Barring unforeseen circumstances, I think I'm going to be able to keep up with this current schedule. I know some people like to wait until fics are done so they can read them all at once (and to those people: I'll see you at the finish line!), but that's not how I work at all, so this is what you get. Sorry.

I hope I am still doing Vincent justice, and that everyone enjoys his appearances, because they are only going to get more frequent. Some other Originals characters we haven't seen yet will definitely show up as well. As always, loving the ride and excited to be on it with all of you.

Soundtrack:

The Dirty Dozen Brass Band – "My Feet Can't Fail Me Now"

Beak - "Brean Down" from

Miles Davis – "Blue in Green" from Kind of Blue

Staffers – "Getting Thinner" from In the Pigeon Hole


February 17, 2015

"Well, I'll be damned. Madame Nora Hildegard herself. Back in NOLA on Fat Tuesday." Vincent is visibly drunk, every other word exaggerated with a flamboyant swagger of his arms, and his collar is piled high with necklaces of various materials and colors. The image is drastically different than the one Nora saw when she last saw him, when he was in mourning, and when he gave her the advice that changed her life forever. The advice that led to Bonnie being with her now, something she sometimes still can't believe. She'll reach out and touch her, as if to make sure she's real, and every time Bonnie laughs her gorgeous, utterly addictive laugh and kisses the tip of her nose and looks her in the eye and says, "I'm real as shit, and I'm not going anywhere."

"I told you I'd be back." Nora smiles and accepts the necklace he hands her, and then another to Bonnie. They're already wearing a few, but their bling still pales in comparison to their welcomer. "And thanks to you, she's here too."

Vincent looks at Bonnie again and grins wide. "So this is that brilliant young witch you were goin' on about."

Bonnie and Nora look at each other and share one of their private smiles. "You might be dramatizing a bit, Vincent."

He waves his arm dismissively. "Nahhh. Me? Never."

Nora laughs and then clears her throat. "This is my girlfriend, Bonnie—"

"—Bennett," Vincent finishes, and holds his gaze as both their eyes go wide.

Bonnie finally speaks. "How did you—"

His eyes are moving, as if scrutinizing her face, but suddenly he snaps out of it and shakes his head. "Sorry, I . . . wow. Just hit me all at once. You look just like another Bennett witch I knew, a long time ago now. Sheila. Let's see, she'd have to be your—

"Grams. She was my maternal grandmother." There are tears in Bonnie's eyes, but she's smiling. Nora wraps a comforting arm around her waist and squeezes her hand.

"Was?" He frowns, then bows his head slightly. "I'm so sorry to hear. Sheila Bennett was one of the best damn witches I've met in my entire life. Still, to this day. It's an honor to meet you, Bonnie." He sets down his drink and shakes her hand firmly, clasping it between both of his palms.

"I could say the same about you. Aren't you the Regent of the New Orleans coven?"

"Sure, yeah, sure, when things need doin' I do them." He picks his drink back up and finishes it. "But like I told Nora last time she was here, when I'm hangin' out I'm just hangin' out. Drinking too much and laughing even more than that just like everyone else tonight in this beautiful hedonistic phantasmagoria of a city." He spreads his arms upward, then stands up. "Speaking of which, come on, follow me. Got some folks I want you to meet."


April 14, 2016

Bonnie holds her arm over her face with the sleeve stuffed up against her nose, trying and failing to block out the eye-watering, putrid smell of decomposition that's saturating this whole warehouse. She hears Damon stumble over something and curse behind and to her left, but she doesn't turn around, determined to get to whatever the source of the stench is so she can set up an air bubble spell and breathe without wanting to vomit. But when she finally sees the corpse, she regrets ever having wished for the sight in the first place. As she walks closer, even after however many months it's been sitting in that chair it's clear that the sunken, almost mummified face is Alex St. John's. Her clothes—what's left of them anyway—are a far cry from the tailored suits Bonnie remembers her wearing, and she wonders what had led their once-formidable foe to this point.

She's also looking anywhere, everywhere for traces left by Nora, still in limbo between wanting to believe she's back and be happy and not wanting to risk yet another sliver of optimism being dashed against the rocks because she's not sure she could survive it this time. So she's simultaneously searching for good and bad signs because she just needs to know, before this hope-flecked, terrified uncertainty breaks her brain in two.

Once she senses Abby and Damon both finally use their vamp speed to zip through the line of consecutive smashed-through walls and stop next to her, she grips one hand with the other and materializes the incantation she knows by heart in her head, and then the smell is gone and all of them gasp with relief.

"FINALLY. Christ." Damon wipes his forehead with his sleeve. "You okay?"

"Yeah." Bonnie looks from him to the dried-out cadaver. "Don't think I can say the same for her, though."

Abby steps forward, careful not to move too suddenly or too far away from Bonnie and be smacked in the face with pestilence again. She squints a bit. "Wait. Is that—"

"The one and only." Damon's face is filled with disgust and contempt. "I know you're not supposed to speak ill of the dead, but that's just something I like to say before I speak ill of the dead, and god, was she the fucking worst."

"I'm pretty sure this means we're in the right place." Bonnie squats down, craning her neck to look under the generic wooden chair. Nothing.

She, Stefan, Damon, and Beau had driven to the hospital in Waco to investigate, but were met by a wide lockdown perimeter enforced by black-clad paramilitary-looking types. Damon said they looked like contract mercenaries, but who would have both an interest in keeping a vampire attack quiet and the resources to hire that many guns to do so? It made them all uneasy. Bonnie cloaked them all and they snuck in through one of the more lightly guarded fence-walls once the sun went down. "Invisiquae" is a spell she could cast and hold in her sleep at this point, but the border was so expansive that she started to feel a bit tired by the time they got to the actual building. Inside, which almost made Bonnie miss the guards because it was so unsettlingly empty and reeked of disinfectant from the in-progress cleaning process and large barrels of artificially lemon-scented odor nukes, they navigated to the office of one Doctor B. Bennett and found two sets of coordinates scrawled in different places. One ostensibly corresponded to the dead center of a nondescript office complex in downtown Little Rock, which Stefan and Beau went to investigate, and the other led here, in the middle of nowhere deep in the Oklahoma panhandle. They'd met up with Abby in Dallas along the way, a development that had surprised them both. Bonnie wonders if her mother is regretting her decision as she looks at Alex's body with an expression just like Damon's.

"I don't like this, though," Damon says as he looks around paranoiacally. "That smell was the kind of infernal shit that comes from ten fresh corpses, not one flaky old museum mummy."

"Are you disappointed there aren't more?" Abby asks wryly.

"I mean, kind of. Because whatever other explanation there is for why this place stinks like a black mass afterparty, it's probably way scarier."

"Damon." Bonnie's voice is quiet.

"Yeah?"

She points at a metal industrial door set into the wall off to their right—that she could swear wasn't there when she first looked. "Am I nuts, or"—she smacks his shoulder after he immediately nods—"is that the same symbol we saw painted in blood on the wall of the hospital atrium?"

It's faint, almost as if drawn in a thin layer of dust, but it's definitely there, the jagged spokes and withered triangles that filled Bonnie with inexplicable dread the first time she saw it, certainly more so than any occult symbol painted in blood on a hospital wall would elicit.

Damon purses his lips. "Yeah, it's the same one. Looks like we gotta get Ric on nerd duty again. Snap a photo, will you?" He looks at Bonnie, then Abby, then back at the door. "Do you think we should open it?"

Bonnie takes a few photos before looking away from her phone screen and glaring at Damon. "Do I think you should open the giant rusty metal door inscribed with a creepy occult symbol drawn on it in a remote warehouse that smells like a body farm? Who says yes to that?"

"You know, of all the times I've done the 'thing that needs to be done' "—he looks at Abby— "no offense—this is not one of my favorites."
"Just be brave and hold your breath like a big boy. Mommy will be right here in case you get scared."

"Oh, screw you." He scowls and then inhales deeply before stepping outside the bounds of the bubble and toward the door. Bonnie barely has time to process the awful screeching noise it makes as Damon's single yank scrapes the bottom edge against the concrete before gasping and then screaming in horror, falling back to where she knows Abby is standing and holding on tight, because from the dark abyss that just opened up pours a river, an avalanche of blood, some of it congealed to dark chunky glue and some of it still bright red, viscera, and body parts, legs, halves of torsos, heads, with bites taken out of them by jaws that look much larger than any vampire's possibly could be, and it all flows out at once like the door was the only thing holding it back. Bonnie turns away from Abby and barely has time to pull her hair away from her face before she throws up, tears streaming from her eyes and nose running. Abby grabs her and in the blink of an eye they're outside, the orange sun just starting to dip below the horizon, but even the endless supply of naturally fresh air isn't enough to stop her stomach from heaving again, because she's seen some pretty awful stuff before this, more than some, but with the unease already there from the symbol and then the way all of the . . . bits were gnawed on and cast aside like lackluster cuts of meat . . .

"Hey Bon, you okay?"

She wipes the tears from her cheeks and uses the backs of her hands to keep her hair back as she looks up to see Damon, his features barely defined in the dark silhouette cast as he stands in front of the setting sun. He offers her his hand and she takes it.

"So, that was something."

Bonnie's emotions whiplash again and now somehow she's able to laugh. "Do you ever feel like the universe is just trying to throw more and more fucked-up shit at you until it brings you to your knees?"

"Pretty sure I've felt like that since—" He suddenly stops and then looks away. "As long as I can remember."

Abby suddenly joins them again, offering Bonnie a water bottle she got from the car. "You good?" she asks Damon.

"Give or take a few drops of who-the-fuck-knows-what on my Bottegas, sure." He looks down at the boots and scrunches up his face.

Abby rolls her eyes. "So was this a total waste? Those coordinates are just the locations of their cannibal dumping grounds?"

"Not exactly." Damon has that glint in his eye that means he knows something they don't. "For one, now we know that symbol's important. And for another, well . . ." He moves the arm that Bonnie didn't even notice was held behind his back, and in his hand is something she really never wanted to ever see again, and yet it's a truly beautiful sight, even crusted with dried gore.

"Looks like Enzo's gonna be home for dinner."

Bonnie's eyes light up. "And then—"

"—we find Little Miss Huntress and have ourselves a little chat."


August 1, 2015

As much as Bonnie is genuinely excited to see Vincent, the events of the past week and the fact that the last time she was sitting on this exact stool she was having the time of her life with Nora by her side are making it impossible to think about anything else. The empty seat next to her seems to glare into the depths of her soul, silently but still somehow loudly reminding her of everything she no longer has. Everyone she no longer has. Because this one loss has dredged up all the buried debris and unhealed scars from the long line of losses leading up to it: Grams, Ric, Jeremy, her dad, Elena, even Jo. Any semblance of the "it gets better" adage she had fooled herself into having fulfilled is gone now, swapped back out with cynicism and pain and despair.

She's only been there for about half an hour, but she's finishing her second glass of whiskey when Vincent finally slides in next to her.

"Bonnie Bennett. To what I do I owe the pleasure?"

She thinks she's doing a decent job of masking the misery she's in, but the smile on Vincent's face immediately drops when he sees the expression on hers, and it's like he already knows.

"What happened?" He asks more softly, quietly, just barely audible over the dull early-evening din of the bar.

Bonnie tries to swallow the lump in her throat that now never goes away. "Nora is . . . . She—" She turns her head, blinking away the hot tears that are coming hard and fast. "She's gone."

Vincent doesn't say anything, just leans forward and wraps his arms around her, one hand at the back of her head. It actually makes her feel safe again, for the briefest of moments. And then she's crying, for real this time, and he just holds her until she's done and the sobs have become sniffles. When she finally looks up at Vincent and then at the bar, her glass has been astutely refilled by the bartender (not Josh; right now it's a woman she doesn't know), and so she takes a gulp and closes her eyes, savoring the burn as it burrows down inside her chest.

"I'm so sorry, Bonnie," he finally says. "I'd ask how it happened, but I reckon you'll tell me on your own if you're ready to."

She nods. "I will. But actually—" She hesitates. "There's something I need to talk to you about. Something I haven't really let myself think too hard about since it happened, and you were the only person I could think of who might have some answers for me."

He sips his own drink and gives her a look that's intense but warm. "Anything you need."

"Thank you." Bonnie wipes her eyes with both hands and then nervously drums her fingers on her thighs. "I don't even really know how to say it. But, well, I died. I watched Nora get her heart blasted out with wooden buckshot and then I got shot in the head. And was dead. For almost three hours."

She tries to gauge whether Vincent's reaction is one of grim understanding or uncertain terror, but his face is totally unreadable.

"I didn't remember anything from that time at first. But it's been coming back to me in bits and pieces over the last few days. And it's probably gonna sound completely insane, but I was in Hell. This guy—said his name was Arcadius—was its ruler, and it's really where everyone who has done something awful goes when they die. He tortures and feeds on their souls for eternity. All of them. Thousands and thousands. Maybe millions. Billions." Bonnie stops, looks right in Vincent's eye again. "There's more, but . . . am I just crazy?"

He shakes his head slowly and solemnly. "No, you ain't crazy." He looks around the room, almost nervously, then lowers his voice. "Something's been brewin' ever since we severed our tie to the Ancestral Well. It's like a façade is slowly crumbling away and revealing something dark. I felt something similar when I first woke up after the Other Side had been destroyed."

"A pit in the back of your mind. Like a black hole that's slowly sucking everything into nothing."

"Yeah, that." Vincent almost looks scared, and it's not a comforting sight. "See, there are some things witches just don't talk about. Things that scare even us. And one of those is the members of our community that get led astray by the Enders."

Bonnie furrows her brow in confusion. "The Enders?"

"It doesn't happen so much anymore, now that both witches and the rest of the world are less superstitious, less likely to fall for the ghost stories spun by wicked tongues. But on the fringes of covens and magical groups of all kinds have always been those who believe that magic is an affront, a perversion of what they see as our 'natural gift.' "

"You mean the psychic stuff?"

Vincent nods. "The visions, the telepathy, all that. They believe a witch's true role in the world is to use those powers to change things. Not things in the real world, but whatever's above us, whatever makes reality the way it is. And they say that one day, one psychic will link all the others together, and they'll will everything to end."

"Everything? What do you mean, everything?" Bonnie's not sure there's a word for the kind of horrified she is.

"I mean everything. Time, space, love, hate, life, death. Can't suffer if neither you nor suffering exists at all, right? It makes sense, I suppose, if you believe life and suffering are one and the same."

"Sometimes it feels like they are," Bonnie almost whispers.

"Ain't that the truth. But if you ask me, that's what makes it beautiful, too. We couldn't have the wonders we do, however big and however small, if we didn't have the bad stuff too. Life just is. And something that just is can't be good or bad. Only things that do. And humans do. Witches do. Vampires do. But to say none of it's worth anything because of all the inevitable badness? I can't get behind that."

Bonnie doesn't say anything.

"Anyway, the Enders are kept out of common talk, documentation, historical records, all that, because they scare people in a way few other things do. Maybe none. I mean, this is something different even than the darkest magic, Expression, necromancy, all of it. Parents just try to steer their kids to away from that and leaders clamp down on any groups that start to pop up—but even then, these people show up in every witch culture across the globe, every time period. In the East African covens they call them Iliyoghairiwa, roughly 'The Canceled.' In Haiti, Espas Vid, literally 'Empty Space.' Pervasive and consistent enough for it to be something somehow innte to those of our ilk. And in all these splinter factions, across millennia, they've always believed that there will eventually be one to unite all, a psychic so powerful they could merge many minds into a single, unified thoughtscape. A great deal in the West thought it was Silas, and so they idolized him and did everything they could to ensure his return."

"Kol Mikaelson once told me he knew a coven of witches who worshiped Silas, and that they said once revived he would bring about the end of all time. I just thought he was full of shit."

"Well, in your defense, he often is." Vincent smiles almost imperceptibly. "But listen, I gotta tell you this too . . . the other Endbringer most frequently mythologized is an ancient persecuted psychic named Arcadius."

A freezing chill ripples through Bonnie's body despite the balmy temperature of the large room. She shivers. "Shit."

Vincent scratches his head. "And this happening to you now . . . it can't be a coincidence. Something's going on. Something bad."

"Why didn't Freya tell me any of this . . ." Bonnie mutters aloud, mostly to herself.

"Freya? As in, Freya Mikaelson?" His eyes are wide—another less-than-reassuring image.

"Yeah. Why? Do you know her?"

"You could say that." Vincent chuckles darkly, humorlessly.

"So do you know where she is? It's like she just disappeared not too long after we met."

He sighs. "Freya and her family declared war on the city. They were dealt with accordingly. No one will be hearing from any of them for quite some time. Vincent purses his lips in a way that makes it clear he's done speaking on that particular subject. "How did you— what connected the two of you?"

"Well she sent me a dress, out of the blue, and then we wrote letters from there, and then she projected her spirit to Whitmore to talk to me about, well, this. How once the Other Side was destroyed, something beyond it started to come into view."

"The amount of good we could do with the Mikaelsons in our corner, if they weren't all such pompous, self-servin' little—" He stops, puts a clenched fist to his mouth. "Well that's good to know. Definitely want to hear everything she said that you can remember. From your, uh, meeting with Arcadius too. Gotta put as many pieces of this puzzle together as I can. I'm also gonna get the word out a bit, cautiously, see if anyone's heard anything, knows anything. The opposite of no one is everyone, right? We gotta take this on together. But speaking of together, before we do any of that, I just want to sit here and have a drink with my good friend who came a long way to visit."

"That— that sounds good to me," Bonnie answers slowly, quietly, her brain still reeling from everything she's just heard, and everything it was already reeling from on top of that. But as they clink freshly refilled glasses and she drinks and her body warms to just the right amount and her thoughts start to loosen and relax, she's able to do the impossible for a moment and set it all aside.


April 15, 2016

As she once again immerses herself in the both tedious and horrific process of sifting through the endless micro-hells housed within the Phoenix Stone to find one specific soul—sort of like trying to find a needle in an ocean of needles, each of which is a window into an endlessly looping snuff film—the small part of Bonnie's mind not in the thrall of the exhausting magic thinks back to how she and Nora would call it "soul-searching," one of many futile attempts to make the task less grueling. Now that they found the Sword, pretty much everything indicates that it's true, that Nora really is alive somehow, and ever since that became clear it's like the last seven months have drifted away from their dock into the open ocean, completely detached from anything that gives it context, makes it make sense. All that grief, all that agony, all those sleepless nights spent sobbing until her head and stomach ached, all that muffling dullness that settled over everything in her life like a thick coat of dust; had it all been for nothing? A waste? And how was Nora even alive in her own body? Did they not bury her extremely dead corpse under six feet of—

"No. No. Too soon."

It's Enzo's voice. Bonnie opens her eyes and stands up, which he's already done, poised with bent knees and flexed outstretched arms like a cornered animal. Valerie grabs the stone from where it fell onto the floor and slips it into her pocket before holding her own arms out in a calming gesture, saying, "Enzo, it's okay, you're safe, you're in Mystic Falls, with—"

Before Bonnie even notices that Damon's walked into the living room Enzo is in his face with a hand wrapped tightly around his throat. "WHY? WHY DID YOU LEAVE?"

"Missed— you— too— buddy," Damon manages to choke out, before Abby snaps Enzo's neck and he crumples to the floor.

Damon rubs his neck, looking a bit sheepish. "Thanks." He looks down at Enzo's unconscious body. "I know what he's going through. And it blows."

"Hey, good job," Bonnie says to Valerie, pulling her into a hug. "Just the two of us and that didn't take long at all."

"I sure picked the best time to get a refill." Damon squats down, picks up Enzo, slings him over his shoulder, pats his back while flashing an obnoxious smirk. "And oh hey," he says to Abby, "just for future reference, whole ass arsenal of vervain darts and syringes right under the seat of that throne right there. Some of us value our necks."

Abby scoffs in disbelief. "The neck snap princess telling me to be more gentle. You know, I've never actually paid you back for the time you, ya know, snapped mine."

Bonnie laughs. Their back-and-forth gets more entertaining to watch every time.

"And besides," Abby continues, "Augustine drugged him up so many times that he has an insane vervain tolerance. Even concentrated stuff won't knock him out for very long."

Damon side-eyes her, his brows raised in a look that might even be his version of impressed. "Right. Good point. How do you know that, exactly?"

"Maybe talk to him every once in a while. He has a lot to say."

Damon's eyebrows go even higher. "Noted."

"Do me a favor and bind him up and put him in the back of my car. I have a cabin not too far from here where he can recover. Bonnie, maybe you could do a boundary spell?"

Bonnie blinks and nods. Abby has it all planned out. "Sure. Sounds good."

Now Damon is definitely impressed. "Yes ma'am." He starts to walk down the entryway to the door, then turns around, Enzo's limp-hanging feet swinging a bit as he does. "But listen, a word of warning. This shit is the real deal." He points to his head with his free hand. "I still haven't gotten rid of it completely. And right after I got out, well . . . it's scary. Be careful. To him, nothing will be as it seems, and if it does, it won't be for very long."

"Seconded," Valerie says, only loud enough for Bonnie to hear. She puts a comforting arm around her friend's shoulder.

Damon finally starts to walk out, humming loudly. As he opens the door he says, "Small victories, right?"

And even though he can't see her do it, Bonnie closes her eyes and nods and thinks about the fact that there is now the most microscopic but nonetheless existent chance, all impossible questions and paradoxes aside, that she might see Nora again. Just thinks about it though. Not hopes. She won't let herself hope.

Not yet.

She's almost smiling when the shotgun blast shatters the windows.