She had died.
Again.
And she couldn't even save herself. She washed herself down the drain to the depths of hell, not one phone call to her friends.
The thing about dying more than once is that it becomes easier to accept, it's impermanent. Dying more than once is just a prolonged slumber. Most people think dying is the end but after the first time, second, third, Bonnie labeled it a beginning. So she kept rising in her ashes.
Dying in New Orleans was an accident. Louisiana was supposed to be her end all, be all, where she would perish from natural causes like an uneaten apple. Start a happy new long life, forget all about Mystic Falls and be the version of herself she saw when she slept.
But darkness always seemed to follow.
She didn't know if it was homicide or suicide, but it happened. That love spell she did for one of her loyal clients had crazy side effects that left her less...awake.
The feeling that she was falling, that dream, it was supposed to wake her up from her sleep, remind her brain and gut that her heart beat couldn't get too slow. It never happened.
She never woke up.
She died right there in plain white panties and a triangle bra at the age of twenty-four.
The pattern was that she was still devoting her life to other people- her clients, Elena. She wanted to live an honorable life, collect her rewards, bask in the ambiance of her accomplishments as a witch to die peacefully so her best friend could wake back up and retain the center spot that would always be waiting for her.
Caroline, Stefan, Damon, they could all forget about her because her death would be overshadowed by Elena's life.
But something about that love spell woke her up, there was a phantom drifting around her and it wanted to take her over. Eventually it did. She opened her hands and gave it her life because she thought she was in control but she wasn't. She couldn't be trusted with it anymore. Making space for the next controller of Bonnie Bennett's body was surprisingly easy. Except it didn't happen that way.
The love spell was dangerous but she never said no to a client. Odds for side effects actually becoming a reality were devastatingly low but naturally, she had to be in that five percent because she never got a break.
She felt fine but when she fell asleep, she dreamed.
"Is that- is that Bonnie Bennett?"
The voice echoed around her, her steps clicked against the stairs that descended down. Everything seemed hazy like she was seeing things through a filter, an implicit stage, music sounding like a memory, the bass from another room.
But the voice was clearer than a glass window.
"How does it feel?"
Everything was dust black, the floor an entity of its own as fog drifted. She was in a chair, chains weighing her down, only able to move from the neck up.
"Anybody ever tell you how hot you look restrained?"
Her eyes were shut because she didn't want to believe that he could access her. Not now, not ever.
"Open your eyes and look at what you made me, Bonnie,"
Malachi Parker in the flesh, one of the prettiest demons she'd ever seen, possessing that boyish beauty that only sidekicks had. A Robin with no Batman- handsome and youthful, but Robin was never dark enough to be interesting. Never deep enough to have a story of his own. Robin was no Batman. But the thing about Kai, he was too dark and too deep and quite frightening. Kai would murder Batman.
"My first crush." He was eating Cheetos and staring down at her with that manic fascination she knew so well. "Good ole Bonster. You look- bigger." His eyes were staring pointedly at her breast as he licked the remains of cheese dust off his fingertips.
"I think I want you in a slip dress. No bra. No panties. And in white."
She was wearing it then, the chains gone, hands tied behind her back by a strip of fabric. On her feet were high heels with a barrage of feathers across the toe strap. Kai approached with a sparkling clean knife aiming at her neck. The bag of chips discarded.
"What do you want from me?"
He lowered his knife like he was astounded. "What do I want from you? Bonnie, aren't you excited to see me?" He circled around her to press the side of his face against hers. "I missed my Bon Bon."
"Get away from me," she said through clenched teeth.
"Or what? You'll shoot me?" Kai sat right on top of her, just straddled her lap and grabbed the sides of her face. Bonnie's legs painfully dug into her seat enough to ache with his added weight. The knife- now a gun- he propped next to her head, finger on the trigger.
"Not if I shoot you first."
Her breath was escaping her and then he pulled.
Instead of a bullet, bubbles surrounded them, so bountiful she could smell the soap. He tried popping one with his mouth. "Something about the fresh scent of terror that really gets me going."
His eyes followed the line of her strap as it fell down her shoulder from her ragged breath.
"Delicious."
He brought his left hand up, a slight flick of the wrist, and plunged a blunt knife right into her ribs. The red of her blood was a loud sight against the gossamer white silk slip dress.
That was the first night, more than a year before she actually died.
She woke up with a gasp, checking her body and confirming that she was okay- it was only a dream so Kai couldn't come back with her.
Bonnie wanted to return, tell him they weren't finished, make him suffer. She didn't want him to think that he won.
It was urgent for her to put him in his place. See him in pain. No one could harm her like that without repercussions. She was better now- stronger.
The next day, Bonnie couldn't wait to go to sleep, skipping out on meals to make herself feel more exhausted so she could meet Kai again, armed.
He was sitting in the chair this time, rope binding his wrists wearing jeans and a graphic t-shirt.
"Happy Pain Day, Bonnie. What are you? Like twenty-one?"
"Twenty-three."
"And you wanted to see me on your birthday? I feel honored." She tugged harder at the chain across his chest, he groaned. "Is this supposed to scare me? 'Cause I gotta admit, I'm a little turned on."
She realized she wanted to step on him like a doormat, clean the dirt off of muddy galoshes with his face. Stomp the shit-eating grin away.
"Okay, you got me. I'm a lot turned on," he chuckled. "I knew this is what you always wanted. Just me and you again. Alone. You ran away from home so you could meet me in your dreams, guilt-free. It's like we're eloping. This is totally our honeymoon."
"Shut up."
"I mean, face it, Bonnie. You only ran because you wanted to be chased." The rope, chain and chair disappeared, they were only a breath's width apart, his eyes low and steady. "So here I am, chasing you." He gripped her arm and turned her around so her back was facing his front. His hand clamped around her neck.
"Look at us," a wide mirror appeared in the darkness, reflecting them. "We're a pretty cute couple."
Kai, pointing a blade up to her neck; he'd be so handsome if he was normal- it'd be redeeming if he dropped the craziness and let it break then swept it all away. What a waste.
Bonnie, trying to loosen his grip around her neck, so pretty and petite against him. His gorgeous little plaything that bit sometimes.
He trailed his nose up her neck. "You know, Playboy wasn't my thing. I used to have a crush on those 90s supermodels. They had an air of unavailability about them, like they would spit on and humiliate you if you even dare approach them. I never realized you look just like Naomi Campbell and Linda Evangelista's love child."
He could talk, in a room by himself for days. He could go on and on without taking a breath.
"Let go of me. Or I will set you on fire."
"Now that's my love language, your lovely little heart full of hate for me."
"Is it? Or are you just taking what you can get?"
He paused, his grip on the knife faltering ever so slightly. "Excuse me, what now?"
"I know it's been rough for you. Your life. I mean, a man's most prized possession is his son and he didn't even want you. You were a disappointment. Lacking. A failure."
He was surprisingly silent, his mouth closed with an audible click and the hand around her throat grew tighter.
"Did you deserve that? I don't know- but that was your foundation. Something dark and nasty brewed in you like a rotting cup of tea. You couldn't afford to feel love. You only saw it given from other people. Like with magic. Sometimes I feel sorry for you."
"You don't know me, Bon Bon. So I advise you to keep your think pieces to yourself."
"I'm scared." She mocked.
"You should be."
"Sometimes I wonder what you would be like if you felt love. And you're probably still a virgin. Forty-something in a twenty-something body and still a virgin. Miserable. You just transmuted horniness and sadness into anger."
He didn't have enough time to snap her neck because the bullet went right through his heart.
Fatality.
That was night two. T minus fourteen months before dying in New Orleans.
Bonnie felt refreshed like a weight was lifted from her shoulders. There was the sneaking urge, a displaced itch, that she wanted to go back. To see Kai. Kill him again, play their little game.
But she fought it off.
For four months.
She had been plagued with work, client after client and the friends she left behind were still calling her. Was it wrong that she didn't want to answer? She just desired to forget she existed there in Mystic Falls because New Orleans was the place Bonnie had actually chosen. New Orleans was the place where she could reinvent herself, start all over again and design the life she deserved.
Listening to her voicemails brought a feeling of belonging that twinkled in her chest. It was an axiomatic that her friends cared for her but to hear how much they cared sometimes left her eyes watering. She did have nostalgia and missed her friends a lot, her New Orleans neighbors were decent though particularly old- elderly.
She'd run into Klaus every now and then who looked at her like she was a four course dinner. Or she'd cross paths with Elijah and admire his demure charms from afar. But she hadn't made any real friends yet since her clients probably didn't count.
And she was definitely craving some affection, some attention, some sex. If she pretended any longer like she didn't need it, she was probably going to implode in a very gory and graphic way.
She was starting to feel that emptiness settling in, one that couldn't be pushed away like with her friends and her old town. That miserable air of the doldrums commencing, too slow and boring and predictable. The witch needed to chase that excitement to feel something again.
On one designated night she went into a bar, handbag in hand, cash stuffed in her wallet on a mission to have fun. Fun meant drinking and drinking meant intoxication, she flirted with the bartender unabashedly and danced until her feet hurt, lost her shoes, threw up next to the trash can, complained about losing her keys, the ones that were in her hand the entire time, and then she got in her car, engine off and slept.
If she were an actress, the audience would clap and Bonnie would take a curtsy but this was real life, some people laughed and others danced with her, happy to be next to someone who wasn't afraid to live out loud. She slept without a care who was watching or lurking because no one knew who she was- not even herself.
It was there, in the privacy of her car she was able to sink, disappear from her consciousness and let her guard down.
Bonnie tried to fight the feeling of her thoughts drifting. Tried to reel it in when she saw those dim eyes.
No matter how hard she pulled against the tide, she couldn't deny that on her mind was Malachi Parker.
So she surrendered.
He appeared as if she grabbed her phone and dialed, smiling fondly with that far away look in his eyes. The look that said the door was open but no one was home.
"A shot to the heart. How romantic."
She was about to grimace but stopped herself. Bonnie wasn't here, this was the girl who had one too many drinks at the party. The silly girl that possessed her, the one who encouraged her to have fun. This was the Bonnie from New Orleans.
"How rude of you not to visit me. I was beginning to feel abandoned." He said and held his arms out for a hug.
Tonight wasn't going to be a cat and mouse game and she had no energy to remember to hate him. There was only a handsome face in front of her and the numbness inside. The devil on her shoulder telling her to live a little more, let loose, have someone she knew witness this side of her- the lawless and wild Bonnie because strangers witnessing just wasn't enough.
So she walked up to him, placed her hands on his chest for support, stood on tiptoes and planted a kiss to his lips, softly and beautifully, blessing him with with all the love she desperately lacked.
He was stock still unsure of what to do, arms at his sides, hands grasping and releasing air. Silent for once.
She thought he would dissipate starting at the finger tips or vanish but he stood there blinking and breathing, solid and unreadable, both of them waiting for her to wake up.
There was no elephant in this room. Only the two of them wondering who the hell she was.
He trailed his thumb along his lower lip to press the kiss in, to feel it a little better, to remember it in all its details. His eyes changed like a chameleon's from jaded to normal. Then he smiled and he almost looked charming but that mischief was right under the surface.
"I bet Devon's gonna be pissed." He said after what felt like hours, the discomfort settling between them like snowflakes on a windshield. He just silly-commented the moment away. Like his fingers weren't twitching, like his heart wasn't drumming.
Bonnie Bennett had died and came back one too many times because she forgot how she was supposed to react. The old her was somewhere else, a pile of beautiful solid white and shiny bones. Nothing but a memory in her friends' heads, that's what her existence chalked up to.
"Damon," she corrected but laughter bubbled up in her throat, too difficult to resist.
Everything was hilarious, and Kai was just the topper to the bullshit life threw at her. Yet he had the audacity to look at her like she was the bizarre one. She doubled over in laughter until she was shaking herself to breathe- her circumstances were comical and maybe she was losing her mind a little bit but what did it matter?
She laughed so hard that hot tears were sliding down her face and that's how she woke up that morning with a cramped neck and thrumming headache. Folded up in her front seat in an empty parking lot.
The sunlight made everything seem more real, the fact that she was most likely spiraling.
The club towered in broad day, lacking its compulsion and mystery, flaws on display, no allure, no pink stylistic lights, simply another vacant building waiting to come alive in the nighttime. She had a thing or two in common with it.
Wasn't it illegal to drive barefoot? The question was lingering in her mind on her way back to her new home and brought a little thrill into the day. She was breaking the law in a cocktail dress and last night's makeup. A story without words. Picture perfect.
One of her neighbors, Miss Rosie looked her up and down with an eyebrow raised then returned to tending her garden, shaking her head and laughing to herself like her new neighbor was just some crazy kid. This Bonnie didn't have a reputation to uphold saving lives and fixing everything even when she was in shambles. She had no expectations or open hands surrounding her because her relationships were now transactional: client to customer and strictly reinforced since too many people insisted on using her gifts for free.
To Miss Rosie, she was no more than a rambunctious party girl who lost her shoes and probably looked a mess. Nothing more, nothing less.
Bonnie was falling in love with the narrative about her that was living in everyone's heads here. It was becoming easier to forget about Virginia. All the weight and the loss. The feeling made her young again, little Bonnie on the way to her grandmother's house, before the wolves, before the vampires and witches. Just cookies and milk, a bedtime story about magic and the stillness of her breath as she slept, heart expanding with each inhale.
No one expected her to be wise in the mishaps that seemed to always be attached to her friends here. No more pleas to sacrifice herself for another's expense.
Bonnie Bennett was hellbent on doing things the right way this time around.
Because she owed herself a happy beginning and fairytale ending.
She let her work become her world, wrote letters for Elena to explore when she awoke, and every now and then she'd go crazy at the club. That fiery little hot mess who broke her heel. Who danced with someone's boyfriend. The one that downed several shots without a chaser. The girl who kissed a girl and liked it. Those rouses were never in the letters to Elena, they were her secrets that began at her and ended at the partygoers of New Orleans.
Work hard, play harder.
In the morning she'd have memories, only memories, and maybe a bruise from busting her ass. A keepsake.
But for some reason, underneath it all, her desire for Kai lingered.
Initially it was masked like an addiction to watching him die; she could feel like a hero minus the cape as the one who killed his own family burned to death, or maybe she brutally stabbed him, or left him in a freezer. She could feel the gratification, the dopamine hit of saving the ghosts of her friends- the ones in her head that actually thanked her. The Old Bonnie just a fingertip's width away.
Sometimes he would kill her back and every time she died it felt thrilling. She was seduced by the beautiful feeling of waking up, the first breath of consciousness out of a crimson red sleep. Bonnie felt like she was cheating death over and over again and it was amazing. She would arise from the dimension Kai was in with a new life, a new mindset, and she didn't even have to worry about facing the people who would know something was wrong with her. They wouldn't hear it in her voice because she wasn't answering any calls.
A beautiful form of escapism, the type in which you stop counting days, you forget your chores, you forget to eat, you dissociate from your body and the only time you exist is when you're asleep. Yet Bonnie was living.
Her wants became displaced onto Kai which in turn illuminated just how blocked her sexual urges had become.
There she was punishing Kai, seeing how much he adored it in his face, the masochist and sadist within just striving for dominance and she would love it, trying not to stare at the tent in his pants that she wanted to touch so bad, trying to humiliate and torture him with a hate she could barely recall, trying to seem disgusted but waking up to a surprise in the seat of her panties. Her own arousal was her instigator, the messenger just waiting to tell Kai how much he didn't know about his Bonster. The one that was waiting to reveal how sick she truly was.
"You're liking this," he said four days before her official death, "I can see it in the way your knees are weak. You wanna touch yourself."
"No, I don't." She snapped back way too defensively to even be considered honest.
She had him hanging upside down from a tree, a thin strap at the ankle, a forest fire below him; would the blood rush to his head first or would the fire eat him away?
"Oh Bonster, you're such a little sadist."
The very essence of calm in such distress, despite the excessive sweating and dangling in midair.
If someone told Kai that four days later, she would come to him, for him and all over him, he wouldn't believe it. Not one bit. But she did.
He almost had a heart attack, Bonnie opening up to him, the prettiest flower he'd ever seen, he could almost taste the ghost of having feelings again. A moment so pure yet carnal, how badly his heart wished to beat again, he'd applause her in this moment. Inch by inch, he'd clap if his hands weren't strapped down as she took him, taken by surprise herself by the length and width- she wasn't prepared but she filled herself up. Kai was inside her. Bonnie finally releasing that last cord of who she used to be, the thoughts she used to have and christening that release by having sex with a demon. The demon, Malachi Parker. He was honored.
He was proud.
They didn't say anything, he was too afraid to open his mouth because he would turn into a beast if she stopped. It was just their skin smacking together, their hearts beating loudly, Bonnie looking like she didn't care anymore; about everything, about anything. She rode him slowly until her breath started to hitch, so he used all the strength he had to bottom out relentlessly until she forgot to hold in her moans and was begging him not to stop.
They climaxed together and fell asleep like that but Bonnie did not wake back up to reality for hours. Kai had vanished and she had died but she didn't know it yet. Neither of them knew that he was an incubus.
When she came back to reality, five hours after her official death, she didn't feel strange or different. She rushed through her morning routine, late for opening her apothecary. However there was virtually no grace in her, she fumbled and tripped constantly like a baby learning to walk again. Her clients were amused so it lessened her notion to worry, it was probably just a bad case of butterfingers.
At nighttime Bonnie slept but to her disappointment there was no Kai. There was no dream, just a deep hunger that left her right side so pained, she had to take a pill before she went back to sleep.
That incessant jab of hunger in her body felt familiar. It was painful and devastating and all consuming, it was reminiscent of the blade Kai used to stick in her like operation, right below the ribs. Her hunger felt just like that.
But what did she know?
a/n: first and foremost if i even began to explain the reason why this update took a lot longer than i wanted i would go crazy. let's just say the retrograde was kicking my ass for a bit. anyways, reviews are always appreciated! thanks so much guys and YES to the user who said like the DW meme, Bonnie is off limits from the last chapter, thats exactly what i was referencing! if you can and youd like to, leave me a tip over at kofi (link in author bio) it would be sooooo helpful during this time. thanks guys!
