Mystic Falls, 13 years earlier
She would spend all day outdoors if her mother would let her.
At five years old, Bonnie loved nothing more than running out in green fields and climbing every available tree. Lying on the warm earth calmed her and filled her with a thrilling joy. Sometimes, if she closed her eyes and touched the grass, she could feel every little creature scurrying above and below the soil.
Other kids had invisible friends. She had Nature, and she was everywhere.
Much to Abby Bennett's chagrin.
Her mother was always stuffing her into lacy frocks and church shoes, tying up her hair in ribbons and telling her how pretty she looked, and frowning if she came home with dirty socks or a missing button.
She hated when her mom frowned.
Abby had a smile that lit up Bonnie's world, and Bonnie tried her best to sit still in fancy dresses so her mother would beam at her and call her "flower girl".
"There's my little flower girl". And Bonnie would sit up straighter. Feel better and more important.
Which is why she was sitting quietly that day after school, even though she longed to run and jump with Elena and Caroline on the playground. Her new dress was cornflower blue and flared in delicate layers at the waist. Abby had tied her hair with a matching ribbon and chosen pale yellow socks to go with her red lacquer shoes.
Bonnie wanted her mom to see her seated there, good and proper the way she liked. Abby always picked her up from school, and sometimes if she was in a good mood she would buy Bonnie an ice cream cone.
She waited and waited while the playground slowly emptied. And it was Rudy, not Abby, who finally walked up the pathway to get her.
"Where's mom?"
Rudy didn't answer, and that silence was like quicksand sucking her down.
When they got home, she refused to change clothes or take the ribbons out of her hair. She went to sleep in the last outfit her mother dressed her in. If she nestled into the sleeve hard enough, she could still catch a faint note of Abby's perfume.
Perhaps it's some spark of childhood rebellion, but Bonnie doesn't stay put as Klaus instructed. She runs downstairs when the sound of footsteps disappear off the roof, hurrying out the front door.
She hears a voice, a girl's voice. Klaus is holding a small figure to his side, marching away from the house. His abductee kicks and spits and growls.
"Put me down asshole!"
"I mean to. Away from my property," Klaus drawls in a contemptuous tone. Bonnie sees him freeze abruptly before dropping the girl none too gently on the grass. He holds up his forearm in amusement. She'd sunk her teeth into him. "Not a wise decision, scavenger."
Her green hoodie falls away, revealing a mop of curly hair and a heart shaped face. Young, maybe twelve or thirteen. Blood glistens in her teeth. "I'm not a scavenger."
Bonnie makes to approach the girl but suddenly the same young face contorts into a beastly grimace. The eyes flash yellow and her whole body jerks like a horrid puppet on a string. Nails turning into claws dig into the earth.
She's never seen a wolf in the throes of shifting before. Horror and pity war inside her as she watches the girl writhing in agony.
Bonnie looks to Klaus. He comes to stand between her and the girl, his face is unreadable in the half light.
"Do something," Bonnie pleads.
"There's nothing to be done, witch, except prevent her from attacking us."
"Prevent her from- she's just a kid."
His eyes flash, "She is a wolf."
"So are you!" she flings back.
They lock into a silent battle of wills that's interrupted by a sick, fleshy sound. The girl is tearing into her own hand, savaging the limb in an effort to stem the transformation.
"Oh my god...," Bonnie whispers, as the metallic odor of blood rises in the air. Curiously, despite his earlier remark about midnight meals, Klaus does not move to drain the girl. Instead he stands there, a strange, heavy look on his face.
The day after Abby disappeared, Rudy let her stay home from school. The babysitter, a college student named Ashley who was more interested in reading for class than playing with her five year old charge, said nothing when Bonnie ate her breakfast cereal and brushed her teeth still wearing her blue dress from the previous day.
It wasn't until lunchtime that Ashley noticed Bonnie's crumpled clothes and suggested changing. Bonnie refused. What if Abby came back and she wasn't wearing her pretty new dress? Ashley didn't understand, nobody did. Finally the older girl put her foot down. She took Bonnie by the elbow and tried leading her upstairs.
And then it happened. A frisson like a mothwing, tearing. A small scream. Bonnie looked up and Ashley was sliding down the kitchen wall where something, something, had flung her clean across the room.
The next moments were a blur. Ashley locked herself in the kitchen. Bonnie sat by the stairs, shaking from head to toe. She'd never felt like this. Like she was a leaf in the wind. She didn't know how long she sat there until the door opened and Sheila Bennett flew in.
Her Grams approached her quietly. Bonnie wrapped her arms around herself. "She wanted me to change my dress. But Mama wouldn't like that. I told her so."
"Oh, honey." Sheila crouched down in front of her, her voice low and comforting. "You don't have to change. But...can I touch your forehead, real quick? It'll stop your shaking."
Bonnie curled up tighter. She tasted something wet and coppery on her lips. Sheila's eyes grew wide.
"My head hurts."
"I know, baby. But I promise, what I do won't hurt at all. In fact, it'll make the pain go away."
Bonnie sniffled. She didn't know what was happening. How did Ashley end up in the kitchen? Why wouldn't her hands and legs stop trembling? Where was Abby? And why was her nose running? Questions and confusion swirled around and throbbed in her head until finally she just gave her Grams a small nod.
"Close your eyes baby."
She felt Sheila's cool touch on either side of her head. Then the whisper of some words she didn't understand but that sounded like a song. A sweet, soft light washed over her, taking her consciousness with it.
"We have to do something," she says, again.
Klaus sneers at her, "Sing her a lullabye why don't you. See if that works."
Bonnie glances at the girl again and feels a stir of memory.
"Hold her arms," she tells Klaus in a low voice.
"What?"
"Just do it.".
Klaus swears under his breath, but nevertheless does as she asked. He wrests the girl's bloodied hand from her mouth and pins both arms behind her back. The young wolf growls and spits blood.
Bonnie swallows, unclenching her fingers. She kneels slowly in front of the girl. Glaring yellow eyes almost make her falter while Klaus is watches impatiently.
"Get on with it, witch."
The girl bucks and he has to readjust his hold.
"Hush! You're making it worse."
She ignores his contemptuous eye-roll and takes a deep breath. Looks the half-beast girl in the face. And sees not anger pulsing in the yellow eyes, but a desperate, hunted fear.
Bonnie tries to keep her voice as soft as possible, the way she remembered Grams. She takes hold of the girl's temples. "I'm not going to hurt you, I promise."
The girl grows still. The spell comes easy a river in springtime, flowing from Bonnie's fingertips and glowing around the young girl's face. When the light fades, she slumps forward.
Bonnie breathes a sigh of relief, while Klaus considers the young wolf in his arms.
They lay her on one of the couches in the living room and Bonnie fetches her Grimoire for a healing spell. She feels Klaus' eyes on her as she washes the girl's hand before whispering the incantation. The magic speeds up her natural werewolf healing, and soon the skin is smooth as new.
"She'll sleep for a while. When she wakes up hopefully the trigger will have receded."
Klaus raises a skeptical eyebrow.
"What you said about a lullabye reminded me of a spell Grams used," she explains, "it sort of puts the magical energy in your body to sleep, lets your other senses reorient themselves. She'll wake up with a slight headache but otherwise fine."
"You have personal experience with the spell's effects?"
Bonnie shrugs. "When I was a kid...younger than her." She picks up a blanket and carefully covers the small body, tucking in the corners and resting a cushion behind her head. She looks up and meets Klaus' sardonic smile.
"What?"
"I see you are in excellent shape for impending motherhood. Hardly surprising."
She gives him a wary look. "What's that supposed to mean?"
He makes an exasperated face. "Your friends. Elena, Caroline, Matt...even Jeremy. You were resident mother hen to all, were you not?"
His implicit meaning is clear: her attempts to play nursemaid to those in her life had failed miserably. She glances down at the sleeping girl. There's a stinging warmth in her chest, an ache for things that would never be.
Bonnie straightens and looks him in the eye. "Don't worry, Klaus. I'm not going to be a mother any time soon."
A flicker of something crosses his face. Surprise, maybe. Or doubt. But it's gone before she can capture it and the smooth, faintly amused mask is back.
"I'm gonna sleep down here tonight," she announces. "Just to make sure she's okay. In case she wakes up-,"
He rolls his eyes again. "If you wish to sleep on a settee instead of a perfectly good bed, please be my guest. But Bonnie...," his voice takes on a warning tone, "you will not make this girl one of your pet causes. As soon as she awakes, we send her away. Do I make myself clear?"
"But what if she-,"
"I am not prone to repeating myself, witch."
"Klaus, she's terrified. I felt it when I did the spell. What if she's running from something or someone-,"
He pinches the bridge of his nose.
" - and I know you hate children but-,"
His head snaps to attention, "Is that what you think?"
"Well...I mean you're the 'big bad hybrid' or whatever. I thought hating kids came with the territory."
His strange, deep-set gaze looks past her to the girl sleeping on his couch. When his eyes return to Bonnie she feels as though she's glimpsing the terrible vastness of the ocean through a tiny window. There's an uneasy sensation of being adrift.
Without another word, he walks past her toward the abandoned fireplace.
When Bonnie returns downstairs with her blanket and pillow she is surprised to find Klaus still there, poking at a small fire. The wolf girl is sleeping soundly.
Bonnie chooses the small settee adjacent to the couch and facing the fireplace. She settles in, pulling her damp hair into two quick braids. She'd have to rewash and comb it out properly tomorrow.
She gives their guest another glance to make sure all is well. The girl's frame rises and falls with each breath, quiet as a small boat on calm water. If not a scavenger wolf then who was she? What was she afraid of? And what was she running from?
"A child died in my arms once."
Klaus' soft utterance startles her out of her reverie. He's sitting back on his heels, the firelight flickering across the planes of his face and naked chest, his eyes also fixed on the girl.
"It happened quicker than cutting a string. One minute he was breathing, the next he was gone. I was still human then."
As he rises to his feet and retrieves a glass of bourbon from the mantelpiece, the fire-glow limns the contours of his back, revealing what Bonnie hadn't noticed before: a map of scars, twisted and intertwining like branches of a dead tree.
She tries but is unable to wrench her eyes away from the marred skin, the body's malcontented evidence of his former humanity.
Klaus turns to face her. "Whether I hate children or love them, shelter a hundred orphans or drain them dry for my supper, it matters not. The true cruelty, that some beings are both purely innocent and purely powerless, that is something larger than you or I. An equation as inexorable as the rising sun."
The bourbon is slowly emptied down his throat.
His words both repel and comfort her. Everything about who she wants to be refuses to accept such an 'equation'.
And yet, everything she's known of life confirms it.
Bonnie looks down at her hands. Slender palms and long, knob-knuckled fingers. Hands like your grandmother, Sheila once said. Her heart aches at the memory, and she feels small and unmoored all over again.
She pulls the blanket over her shoulders and curls into the settee, letting the snap and crackle of flames wash over her weary senses.
"I keep wondering if there's another way," she muses quietly. "There has to be..."
The hybrid offers no immediate reply. He leans on the mantelpiece and looks down at the small dancing fire, poised and still as any statue. Bonnie's eyes drift across a cartography of scars.
At length when he speaks, his tone is wry and yet somehow, without mockery.
"Well if anyone can puzzle it out, little witch...I'm quite certain it will be you."
A/N: So a couple of things. One, I have a somewhat different take on the "werewolf trigger" as TVD calls it. Hopefully my interpretation will become clearer as the story develops. Two, you may have noticed that this is a fairly slow burn fic. I have lots of Klonnie goodness planned for the future, but I hope the pace isn't too dreary for people. Finally, thank you from the bottom of my heart for your wonderful reviews last chapter. I had an incredibly stressful couple of weeks with teaching, writing and getting sick, and your reviews cheered me up immeasurably. Thank you for believing in and supporting the story I want to tell. (Special shoutout to the road dogs, y'all know who you are.)
