This story was originally intended to be a half–joke gift for my good friend Monika, but it ended up being a lot of fun to write—and a hit over at AO3, so I thought I should post it here too.

As always, many thanks to the wiki episode transcribers.

Song/title: Unknown Mortal Orchestra – "Multi-Love"

To this day, god knows how many years later, Bonnie still doesn't know for sure if it really happened or not. She still doesn't know if she wants it to have really happened or not.

She remembers the hours before and the hours after clear as day. Damon throwing back finger after finger of bourbon as if it were water as he crosses off the 60th day on their shitty 1994 puppy calendar before turning back to the pancakes on the griddle, his technique even sloppier than usual as he wrestles clumsily with the batter and its refusal to stay circular. Bonnie at the table, tapping the end of the pen on the incomplete crossword puzzle over and over as she watches him the way she only does when his attention is elsewhere, once again letting herself think the things she'd never let herself think before. The sun dipping behind the horizon in the exact same way it's done every other evening here. The—

A sudden crash breaks her reverie. She refocuses her eyes to see that Damon has angrily tossed the entire griddle into the sink, his hands now braced on the edge of the counter as his shoulders heave with... sobs?

Bonnie gets up, slowly, quietly walks toward him. He really is crying. Hard. Any other day she might have allowed herself to shrug off temptation by making some good-natured quip about sucking it up and give him a clap on the shoulder before running and hiding and stuffing all her feelings somewhere deep and hidden. But today somehow feels like a new beginning, even in this world of ends.

"I miss them too, you know," she says softly, leaning against the cabinets next to him.

He meets her eyes for a second before aggressively wiping away the tears, as if he can do it quickly enough that she won't notice they were there at all. "I'm fine." The words come out slurred, broken; this might be the drunkest she's ever seen him.

"No, you aren't. And neither am I." Bonnie takes one of his hands in both of hers. "Why don't we take a drive? Go somewhere beautiful. Remind ourselves what makes living worth it."

"Nothing makes living worth it." Damon turns away from her, dries his hands on a towel, picks the bourbon bottle back up and drains it completely. "So I'd prefer to just stay here and get trashed, thank you very much."

"You realize that if you're right, and this is your own personal custom-built hell, you're just letting whoever built it win by giving up, right?"

Bonnie can feel those twin ice-blues piercing right through her. "What's there to give up, Bonnie? Everyone thinks we're dead. We probably are. You don't have magic. We're gonna run out of booze eventually. Hell, I'm gonna run out of blood eventually. Fuck it. Let's break open the pact bottle. Today's the day."

She grabs his wrist. "Stop it. I'm not gonna let you spiral like this alone. If you're getting wasted, so am I. And we are not dying today."

He shoots her look she's never seen before. "Fine. But I get to pick what we drink. Your taste still sucks. Pun intended."

The rest is a blur: both of them beyond blackout level, countless tears shed, secrets spilling out like blood from wounds, a slow uncertain kiss melting into an urgent, desperate one, pleasure like she'd never known and hasn't since, clothes strewn across the floor as the sun wakes Bonnie the next morning, her hungover head not the only thing throbbing. Neither of them have mentioned it since, and nothing seemed to change between them, except, at least on Bonnie's end, the thoughts she could once push away or ignore got louder and louder, the memory of that delicious ache returning every time his lips curled into a smile, every time he pulled her close in his arms.

But it wasn't enough to make him stay.

"Hey, love, we're almost there." Enzo shakes her from her dozing session in the passenger seat. "You okay? You were tossing and turning."

Bonnie sighs as the reality of the present seeps back in, the present in which after everything, Damon had left, chosen himself over everyone and desiccated for the past three years, and then suddenly showed up at her hospital room today as if none of it had happened.

As they pull onto the tiny dirt road, Enzo checks behind them to make sure Damon's Camaro is still following, then turns back to Bonnie. "You know, the odds of us getting through this without a single word being spoken..."

She scowls. "Lots of words can be spoken. I just don't want him to speak any to me."

"I thought we'd gotten past the anger stage," Enzo replies, chuckling.

"We had. We were blissfully not angry because we had blissfully moved on from Damon and his selfish, narcissistic existence. But, when someone who you have erased from your mind has the audacity to show up at your door with flowers, and not even your favorite flowers, by the way—" She nearly trembles with disdain. "—anger returns. Anger floods. I'm flooded."

"Careful, love. Your excessive vitriol might convince me you're just covering for the fact that you really do care about Damon, and that you're happy to see him, and that scares you."

She squints at him. "You're one to talk."

Enzo laughs. "Touché." He taps his hands on the steering wheel thoughtfully as the car slows to a stop in front of the cabin. "You know, I think I might have a plan that could defuse all this tension between us three."

Bonnie realizes what he's referring to and snaps her head toward him. "I swear to god Enzo—"

"Oh come on, why not? It's always just been a hypothetical before, but now he's here. And—"

Their heated debate is interrupted by Damon rapping smartly on the window with his knuckles. "Are you lovebirds getting out, or what?"

To this day, god knows how many years later, Enzo still doesn't know for sure if it really happened or not. He can see, hear, feel, taste the memory in his mind, but it doesn't feel real, like it actually happened to someone else and was choppily revised to include him.

Aaron Whitmore's ravaged, blood-shucked corpse sprawled on the pavement. Damon's eyes burning, the thrill of the kill still burning bright in his irises, the thick red venous liquid dripping from his lips onto his chin. The surprising but entirely welcome sensation of his mouth on Enzo's, the still-fresh blood smearing across their faces as their lips and then their tongues connect with dazed, delirious intensity, Damon's hands around Enzo's head, pulling him closer, closer.

But it was over as soon as it began, and Damon had been entirely content to never speak of it again. Enzo would never admit it in a thousand years, but this pain was so much worse than anything he endured at Augustine.

Except, perhaps, the sight of Damon walking away from him as the fire consumed all.

Bonnie sees the way Enzo's looking at Damon as he walks away from their car toward the cabin. "Okay, fine," she finally says. "But when we both inevitably get hurt, again , don't say I didn't warn you."

TO BE CONTINUED...