeds or lifestyle changes that can provide any kind of redemption? You will always be a monster, Nora. You will always be that merciless beast whom I once saw tear through an entire theater audience in one go. Every second you spend with Bonnie allows more of your darkness to seep into her. You may believe she makes you better, but she doesn't—nothing can. And you most certainly make her worse."
"SHUT UP!" Nora screams and goes for Julian's heart, only to jolt and feel as though the bottom of her mind has fallen out as he yanks hers from its socket. He holds it in front of her eyes as she collapses, the bright arterial blood soaking his hand. "Oops. Looks like it's time."
Nora startles upright with a gasp, immediately feeling something small but heavy roll from the middle of her chest down her abdomen and clatter on the table she's now sitting on. A lightning-fast head whip survey of her surroundings reveal the exhausted-looking faces of Beau, Valerie, and Bonnie, who, to Nora's relief, looks much less psychopathic. The uneasy feeling of something amiss is gone. Is she really out?
"How do you feel?" Bonnie asks after flashing Nora a comforting smile.
"Like I just lived a day in a terrifying hell-nightmare universe," Nora answers, taking a deep restorative breath and stretching her sore limbs, which feel so brittle and rusted that she wouldn't be surprised if her joints creaked when flexed.
"A day?" Bonnie's eyes widen and she turns to look at Valerie and Beau, whose expressions look grim.
"Why? What's wrong? What aren't you telling me?" Nora suddenly feels much less restored.
Beau looks at the ground. Bonnie opens her mouth as if to say something but then closes it again. Finally Valerie speaks, softly, hesitantly. "Nora... you've been dead for over a year."
It suddenly feels as though gravity has been profoundly distorted and that her body is simultaneously heavy as treacle and floating weightlessly in the air. "What?"
"Your soul went into the Stone on January 13, 2014. Today is…" Bonnie's voice was already shaky, but now it breaks completely. "Today is May 24, 2015."
Nora's throat is bone-dry. Her gulps for air feel like swallowed razors. "In there it felt like an hour, maybe two at most. What's happened? Where's Rayna?"
"Alive, unfortunately, but indisposed." Valerie's voice sounds like that of someone on the edge of collapse. "Just when we thought her supernatural power arsenal couldn't be any more inconvenient, it turns out she resurrects with more strength every time she dies. The Armory has her under lock and key, and one of us goes there every week to make sure the cell is secure, but it's all still rather unsatisfying considering her initial escape was enabled by a guard who simply unlocked the door for her."
"There's something so weird about that place. I don't trust them." Bonnie doesn't move her gaze from Nora, who's caught in flux-limbo between a sudden comatose state and a vicious panic attack. "Hey, do you need anything? We thought you'd be starving when you woke up so…"
Unspeakable images of the butchery scene in the Stone flash before her eyes and Nora feels sick again. "I need…" She looks outside to see an inky sky nestling a crescent moon and is filled with a powerful desire to be outside, submerged in the open air. Without finishing her sentence she zooms out the front door, barely even registering the fact that they're in the Salvatore house now. Someone must have taken her shoes off at some point, because the surprising but not at all unpleasant feeling of long blades of grass on her bare feet is exactly the reality check she needs. But the tremendous weight of a year and a half of life lost still looms heavy and dark in her mind. Did Bonnie spend all this time trying to save her? Did she even go to school? Or did she give up her life and dreams to save a vampire who probably—no, definitely—isn't even worth it?
Nora doesn't know much time passes while she's out there alone, but her cloud-riding brain, attempting to escape the bleak reality the hard surface of the ground entails, is brought crashing back to earth when Bonnie joins her.
"Are you checking up on me?" Nora asks. She tries to sound playful but it just comes out sad.
"Um, yeah. I hope your memory bank isn't mush and you still recall how Damon acted right after he got out. And he was only in there for like a month. So you can't really blame me for being worried. But also, I have missed you so goddamn much and I just want to be with you."
They spend the next ten minutes or so kissing and hugging and crying, the warmth of the human hearth that is Bonnie Bennett raising the temperature of Nora's freezing soul, but the warming is tempered by the impending arrival of the conversation she knows they need to have. And eventually she's the one who starts, in a burst of anxiety: "Bonnie, please tell me you haven't spent the last 17 months working tirelessly to save me. Please tell me you stayed in school, spent time with friends, that you didn't put your entire life on pause for me."
Bonnie smiles in response, but it's a deeply sad smile, one that says I'm fine with it, but I can't give you the answer you want.
Nora isn't fine with it. The mounting dread that's been congealing deep within her tips into the tartarus of gut-churning guilt. "You have to know I never wanted that."
"And neither would I for you. But you'd do the same for me. You know you would."
"But the difference is that you would deserve it! You are an amazing person with an entire life ahead of you. And me, well... the only number higher than the years I've been alive is the quantity of people I've killed. A couple months of paltry attempts at virtue and amends don't make up for that. No amount will."
"Jesus, what did that thing do to you?" Bonnie cups Nora's face in her hands. "You know that's not true, right? If your life isn't worth anything, none of ours are. The future is all that matters."
She keeps talking, but now Nora can't hear anything but the intoxicating thump of the witch's pulse, ever-so-slowly increasing in pace as the chilly night air slightly tightens her veins. Nora is hungry, and that incredible hunger, the likes of which she hasn't felt since they left the prison world, and somehow even worse than that, is consuming her. All of her emotions lose their shape and merge together into a single sinister urge.
"Nora, what's going on? Your face…"
It's the last thing Bonnie says before her words trail off into pained gurgles as Nora's fangs plunge into her neck and her life slips out of her ruptured carotid ounce by ounce.
The bloodthirst doesn't release its grip on Nora's vulnerable mind until the sobering moment many vampires know all too well: the craze of the feed, the overzealous teeth-gnashing tearing through the already weakening flesh of the neck until there isn't much left at all and the weight of the lifeless head shifts and the vertebrae pop and the dull thud of the halves hitting the ground is the first sound of a guilty ripper's living nightmare. In that fleeting, fateful moment, Bonnie had ceased to be Bonnie, reduced to the metronomic throb of red nectar under her skin… and now Bonnie has ceased to be anyone.
Her body, clad in sweatpants and an oversized winter coat, probably Stefan's or Damon's, lies chest-first on the ground, the ravaged hollow between the shoulders still spitting out miniature crimson spurts onto the ground.
Her head lands a few feet away, clammy dead-fish eyes locked straight ahead, dull, uncomprehending.
I'm still in the Stone. I have to be. Nora refuses to let her brain process the sight before her as reality. People wake up while they're still dreaming; who's to say a Phoenix Stone hell-trip doesn't have an equivalent? And Julian said every day ended with him killing Lily. Yes, that was it. Bonnie is her Lily.
"So does it reset now, or what?" she asks no one in particular.
Silence.
"You didn't exactly make me wait long last time. Can we just get on with it? So I can keep learning whatever lesson you want me to learn?"
More silence.
A horrifying possibility blinks to life in the back of her mind and starts to spiral outward, expanding exponentially even as her conscious neurons fight tooth-and-nail against it.
What if—
"Nora... what happened?" The voice is Valerie's. She's standing close to the door of the mansion, with the cautious, fearful expression of someone approaching someone about to jump from a ledge. "What did you do?"
"I…" Nora looks down, sweeping her field of vision slowly so as not to take in the gruesome sight all at once. The body parts are unmoved. Nora can see ants starting to crawl onto the cheek and chin of the head. "This isn't real, is it?"
Valerie doesn't say anything, just looks at her with sad, sad eyes.
"IS IT?"
"Nora, it's okay, it's not your fault. You didn't know what was happening. You can't blame—"
"No. NO." Nora shrugs out of Valerie's attempted embrace and drops to her knees, grabs the body by the shoulders and flips it over.
"Nora…" Valerie sounds like she's crying.
"It's okay, she's okay, we just… I just…" She reaches for the head, ignoring the jarring, jagged truncation at the bottom and gently placing it back on what's left of Bonnie's neck. When she takes her hands away it pitifully lolls to the side, exposing more ants swarmed on and in the left ear.
"Nora, please."
The spiral saturates, and something irreparable breaks inside her.
"This is really happening, isn't it?"
Tears stream down Valerie's face, but only the smallest indication of it creeps into her voice, which is shaky but sure. "Nora, let's go inside."
"No." She sits on the grass with her knees up, arms wrapped around her shins, eyes blankly staring forward as the floodgates of true realization begin to open. "No."
"I'm... I'll be right back, okay?"
Nora barely registers Valerie leaving. Somewhere under the pitch-black, crushing weight of unimaginable shame and self-loathing, an amber lamp flicks on, a point of warmth to which her subconscious desperately clings: I didn't deserve her. I never did. Maybe she deserved something before this, God knows what. But it's certain that Bonnie Bennett deserved the world, and all she got was death at the hands of someone whose evil she forgave over and over. And now, Nora knows that is the only gift she is entitled to accept from the universe anymore. In a strange trance of soul-shredding guilt weaponized by epiphany, she slowly but deliberately gets to her feet, closes her eyes, and removes her daylight ring, spreading her arms in a morbid offering to the sun as the first flames begin to catch on her clothes and she starts to feel her skin melting and
January 14, 2014
"Should we even be trying to get her out so soon? It took Damon like a month to be ready to be pulled out." Bonnie sips her coffee, trying to look at anything but the prostrate form of her dead girlfriend on the heretics' living room table.
"Maybe. But we have to try. I got out after only a few days passed in the real world, but for me it seemed…" Valerie's already exhausted expression crumbles into something even wearier. "...It seemed like a lot longer than that." She accepts her own cup of coffee from Beau, who's just returned from the kitchen. "Okay, are we ready to try again?"
Beau nods.
"As ready as I'll ever be for this mind-numbing spell," Bonnie sighs, her eyelids heavy from less than an hour of sleep last night after they dealt with the aftermath of Rayna's arrival. She's somewhere between refusing to acknowledge the possibility of weeks, possibly months without Nora, and mentally preparing for something even worse than that: losing her entirely. She tries to push these conflicting thoughts from her mind as she forms the familiar triangular formation with Valerie and Beau and begins to chant with them, closing her eyes and sinking the full extent of her magic into the spell. We can do it, I know we—
They hear the impossible: a small gasp from below.
"No. No, please, no…"
Bonnie's brief surge of joy is immediately extinguished by the look of utter terror and grief in Nora's eyes. "Hey Nora, it's me, Bonnie. We just got you out of the Phoenix Stone."
"NO! NO NO NO NO NO! PLEASE LET ME OUT! PLEASE! I CAN'T DO IT AGAIN! I CAN'T! I WON'T!"
And before any of her saviors can process what's happening, Nora is gone.