No flashback/flashforward before or after this one since it already jumps around so much setting-wise. I know it's not even that long and that I should have had it ready sooner, but 1) this is an important chapter, and 2) remember when I said I'd have an announcement that some of you might be excited about? Scroll to the end notes for that (it makes me feel less guilty for self-promoting something else using my own fic). But I will tell you I'm extremely excited about it.

I hope you enjoy the chapter. This is the penultimate section of Part One (a 30th chapter will follow) and then it's time for Part Two. I can't believe I've been writing this thing for almost a year now, and it makes me so appreciative of those who have stuck around for the ride this long. All of the love to you.

Soundtrack:
Mimicking Birds – "Burning Stars" from Mimicking Birds
Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross - "Lincoln Tunnel" from Watchmen Vol. 3
Wintersleep – "Jaws of Life" from Untitled

April 4, 2014

Now that she's come all this way, now that she's actually staring at the door, she's not sure what she expected to happen. That it would feel like 100% the right thing to do all of a sudden? That the anxiety and fear and uncertainty gnawing at her stomach would just dissipate? That she would be able to walk into this thing like the smart, confident woman she appears to be on paper and nail it without a second thought? Any concrete answer escapes Bonnie as her eyes fix on the one variation in the smooth chesnut of the door in an attempt to steady herself: the small sign with even smaller typed text that reads, INTERVIEW ROOM #3.

Now that she's come all this way, now that she's actually staring at the door, she's not sure what she expected to happen. That some sort of resolution would suddenly wash over her like a tidal wave? That years upon years of deeply buried traumatic memories would suddenly unknot themselves from the dark recesses of her brain and drift away in a blissful dandelion-wisp cloud of emotional healing? That some final family vestige, perhaps a distant cousin or marry-in, would be out in the yard planting tomatoes and she could tear them limb from limb and miraculously feel better? Any actual answer escapes Nora as her eyes fix on the one variation in the rough-hewn oak of the door in an attempt to steady herself: the cutesy brass plaque engraved with the name PARKER.

"Good afternoon! You must be Bonnie."

"That's me." She takes the offered hand. "And you're Dr. Yu. It's great to finally meet you in person."

"Call me Arthur, please." He's a tall, willowy man, probably in his mid- to late fifties, but there's still a defiant amount of jet black in his salt-and-pepper hair. He smiles warmly at her. "And I'd have to say the same. I've been wanting to make your acquaintance for quite a while, actually."
Bonnie raises an eyebrow. "Oh?"

"Your grandmother, Sheila Bennett, was a great friend and colleague of the NYU program. She ran a tight ship over here with the occult studies program yet still somehow always managed to find room for lectures and events for us to give at Whitmore. She was a tremendously kind and brilliant voice, and she is missed."

"Oh wow." Bonnie smiles; she's gotten to the point where, most of the time at least, any mention of Grams and the amazing impact she had on so many people throughout her long life cheers her up rather than brings her down. "Did you ever work with her?"

"Personally I never had that honor, no. But I did get the chance to speak with her a few times. She was a true believer."

"And you aren't?" Bonnie tries her best not to grin at the irony of the situation.

"Well, I certainly have my suspicions. Too many things in this world are completely inexplicable for there to not be anything more going on behind the scenes." Yu laughs. "And I believe that supernatural or not, witchcraft is certainly a force to be reckoned with. All of history says this too loudly to ignore it."

Bonnie nods. "Interesting."

Nora had thought the giant grassy clearing the sprawling Gemini village once occupied was quiet, but inside the Parker house as the door creaks closed behind her it's so silent it almost gives her a headache. A soft haze of dusk saturates every cubic inch of the stagnant, musty air in the abandoned building, and even more has collected on the furniture, shelves, and pretty much every other surface, including the floor—some of it sticks to the edges of her shoes as she walks slowly through the main hallway. Though the house has undergone many a facelift, both inside and out, during the century and a half it's been since she last saw it, the layout of the rooms and the way it feels to move around in is exactly the same, and soon Nora begins to shake as the gruesome recollections come slithering out of the shadows: being painfully tied to a chair and forced to siphon as much magic as possible before passing out in an attempt to "override her defect"; standing motionlessly with the other siphoners as the "normal" children ate, talked, and laughed right in front of them, consumed with fear over accidentally making even the slightest noise or movement to avoid being imprisoned in the stone well outside without food for days on end; straining until her muscles seized and tears streamed from her eyes trying to cast spells using only the magic inside her, which the elders insisted was there, that she was just too incompetent to harness it. Every corner of the completely empty house seems to sneer at her as she keeps moving, finally circling back around to ascend the staircase, whose creaks sound like a shotgun blast in the still, dead air with each of her steps.

"So I know this is never an easy question to answer, but I have to ask nonetheless: why do you want to finish your undergrad at NYU in conjunction with getting a head start on the graduate program, rather than just completing four years here and then joining us in the city?"

Bonnie gulps, tries but fails to hide it. They're getting to the big questions now, which means plenty of unexplainable things that she'll have to explain are on the way.

"Don't be nervous," Yu says, presumably in response to her expression. "Just think of this as a conversation."

Said every interviewer ever, and it has never helped. But she finally collects herself enough to start speaking. "I have a lot of reasons, to be honest, and if I were to tell you them all we'd be in this room for a very long time, but the most important one is probably the fact that I need to get away from central Virginia, for my own wellbeing. I've lost too many people; my Grams, my dad, my best friend, my—" girlfriend "—well, you get it. I need a fresh start in a place that will challenge and change me. I think New York is that place, and the fact that my dream academic program is also there seems too serendipitous an opportunity to pass up."

Yu sets his pen down and looks up. "I'm so sorry you've lost so many people, Bonnie."

"Thank you." Bonnie fidgets in her chair that's just a little too cushy. "It's not that I can't be here because things remind me of them, even though that does happen... more like I can't escape the feeling that they would want me to move on. See the world, and so on."

"That's probably a safe assumption." Yu flips through some of the pages on his clipboard. "Again, I'm sorry to have to ask this, but it's just procedure. Despite you having most of the credits you need for graduation already, and your immensely impressive grades, which are the reasons your unusual circumstances are being considered, you have two significant gaps in your collegiate record, one in the first half of autumn 2011, the other the entirety of the 2012 autumn semester. Can you explain?"

I died but then half came back to life as the keymaster of supernatural purgatory, then when said supernatural purgatory came apart at the seams I was resurrected and dropped into a 90s–time capsule universe where I was trapped for nearly a year and got so lonely that I tried to end my own life. But she can't say any of that. She can't tell the truth. So she lies. Again.

The archives room had been the stuff of legend among the abused, neglected Gemini siphoners. They would dream of it together aloud, collectively: a dense, wealthy library in miniature full of books that told the truth (or what they hoped was the truth) that people didn't need to have their own magic to be normal. Nora herself used to daydream about sneaking into the house when all the adults were asleep, sneakily climbing that enormous staircase she had seen but never set foot upon to something that would tell her everything was okay, that her parents really did love her and this was all for her own good, that one day they would stop shunning her and look her in the eyes and tell her she was their daughter. But she never got that chance, and after she left with Julian she never saw them again. And it still doesn't hurt any less.

After the first few opened doors reveal nothing more than a handful of bedrooms and a towel closet, the last one on the left is sealed, and Nora has to both siphon the locking spell out of it and then break the physical mechanism in the knob with a jerk of her wrist. There's even more dust in here; it billows toward her as she pushes into the room, causing her to cough uncontrollably which sends even more particles spinning and swirling about. Nora covers her mouth and nose with a sleeve and waves open the small window on the opposite wall before sweeping both arms forward and whispering motus, and then she watches as the grayish flakes gather together in a torrent that jets through the opening and out into the sun outside. If she were standing in any other house it might be beautiful.

The instant magical dusting doesn't serve to make the small space look any more impressive. It's certainly not like anything young Nora imagined: there are no tall library ladders jutting upward to a towering ceiling, no shelves stuffed with colorful grimoires and photo albums, no warm oil lanterns or soft carpet on the floor. It's cramped, dingy, lit by a single dangling lightbulb that fizzles out twice after Nora flips the switch but somehow claws its way back to a stable glow. There are only two shelves of books, and each volume in the row has the same ruddy brown leather spine with a different range of years typeset in gold in the middle. She reaches out and grabs the one marked 1807–1884, nearly dropping it as the bundle of parchment pages rips away from the old binding glue and hangs by a single stubborn stitch at the top. As she flips through the pages, glazed eyes scanning over names and dates and tedious descriptions ad nauseam, it soon becomes clear that the coven prevented any trace of any of the siphoner children from their historical records. Malcolm, the eldest of seven siblings but the only siphoner, is conspicuously absent under his parents on their family tree, and Beau, an only child, has been reduced to "Tom and Ignes Mendenhall bore no children." Nora's already in tears by the time she gets to her own parents, because she knows what she'll find, but it cuts like a rusty boxcutter anyway: "Augustus and Marie Hildegard are survived by their only daughter, Cassandra."

And a tidal wave of memory sends Nora tumbling into the riptide of time once again.

"I just have one final question for you, Bonnie. I don't expect you to be sure of it yet by any means, but have you done any thinking about what you'd like your graduate thesis topic to be?"

Whatever will help me figure out who the fuck Arcadius is and why he's messing with me from the great beyond. She hasn't had any more visions while awake, but at least once a week the images return in her dreams, preventing her from ever forgetting about it. "I actually have thought about it. I'm sure you're aware of the supernatural reputation my hometown has. And while I may not live here forever, it'll always be a part of me. I think I'd like to write my thesis about it, if I can."

"That sounds good to me." Yu smiles and then stands up. "We'll do our best to make sure the program will make that possible."

Now Bonnie's own face lights up. "Does that mean I'm in?"

He laughs. "If it were just up to me, yes. But like I said, your situation is unusual, so there's a bit more legwork to be done before we make a final decision. But if I were you, I'd be optimistic."

Her stomach can't seem to decide whether to flip and twirl in excitement at this new opportunity or twist in knots at the terrifying prospect of leaving Mystic Falls behind for good, so it very considerately manages to both at once, almost making Bonnie wince as she rises to shake Yu's hand again.

"Can I ask you one more thing before I go, Dr. Yu?"

"Of course."

"When I scheduled my interview I wasn't exactly expecting to speak face-to-face with one of the program's lead researchers. I figured it would be a webcam call, maybe a conversation with a recruiter. Can I ask what brings you all the way here?"

"I really did want to meet Sheila Bennett's granddaughter, but that's not the only reason." He chuckles. "There are a few other students here who are interested too, and occult studies on such an advanced level is a rarity in modern universities, so Whitmore is usually worth the trip. Plus, as you said, the quaint little town of Mystic Falls has some... intriguing mysteries that I'll admit I'm very eager to look into myself, even if it's only at a distance from the comfort of an outdoor dining patio."

"Well, be careful. Mystic Falls may be quaint, but it's also where innumerable bad things have happened to immeasurably good people."

September 19, 1854

When Nora opens her eyes she is transported back to that night when Julian stumbled across the gender-segregated dilapidated bunker on the outskirts of the coven village where she and her fellow "defectives" were kept when they weren't being tortured or overtly shunned. At 14, she's grown past the hesitant idealism of her youth, the ever-present but steadily eroding certainty that all of it really was for her own good, and now, as she packs her meager handful of possessions into a tiny rucksack and the screams of Julian's victims and the chanted protection spell of the coven's inner circle reach her ears through the crisp night air, her bitter resentment twists her exhausted face into a vindictive smile.

She hears the loud, splitting sound of a house collapsing (she would later learn of Julian's penchant for setting homes on fire after eating his way through their occupants) and grabs the thin blanket off the piece of splintered wood she used as a bed, wrapping it around her shoulders as she joins Beau, who's furiously motioning for her to hurry up. They huddle together and step out into the clearing, which has the crackling electric tension of an active battlefield. Ahead of them she can just barely make out a few more of the children in a larger group ahead of them, almost to the treeline where ankle-length grass suddenly shoots up into dense, dark forest. They're right at the edge when Nora and Beau both watch in horror as the hazy silhouettes are engulfed in flames one by one, their shrill screams slashed to whispers by the distance, their sporadic movements and subsequent collapses to the ground absurdly doll-like. Nora sweeps her eyes away from the bodies to see a single figure off to the left, her long brown hair and pink nightgown devastatingly familiar.

Nora's running as fast as she can before she even realizes she's moved at all, and by the time she makes it there she's not sure how much of herself actually tagged along for the ride. "Cassandra?"

"Nora." When her twin sister turns to face her, Nora can see the guilt and fear in her eyes even as she tries to hide it behind a mask of mature indifference. "Do I need to burn you too?"

"You just killed my friends." Nora's either sobbing or laughing. Maybe both. She can't even tell. "You killed them. You say we're the defective ones, broken, but we're not the ones with hate in our hearts. You are. You and mother and father and all the rest.

"Talk all you want, freak. You aren't leaving alive."

The defiant eyes that are slightly different shapes than Nora's own, but still the exact same shade of pale emerald, suddenly widen and bug out as Nora constricts her throat with a spell, one hand on the old quartz totem with Greek engravings she had stolen and hidden for a hypothetical emergency scenario not unlike this one. She didn't imagine it would be her own sister that she'd have to fight, but it barely even feels real anyway, like she's on autopilot.

Cassandra collapses to her knees, gasping in horrible, harsh bursts like a drowning fish, and Nora can see the light starting to leave her eyes just as she feels arms close around her from behind, breaking her trance and letting back in the sounds of the carnage. She whips around to see Beau, looking at her with the same fear she'd seen in her sister's eyes just seconds ago, but with none of the hate, only love.

"Nora, don't. We can't be like them. This isn't us. This can't be us."

Her eyes dart from his deep brown ones to a now barely conscious Cassandra to the deceptively warm orange light of the fires raging in the village behind them to her own hands, contorted into claws and trembling uncontrollably. She looks at her sister one last time, and then a switch buried deep in her brain flips, and then she is running into the darkness, toward her new family.

April 4, 2014

Bonnie lets out a long, tired exhale somewhere between a yawn and a sigh as she shrugs through her dorm room door and drops her bag on the edge of her bed, already unbuttoning the white formal blouse whose a-little-too-tight fit had transformed from minor irritant to outright annoyance over the course of few hours that have passed since she put it on. It's Friday and she could probably go out if she wanted to, but even though the interview had gone better than she expected it would, and the end of the semester's stampeding approach meant that next week was the last one before finals so most of her classes have mostly wrapped up, and the hot guy who'd bumped into her in the library the other day had offered to take her out tonight which meant she could probably get laid if she wanted to, her brain is in firm homebody mode, quickly shooting down all of these motivators with its depressive laser-guided missile defense system: You still won't get into the program. And you should still study and prepare for finals; gotta stick the landing, right?. And that guy was way too nice and cute to be an easy, guilt-free one-night stand. She jerks her head in a vigorous back-and-forth to shake away the flashes of heavy-lidded green irises, long brown tresses clutched in quivering hands, perfect pink lips and how they look as she pulls her face away and looks up from—

The caustic buzz of her phone vibrating from where she'd absent-mindedly set it down on the nightstand snaps her out of it.

"Hello?"

"So? How'd it go?" Ric's voice when he's excited is one of the cutest things ever.

"How'd what go?"

"Ha. Did you interview for clown college instead? Because you're hilarious. Seriously, tell me about it. I heard Arthur Yu himself is on campus. I could just ask that guy questions for hours…"

Bonnie laughs. "It went well, Ric. Like, really well. I'm still not completely sure this is what feels right, but it also feels like it's getting there." Her wandering eyes catch on the old Bennett grimoire that had been Nora's first gift to her and her shoulders sag. "Regardless, thanks for talking me into it."

"Of course. I always wanted to go to school in New York when I was your age. Just because I missed out on the opportunity doesn't mean you should too. Are you worried about leaving us behind?"

"A little."

"Well, we'll come visit. And you barely see me anymore anyway, I—"

As if on cue, Bonnie hears a shrill cry from the background on Ric's end of the call, followed by Caroline screaming, "Ric! Kit please!"

"Well, case in point. Looks like I gotta go. Congratulations again. We'll talk later."

Bonnie smiles and shakes her head as she tosses her phone onto her bed. To put things in perspective, at least she doesn't have to worry about caring for two fragile, defenseless noisemakers whose very survival depends entirely on her. Maybe leaving shouldn't be so scary. She'll always be herself, right? And—

She hears a knock at the door. A very familiar knock.

Nora stands silently before Cassandra's grave in the center-left of the nondescript Gemini cemetery plot. The fraternal twin sister whose existence she has completely suppressed in her mind until now lived for almost fifty more years after that night, finally dying in 1901. She never had any children, and thus was presumed to be the last living Hildegard at the time of her death. Which, Nora supposes, was technically correct.

The knowledge that she is the very last of her family doesn't depress her. Nor does it invigorate her. It just sort of... sits in this upgraded emotional frame she has built inside herself, a more concrete connection to herself and where she is in the here and now, an appreciation for the moment. History, memory, hate, shame, anger... it all flares out behind her in a fiery afterburner plume, burrowing infinitely into the past as she rises steadily to the present.

And later, as she watches the last remnant of the Gemini coven erupt in flames, collapse to a smoking husk of char and ash, it is not retribution she feels radiating from the fire, but renewal. She leaves her incendiary elegy behind and walks with her eyes closed until she hits the main road, breathing in and out as the sounds of the forest slowly overtake the crackle of the burning wood and drywall, and then she calls a ride to the airport and somehow manages to find her way to the exact place she knew she needed to be before the night set in.

And then she knocks on the door.

THE ANNOUNCEMENT: My friend and I started a Vampire Diaries fan podcast! It's called TVD . . . JK and you can listen to our first (and only, so far) episode on Spotify, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, or directly via our Tumblr site ( .com). I wouldn't be plugging more of my own stuff if I didn't think many of you beautiful Bonnie-lovers would be into it, since I'm already so grateful you read my writing at all, but for anyone whose love for the show is just too big to process, maybe you can try listening to us attempt to process ours. We are also looking for guests (the goal is to have one every episode), especially people who would be interested in discussing the typically less lauded seasons (4, 5, 7), so if talking with us is something that interests you, please reach out! (See story on AO3 for direct links)