15 / boundaries
She is finished reading poorly handwritten spells when the words begin to blur into one continuous scribble. Wine glass in one hand, his phone in the other, she closes Docs and accidentally finds herself in his app collection. It's sparse and unsurprising, except for one familiar icon.
"You have Instagram?"
She doesn't care that he's been avoiding her. She did, but she's buzzed now, and part of her only wants to relocate the wayward string in him that is his exposed vulnerability and pull it until he's unraveled.
"Duh," he mumbles from the floor, where he's crumpling up pieces of paper and throwing them into the furnace, his back turned. He won't even face her. "I'm following you."
"I didn't notice."
"Yeah, you and everyone else who won't follow me back."
"Don't be like that."
"Don't be a person with feelings?"
"Pro tip, there's a difference between feeling sorry and feeling sorry for yourself," she says, opening his Instagram and looking at his profile.
"I'll make a note of that," he grumbles.
He only has seven posts. Most are edgy, heavily filtered close-ups of random objects. A melting ice cube, a stepped-on candy wrapper, a pepperoni ripped from its pizza. The latest one is of her, swapping the collection bucket on one of their tapped trees. It was posted today, but she recognizes her outfit from the week before.
"You didn't ask me if you could post this," she says, holding the phone up for him to see, annoyed but not astonished that netiquette isn't a given for him. "You need to ask permission before you put pictures of people on the internet."
He stops burning things for a second and looks truly bewildered.
"Why?"
"It's just privacy. And consent."
It takes him a moment before mumbling, "Sorry."
"It's ok. This time. But don't do it again."
He returns to crumpling his paper balls and throwing them.
She scrutinizes what expression can be seen on the portion of her face shown in the picture he took. She looks happy, almost. Content, at least. Borderline fulfilled. She doesn't even remember him taking this. That's another thing to talk about.
"You know my friends could use this to find us, right?"
He shrugs, as if he'd thought of it and decided not to care.
"Just thought they should see that I'm not keeping you in a basement or like some sex dungeon."
"Hot," she says sarcastically, appalled he would even invent the possibility.
"Probably what they're thinking. Maybe they'll fuck off if they see that we're actually doing something productive and we're happy, or something. Plus there's probably hundreds of these types of places all over the country."
"Why do you care what they think? Truthfully."
He grins somewhat evilly, she can see it on the side of his face, glowing as the fire grows.
"I bet it pisses them off a little, don't you think? They could really use our help, and we're here, taking it easy. In their eyes, you're shacking up with the villain. By choice."
"We are not shacking up. And I'm not trying to piss anyone off."
"Maybe you should. You said you tried setting boundaries in high school and here they are, still crossing them." He gives the fire one good poke. "They don't respect you."
By this point, they've exchanged high school stories. She's told him it's been impossible to keep up with regular life since the Salvatore brothers returned to Mystic Falls. That she's tried to set boundaries between herself and the vampires before, before her friends became them. When Grams died. And it's true that her boundaries didn't hold. But she chose to involve herself again, initially to sabotage their plans and get Damon killed. She only became woven more tightly into their dramas after that.
When she was telling Kai all of this, it almost became a breakdown. And she wonders how different life could be, if...
"I can never go back," she realizes out loud, "It'll all just be the same. Drama, day in, day out. Over and over. Someone's dying, someone's dead, someone's coming after someone and soon they'll be dead. There's always something to fight. No time to live a normal life, no time to breathe."
"And witches always get roped in, don't we?"
"I'm sick of it," she says, biting down her molars for the anger of saying it out loud.
Kai uncrosses his legs and gets up.
"Everything you said earlier," she says, and she's just thinking out loud now. "You're right. They just need me to fix it. Because they don't have the power."
He eases himself onto the couch with her, still somewhat reticent, but something's changed. The vibe is delicately momentous. He's trying to make up with her. Things have been so tense.
"Wanna make them really mad?" he asks.
He reaches for his phone, but rather than take it from her hands he presses the camera button with his thumb, his fingers brushing the back of her hand with electricity in them. She almost flinches but controls that impulse. He puts the camera in selfie-mode, and she sees the both of them together, staring down and at themselves.
"Let's give them something to talk about," he quotes the song, with some hint of the day's mood, his hurt-fueled spite, lingering in his tone. It might not be healthy, and it might be dangerous, but she's discovering that she likes this part of him. The part that gets even. She doesn't know if she's changing or if he's bringing something out in her that was present all along, and what it could mean for her future. For their future.
Letting his hand guide hers, she holds the phone up above them, frames their faces looking darkly into the camera's eye.
"Smile," he whispers, and she catches the tiniest glance at her mouth. She turns up her lips, brightening her eyes, trying to express in one image how much it scares her but how free she has felt, being away, being unavailable, being with someone who challenges her to put herself first. Someone who, although he's done his harm and could probably never really make it up, is trying.
"Hold up the wine," he suggests, fuel to the fire.
Obliging him, she brings her wine glass into the frame, and suddenly she's extremely aware of his face just beside hers, his left hand creeping around her shoulder, that he smells like Fritos but in a way that makes her hungry, and his smile is arresting but she knows he's doing it on purpose. She presses capture, exhilarated, intoxicated.
They choose a filter and post it together like conspiratorial goblins, giggling at their own insolence. He steals a sip of wine from her glass and his hand hasn't left her shoulder. When it's done, his Instagram feed refreshes and it catches her off guard to see something new, from Jeremy. With a girl. All in the span of two seconds, she registers these things and that he's tagged the girl and she could, if she wanted, click and investigate what's happening there, is she really that cute, is she a long-lost family member, or is he fucking around already—was he fucking around while she was gone?—and why should she care when she's just made a fuck-you post with everyone's least favorite and anyway she told him explicitly not to come home and see her because she's different now...
"I have to go to bed," she says in sync with the speed at which Kai blackens his screen to disappear Jeremy's photo and pockets his phone as if nothing remotely hurtful has just occurred. Possibly, in his limited grasp of emotions, nothing has.