CHAPTER SIXTEEN
June 2013
Whitmore College
Five minutes to the end of the ceremony, the groom broke down in tears.
Elena slipped herself a mental twenty. She had been expecting the weeping to start when Jo finished her vows, but this was close enough to count.
Jo's eyes were shiny when it was all over, and the two witnesses rushed in with hugs. Well, Elena rushed in with hugs. Kai stood awkwardly at the edge of the stage, trying not to look like he wanted one, until Jo turned around and pulled him in. For a moment, he stood frozen in his sister's embrace, then slowly, very slowly, put his arms around her. They stood like that for a long time.
She hadn't forgiven him, not entirely. But she wanted to, and this was the beginning.
"Oh crap, I'm leaking again," Alaric whispered next to Elena, rubbing on his cheeks.
Elena blinked hard. "I won't tell if you won't," she said hoarsely.
He laugh-sobbed and pulled her into another hug. "It means so much to me that you're here."
Elena just nodded silently, her throat too clogged to speak.
Alaric sighed as they broke apart. "I can't believe Jeremy missed it again."
"It was my mistake," Elena said guiltily. "I told him the wrong date…"
"I'm not blaming you," he said generously, making her feel worse, as he wiped at his cheeks. "You made it and that's what counts. We never even heard back from Liv. Bonnie texted she was out of town. Has anyone seen her since the wedding? Is she OK?"
Bonnie had disappeared after the wedding, showed up a few days later, disappeared again, turned up, gone back into hiding… Elena couldn't keep up. She knew one thing though – Bonnie would have made it today if Kai Parker wasn't here. Elena would have resented him for that if he wasn't so palpably miserable for the same reason.
Gosh, this was tiresome.
"Bonnie should be here," Alaric said, adding salt to the wound. "None of this would be possible without her. And since Jo said I couldn't ask Damon…" He stuttered to a stop, gave Elena a shifty glance. "Um…"
Elena looked at her feet. "I'm sorry. I know you wanted him here and I put you on the spot."
"No, it's fine," he said. "We wanted something small and intimate, and that's what we got. I have you. Jo has Kai." He shook his head, still surprised that he could say that non-ironically. "And we actually managed to finish our vows." He laughed, loud and giddy. "I'm married, Elena!"
She gave him another hug. Jo looked up, gave them two thumbs up before she turned back to talk to her brother.
The professional photographer crew – the only carryover they had from their first elaborate ceremony were setting up their equipment on the stage. One of the crew signalled to Alaric, and he excused himself.
Elena watched Jo and Kai for a bit. They were still talking, now looking a bit too serious for a wedding. Jo, at least. Kai had been sober throughout the ceremony. Too solemn. In some of the photos Elena took before the signing, he'd looked positively menacing.
She supposed she couldn't blame the guy. Watching a happy couple exchanging vows while nursing a broken heart was a special kind of hell. The Gemini leader was standing on a ledge, and Bonnie didn't even know that she could push him off.
"Who should I thank for compelling the photo crew's memories of the wedding?" Alaric asked, as he came back to stand beside her.
Elena frowned. "No idea."
He opened his mouth as if to suggest – Damon – and then quickly shut it. He looked over at the twins. "Do I want to know what those two are talking about?"
"Probably not," Elena said, honest this time. Jo wanted to relocate to Portland. A major life change, to put it mildly, and not one she had discussed with her husband. The new Praetor factored into her decision, and she and Kai were talking out the details. The next few weeks of Mr. and Dr. Saltzman's lives were about to be rocky.
"Jo seems to be doing all the talking though. I thought that guy never stopped talking but today his jaw is sealed so tight, it looks like it's been glued shut."
"He's family now," she reminded him. "You have to play nice."
"God help me," he said but he was smiling, and the fondness in his eyes wasn't just for his new wife.
Finally, the siblings broke apart and Jo glided towards her husband. She looked beautiful. She had donated that blood-stained wedding dress to charity. Today, she wore a light blue pantsuit that somehow suited her better. Her husband looked at her like if he couldn't believe his luck. Elena felt tears well up in her eyes.
"Picture time!" Jo cried, grabbing her husband's arm. With a besotted smile, he followed her to the stage.
Elena walked across the hall to where Kai had found a folding chair and was sitting on it, his phone in his hand as he typed furiously. When she got closer, she glimpsed a text app, and the series of blue bubbles that betrayed a one-sided conversation. Then he swiped quickly, and a multi-coloured bouncing game filled the screen.
She picked up a chair and set it up next to him. Up close, he was even more brittle than she realised.
"Hey," she tried.
He grunted without taking his eyes off the screen.
No point easing into this, then. That was a relief. "So… I was thinking… the heretics were probably sired to Lily Salvatore."
Kai didn't look up, but the fingers pushing bubbles across his screen paused. "How do you figure?"
The truth was as good a reason as anything. "Take it from someone who's been there."
Too bored to take the bait, he went back to playing the game.
Elena rolled her eyes. "Did the sire bond break after she died?"
His head snapped up. His shocked face made her feel smug.
"Sorry, was I not supposed to know?" she asked, mock-innocently.
Kai's expression turned wry. "I liked having one over on Damon. Besides that, I don't give a damn." The wryness turned a little mean. "Guessing you know how she kicked it?"
"I know Damon killed her."
He studied her for a moment. "Of course," he muttered, and went back to his phone. The dismissal was clear.
It was almost a relief to feel angry.
Elena knew that Kai Parker had known she was sired for months. That Luke had probably known earlier. Maybe Liv. That this information could have reached their father even. Intellectually, she had understood this. Understood that so many people knew and kept it a secret from her, not because keeping it a secret was important to them but for the opposite reason – they just didn't care.
But facing up to the actual confirmation, the casual indifference he clearly felt about this was infuriating.
Her voice deepened with spite. "If Bonnie had died–" and it was satisfying to see the way his entire body flinched at that casual speculation "–would you have killed him?"
Kai's fingers were gripping his phone so tightly, his knuckles were white. It took him ten whole seconds to calm down enough to answer. If he were looking at her, she suspected his eyes would be flashing with rage. As it was, he was exercising an enormous amount of self-control not to lash out.
He turned off the phone, placed it face down on his leg, and clasped his hands together. To stop himself from striking out with magic, she realized.
Better to dial back on the antagonism.
"Because I know how that feels like," she said gently.
"What do you want, Elena?" He snapped.
"I'm just making conversation," she said mildly. "You're usually good for that."
"I'm still the one who can't pick up social cues, right?"
She laughed. "There you go!"
He took a deep breath. "You want to make conversation, but not with me. What you really want is to yell at your boyfriend about being the asshole he never pretended not to be."
"Not my boyfriend," she corrected immediately.
He huffed. "Big life changes, right on the heels of the Cure? That thing should come with a warning."
A part of Elena was surprised. Everyone thought the same, but she had half-expected the Gemini leader to know better.
"Should I be giving condolences or congratulations? Does it matter who broke up with whom? Can this conversation end?"
"Damon doesn't know we've broken up yet."
He barked out a laugh, and the anger in him morphed into something less dangerous but just as malicious. "I will pay good money to watch that go down."
"Damon was supposed to go away."
"… after Jo's wedding?"
"No, two years ago. Before I died and became a vampire. He was supposed to leave if I chose Stefan. That was the deal. I choose one brother, and the other leaves. Stefan left when I chose Damon. Left and got locked in a box by Silas." Just remembering that time made her angry all over again. The same black rage that had made her tie Damon in a chair, dose him with vervain and launch a stake at his heart. She had to take a deep breath just to push past it. "But before that? When I chose Stefan? Damon didn't leave." She all but snarled the words. Careful. "He stayed. He stayed and next I knew, we were together."
Kai was staring. "I don't know if it's being new to empathy or not, but I have no idea why you're telling me this."
"Do you remember when you told me that I had chosen the good brother, then turned into a vampire and chose the bad brother?" He nodded warily. "You knew even then that I was sired to him." It wasn't a question.
He didn't even blink. "Your point?"
"You could have said more that day. You've never had a problem running your mouth."
"Not my circus, not my monkeys."
For a moment, Elena was too angry to speak. She could literally feel flames in her cheeks.
Kai, utterly oblivious, went back to his game.
She knew his weakness, she thought through her anger. She hadn't been sure of it before, but today she knew. She could use Bonnie to hurt him.
Brittle.
Elena toyed with the idea.
"You wanted to kill him."
Kai grunted. "You're still here."
Deep breaths, Elena. "You wanted to kill Damon, too."
"'Too'? The break-up was that bad. Or will be?" He snorted. "Are you looking to start a Damon Murder Club?"
She laughed bitterly. "I wish. You'd think with all the people Damon's fucked over-" Kai's eyebrows rose "–that someone would have killed him by now. When the Veil fell, and the ghosts of his victims crossed over. They took him to the bar and bought him drinks."
Kai's lip curled.
"Somehow he always manages to win them over. Alaric. Liz Forbes. Even Bonnie."
Kai went perfectly still.
"There was one night, a long time ago, when I jumped through fire to stop Bonnie from killing Damon. Now I look at them, and I'm afraid she'll be the one to jump through fire to save him."
Keep that in mind.
He didn't answer that. He wanted to; she could tell. Wanted to say something flip and glib and dismissive. To send her away so that he could switch from the game to the text app where he could keep sending increasingly desperate messages to her friend. But the thought of Bonnie being willing to die for Damon, the reminder, had shaken him too much to hold up the facade.
He hated Elena as much as he hated Damon and Caroline and all those people that Bonnie had jumped through fire, figuratively and literally, to save.
Maybe that's what made this easy. Few people hated Elena and fewer managed to do it without becoming obsessed with her. Kai's hatred of her was because he was obsessed with Bonnie.
What kind of obsession though? He wanted to save Bonnie from herself, from her friends, from all the fires she kept running into. He had pulled Bonnie out of danger, and he thought he could be good at it on a regular basis, too. But did he realize that it mattered to Bonnie that those fires were the ones he started?
Elena would be damned if she let her friend go through that.
"If there's something you want to say to me, Elena, then just do so."
"You should have told me about the sire bond."
He banged his head on the back of the chair. "This again."
"You came for my help with Jo after the Merge. You could have come out and said it then."
"You probably don't remember this since you were stuffing your face with someone else's birthday cake at the time, but some of us were very busy that day." A range of emotions flickered through him, almost too fast to read. Fury. Bitterness. Regret. Desperation. And underneath all that, the persistent overpowering bleakness that swirled under his façade of collectedness like a storm of black holes, threatening to coalesce.
Despite the bravado of his façade, he was brittle. Elena had to keep reminding herself to be careful. She braced herself, ready to back off-
But he checked himself. "You've rolled with vampires for a long time. You know the drill. Your personality gets hyper after you turn into, not reversed. I figured out your personality switcheroo and I'd never even met you. Not my fault none of your friends ever bought a clue."
"I told them the sire bond broke when I turned my humanity back on again," Elena muttered. At the time, it made perfect sense. Now, she felt like an idiot.
From the way he rolled his eyes, he agreed.
"Hey, it works on computers, why not on mystical enslavement?" His voice went high-pitched, like a female customer service rep. "'Ma'am, did you try turning it off and on? Then I'm sorry to inform you that going from 0 to 100 on the emotional metre crashed your meagre firewalls and allowed the sire virus to compromise the entire operating system. As we no longer support the Elena 1.0, I'm sorry to inform you that you're screwed. Would you be interested in completing our survey?'"
Despite herself, Elena's mouth twitched, and she ducked her face to hide it.
"For all I knew, your friends caught on but they preferred the sired you and stayed numb. Heck, you probably liked being sired. I was the newly minted empath. What would I know about interpersonal relationships? Anyway, before I knew it, you guys had broken up."
Elena blinked. "I literally told you about our impending break-up a moment ago."
"Mobile plans don't work in 1903."
Touché. She had the grace to stay silent at that.
Kai made an impatient gesture. "Help me out here: condolences or congratulations? Whatever it takes to end this conversation because I literally have no clue. I guess condolences to my sister and her hubby. They were rooting for you crazy kids. Do you think there was an actual betting pool? I wish I had placed money on it."
"It's good to know that merging with your brother hasn't made you overly sentimental," she said dryly.
He scoffed. "More like your dysfunctional relationship with Damon is one of the few things Luke and I saw eye to eye."
It took her a moment to remember. It felt like a lifetime ago. The drugs that Luke supplied her. The hallucinations. She covered her face with one hand. She had been such a fool.
"Of course," she muttered bitterly. "Luke didn't feel guilty or sorry for me. He was just managing the unstable, doppelgänger vampire who was sired to a dead man."
Kai made a mock-soothing sound. "Our coven has this whole thing about babysitting doppelgängers. Throw in the small detail that sire bonds don't break when the sirer dies. They just become-" He made a face. "Let's just say Luke had good reasons. Don't take it personally."
"Why should I?" she murmured. Sired. Turned. Used as a sacrifice in Klaus's freaky moonstone ritual. Used as a sacrifice in the Traveller's Spell. The Gemini coven has been doing a bang-up job of babysitting doppelgängers.
"I probably would have slipped up eventually and said something about the bond. I've been told I talk too much."
He was back to fiddling with his phone, didn't meet her gaze. It was the truth, but she couldn't tell if that was an apology or an attempt at comfort. He didn't seem to know either.
"Thanks, I guess," she said finally.
He grunted.
Not brittle, she realised. Cracked. Splinters through his psyche that had preceded his collision into their lives, into Bonnie's life. But a broken thing that was mended was still useful. It was different from what it originally was, but that also mean it could serve more than one purpose.
In the end, it was up to Bonnie; and Elena would do everything possible that that decision was entirely her own. It was the Elena could do. It was shameful enough that it had taken her this long to start looking out for Bonnie.
"Come on guys!" Jo called from the stage. "It's your turn."
"Great!" Kai declared so excitedly, that the happy couple did a double take as he rapidly put distance between himself and Elena.
She herself followed at a sedate pace, a happy smile on her face, that while genuine, still masked the thoughts turning over and over in her head.
June 2014
New Orleans
The alarm on Bonnie's phone went off and she tapped the snooze button without opening her eyes. It happened again. And again. At the fourth snooze, something heavy smashed into the pillow beside her and a piercing shriek filled the air. "Turn it off already!"
Bonnie bolted into a sitting position, her heart racing, her fingers curled and warped with power. "What? Who?"
"Just turn it off! Bloody hell, you never wake up when it rings so why do you set the bloody alarm in the first place?! My brother has killed people for less! Turn. It. Off!"
Bonnie turned it off.
Then she turned to stare up at the blonde Original who was standing – no, jumping on the other bed in the hotel room. A quick glance at Bonnie's side told her that the thrown object was the other's phone. She picked it up and flung it back. Hard.
"Hey!"
Bonnie slumped back into bed with a groan. "My god, did you compel me last night?"
Why else would Bonnie have let Rebekah Mikaelson talk her way into staying in Bonnie's room after Bonnie had firmly rejected the Original's offer? Bonnie had even given her a change of clothes, to replace the blood-stained mess Rebekah had showed up in, even though Rebekah adamantly refused to explain how they got into that state.
At least, Bonnie had had the presence of mind to draw a barrier circle around the second twin bed. Rebekah had been outraged.
"I refuse to be caged like an animal!"
"You can stay inside the circle, or you can go back to the Compound where I'm sure there's an entire wing with your name on it. That is, if you didn't wreck it when you went berserk at dinner."
Rebekah had bitched and whined for twenty more minutes, then plumped her ass into the bed.
If not compulsion, then it must have been fatigue from just how exhausted Bonnie was. She still felt tired, even now as she dragged herself into the bathroom. When she checked her phone and saw the series of messages from Caroline, Matt and an unknown number that identified the owner as Kaleb Westphall, a witch of the Nine Covens, she groaned. It was a long day, and it hadn't even started.
Her eyes caught the tattooed band on her wrist. On instinct, she placed her other hand over the band, then taking a deep breath, she… reached out. It was a half-hearted magical ping. She didn't really expect an answer. When she felt the pingback – faint, blurry, uncertain – she yanked back like a child who had accidentally touched fire.
"Crap!"
"Bonnie, are you OK?"
"Fine. I dropped… my toothbrush."
"Gross. Stop hogging the bathroom."
"You can't even get in," Bonnie retorted.
"It's still bad manners. When you're sharing living space, you need to consider other-"
Bonnie tuned out the rest of Rebekah's tirade, and picked her outfit. For stupid reasons she didn't want to look too closely at, this took longer than usual. She finally settled on the tee and shorts combination that once passed the Forbes approval test. When she opened the door, she almost ran into Rebekah. The vampire was standing right at the edge of the circle where it touched the bathroom door.
"I'm hungry," Rebekah growled, which was a blatant lie. She was the same complexion as Caroline and Bonnie recognized the pink-cheeked, bright eyed look of a well-fed blonde vampire. "Can you at least ask Caroline for a blood bag?"
Bonnie side stepped her and tried to settle on footwear. "I'm not telling Matt or Caroline that you're here."
"Why bloody not?"
"Because you're up to something and I don't want my friends falling for your act until I know what that is. Now, Matt and Caroline are having breakfast downstairs. I, being the actual hungry person here, need to hurry if I want to get a bite before a car comes in a few minutes to take us to some Augustine thing."
"What Augustine thing?"
"I got a message from a witch called Kaleb Westphall about an exhibition at ten."
"Ugh, that. Freya's probably going to attend. OK, this is good. Maybe she won't notice I'm gone before she's back."
Bonnie paused in the middle of pulling on her sandals. "So, you are hiding!"
"Why are you wasting time with the exhibition," Rebekah ignored the question like a pro, "when we can be in Mystic Falls by the end of the day."
"Because I can't trust you further than I can throw you."
Rebekah paused. Then she rolled her eyes dramatically. "Look, I'm sorry I tried to kill Kai Parker."
Bonnie choked.
"If it's any comfort, Freya's going to make me pay for it. I've probably violated some article in her precious treaty with her precious Gemini ally."
Bonnie stared at her feet, suddenly preoccupied with her sandals. Her stomach was churning. "Everyone keeps talking about this treaty. How it ended the Sire War and fixed the rivalry between the supernatural communities in NOLA."
Rebekah rolled her eyes. "And peace reigned in New Orleans forever and ever. Amen!"
"You don't sound impressed by it."
"My family has seen a lot of wars. Granted from what I heard, my brothers had some hairy moments with this one. Look, I know the treaty isn't that bad. It was nice not to keep looking over my shoulder all the time. Is nice." She threw Bonnie a shifty look. "It's just that the treaty is all Freya talks about. Everyone gets along now. Bloody fantastic. Can we stop worrying about it and just live our lives?"
Bonnie thought about that. "I guess Freya and the Gemini leader are close?"
Rebekah burst out laughing.
"What? I just asked…" Bonnie felt the blood rise in her face. "Forget it."
"Oh Bonnie! I could make you absolutely miserable for the next few hours. But to show you I'm not the horrible person you think I am, I'll level with you. Freya is dating Vincent Griffin."
Bonnie's head snapped up. Relief flooded her. "What?" At the sight of Rebekah's smirk, she said quickly, "I mean, that's interesting. None of my business, but…"
"You're terrible at this."
"I don't know what you're talking about."
"Indeed. And this is obviously not your business, so I won't bother to tell you." She paused dramatically and let Bonnie squirm, then laughed again. "But if Freya was interested in Kai Parker? She wouldn't stand a chance. You're the only woman he looks at, Bonnie. Like ever. I met him in NOLA before. I didn't know he could look at someone the way he was looking at you last night."
Bonnie looked down at her sandals again. They were nice, faux designer but you'd never guess. Her European friends had picked them out from a store in Brussels. If she concentrated hard enough on the memory, she could fight the sensation of euphoria rising in her over something that absolutely did not matter.
Rebekah was still laughing. "Oh my god, you should see your face. You've got it just as bad as he has."
"Shut up. You don't know what you're talking about."
"You can't lie to a vampire, and I can read you like a book, Bonnie Bennett, so you might as well spill!" With a little squeal, Rebekah bounced on the bed, looking for all the world like the teenage girl she'd been frozen into for a millennium. "How long have you guys been a thing? What is your thing exactly? Did you date? Are you broken up? Who broke up with whom? Were you official or was it just sex? Oh, you definitely had sex, don't even try to deny it!"
She was like Caroline on speed. Bonnie gaped in horror, unable to speak even if she had been able to get in a word edgewise.
"He wanted more, and you showed him the door? Only you didn't want to, and how far does this go? Last month? Last year? Definitely earlier than last summer, that will explain so much. Oh my god, were you guys getting it on in the Prison World?" She paused to breathe.
Bonnie jumped to her feet. "See you later!"
"Hey! You're not seriously going to leave me in this bubble all day!"
"The exhibition is two hours long."
"I won't accept this."
"I can let you out now, you leave and never come back."
Rebekah's eyes boggled. "I offer you a favour, and you treat me like I'm the beggar. Maybe I will leave!"
"Fine by me." Bonnie stooped down to rub off the chalk.
"Wait!" Rebekah said, looking panicked. She quickly smoothed her face into a bored expression. "I have nothing better planned. If I go back now, Freya will just drag me to this exhibit thing. I can spare a few hours."
If Bonnie hadn't been suspicious before… "What's really going on? Why are you doing this?"
"Doing what? Being nice to you? Doing you a favour at no charge? The real question here is why you keep looking a gift horse in the mouth."
"Tell that to the Greeks."
Rebekah shook her head. "That is just sad." She slumped into the bed, and dug around for the remote, then started arranging the blankets around her until she was completely cocooned. "If you don't push the walls of this bubble into the bathroom, you'll find out the hard way if vampires need to go."
This was such a bad idea.
"By the way, I like your outfit. Especially the shoes. Whoever bought them had taste, so probably not you." Rebekah snickered. "Parker won't know what hit him."
"Shut up," Bonnie said without rancour, and re-drew the damn border spell. She paused on her way out. "Don't order room service."
"I make no promises!" Rebekah's words carried out before the door slammed shut.
June 2013
Barcelona, Spain
"Promise you'll call me as soon as you find my mother's letter?"
Whatever Stefan said must have been satisfactory, because Caroline ended the call without another word.
Not even a 'bye' or an 'I love you'. Of course, having a conversation with your maybe-boyfriend while his ex, who was also your best friend, was right beside you was probably awkward.
They were walking their bicycles along the pedestrian path that led from the Museum of Archaeology to the main bicycle path. The building loomed behind them, casting its late evening shadow. Bonnie couldn't wait to get to their hotel and soak her feet in the tub. Hours of walking around staring at prehistoric artefacts until she felt dizzy had taken their toll. It hadn't escaped her notice that the museum barely had any other young tourist visitors, just old professors and a grumpy American family. She had once spotted a girl their ages in glasses and a dupattā, but she'd been too far away to get her attention.
Bonnie sighed. She was sure there were interesting things to do in this city. All the guidebooks said so. The problem was that Elena had a Schedule.
"How's Mystic Falls?" Elena asked Caroline.
"Good," Caroline said shortly.
Awkward silence followed. There had been a lot of awkward silences this past week. On top of the, well, strain between Bonnie and Elena, something had happened between Elena and Caroline just before they left the States. Bonnie didn't know the details - she didn't ask, and no one told - but it had been bad enough to make Caroline almost back out of the trip, and only Stefan's intervention had made her come. Now they took turns to either snap at each other, or to walk on eggshells. The fun, bonding girls's trip had turned out to be anything but.
"So…" Bonnie said, before the awkward turned toxic. "Where to next?"
Elena pulled out The Schedule.
Bonnie and Caroline groaned in unison.
Elena looked up. "What?"
"We want to go to fun places, Elena," Bonnie said. "Not the boring museums you've been dragging us through since we got here."
"I thought we left school behind in Whitmore," Caroline added. "Or are you looking for something?"
Elena tensed. "Something like what?"
"A new major? History? Archeology?"
"Religion?" Bonnie threw in. "Don't think I haven't noticed all the interest you have in old mythology and religions. End of days stuff."
"I can have other interests outside Medicine. Maybe losing my immortality has made me paranoid." Elena chuckled as if she was making a joke. "So, if we're not going to the ruins of Puig Castellar, maybe we can try-"
"On your right! On Your Right!" yelled a voice from behind them, sounding closer with each screamed word.
The girls were used to the battle cry, and turned as one to move to the grass on the left of the pavement. But Elena was holding the stupid Schedule and it made her uncoordinated. She bumped front wheels with Caroline, who somehow got her handlebars into Bonnie's satchel strap, and suddenly three girls and bicycles were tumbling to the grass.
"Ow!"
"Get off me!"
"You get off!"
A screech of tyres sounded frighteningly close to Bonnie's ears and suddenly, a pair of brown arms was reaching into the pile. "I'm so sorry! Let me help!"
Somehow they got untangled and on their feet, all the worse for wear. Caroline's carefully styled curls were a sweaty mess. Elena was brushing leaves off her face, and Bonnie didn't even want to know how she looked.
"Are you alright?" Their helper asked in a clipped British accent. She was tall and pretty, probably their age. Despite her apology, she was smiling.
Bonnie smiled back on instinct, and the other girl's grin broadened. "Tourists, huh?"
"How can you tell?" Bonnie laughed.
"The accent. The backpacks. The Schedule." She snickered as Elena hastily shoved the offending object into her bag.
"You don't sound like a local," Caroline said, an edge in her voice. Bonnie glanced at her friend. Her arms were folded, and her lips curled.
"What she means," Bonnie said quickly, before Caroline's attitude frightened away the first interesting person they'd met since they left the States, "is that it's nice to meet a fellow tourist."
The frown that had been starting on the girl's face melted as she turned to Bonnie. "This isn't my first backpack through Europe. I know all the good places. Have you guys gone sailing yet? Done the Sunset Tour?" When they shook her head, she asked. "Or rented a Vespa? Or…"
As she narrated what sounded like a list of incredibly fun experiences to have there, Bonnie whispered to Elena: "Is Vespa riding on the Schedule?"
Elena flushed. "It's not like we're here for the entire summer."
"Are any of these things on the Schedule?" When Elena just scowled, Bonnie interrupted the girl's litany. "Good thing we bumped into you then. We were just wondering what to do tonight."
She beamed. "I know someone who works in the best club. I can get us on the VIP list for free."
Bonnie beamed back. Aching feet or not, that sounded great.
"What's the name of this club and who exactly do you know there that just gives VIP tickets for free to three random strangers?" Caroline asked.
Caroline apparently didn't agree.
The girl narrowed her eyes. "What's with the third degree? Are you cops or something?"
"Should we be cops?" Caroline retorted.
"Care," Bonnie hissed.
"Thanks, but no thanks," Caroline drawled. She straddled her bike. "Let's go, girls."
Bonnie hesitated, but Elena too was readying to leave.
"Well…" She said reluctantly. "Thanks for the help." Elena echoed the same. Caroline stayed silent.
The girl stared at them for a moment, biting her lip as if she was fighting back words. With a sniff, she tossed her head, mounted her bike and rode off.
Bonnie whirled on Caroline. "Seriously, Care?"
"We wouldn't have needed her help if she hadn't knocked us down in the first place," Caroline snapped.
"She was being perfectly nice. What's with the attitude?"
"Didn't you hear anything the travel advisory told us? Do you want to end up as chattel in a brothel? Because that's what happens when you go off with 'perfectly nice' overly friendly strangers."
"You're a vampire. I'm a witch. Elena's with us. I think we can look after ourselves."
"I don't know, Bonnie," Elena murmured. "Care is right. We don't know this girl from Adam."
"Everybody we meet here will be a stranger, Elena. That's the fricking point!"
Panic was rising inside her. If she had to be stuck for the rest of the day with these two and their tiptoeing and secrets and resentment, she would explode. If she had to spend another week, another month, a whole summer in just their company….
She jumped on her bicycle and pedalled away.
"Bonnie! Where are you going?" Caroline yelled. "Bonnie!"
Bonnie ignored the shouts behind her. The traffic around the museum was thin, and the girl was still in sight.
"Hey! Wait up!"
The girl didn't. It wasn't until Bonnie was riding alongside her, that she turned and stared in surprise at her.
They both slowed to a stop.
"I'm in," Bonnie said, gasping a little. "Where did you say this place was?"
The girl's eyes widened in surprise, and she looked over Bonnie's shoulder. Bonnie turned too, to see Elena and Caroline biking down the street.
"They're not," she said. "In, I mean. Just me."
The girl looked back at Bonnie. "They're letting you?"
Bonnie bristled. "We're not joined at the hip. And no one lets me do anything."
A smile slowly creeped over the girl's face. "OK then. Here's the address." She wrote it into the touristy pad that Bonnie always carried with her. "I'll leave 3 spots open, just in case. Tell the bouncers that you're a friend of Freya and Nora's." She winked at Bonnie. "I'm Freya."
"Who's Nora?"
"Someone almost as fun as me." She looked over Bonnie's shoulder one more time, then with another wink, she hopped on her bike and rode off.
Bonnie turned to see that her friends had caught up with her. She sighed.
That evening, she checked herself out in the mirror. Jeans and a plain blue tee. It didn't even have sequins. She sighed. She hadn't packed with clubs and parties in mind. Maybe she'll go shopping tomorrow with her new friend, Freya…
Caroline came to watch, arms crossed.
"What do you think?" Bonnie asked, preening.
Caroline just scowled.
From where she sat on her bed with her laptop open in front of her, Elena hummed with disapproval.
"You guys really don't want to come?" Bonnie asked, embarrassed at the wheedling tone in her voice.
She was surprised at how disappointed she was that her friends hadn't changed their minds. When she accepted Freya's invitation, all she'd been thinking about was what a relief it would be to escape the tension with her friends for a few hours. But now, a bigger part of her wanted them all to have a break. Maybe a good night of fun was what they needed to start mending them. The last party they'd attended together was Caroline's disastrous rave.
And the wedding definitely didn't count.
No, no! Don't think of that!
"You're really going to go off with a total stranger?" Caroline retorted.
"Bonnie, I don't think this is a good idea," Elena said quietly.
"Noted," Bonnie said stiffly. She grabbed her purse. "See you… whenever."
She was half-way out the door, when Caroline vamp-sped to her, blocking her exit with her arm on the doorframe. "What exactly are you trying to prove, Bonnie? This isn't you."
The. sheer. nerve.
"12 hours, Caroline."
Caroline blinked. "What?"
"12 hours after a year of solitary confinement," Bonnie said in a voice that was so cold she almost didn't recognise it, "I dragged my traumatised self to your rave to babysit your humanity-off ass. I don't have to prove anything."
Caroline was so shocked, she let go of the door. She was still gaping when Bonnie slammed it in her face.
June 2014
New Orleans
Bonnie came down for breakfast as three young men walked up to the table where Caroline and Matt were already eating.
The one that first offered his hand was good-looking in a boyish, mischievous way. "Kaleb Westphall." He smiled crookedly and Bonnie pinged him as a witch even before their auras brushed. "Welcome to New Orleans, Bonnie Bennett. It's quite an honour to have you here."
"So I've heard," Bonnie said, but she smiled.
The other two men – Aiden the werewolf and Josh the vampire introduced themselves in turn. They were equally cute and college-aged, even Josh the vampire who explained that he was barely three years old as a supernatural.
"I came here for Mardi Gras, turned the first night, and never left. My parents think I dropped out of school to waste my life. Little do they know."
"That's horrible," Matt cried.
Josh laughed. "Are you kidding me? I have this incredible body, and I will live forever. There are zero downsides. I don't even have to give up mundane food. Talking of which, are you done with that?"
They had time to kill, and while they waited for Matt, Bonnie, and now Josh to finish eating, the vampire did most of the talking. Kaleb chimed in now and then, but Aiden stayed silent. Bonnie glanced over at him, and he gave her a strained smile.
"So you each represent one faction of the community here?" she asked, buttering her toast. "Things are so organised here. It's impressive."
"You should have seen this place a year ago," Josh said between mouthfuls. "Things were far more exciting."
"He's being sarcastic," Kaleb said, "you'd have hated it. Thank goodness for the Gemini or this town might have sunk into the ground. Now everyone gets a seat at the table."
Bonnie's toast turned sour. Just what she needed. More people singing Kai's praises.
"Where's the human representative?" Matt asked.
There was a beat, then the other three laughed. Even Aiden chuckled softly. Though he was the first to stop when the Mystic Falls group didn't join in the laughter.
Matt pressed his lips together. "Didn't think it was that funny."
Bonnie and Caroline exchanged looks. Not this again.
Kaleb blinked. "You're not joking."
"I mean, we have a Mundane – I mean, Human Faction," Josh offered.
"Yeah, we have something for the mundanes…" Kaleb said, unconvincingly. "Camille gets a heads up… when we remember…"
"We love mundanes in NOLA," Josh said, and Bonnie cringed. "This whole city is a tourist trap for mundanes. When we're done with this snore fest, I'll show you some real fun. You guys look like you know how to have a good time." He winked at Matt, who was either shocked at the condescension or at the blatant flirting.
"I don't think they'll have time for that," Aiden said sharply. "And talking about time, the exhibition starts in a few minutes. We should leave now."
Josh shot him a glare, and Kaleb hid his mouth behind his hand.
The Mystic Falls trio blinked at each other.
"Oh-kay," Caroline said slowly. She mouthed at Bonnie 'what's his problem?' Bonnie shrugged.
Whatever his motives, Aiden was right about the time. It was a half hour drive to the Augustine Hall, situated in the heart of the Quarter between the Town Hall and an open market. By the time they arrived, the exhibition had already started, and they'd missed whatever opening words had been said. Uniformed security had to check their names off a list, take their phones and weapons (Matt had a gun!), and pass them through a metal detector, before they stepped into the Hall.
According to Josh and Kaleb, it was a renovated Church turned hall for rent, and not a permanent acquisition of the Augustine Society. (Yet.) Most of the building was one large room, with side doors for restrooms and utilities. The walls were high-ceilinged with screened, UV-blocking windows that bathed the space in a hazy, bluish hue. Every few feet were artefacts on display – from intricate objects in free-standing vitrines, carefully labelled with stencilled plaques to the portraits behind glass, depicting images that ranged from mundane to the fantastical. A uniformed usher approached them at the entrance and showed them around briefly before excusing himself. It was easy to see why – there were several other people in the building, visitors like Bonnie and her friends, all demanding attention from a handful of Augustine ushers, who rotated from one party to the other, explaining objects and answering questions.
Between the exhibits and the people, there was a lot of magic in this space. A lot was unfamiliar, alien even and it brushed against Bonnie's aura like fingers ruffling fur. Some of it she recognized. And a few others even felt soothing, comforting, stroking down and making her own magic hum. One particular signature called to her. She spun around, trying to get a sense for-
Josh yawned loudly. "I am already bored! Who wants to ditch this place and go to the bar? I won't tell Marcel if you guys don't tell your other bosses."
"We're not here for that," Aiden snapped.
"Someone is in a mood," Josh snipped. His eyes widened dramatically. "I'm sorry, it's your time of month, isn't it?"
Aiden gave him the finger. The white stone on his ring glowed in the blue light.
Bonnie stared. "Is that a-?"
Aiden quickly shoved his hand into his pocket.
"Sorry," Bonnie said quickly, "it's just - if that's what I think it is - I've heard of them, but we've never seen one up close. Please?"
Kaleb laughed - quickly turned it into a cough when Aiden glared at him. Reluctantly, the werewolf pulled out his hand and let Bonnie hold it. She, Caroline and Matt huddled over the moon-coloured ring. A gentle touch revealed the faintest hum of magical resonance.
"Wow," Caroline whispered.
"What am I missing?" Matt asked.
"It's a moonlight ring. Kyanite stone. Very rare. I've never seen one in real life."
"Used to be rare," Kaleb said. "The Gemini found this trick where they substitute kaolinite rock with the same effect. Now thanks to the Regent and Kai Parker, almost every werewolf in the Bayou has one."
Bonnie dropped Aiden's hand as if it burned. She could feel Caroline and Matt's eyes on her, and she kept her own gaze firmly on her shoes. Pull yourself together already! She told herself. But it was easier said than done.
After an awkward pause, Kaleb managed, "what did I say?"
"Nothing," Bonnie said quickly, and refused to catch Caroline's gaze. "So… moonlight rings are part of your treaty with the Gemini Coven."
"Part of the bounty that comes with the treaty. We traded Klaus Mikaelson for ceasefires, fancy jewellery, and a direct line to one of the most powerful covens in the country, maybe even the world."
"Not that every werewolf likes fancy jewellery," Josh said in a voice that was too smooth. "There are some that think that the rings are a crutch. That wolves should turn with the moon, and any other way is unnatural. Isn't that right, Aiden?" He gave the other man a good-natured shove.
Aiden didn't seem to think the shove was good-natured. His lip curled in a sneer. "If you mean that, unlike some other creatures, wolves prefer to embrace their nature, rather than compromise it, then yes, that's right." Abruptly, he walked away.
"What's that supposed to mean?" Josh snapped and followed him.
Kaleb raised his hands in frustration and with a hasty smile, "I'll be right back," he chased after the other two.
"Hey!" Caroline called.
Kaleb spun around, his finger and thumb pressed together in a 'just a moment' gesture, and spun back, now all but running after the other two who were rapidly walking out of the Hall, bickering in loud whispers.
Caroline, Bonnie and Matt blinked at each other. "Did our babysitters just walk out on us?" Matt wondered.
"Apparently so!"
That was how the Mystic Falls trio were left to wander by themselves in a sea of strangers. The Hall was getting more crowded. Bonnie recognized witches by instinct, vampires by aura, wolves by the nervous twitching that happened so close to a full moon (some wore rings, but a few did not), and mundanes, including of all things, a Catholic Nun.
In fact, minus the concentration of supernaturals, it was just another museum tour like the ones in Europe. Even the visitors exuded the same air of interest mingled with resentment. Though for obviously different reasons.
They watched a family of witches arguing next to a display of Grimoires that, by their conversation, apparently belonged to an ancestor. An Asian couple, werewolf and vampire pair, examined a katana sword in a case and wondered aloud if the wolf's dead mother had forged it.
"I wonder how long the Augustine has had this stuff," Matt said. "Some of these things have dates on them from BC. Just how old is the Society?"
"I'm more interested in how they got this stuff." Caroline said testily.
Matt shrugged. They were now staring at a display case of wooden-tipped steel weapons that apparently once belonged to a group of Hunters in the 18th century. "I guess they found them."
"Found?" Bonnie scoffed.
Matt hesitated. "I mean. Maybe some of these people sold things to the Society." He looked up in time to see Caroline and Bonnie exchange knowing glances. "I know what you're thinking. Maybe the Society did take some things without asking. Tomb raiders and all that. But they couldn't have stolen everything."
"You know what they say," Caroline said bitterly. "Possession is nine tenths of the law."
"Standard museum acquisitions procedure then," Bonnie said.
"That's a bit harsh."
The voice was right behind them, and Bonnie started.
Caroline whipped around at once. "Back off!" she snapped, veins out, her hand out and ready to strike. On Bonnie's other side, Matt's hand had automatically gone to his belt for the gun that, thankfully, wasn't there. Bonnie didn't even want to know why Matt had been carrying one in the first place.
"Woah!" The man said, stepping back, hands up. "Talk about a hair trigger." He flashed a smile that tried to be disarming. The fluffy blonde hair that fell over his brow barely softened his square-jawed face. He wore jeans, a T-shirt and a face flushed with excitement. He couldn't have screamed mundane any louder if it was printed on his T-shirt. "I come in peace."
"Do they?" Caroline snapped, fingers still curled as she jerked her chin towards the pair of suits and glasses, clearly Augustine security, that stood two steps behind him, flanking the man.
"Them? Guys, come on." He gave one of the security guys a firm headshake. The man hesitated, then with one frown at Caroline, he and his partner took a step back.
The mundane gave Caroline a shrug. "That's the best we can get. You are a vampire. You can totally rip out my heart before they blink twice." He grinned. "Caroline Forbes. Mystic Falls, Virginia. Turned in 2010 at the age of seventeen. Bet it drives you crazy, not quite making it to legal age?" He chuckled at his joke, then swivelled to Matt and Bonnie in turn. "Matt Donovan, Mystic Falls Police Department cadet. And Bonnie Bennett–" He grinned so widely it threatened to split his face, "– of the Bennetts. Wow. The Mikaelsons told me you were coming but still… Wow." He stopped short of rubbing his hands with glee.
Slowly, Caroline let her hand fall. She, Bonnie, and Matt exchanged glances. Who the heck was this guy?
The man let out a self-deprecating laugh. "I'm doing this wrong. Ethan Crane." He stuck out his hand, and Matt took it more out of surprise than willingness. The handshake was just a touch too long, Crane's eyes lingering on Matt's fingers, before he shook Bonnie's. After a few futile seconds of holding out his hand to Caroline, he took it back. "I work here."
"Let me guess… acquisitions?" Caroline asked belligerently. Bonnie wondered how she could signal her friend to rein it in. They hadn't been here long enough to start this.
Either Crane didn't mind, or he didn't notice. "Finances." He grinned again like if he was making a joke. "We need all hands on deck for the tour, and knowing almost what everything is, I'm here on my time. But my real job is making sure the Society can afford it."
"Really? Because you got all this stuff legally?" Caroline mocked.
His grin slipped off. For the first time, he looked sober. "I personally see to it that our items are acquired ethically from covens, dens, and wolf packs; or purchased from private mundane collections. I know what the Society was. We no longer work that way. This Society was founded on good principles, to help humanity, but we failed to…" He cleared his throat, adjusted his glasses. "What I mean is that our concept of who constituted humanity was a bit… old-fashioned."
"Never heard that one before," Bonnie said. Yeah, this was definitely another museum tour.
"Well… Just like most things in the mundane world, our Society is evolving. We want to work with supernaturals now, not use them. We can make far more strides by cooperation, than by what we had before."
A slim woman in a sharp lilac suit, wire-rimmed glasses, impossible heels, and wielding a large tablet like a weapon, whispered in his ear. Bonnie started a little at her appearance. The woman had either popped out of mid-air, or had been standing by unobtrusively all along, and Bonnie couldn't decide which was more disconcerting.
She had all of Crane's attention now, his expressive face changing rapidly at whatever she told him. After a moment, he sighed, and he looked at Bonnie and her friends with a grimace. "Apparently I need to work the room. Can't monopolize you guys as much as I want to. But we're going to have time to talk more soon. I'll be personally escorting you through the underground tour–"
Heels frowned, leaned close and whispered something urgently.
Crane frowned back, shook his head firmly. "I don't care. They should be in our team."
Heels frowned harder. She looked at the Mystic Falls trio.
Bonnie gulped.
Heels turned on her heel and walked away. Crane gave them a rueful smile, then hurried after her. Suit and Glasses followed.
The three were silent for a beat.
Matt asked: "Was I the only one who noticed-"
"The death glare?" Bonnie finished. "No, you weren't. Who is that woman?"
"Girl," Caroline said. "She looks even younger than us and no, I've never met her in my life."
"She looked like she knew us," Matt said.
"No, she looked like she hated us," Caroline corrected. She huffed out a breath. "We're in the Augustine. Not all of them are going to pretend to be nice."
"How do you know Crane was pretending?"
"I think he was pretending to be an accountant," Bonnie said.
The three of them looked at Ethan Crane where he was now talking to a group of vampires (or werewolves, they all wore rings) in bespoke suits. His gestures were expansive, his hands flying as he chuckled every now and then. A few feet away, his high-heeled shadow tapped over her tablet, raising her eyes occasionally to check on Ethan.
Once, she turned her head to glare at the Mystic Falls trio.
They quickly turned around and started walking away.
"Why would Crane lie?" Matt asked.
"What kind of accountant has a PA who dresses like that?" Caroline wondered. "Those shoes alone must be worth thousands of dollars."
"That just means working here pays well," Matt retorted. "You can't just assume the worst because they're mundanes. You didn't even shake his hand!"
"No, Matt, we're assuming the worst because they're Augustine. Why can't you see the difference?"
"Because there isn't!"
Bonnie would have joined in, but at that moment, her eyes and her magical sixth sense aligned. It was that scent of familiar magic that had haunted her a few moments ago. And now that she was looking directly at its source, she knew why. Without another word to her friends, she walked towards it.
The artefact was placed on velvet in a free-standing display. The clockwork piece was inset within a circular mahogany box, slightly larger than palm size. The gears and tiny metallic parts had been oiled and polished, but nothing would ever make the machinery work again. An undiscerning eye would have dismissed it as a broken astrolabe, an obsolete curiosity. But Bonnie didn't need to read the etched label under the display case to know what she was seeing.
"There you are," Caroline said, making her jump. "What are you looking… Is that the Ascendant?"
"So I finally get to see it," Matt murmured beside them.
This Ascendant was neither from 1994 nor 1903. And besides the clockwork mechanism, it didn't resemble either of them. Maybe all Ascendants were uniquely constructed. Most importantly, this Ascendant was dead. Up close, she could see that the aura it emitted was just magical decay.
She didn't tell Caroline this though. It was ridiculous but she felt like if her friends were intruding.
"How does it work? If we grabbed it, and Bonnie did her magic, can it take us to any time in the past we wanted to go?"
"Ascendants aren't time machines, Caroline," Bonnie said. "They're… keys… to snapshots of time."
"Bet you hoped you'd never see one of these again," Matt said.
It was funny. A year ago, if anyone had brought her near one of these devices, she'd have run away screaming. But today, the moment she had sensed this one's magic, it had drawn her in. For the first time, she was noticing things she had never taken the time to notice before. The elegant mechanical beauty of the device. The intuitive, jigsaw-style of its assembly. This ingenious marriage of machine and magic was a key to another world, crafted to harness celestial power and hold back all that magic by mere clockwork.
And some incantation and her literal blood, but still. Looking at it now, Bonnie felt awe, and a tad nostalgic.
"I've never had the chance to just look at one before," she said softly. "It's beautiful."
April 2013
Whitmore College
In the mid-day sun, the dials and gears glinted in the box. It felt good holding it, feeling that steady, heavy magic humming from it. Bonnie wasn't sure, but it felt heavier than the first one, a disparity that was disproportionate to the difference in dimensions. She wondered if the weight of the device correlated with the age of the Prison or the number of Prisoners it sealed.
A shadow fell over her, turning the metals dull. She shoved the Ascendant into her bag.
"It's impossible to find parking these days. It's like they cordon off a new part of campus every week now. I'm all for upgrading the school but this is getting ridiculous."
Elena dumped two lattes and her satchel on the table, and sat across Bonnie with a grimace.
"Yeah, it's so weird," Bonnie said, feigning interest while she breathed a sigh of relief that Elena had apparently not seen the device. "Where's all the money for the construction coming from, anyway? I mean, the Whitmore family… is no more." At the last minute, she remembered to euphemize the phrase 'was wiped out'. "Who even owns Whitmore College now?"
"The town. Or the state. Or bankers. I'm not sure. There's a rumor that there was some lost heir that showed up and claimed everything."
Better not tell your boyfriend that, Bonnie thought as she sipped her latte gingerly. Considering Elena's apparent non-reaction to the reminder that Damon had exterminated a family –
Elena pointed her chin towards Bonnie's bag. "You know Damon's been looking for that."
It was Elena's vampire-quick reflexes that saved Bonnie from spilling hot coffee on herself.
"Easy," she said, as she put the cup a safe distance away. "You're jumpy." It wasn't a question. "What's going on?"
"Oh, the usual," Bonnie said, still gasping slightly. "Lily wants a family reunion with a den of hungry vampires; Damon thinks I should play along without exactly qualifying what that means. Neither of which suit my agenda to keep my personal nemesis locked up for all eternity."
Elena grinned. "The usual then."
Bonnie grinned back, ruefully. There was a moment of companionable silence as they watched the traffic pass by from where they sat at the outdoor café. It was a week before finals, and harried-looking students trudged to and from the nearby library.
"So where were you anyway?" Elena probed. "You weren't at your dorm all yesterday. You didn't come in last night…"
Bonnie hedged. "I slept in the library. I have a ton of work to make up for."
"But I sorted out your exams. You're not taking any."
"So? I still have a year's worth of college to catch up with," Bonnie said, vaguely irritated. "You can't compel the knowledge into my brain." She glanced over at Elena's slightly hurt face and felt like a heel. "I'm sorry. I've not… been sleeping well, for a while."
"Bad dreams?" Elena asked, kindly.
"Not really… just insomnia. My mind refusing to shut down, I guess." There had been nothing to do in the Prison World but think, and she was struggling now to shake the habit. The thoughts that had filled her head in there had become increasingly toxic and she needed to get rid of them.
Elena sighed. "I know exactly what that feels like. I've been having bad dreams lately. With everyone busy getting Caroline's humanity back, I'm so glad you're here to talk to."
Bonnie blinked.
Elena laughed a little. "OK, maybe they're not really nightmares. They're more weird than scary, really." When Bonnie didn't say anything, she seemed to finally catch on to her friend's expression. "You do have a moment, right?"
Bonnie took another sip of coffee as she tried to school her face into something that won't reveal the angry, treacherous whispers running through her head.
Took you all of 3 seconds to make this about you. That must be a new record, Elena. No, I don't have a freaking moment to listen to you whine about your caffeine-induced nightmares when I have an actual problem to deal with.
"Bonnie?"
"Yes, of course, I do," Bonnie said, clamping down on those furious thoughts with a bright smile. "Please, go ahead."
Elena sighed again. "Well, the thing is… I don't even remember when they started. All I can figure out from reading my journals of before Alaric compelled me to forget Damon…" Her face twisted with shame. "They started after the Other Side was destroyed. After Damon died. I don't know what triggered them: his death or the drugs that I was taking to hallucinate him."
Damon wasn't the only one that died. But Bonnie made herself hum encouragingly.
"I wrote a couple of them down because they were just so… weird. Like I said, not scary weird or even creepy. Just weird." Elena grimaced. "They were about Amara. She wanted something from me."
Bonnie perked up. "Amara? Your Grand-doppel Amara?"
"Or at least, someone that looked exactly like me but with her crazy hair."
"What did she want?"
"For me to get ready, I think. For a decision… a choice…that was coming to me…" Her brow furrowed even deeper.
"What decision?"
Elena shifted impatiently. "I don't remember… or she never said." She shook her head in frustration. "I don't remember her words, as much as I remember the images, the sensations. I wrote them down in my journal but then Alaric took my memories, and it's like the dreams stopped with them. Reading them later, I couldn't even figure out if I was grieving or just high when I wrote them down."
Bonnie leaned back in her chair, regarded her friend. "The dreams stopped?" She asked slowly. "So… you're telling me – now – about dreams you had almost a year ago?"
Elena huffed with exasperation. "No, silly. The dreams came back! I woke up in the middle of the night, and started writing everything down – when it hit me why it all seemed so familiar. I checked my older journal entries and there it was. Almost word for word, the same account."
Bonnie felt a prickle of alarm. "How frequently have you had this dream since they restarted? Every night? Every other night? Do you get them when you're asleep or does your mind just wander into the dream? I need to understand if they're dreams or visions."
"Well, actually, I've only had the dream the one time."
"Once?" Bonnie asked, weakly.
"Hey, that was once too often. Isn't it weird enough that it's the same dream? The. exact. same. dream. I'm a doppelganger, Bonnie. Surely, a recurring dream from a doppelganger about another doppelganger should mean something? Hold on. Let me get my diary."
As she rifled through her bag, Bonnie wondered how much of this she should take seriously or if now that Caroline was the center of attention, Elena was trying to find a way to edge herself back into the limelight.
Not for the first time in days, Bonnie was checking herself for bitter thoughts. Mean, angry, treacherous whispers in her head. She had thought she had left them behind in the Prison World but apparently, she hadn't. They snuck up on her more and more these days, making her feel sick and guilty. She had thought getting rid of Kai Parker would end them. Give her some measure of peace.
It was all the more reason why she needed to finish what she started in 1903.
Elena had found her journal and was flipping through the pages. "I think it was a few days after your birthday. I remember because I had just moved back into the boarding house, and everything was still so new and exciting with Damon and me. Your birthday was actually the first time that we, you know…" She blushed.
She continued, her gentle voice going intense as she read from her journal, but Bonnie had tuned off after 'birthday'. Tuned off not just from Elena's voice, but from reality.
The bright Sun and the cool Spring breeze seemed to fade away into the cold, dampness of the Salvatore's garage.
"… the world was on fire… the stars were falling…"
The pleasant smell of her favorite coffee morphed into the nauseating smell of carbon monoxide.
"… and a dragon of all things. None of it made any sense…"
The sound of Elena's voice, murmuring words about wings and flames, was replaced by the loud thumping of blood in Bonnie's ears, and the sound of someone dear, someone impossible shouting as if through water:
"Get up! Bonnie, get up!"
Bonnie blinked, and instead of campus and co-eds, she was staring into bright light and was that Jeremy standing there, looking down at her like a kind of Guardian Angel as she clawed out her way past the jaws of death?
How had that garage door opened?
"Bonnie, are you listening to me?"
She blinked again. Elena's frown, and the rest of reality rushed in.
Bonnie started, and this time, the still-full cup of coffee in her hand did spill, almost scalding her.
"I'm sorry," Elena gasped, grabbing for paper towels. "I didn't mean to-"
"It's OK, it's my fault," Bonnie replied quickly, embarrassed, as she helped. "I was… wool-gathering…"
"We both need to get some more sleep," Elena said with a laugh. "Preferably without dreams."
Bonnie nodded grimly. And she would. The moment she destroyed the Ascendant for good, all these distracting not-memories and spiteful thoughts would stop.
She glanced at her watch. "I have to go."
Elena pouted. "Where? You don't have classes."
"I-"
"We've barely spent any time together since you got back," Elena accused.
Bonnie stared. "It's a bit hard to make time between freeing your future mother-in-law and keeping an eye on our soon-to-be-a-serial-killer BFF."
"Well, Stefan's humanity switch is on now, so he and Damon are taking care of Caroline. Lily Salvatore is off somewhere learning how to use the Internet or something… I don't have finals… Why don't we just hang out? You can help me figure out if these weird dreams are doppelganger premonitions or if I just need to scrutinize my blood bags better?"
Bonnie started gathering her things. Elena was right – she could spare the time; but suddenly, Bonnie couldn't stand to be around the other girl. "I'm sorry, but it's kind of important."
"Where are you going?"
Bonnie tried to look disingenuous. "To the library…"
"You said you were there all night." Elena's eyes narrowed, and Bonnie felt her heart quail. When she wasn't being self-absorbed, her friend was unerringly perceptive. "Bonnie, what is going on?"
Bonnie stared into her oldest friend's dark eyes, and hesitated. On the one hand, she didn't want to jeopardize her plans by confiding in the wrong person and the sad truth was that Elena was probably the wrong person. On the other hand, Bonnie desperately needed to share her thought process with someone and in the end, this was Elena.
Dark thoughts aside, did Bonnie really not trust her oldest, dearest friend?
"Fine. But you must promise not to tell Damon or Lily, alright? I don't know what's going on between him and Lily and her so-called family, and I don't care. I have to protect myself, Elena. I have to."
"Bonnie, I promise," and now Elena sounded almost frightened. "What is it?"
"I took Qetsiyah's magic from that rock in Nova Scotia to come back. I was filled with it when I returned, and I swapped it with my own magic in Ms. Cuddles. I buried her in Gram's house. With all the wards there, I figured that was the safest place." She took a deep breath. "Well, I went to Mystic Falls yesterday to get her back. That's why I was away for so long. It's in our dorm now. I'm going to use it to seal the 1903 Prison World. Stop Kai or anyone else from ever escaping."
Elena gaped. Then she shook her head. "Bonnie… what about Lily's family? Damon…"
Panic rippled through Bonnie. "You promised you won't tell them. You promised…"
Elena quickly reached over and grabbed her hand. "I won't! I swear! I just…" She squeezed. "Bonnie, I understand. You need Kai gone for good. No one can hold that against you. Remember when I was bent on killing Katherine?" Her eyes narrowed. "It consumed me. If Jeremy hadn't come back…"
If I hadn't died for him, you mean. Bonnie held her breath, waiting for her friend to share another 'relatable' experience. But thankfully, Elena moved on. "So… what's the plan?"
She was still unsure if confiding in Elena was the wisest choice, but the temptation to have a sounding board was too good to pass up. "Destroying the Ascendant is easy enough. It's sealing the Prison World that's tricky. Plus, I need firepower. My own magic isn't enough and Qetsiyah's the most powerful magic I've ever channeled. If I can harness it for the spell, I could seal the Prison World for good."
"Qetsiyah's magic…" Elena's eyes widened, and she yanked on Bonnie's hand. "Bonnie, don't tell me you're talking about Expression?"
"Ouch! and Shhh!" Bonnie pried her hand out of her friend's pincer-grip and looked around nervously, half-expecting Elena's boyfriend and her own Prison World-forged BFF to pop up from behind a co-ed.
"You are talking about Expression!" Elena whispered harshly. "Are you forgetting the last time you used Expression, Bonnie Bennett? You died."
"And if Kai gets out, I'm dead. It's worth the risk."
"Then just destroy the Ascendant with your own magic and trap him there."
"He doesn't need the Ascendant on this side to get out, Elena. He has an Ascendant there with him. It was fine when I thought he was going to be alone there, but then I find out that he has company! He got out of 1994 because I was there; I was willing to trap myself in there with him, but he still used me to escape. Imagine what he could do with a half-dozen ripper-babies who want to get out as much as he does."
"Starving vampires who'll probably tear him into pieces on sight."
"Unless he comes out leading the pack. You met him, Elena. Do you really think that he's not going to be capable of that?"
"I…" Elena flailed. "What about your blood? He needs that for the Ascendant to work, right?"
"I thought of that. Then I remembered that the rock in Nova Scotia in 1994 will still be there in 1903. The rock filled with Qetsiyah's blood. It's a long shot, I know. It's my ancestor's blood and I don't know if Kai would even know about it but with six other vampires…"
But Elena was shaking her head vigorously. "It's not a long shot." She took a deep breath and it seemed that finally, Bonnie's panic had infected her. "OK, we have to do this. But first, let's calm down for a sec and think of some other strategy before we go for the nuclear option."
"I told you, I've thought of everything, Elena."
"Have you? Tell me about your plan to seal the Prison World."
Bonnie tried to explain it as best she could. She had put together bits and pieces of various barrier spells and finagled something based on the Ascendant as a focusing point. Even as she said it, she didn't need to look at the skepticism on Elena's face to know that it sounded dubious.
"I don't have any other options," Bonnie confessed. "And I don't have the time to come up with something better. Between Lily, Damon and Kai maybe figuring his way out…"
"Bonnie, if you're going to use Expression again, you have to be sure that it's worth it and won't make things worse."
"Elena, I–"
"Have you considered that hitting that–" She gestured in the general direction of the device in Bonnie's bag –"with something as powerful as Expression might just end up unlocking the Prison and doing exactly what you're trying to avoid?"
A cold, bony finger worked its way down Bonnie's spine. What did she really know about the Ascendant and Prison Worlds? Enough to travel back and forth, yes. But she hadn't even known that it was her blood that activated the device until Kai had carved through her with his sister's knife. She hadn't known that the Gemini leader won't need a celestial event until he flaunted that at her.
It was ridiculous, really. She had done powerful magic before. Dangerous magic. Spells that would make an older, more experienced witch quail. She'd done them with no guidance, no mentorship, nothing but the few weeks of training she'd got from her grandmother all those years ago and maybe Luka Martin's hours of dubious lessons. She was assuming that this was a straightforward fix, but what if it wasn't?
The stakes were too high. You only got one chance with Kai Parker and if she used up hers…
"Then what do I do?" she asked, trying to swallow down her panic. She couldn't live with the uncertainty that someday – tomorrow, next year, a decade from now – Kai Parker would show up in her life like a maniacal Jack-in-the-box, knife swinging and ready to stab her. "Spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder? I can't! I won't know any peace until I know he's gone for good."
"Then you ask for help. What about his Coven? The Gemini want him locked up, too. If anyone would know how to do that, it's them."
"I already tried calling Liv. Her phone's been dead since I got back. Apparently, she and the rest of her coven went into hiding when he became the leader. See what I mean, Elena?"
"Well, Dr. Laughlin's still here. Why don't you ask her?"
"Dr. Laughlin?"
"Jo Laughlin, formerly Josette Parker. Kai's twin sister. She's dating Alaric, too." Misinterpreting Bonnie's startled expression, Elena smiled ruefully. "I keep forgetting how much you've missed out while you were in the Prison World."
Aww, what a shame. Pity I wasn't just stuck on the Other Side, the ghost that looked on as the rest of you went on with your lives. At least I'd be up to date on all the goings-on, wouldn't I?
Bonnie drained the rest of her coffee to hide the stink-eye she had almost thrown at her friend.
"She protected Luke and Liv. Helped her coven trap Kai the first time."
"Exactly!" Elena's brow furrowed. "How did you know all this?"
"Because he told me," Bonnie said quietly. Right before he stabbed me and left me to die in his own Prison.
"So you know he murdered half her family! I can't think of anyone who wants just as badly to see him gone for all eternity as you do. She doesn't know he's locked up yet, so you can break that good news to her."
Bonnie fiddled with her empty cup and thought about that. Siblings wanting to destroy each other. Wasn't that familiar?
She thought of the family that had plagued their town years ago. About the first one they met – Elijah Mikaelson – who had sworn to destroy his brother, who had asked them for help doing so. Bonnie had filled herself with the power of a hundred witches for that singular reason. But when the time had come, Elijah Mikaelson had betrayed them.
What if this Dr. Jo turned out to be another Elijah?
"She knew Grams, too," Elena said, picking up on Bonnie's hesitation. "She was Jo's mentor. You might want to see her for that reason alone."
"My Grams mentored a lot of people. Remember Shane?" Bonnie muttered, but despite herself, she was intrigued. Elena was right – Bonnie needed help with this, whether she liked it or not. "Fine. I'll see this Dr. Laughlin and ask her about making Kai's prison permanent. And if that's no help…"
"You'll come to me and Damon, and we'll figure out something else," Elena insisted.
Bonnie boggled her eyes, more exasperated than surprised. "You just promised me you won't tell Damon!"
"I won't! But if Jo can't help you, then we'll tell him together. You two are friends now, aren't you? Just explain things to him like you did to me and I'm sure he'll gladly help you." She rolled her eyes as Bonnie continued to look worried. "I won't tell him until you give me the say-so. I promise. Meanwhile," she checked her watch, "I happen to know that Jo will be on-call in an hour so if you want to catch her at her apartment…" She brought out her phone and searched for the doctor's address to send to Bonnie's.
Bonnie hesitated, staring hard at her friend. She had no doubt that Elena had every intention of keeping that promise. But where Damon Salvatore was concerned, Elena was completely…
(unreliable)
unpredictable. Always had been.
Her phone beeped. She had the doctor's address, and no choice but to trust her oldest friend, and hope that at least, by the time Damon found out about this, it would already be too late.
Just as she had no other choice but to trust that Jo's hatred for Kai would not be as ephemeral as some other siblings' hatred for their brother had been proven.
"OK then. Thanks." She got to her feet. "See you soon."
"Good luck!"
Bonnie waved, and started heading to the parking lot, her head full of dreams, memories of past betrayals, and the teddy-bear that was buried at the bottom of her dorm room closet, brimming with magic.
June 2014
New Orleans
She had been standing in front of the Ascendant for so long, basking in its magic that she hadn't noticed her friends had wandered off until she heard Caroline's strained voice.
"Bonnie, come and take a look at this."
Reluctantly, Bonnie walked away from the Ascendant. Caroline and Matt were by the adjacent wall, studying a mounted display. It seemed popular. Bonnie had to walk through a small crowd of people, mostly vampires, to get to them.
"How dare they?" whispered a woman as Bonnie passed her. Bonnie finally reached Caroline's side, and got to see what the fuss was about.
'Popular' was not the right word.
Mounted behind glass, in a case that reminded Bonnie of the trophy wall at Mystic Falls High was a large collection of jewellery pieces. Twenty items or more in number, they ranged in size and variety from a necklace of 3cm-large lapis lazuli stones to a pair of dot-sized lapis lazuli earrings.
Coldness creeped up Bonnie's spine as she realised that all the jewellery were lapis lazuli. She didn't need to read the label beside the frame - 'Daylight Jewellery' to know what they were. The Augustine had the good sense, at least, not to include any more information.
Why the Hell a Society that claimed to be moving on from its past put this up here was anyone's guess?
"I wonder how much they paid vampires to hand over their jewellery," Matt said.
The group of vampires who were close by enough to hear hissed. He blanched. "What…?"
Bonnie tugged his elbow and yanked him away from the offensive display and irate crowd. "Come away, Matt before you hurt yourself."
"What did I say?" He yelped.
"The Augustine experimented on vampires for decades. How do you think they got that collection?"
Matt gaped. "No. They didn't. They can't-"
"Wake up, Matt. I know you think that the Augustine are the good-"
"What is Caroline doing?!"
Bonnie whirled around. Their friend had left the display and was walking across the room. She moved with loud, quick steps and most people had the sense to get out of her way. Those that didn't, got moved.
And she was making a beeline to…
"Oh no, she isn't!" Bonnie gasped and started running.
"Crane!" Caroline shouted.
At the sound of his name, Crane started turning with an easy smile. "Just a moment. I'm in the middle of…"
"I just have one question," she said, her voice thick through dropped fangs.
Crane blinked.
Suits and Glasses popped out on cue, but they weren't fast enough to stop Caroline from grabbing Crane by his shirt and smashing him against the display case behind him. Her hand splayed over his heart, pinning him down.
Crane yelped, the people he was with scattered as others screamed, and the usual sounds of commotion followed. Bonnie and Matt, who had been struggling to get through the crowd, could suddenly move faster since everyone was quickly leaving the hall.
Suits and Glasses grabbed at the holsters under their jackets. Caroline growled, her gaze not turning away from Crane. "Want to see how fast I can rip out his heart before you can use those useless guns?"
Suits spoke, his voice trying to be placating. "Now, let's all just take it easy…"
Caroline yanked Crane forward and slammed him back again. The glass cracked.
They froze.
"Back. Off."
They stopped reaching for whatever weapons they had but didn't move.
Thank goodness for those early morning jogs! Bonnie thought as she and Matt reached their friend.
"Caroline, are you crazy?" Matt snapped. "You can't just… attack people…"
"I'm getting answers, Matt," she growled. "Right here, right now. Hard to claim plausible deniability when he's confessing in front of God, us, and every supernatural in this town."
OK, that made sense. Still. "A little heads up would be nice next time," Bonnie noted.
Caroline flashed a grim smile. "Sorry."
"So, you've got him. What's the plan?" Bonnie whispered, conscious of eyes and whatever was in those holsters now pointing at her, too.
Through the glass behind Ethan, Bonnie could see Caroline's veins darken, see her pupils widen. Compulsion.
"I'm going to ask you questions and I only want the truth. No lies, no clever workarounds."
"OK," Ethan said in a dull monotone. His gaze was unfocused.
"Brilliant idea, Care! Compel someone who works in the Augustine. Who doesn't know about vervain?" Matt snarked. "He's probably just acting compelled!" Matt snapped.
He had a point.
Caroline glared at Matt, then turned to Crane and shook him. "Are you on vervain?"
"I'm not," Ethan droned. "I can't drink it or have it anywhere near me."
"Why?"
"I'm allergic."
"We'll see. Don't scream." She grabbed his hand and sank her teeth into it.
"Watch out!"
Matt had registered the sudden click clack of guns cocking first. Bonnie whirled to see what looked like an army of Suits and Glasses with revolvers trained on them. Caroline reeled back, teeth bared, blood painting her chin…
Bonnie stretched out both arms, feeling magic propel towards her palms. Her left palm hit the back of Caroline's shirt and the right hand splayed open, her arm swinging in a tight arc as she cried out the words of a barrier spell.
The bullets… pellets… smashed into an invisible wall and fell to the ground.
Caroline met her gaze over her shoulder, her veins dissolving into a look of gratitude. Bonnie answered the wordless thanks with a nod. Caroline might have lost her mind, but Bonnie still had her back.
Bonnie quickly looked around to confirm that Matt was beside her, on the right side of the barrier. His face was white, his eyes bulging.
On the other side, Suits and Glasses Army were reloading their weapons.
"Seriously?" Caroline shouted.
"Just get on with it," Bonnie said, pointing her chin at Ethan Crane who was still staring into nothing, his face slack jawed. She was feeling the start of a headache at the base of her skull. She had raised the barrier without preparation, and she was going to pay the price for that soon.
Caroline wiped the blood off her chin, and shook Ethan a little, making his gaze snap back at her. "OK, you weren't lying about the vervain. What is the Augustine Society really planning?"
"An inauguration party," he said monotonously.
Caroline shook him harder. "I'm not asking about your stupid party! I want to know if your Society still keeps labs for cutting up vampires, or any other supernaturals?"
There was a murmur through the crowd. Bonnie turned around. Behind the human perimeter of the Augustine security forces, some visitors were still in the Hall, watching avidly. Whatever they felt about Caroline's methods, it was clear she was asking the questions they all wanted answers to.
"Experimenting on sentient supernaturals, as practised by our predecessors was immoral. The Society will never be involved in such actions under my watch."
"So why do you keep the trophies? Why is that disgusting display up there?!"
"As a reminder, and an apology. And when we start discussing terms with the supernatural society, we want to have these returned to any survivors or their families."
Caroline's grip loosened, her fangs retracting. She and Bonnie exchanged surprised glances.
"What does the Society do now?" Bonnie asked.
He blinked, his gaze blank.
"Answer all her questions," Caroline said sharply.
"Researching and archiving knowledge of the supernatural world. Conducting medical experiments, within strict ethical guidelines, and only on voluntary subjects who are generously compensated and released after their contracted time."
"Ethical guidelines?" Bonnie asked.
"Voluntary subjects?" Caroline snarled.
"Our research team is diverse, recruited from both humans and supernaturals. One of our goals for this inauguration is to get input from all supernatural stakeholders into how we conduct our practises. I promise you: the Society won't regress to barbarism on my watch."
My watch.
Even through the headache building in her skull, the words prodded at Bonnie.
"That's the second time you've said that. You don't just work in Finances, do you?"
"I do, in a manner of speaking. It was a joke."
"Who exactly are you?"
"My name is Ethan Crane." Beat. "Crane after my step-father, the man who raised me. My biological father was a summer fling my mother had as a college student visiting the US. She returned to London not knowing she was pregnant with me, and by the time she realised the truth, tried to tell my father, he was dead. A freak animal attack, she learned. She met my stepdad soon after and married him. He adopted me and I lived all my life not knowing who I was until a few years ago when I came into my inheritance."
"…inheritance?"
It can't be…
"My biological father's last name was McLeod. His mother, my grandmother, was Courtney McLeod. But before she married, her name was Courtney Whitmore. I am the last living Whitmore."
Bonnie's jaw dropped.
The murmurs reached a fever pitch. People were talking so loudly that she could make out words.
'Thought they were dead?'
'Thought they were cursed!'
Caroline took a step back, letting him go completely. "You're a Whitmore?"
"I'm a Crane. But because everyone else in my late grandmother's family is dead, this legacy was left to me; and now it's my responsibility to restore it. The Whitmore Foundation. Whitmore Hospitals. The Armoury. Whitmore Biotech. Whitmore University. The Augustine Society. Whitmore-"
The University. The two girls locked gazes, the same thought passing through their heads.
"The reconstruction work, the expansion and the renovations," Bonnie murmured. All that money pouring into the school and no one quite knowing where it was coming from…
"That was you?" Caroline asked. Ethan paused mid-list, nodded. "How long has…?"
The shots and her scream followed so closely together that they were one blood-curdling sound. Bonnie didn't even realise what was happening until Caroline was half-way to the floor.
"Caroline!"
Bonnie caught her, only managing to break her fall as her weight dragged them both down.
All around them was pandemonium. People were shouting for help. Others were shouting for calm. Feet were pounding around the Hall, to get out, or to get closer.
"Hey!" Matt shouted, struggling with Heels?! From the edge of awareness, Bonnie saw him and the woman grappling over a … gun? She barely noticed. All her attention was on Caroline who was whimpering, convulsing in her arms, as her eyes stared wide and scared. Bonnie rolled up her t-shirt to see a tiny black hole leaking blood an inch from her navel; there was a blotch of dark red spreading through the raised veins, spiralling from the wound. The rest of her complexion was rapidly greying.
"What did you do to her?"
One of Suits and Glasses got it into his head to make a rush at them. He smashed into the invisible wall and crumpled.
Instinctively, Bonnie shifted Caroline's weight to one hand, and raised her free hand. "Touch her and I will light you up!"
"She'll be fine. It was just a vervain gun," Ethan Crane said. Bonnie jumped, startled to see him crouching beside her. His easy smile had slipped back on, and he looked at her in what he probably thought was a reassuring manner. He tried to reach for Caroline and Bonnie aimed her hand at him. "Woah! I'm trying to help-"
"He's right, Bonnie."
Bonnie's gaze swivelled up to Matt. It took a moment to realize that he was no longer struggling with Heels. He had won the gun fight and was holding the weapon's ammunition out for her to see. "Concentrated vervain in hollow wooden pellets. They modified a semi-automatic." His voice was strange. To Bonnie's ears, it sounded almost…
…impressed.
Her hand was whirling to him before she checked it. She balled her fingers into a fist - they were red and wet, had been all this while and she'd never noticed - and changed her aim to Heels, following the woman as she walked around her to crouch beside Crane. She touched his hand, still bleeding from where Caroline bit it and her breath seemed to catch. She and Crane looked at each other, seeming to hold a silent conversation.
"Is Caroline going to be OK?" Bonnie cried.
"She will be," Heels said coolly. She and Ethan looked away from each other to stare at Caroline.
Fear like cold fingers crawling down her spine, Bonnie followed their gaze.
Caroline was completely still now, her eyes wide and unblinking, her skin the dark grey of desiccation.
"Is she…?" Bonnie could barely force the question out. She felt like she was choking.
"The entry point is non-fatal," Heels said clinically. "Therefore, the usual effects of oxidation and desiccation by vervain and lignin injection respectively are taking place. With these concentrations, and accounting for her body size, she should be immobile for five to seven hours, during which her vampiric physiology will gradually expel out the toxins and she will regain consciousness shortly after. Recovery will accelerate by up to sixty percent if she consumes human blood."
"What?" Matt asked.
"Your friend will be fine in a few hours."
Bonnie unclenched her hands. They started shaking. She fisted them back. "You. shot. her."
Heels looked at her. Her eyes were like flint. "She bit Ethan. Threatened to rip out his heart. I almost aimed at hers."
June 2013
Paris, France
"Just imagine the target is Caroline Forbes's heart." Nora said.
"Hey!" Bonnie yelled.
"Sorry," Nora said, not sounding one little bit.
"As I was saying," she said, shooting Nora a glare. "I've been good at this long before I knew about magic. I wonder how much of my hand-eye coordination was just my magic directing the target."
"In other words," Nora said, sotto voce, "why do you suck so much at this, Freya?"
Freya scowled. "Be quiet." She frowned, staring hard at the bullseye. She finally got her hand steady enough and took a deep breath. Just before she let the dart fly, Nora whispered, "Forbes's face."
The dart hit the bullseye and the three girls cheered, jumping and hugging in glee.
"I'm going to collect my winnings." With a broad smile, Freya bounced over to the bar.
Bonnie shook her head, watching her friend sashay across the crowded pub, causing a stir amongst most of the patrons.
"Stop stirring the pot," she hissed at Nora, but she was smiling.
"I call it as I see it. Those two hate each other and there's no point making them get along."
"How can they hate each other?" Bonnie wondered, not for the first time. "They don't even know each other. We literally just met you guys last week." When they found out Freya and Nora were witches, Bonnie was sure it would warm them up to her friends. Instead, it had had the opposite effect:
"Because new supernaturals in our town have always been a good thing," Caroline had said sarcastically.
"This isn't Mystic Falls," Bonnie had said exasperatedly. "I thought that was the whole point?"
"Just be careful, Bonnie," Elena had said.
"I'm always careful," Bonnie had muttered. "I'm tired of being careful."
"I have a theory about your friends," Nora said now. "Do you believe in love at first sight?"
Bonnie dropped her dart at Nora's question. Bent down to pick it and breathed out. "Don't I have to believe in love first?"
Nora gave her a look that saw too much. "Whoever he was, he sure did a number on you, didn't he?"
"What are you talking about?" Bonnie muttered.
Nora shrugged. "I won't push. But it's surprisingly easy to talk about things to a couple of strangers that you might not want to share with people you've known all your life. Whenever you're ready, I'm all ears."
Bonnie's hand was hurting. She looked down and saw that she was gripping the dart so hard, it was almost cutting skin. She put it down. "There's no story." She could feel Nora's gaze on her face and refused to meet it.
"I said I'm not pushing." There was terse silence, then Nora continued as if the segue never happened. "If there's love at first sight, then it follows that there'll be hate at first sight, right? That's what's going on with your friends and Freya." She took a sip of her drink, thought for a bit. "Either that or they're just resentful that the three of you went on this one-in-a-lifetime holiday together and you're spending all your time with a pair of pub crawlers you picked up in Barcelona."
"Nah, too far-fetched," Bonnie deadpanned. They both laughed after a minute.
They returned the darts and went back to their table to wait for Freya.
"What's taking her so long?"
Bonnie turned her neck, watched Freya chatting up the cute bartender with the mohawk and D cups. "Apparently, she's really thirsty."
Nora scoffed and pinched Bonnie.
"Hey!" Bonnie yelped, not so much angry as surprised. "What was that for?"
Nora blinked at her, looking down in surprise at where her hand was resting on Bonnie's elbow. She let go, and adjusted her necklace, looking embarrassed. "Sorry, I just… thought it'd be funny."
"To maim me?" Bonnie asked, rubbing at the raised skin.
Nora chuckled. "That's why you hang with us, remember? We're crazier than those chicks you came across the pond with."
"Hey, stop insulting my friends!"
Nora snickered. "Sorry. I'm just grouchy because I left my best lip tube at the dorm."
Bonnie rolled her eyes. "So? Just…" She wiggled her fingers. "I've seen you do it before." It was a neat trick that she'd made Nora teach her. If generic portation spells reminded her of the coven that specialised in them, she refused to dwell on it.
"Nah," Nora said. "I'll be bold. Let my lips go nude." She puckered up at Bonnie.
Bonnie laughed. "You can make anything sound dirty, I swear. Stop pretending to flirt with me."
"Who said I'm pret-"
"What did I miss?" Freya asked. Her hands were weighed over with a tray full of what looked like half a dozen drinks. "On the house, ladies." She set down three.
"Woo-woo!" Bonnie cheered.
"And the Pina colada for Bonnie from the ginger in the corner." Bonnie turned to see the rather stacked young man grinning at her. She grinned back and waved. "The blondie by the bar." Bonnie looked up at the well-dressed older guy at the bar. He was … wow. Hot in a very grown-up, very Mr.-Gray-Will-See-You-Now-in-French way. She managed a nervous smile, and he tipped his glass at her. "And Curls by the door."
Curls looked like jailbait. Bonnie shook her head firmly. His face fell so hard, he looked like he would cry. Yikes!
"And that's not all…"
By the time Freya was done naming all the people that had bought her drinks, Bonnie was feeling dizzy. "What the hell…"
Even Nora looked stunned. "I guess your time on the karaoke stand touched hearts, minds and other body parts. What are we going to do with all these drinks?"
Freya looked at Bonnie; her brown eyes were bright with challenge.
"This." Bonnie lifted her chin, took the pina colada and downed it one gulp.
Both girls gaped, then started hooting and applauding.
"Damn!" Nora said.
"Seconded." Freya was shaking her head as she took her own drink. "I'd never have thought you… You're so different from what I expected."
"Different how?" Bonnie asked, downing another shot. Freya's eyes widened. "You barely know me."
"Yes, but still… When I first saw you with your friends, I thought you were the Designated Driver."
Nora guffawed.
"Sounds ridiculous now," Freya admitted.
Six shots in, Bonnie was in the middle of a dance sandwich with Nora and Freya. Her blood thrummed with the beat of music, and laughter from her friends, and from all the boys that kept trying to cut in to get close to Bonnie. It had been so long since she had had uninhibited fun that the realization made her more delirious than the alcohol.
"I'm tired of being careful."
Her head was spinning when they stumbled back to the table. They had barely sat down when the bartender came over with a loaded tray.
"More drinks?" Nora gasped. The three girls stared at each other and burst into laughter.
"Wow, BB, you're definitely turning heads."
They turned around to see Caroline and Elena standing behind them. Elena was smiling broadly, like she completely expected to meet up with Bonnie here, and not at all like someone whose friend had (not sneaked off) left her to hang out with other people.
Caroline looked livid.
"Bonjour," Bonnie said weakly.
"Caroline, Elena, how nice to bump into you here," Nora said, friendly.
Freya was silent.
There was an awkward pause.
Nora sighed. "Would you like to join us?"
"Of course," Elena said immediately, pulling up a chair and making herself comfortable with almost record speed. "I'll have whatever… what exactly are you having, Bonnie?"
The three – Nora, Freya, and Bonnie – exchanged gazes, then burst out laughing. Elena smiled, as if she was in on the joke.
Caroline pulled out a chair and sat as loudly and as angrily as possible.
"We wondered where you went, Bonnie," Caroline said.
"Didn't you get my message?"
"The message you sent, ten minutes ago? An hour after you just walked out of the hotel we were all staying in a strange country, on a strange continent. Yes, Bonnie, we got your message."
"Girl, you need to get that stick out of your ass," Freya said sotto voce.
"I heard that," Caroline snapped.
"You were meant to."
"No one was talking to you, Freya Whatever Your Last Name Is."
"No one invited you, Forbes."
"Hey, Care," Elena muttered. "It's OK. We planned on going out, and this… place is as nice as anywhere… I'm sure."
Freya flipped back her hair. "God save us from upper middle-class America. You are such a bloody cliche, Gilbert."
Elena took a deep breath. "You don't need to keep baiting me, you know. We're all Bonnie's friends here. We can just… get along."
"Maybe I don't want to get along with you two."
Nora cleared her throat. "That's enough, Freya."
"Oh, I haven't even started."
"What is your problem?" Caroline yelled. A few heads turned but she ignored them, incensed beyond words. "We've been nothing but nice to you and you keep treating us like crap."
"You call being a patronising bitch nice?"
"OK, that's it!" Caroline threw down her phone and started yanking off her jewellery. "I will kick your ass, you cliched piece of European trash–"
It was only after all four girls had been kicked out of the bar, and they were standing in the street, glaring at each other as they licked their wounds and waited for an Uber, that they noticed.
"Where's Bonnie?"
They checked their phones. She had sent them all the same message.
"Who the Hell is 'Mr. Gray'?!"
June 2014
New Orleans
In her short, albeit concatenated lifetime, Bonnie had done her own share of dangerous things.
Facing down a millennia-old Original with nothing but her moxie and the arsenal of a hundred judgmental spirits.
(The outcome had been disappointing, but in retrospect, it could have gone worse.)
Facing down a two-millennia old Immortal with nothing but her moxie and the kind of power that had driven stronger witches than her to suicide.
(The outcome had been disastrous. Do not repeat.)
Going home from a seedy bar with a guy that looked like he had his private Red Room.
(He hadn't. He had been a perfect gentleman and they ended up not even having sex because halfway through making out against his Ferrari, she remembered the last time she slept with someone, and promptly burst into tears. She ended up talking through most of the night, then falling asleep on his couch, and going back to the dorm the next morning to face Caroline's, Elena's, Freya's and Nora's combined wrath. It was the first and only time that all four girls had been on the same page.
Oddly enough, the guy had called her for another date. Who knew emotional wrecks could be a kink? Bonnie hadn't called back.)
But descending into the bowels of the Augustine Society after assaulting their leader was pushing the envelope even for her.
"Where exactly does this elevator go?"
The nun that shared the tiny space with Bonnie looked at her with dark, gloomy eyes. Her voice when she spoke was deep and foreboding.
"To Hell."
Whatever was on Bonnie's face must have been priceless because the woman broke into peals of laughter.
"That was low, Cami," said Kaleb through chuckles and gum-popping.
Their three escorts had turned up in time to show dismay and contrition at how disastrously their assignment had gone. Josh and Aiden had escorted Caroline and Matt back to the hotel. Kaleb healed Bonnie's magic induced migraine and stayed behind with her. Matt had wanted to stay with Bonnie, but she insisted that he couldn't leave Caroline alone and defenceless.
Matt had tried to talk Bonnie into coming with them. After a remarkably short time to 'clean up', the Augustine tour was back on schedule. Bonnie expected to be thrown out as well, but Ethan Crane had surprised them: "My hand will heal," he told Bonnie as Heels bandaged it up, while shooting glares at them. "The people that my family hurt will not. Tell your friend that I don't hold any grudges."
Bonnie didn't trust him but until she ruled out Elijah's offer, she had to see this through.
Schemes upon schemes upon schemes.
And now she was in an elevator with Kaleb, a nun with a twisted sense of humour, a tall vampire with sunglasses and a shawl and an Augustine usher who had handed out sweets. "You'll need them," he had said cryptically.
"Come on, Kaleb," the nun said, still giggling. "That was too easy. There was no way I could pass that up." She swallowed her laugh and offered her hand. "Sister Cami O'Connell. You can call me Cami."
Bonnie smiled as she shook it. "I'm Bonnie, and that was funny."
"She's a barrel of laughs, this one," said the vampire, startling Bonnie. Up until that moment, he hadn't said a word. He stepped closer and Bonnie could appreciate his clean-shaved, gorgeous face. He gave Bonnie an equally appraising look. "Figured I'd see you again eventually."
It took Bonnie a moment. "Marcel Gerard?"
He smiled. "The one who got away."
The smile brought back memories. A smoky night in Nice. A chateau. Freya - her British friend, not the Original - and her devil-may-care smile.
Bonnie was about to snark back something about who really got away from whom, when her ears filled with cotton. Metaphorically, that is. The sensation of pressure building in her drums, muffling sound was overwhelming and painful. The others felt it, too. She could see varying degrees of discomfort on their faces, but it looked like she was the worst hit. Kaleb pointed at his mouth, and she recoiled, what the hell? Then she realised what he meant, and quickly unwrapped the gum that the escort had handed out.
Her ears popping felt almost as painful as the earlier build-up. Relief had barely set in when the ground morphed and thick viscousness, in turn bitingly cold then scorching hot, rushed from her feet to her head and away.
She looked down to see solid ground still under her. Around her, everyone was gasping in shock. Even the escort looked slightly nauseous.
"What was that?" The nun cried.
"Air pressure changes at this depth," the escort said in a strained voice.
"More like we just plunged through a portal," Gerard retorted.
The escort said nothing, which just confirmed it.
"So where are we?" Kaleb asked. "Are we even still in New Orleans?"
"We could be anywhere. We might not be in Louisiana anymore. We might not even be in the country."
"Where are we?" Camille demanded from the Augustine.
"This location is classified."
She looked at Gerard, but he shook his head. He either didn't want to compel the mundane, didn't expect it to work, or knew it was pointless; that this low-level worker couldn't give information he didn't have.
"I've passed through portals before," Bonnie said. "They didn't feel like that."
"Those were built on ley-lines, fae-magic," Gerard explained. "This is a witch's portal."
The elevator ground to a halt. There was a short oppressive silence then with a hiss, the automatic doors slid open to reveal old-fashioned grill cage doors. Behind it was solid wall. The Augustine attendant stepped forward and started turning a metal crank hinged to the side. As the grill contracted, the solid wall started retracting into the floor, one inch per second. The sound of stone grating against stone was unnerving.
"What is this place?" Kaleb whispered.
"I told you," Cami said. She wasn't smiling this time. "Hell."
July 2013
Milan, Italy
The Pandemonium was loud music, flashing strobe lights and smoke that flooded the dance floor, obscuring the places where rainbow colors of elf magic sprayed out like geysers. Rumour had it that the club was built on fae-land, which was given to the owner when he rescued their Prince. Or so Nora had said. Freya had said that the owner had ransomed their Prince. Bonnie hadn't even known that fae were real, and a part of her world, until then.
Whatever its history, the club was full that night. Bonnie danced in a circle of witches, then spun in the arms of a werewolf, before a vampire cut in. It was hard to flirt in the crowd, and the noise and the press of bodies, but the vampire who called himself Lucien Castle managed. At first, she had mentally dismissed him. He was good-looking, in a forgettable way that instantly bored her, and the whole point of ditching Caroline and Elena to go to the Pandemonium, this barely legal mundane-prohibited club, was to find something with an edge. Then his hand brushed her bare shoulder, and she felt the aura of centuries crackle against her own.
It took a lot to impress a witch who'd tangled with Mikaelsons.
"Just how old are you?" she asked, her eyes wide.
He did a double take, then a broad grin spread across his face, changing it from 'cute but plain' to 'dangerous and definitely worth the time'. "Witch, huh? Just how powerful are you?"
He bought her a drink at the bar, and they talked. Or rather, he talked. His idea of flirting was listing all his accomplishments. He seemed to think that it mattered to her that he was a legitimate entrepreneur, whatever that meant, and not someone who had spent eternity as a glorified mobster.
"2nd century land ventures?" Bonnie mused, biting off the cherry from the martini stick, and watching him watch her mouth. "You must have been sired by one of the earliest vampires, maybe even an Original."
He started. "You've met Originals?"
I've taken down Originals. "A few."
"Klaus?"
Interesting. She rolled the cheery from one cheek into the other. "We've crossed paths."
"…and? What did you think of the Original Hybrid?"
There was a story there, if the sharp tenor in his voice meant anything. Bonnie swallowed the cherry, and pushed her magic into her palms.
"I took freshman Psych and when we talked about Middle Child Syndrome, my mind immediately went to him."
He burst out laughing, the tension that had slowly crept into his face falling away. Bonnie smirked, feeling dangerous.
"I never got your last name."
She let some of the magic go, not all, just enough that she didn't feel like a ticking bomb. "Take me home, and maybe you'll get lucky."
Home for Lucien Castle was a penthouse suite in the kind of hotel that was reserved for Heads of States and Monarchs. He leased it all year round, even when he was abroad. She stood at the balcony and watched the lights of Il Duomo twinkling in the distance. It wasn't the first time in Europe that a man had taken her to a hotel room, and each time made it less and less significant.
(She refused to ask herself why that was important.)
Lucien joined her with 2 wine glasses and his shirt off. His chest was well-muscled, and tan.
Nice.
She took a sip of the wine and her mouth exploded with flavour. She was no connoisseur, but this was richer than anything she'd tasted in her life. Her eyes watered. Her face must have given something away because he smiled.
"'51 Romanée-Conti."
"No idea what that means but… wow!"
"It means I was saving it for something special." And that's you, his eyes said as he sipped his wine.
Bonnie didn't know whether it was the wine but Lucien Castle was looking more and more attractive with every minute she spent in his company. She rested a finger against his chest. "I like unwrapping my present."
"I'll keep that in mind for next time," he murmured. His eyes were doing some unwrapping of their own.
"That's a bit forward of you," she murmured back, staring up at him through her lashes. "Assuming there'll be a next time."
"I told you." He snaked an arm around her waist, pulling her so her back was to him. "I was saving that bottle for something special." He brushed his hand down her bare shoulder. "Now tell me your last name."
"You'll have to earn it," she whispered back.
He laughed quietly. "I like a challenge."
He put away their wine glasses and turned her in his arms. She locked her hands around his neck, lifted her face and–
The sound of a phone buzzing made him freeze.
Keeping one arm around her, he reached into his pocket. "I'll just turn this off."
He pulled out his phone, looked at it and then his arm fell as he stepped back. "I have to take this."
Bonnie blinked. "Seriously?"
"I really have to take this." In fairness to him, he sounded more disappointed than she felt. "If it were anything else… I'll be right back. Don't leave." Her last glimpse of him before he disappeared through the curtains was the black-inked ouroboros tattoo on his back.
She picked up her wine glass, sat on one of the deck chairs, and checked her phone. Bonnie had sent Nora a message when she arrived at the hotel, and Nora had replied with one that loosely translated to "you go, girl!" She must have passed on the deets to Freya who, in her usual fashion, used emojis to communicate the same. One of these days, they were going to set up a group chat. There were messages from Caroline, too. The passive-aggressive scaremongering that had become her routine. Bonnie ignored them. Elena had just sent a one-line 'I hope you know what you're doing, Bonnie' that was more infuriating than Caroline's litany.
Between her date jilting her, albeit temporarily, and the sour messages, Bonnie's buzz was slipping away. After watching the city-line for a few minutes that stretched to ten, then thirty, she was all out of buzz.
He'd better be amazing in bed after all this.
She left the balcony. She could hear Lucien's muffled voice in the distance. He was still on this oh-so-important phone call. Restless, she went looking for him. The suite was huge, more apartment than temporary lodging. There was a bedroom, which looked nice. Rich brown walls, literal silk red sheets, a collection of artworks on one wall with no particular theme. The pictures looked like they were chosen more for show than personal interest. Everywhere else in the apartment was more of the same – expensive, aesthetically pleasing and devoid of personality.
The last room she found was an office – desk, laptop, bookshelf. There was an inner door that she assumed led to a tiny bathroom or closet. She could hear Lucien's voice coming through there. He was speaking in a language she didn't know, so his voice easily faded into the background.
She examined the bookshelf. There were lots of boring legal volumes, but one row had more interesting reading: a collection of Grimoires. None of them were in any language she understood, so she placed them back. The top row served as a kind of display space, with pretty but forgettable figurines and artwork. One thing stood out though – an oddly-shaped wooden box. It was about the size of a shoebox, and locked. On its lid was stencilled the same ouroboros symbol he had as a tattoo.
'Don't underestimate me, Genova.'
She turned around, but he wasn't in the room. He was still in the closet/bathroom, and she heard him because he had slipped into English temporarily. He was back to speaking in a foreign language. The important phone call didn't seem to be ending soon.
Bonnie sighed, now just bored. She returned the box to its shelf and walked to the desk. It was a nice, sturdy mahogany, with adequate length and breath. It had potential. Her hands ran over the papers on the table absent-mindedly, not really registering any until one caught her eye.
She pulled it out.
It looked like a photocopy of an older manuscript – the letters and symbols were in a strange language she couldn't make out. At the bottom corner of the page was the ouroboros symbol that was apparently a recurring motif here. She stared a bit harder at the symbol. Was that a snake or a-?
Her phone buzzed, startling her. She put the page back, hopefully the same way she'd found it, and checked.
Freya.
Bonnie slipped out of the room and answered it.
"Lucien Castle is bad news! You need to get out of there!" Freya shouted.
Bonnie started. "What do you mean 'bad news'?"
"There's no time to explain, BB! I just read your text on Nora's phone, or I wouldn't have let you leave the club with him. Next time, text both of us!"
"But…" The champagne, the red silk sheets, the fancy penthouse suite.
The vibe she'd sensed in the club. The creepy snake fetish. Easy-going-sex-positive Freya sounding freaked out.
"I'll be down in five."
"We're coming up to get you."
"Honestly? I don't think he'll even notice when I leave."
She ended the call and listened. Yep, he was still on that darn call which had been going on for – She checked her phone – one freaking hour! If Freya hadn't called to tell her he was bad news, his bad manners alone would have chased her away.
She was opening the door of the suite, when she heard his voice – this time directed at her.
"Bonnie?"
Her heart jumped and she turned around, her magic keyed to her fingertips, but he wasn't in the foyer. He must have been checking the rest of the suite. Bonnie walked out, shutting the door as quietly as she could behind her.
She could handle herself, but discretion was always the better part of valour.
She walked quickly to the elevator and through the lobby, nodded at the snobbish-looking Maître d' and found her friends waiting at the end of the driveway with two boldly coloured, chrome-plated, beautiful streamlined Vespas.
OMG!
Bonnie barely stayed put for their hugs and "are you OK? You look OK? Did the bastard try to stop you? We're setting up a group chat ASAP"s before she turned to squeal at the machines. "Dibs on the red one!"
Freya scoffed. "You wish." She handed Bonnie a helmet. "Hop on."
She pouted. "Oh, come on! You must have ridden a hundred times, and this will be my first-"
"Bonnie!"
The three girls froze, then as one, turned to see Lucien standing in the Hotel entrance way, staring at them. He had put on his shirt – that had probably slowed him down. He was silhouetted against the light from the foyer so Bonnie couldn't make out the expression on his face. But the intensity in his voice was unnerving enough.
"Let's go!" Nora shouted.
Bonnie jumped behind Freya's back. Freya throttled, and roaring, the two Vespas charged into the darkness.
June 2014
New Orleans
The double doors opened into a corridor flooded with fluorescent lights. On one side was a wall of solid black rock, shiny in the brightness. On the other side was a glass wall through which they could see groups of white-coated people working around a variety of equipment – computers running analytical graphics, cold freezers, X-ray machines, centrifuges, small and large test equipment, some far too exotic for Bonnie to identify. The glass walls must have been soundproofed because apart from the noises they made and the background hum of machines, the hall was silent.
'Hell' looked a lot like the Whitmore College's Science department. Based on what Bonnie now knew, this wasn't by accident.
Her gaze was drawn to one lab where a brown-skinned man with a fro of brown curls, was sitting on a reclining chair, surrounded by white coats. A variety of tubes and wires ran from his chair to the machines and screens behind him, including a huge metallic hemisphere that was suspended over him, and looked like it fit into the ring of serrated grooves machined into the floor around the chair.
There was a metallic muzzle wrapped over the lower part of his face.
One of the white coats was asking the man questions, reading off the checklist in her clipboard and ticking off his answers. The others adjusted the wires around the man. The wires which, Bonnie realised with a jolt, didn't only come out of the chair but also came out of him. A tube took red liquid from his elbow to one of the numerous machines.
Three white coats stood to the side, apparently just observing. One of them looked up as Bonnie's party drew closer, and she recognized Ethan Crane. He smiled and waved over, mouthing words she couldn't hear. Their Augustine escort produced a key card and tapped it against the scanner on the glass, and a door popped open.
"I'm so glad you stayed," Ethan said, walking straight to Bonnie and grasping her hand. "We'll arrange a tour for your friends after the Inauguration." He beamed at Kaleb. "Kaleb Westphall, pleasure to meet you. Though I'm disappointed the Regent couldn't make it."
"The Regent was detained by urgent business," Kaleb answered. This was news to Bonnie. She hadn't known that Vincent was supposed to be here.
Ethan turned to the Nun. "Sister O'Connell. I'm glad you could make it."
She nodded
"Marcel Gerard, the honour is-"
"Yeah, yeah, cut the bull. What's going on over there?"
Ethan made a face, as if disappointed that he couldn't get out whatever speech he'd prepared. "That's one of our test subjects. A vampire by the name of," he laughed, "John Smith."
Marcel laughed, too. "Give me a break."
"Said the same thing. But we promise our volunteers anonymity so John Smith it is. When the tests require genealogical information, we give them the choice to either terminate the experiments or proceed with extra compensation."
"You pay them?" Bonnie asked.
"Of course," Ethan said, sounding slightly offended. "I told you - I've changed things here. Our procedures are completely humane. Every test subject here is voluntary. Dr. Malraux could tell you more…"
Why did that name sound familiar? Bonnie wondered as they followed Ethan across the lab to the two women he had been standing with before. Bonnie immediately recognised Heels, who gave her a stony glare. The older woman beside her was tall, coily-haired, and good-looking and one of the last people Bonnie expected to see here.
"Please meet Dr. Keelin Malraux, co-founder of the National Genome Sequencing Program, Dean of Biology and Head of Genome Sciences at the Whitmore University, and that's just for starters. Dr. Malraux, meet some of our, hopefully, future stakeholders."
Oh my God!
This woman was like a rock-star at the University.
"You probably don't know me," Bonnie said, a little shyly when it was her turn to be introduced, "but I'm a sophomore at Whitmore. I take a class in your department, and I've attended two of your seminars."
Dr. Malraux's eyes brightened with interest. "It's nice to meet you all the same. What's your major?"
Bonnie wanted to hide in her own shoes. "Undeclared."
The doctor smiled kindly. "Well, the process is just as important. And did I hear right? Bonnie Bennett?"
The gleam in her eyes made Bonnie's smile falter. She took her hand back. "You did."
"Mind if I chat with the vampire on the hot seat?" Marcel cut in. "Shouldn't take too much of your time."
"Yes, we expected this," Ethan said. "If you give us a few minutes to arrange things-"
The vampire smiled, with teeth. "Now. Before you make any arrangements."
The doctor stopped looking at Bonnie to frown at him. "I don't think-"
Ethan stepped in smoothly. "Why not? We have nothing to hide."
Dr. Malraux was obviously not happy, but she led the party to the vampire in the chair. She gave some quiet instructions to the technician with the clipboard. She seemed to be in charge, and she rounded the others up. Wires were unhooked, the muzzle was removed, and all the technicians cleared space for the visitors to approach the vampire.
Malraux tapped on a tablet, and the vampire's chair adjusted into a position that put him on the same level with the visitors.
He didn't look pleased. "What's with the civilians?"
"They just have a few questions," Dr. Malraux said.
"I didn't agree to no interviews."
"You'll be compensated for your time," Ethan Crane said.
The vampire's scowl turned into a smarmy grin. "Then ask away."
"What's your name?" Cami O'Connell asked at once.
He looked her up and down and leered. "John Smith. What's yours, Sister?"
"Seriously, that's your name?" Bonnie said.
He turned his leer from Cami to her, and impossibly, it became creepier. "You can call me anything you want, babe."
Ugh.
"Are you here by choice?" Kaleb asked.
"I chose the van-load of cash they're paying me for my services, if that's what you're asking."
"How did they find you?"
"They put out an ad."
It went on like that. His answers were cryptic and borderline rude. Whoever he was - John Smith, really? - he clearly wasn't in need of rescue. After some probing, he admitted that he was lying low from 'creditors'. He was happy to be here, and not in a hurry to leave.
Was he treated well? Were the experiments human? Well, what was that to them, he retorted. He wasn't being paid a fortune for a spa vacation. He knew what he was getting to, and they should quit bothering him. Only he said that last less politely.
"When you leave here, you should spend some time in NOLA," Marcel said at the end of the conversation, surprising them. They were the first words he'd spoken to the other vampire. He had insisted on this interrogation, then let everyone else do the talking. "You look like you'd fit right in."
The man scoffed. "The Big Easy? Hard pass. I hear it's run by a real tight-ass. Not looking to add myself to the stiffs in the garden."
Marcel chuckled. It should have sounded friendly, but it wasn't.
The man shifted. "Are we done here? I'd like to get out of this chair someday."
"No more questions," Cami said, stepping back.
He winked at Bonnie. "See you around, babe."
Ugh!
The technicians crowded back in, and the muzzle went back on. Bonnie had a glimpse of the man staring at Marcel, an unreadable expression on his face, before his chair was rotated back into a recline. The loud noise of machinery filled the room. She glanced up to see the hemisphere descending. In seconds, it had completely enveloped man and chair.
"What's happening?" she asked. "What are you doing to him?"
Ethan rubbed his hands with glee. "Where do we start? I have so much to show you about what we do here."
July 2013
Zürich, Switzerland
There was so much to see in Europe, but Bonnie's friends didn't share her priorities.
When she told them about the other supernatural-exclusive club in Zurich, they passed.
"I had to change the Schedule to attend this seminar," Elena said that evening, sounding more upset than the situation deserved. "The speaker is the world's expert on The Commonalities of Eschatology across Creeds."
Bonnie blinked.
"He's 80 years old and has a family history of Alzheimer's! This might literally be the last public lecture he will ever give!" Elena looked positively frantic. She turned to Caroline.
"I would. You know I would, Bonnie but Stefan's going to call about my mother's letter. I can't leave, I'm sorry." Caroline sounded sorry. "I promise tomorrow night-"
Bonnie dismissed the suggestion with a gesture. "No biggie. I can always go with Nora and Freya."
Elena paused in the middle of annotating her Schedule. "Don't take this the wrong way, Bonnie, but why did you ask us in the first place? You've left us to go off with Nora and Freya before."
Bonnie didn't meet her gaze. "Just thought we'd do something fun together."
Elena frowned. "Bonnie-"
"Well, I'm off. Have fun with your stuff and your stuff."
She met only Freya outside the hotel. Nora had gone to Italy for the day to visit old family – something she failed to mention to Elena and Caroline. The two walked to the first fae portal. The club was in Zurich. To get there, she and Freya would pass through the fae portal network that connected the cities of the continent. The portals were built along ley-lines.
"It's less disorienting than I thought it would be," Bonnie said after the first port.
"It's fae magic," Freya explained. "If this were a witch portal, like the ones that the Gemini are known for, you'll feel the difference. You dropped your purse." She bent down to pick it up.
"Sorry," Bonnie mumbled, taking it and mentally kicking herself. She thought she had got over that particular nervous reflex.
Navigating the portals was easy enough. After the second port, Freya split; she was taking a different portal to meet up with an old friend in France. (Another detail Bonnie hadn't told Elena and Caroline). Not for the first time that evening, she strongly suggested that Bonnie come along. The word 'threesome' was thrown around.
As nicely as possible, Bonnie passed. It was easy to have meaningless hook-ups with people she never planned on seeing after the next morning's coffee. But she liked Freya – and Nora, too – too much to risk their friendship over sex etiquette. Not when the entire continent was filled with so many enthusiastic options.
It was easy to find the club in Zurich. It was very similar to the other one in Milan. The loud music – Swiss folk pop this time – the strobe lights, the rainbow geysers.
It was the first night she was flying completely solo, but it took her shorter than she expected to loosen up and start having fun, throwing herself into the music and the free drinks that she now took for granted would keep coming her way.
She was taking a breather at the bar when he turned up.
"Aren't you a sight for sore eyes," said a deep American-accented voice beside her.
Bonnie looked sideways… blinked. OK, this was promising. Nice smile. Nice face. Very nice body. She grinned. "Does that line ever work?"
He laughed, his eyes crinkling at the corners. Nice laugh, too. Nice everything. "I'm usually on the receiving end of the pick-up lines."
"So you're a taker."
"For you, I can be a giver, too," he leered cheerfully.
Bonnie giggled.
"Well, this is a surprise."
Bonnie glanced up, and froze.
Lucien Castle was staring down at her. There was a faint smile on his face, an attempt at casualness that the intensity in his eyes contradicted. "After searching for weeks, you show up here, practically where we first met."
"Hello, have we met?"
The smile vanished into a scowl. In the neon lights, he almost looked his age. "Is that supposed to be funny?"
"It's supposed to be 'I want to avoid a scene'-y."
"You should have thought of that when you ran out on me without so much as a goodbye."
"You mean when I waited for one hour while you had your business phone call with Geneva or whatever, and never once checked on me?"
He flushed. "I told you it was important. Give me a chance to make it up to you."
"You had your chance."
"Bonnie-"
"Castle. Nice to see you here," the American declared.
Lucien started at the interruption, noticing the other man for the first time. "I can't say the same. As my employees in Kingmaker can tell you, I don't like poaching." His voice was cold as he looked at Bonnie pointedly, then back to the American. The message was clear.
Bonnie spluttered. "Excuse me?"
Lucien barely spared her a glance; his glare now fixed on the other man who just smirked at him. "Bonnie, it might interest you to know that Marcel Gerard here is an old friend of Klaus Mikaelson."
Bonnie recoiled. Lucien smiled coldly.
Marcel Gerard was unfazed. "Same as you, Lucien Castle. We both know these aren't your usual haunting grounds. Didn't I just hear something about you talking to the Genova witches?"
Lucien looked affronted.
"I wasn't eavesdropping on your call," she said defensively. Geneva or Genova, it made no difference to her. "I just overheard a name when I went looking for you. And it slipped out now because you can't take a hint and leave me alone."
"What game are you playing now, Lucien?" Gerard mused.
"None. Unlike Klaus," Lucien rasped, "I don't pick losing battles. There's a shake-up happening in that coven and until then, anyone with sense will stay away from their witches."
"So, you're here to do what…? Spy? Oh wait, I get it." Gerard laughed, making Lucien stiffen even more than he already did. "You want leverage to cancel your persona non grata status."
Lucien's hand curled into a fist. "You may be King of your little den, but this continent is my domain."
"Easier to kick out the competition than face it?"
"I don't need to have you thrown out. I have centuries on you, and I can squash you like a bug."
Gerard stood up and folded his arms. Bonnie took a moment to appreciate the height and muscles. "You can try."
"OK I've heard enough," Bonnie declared. "I don't know what is going on here but I'm not going anywhere with you, Lucien Castle."
Lucien gave her a patronising smile. "Bonnie, you don't know what he's done-"
"I know you can't take a hint, and I don't like bullies." She stood up, too. "Excuse me."
It was a shame about Gerard, she thought as she burst through the club doors and turned into the dingy alley. But she wasn't in the market for more drama.
She had almost reached the street when Castle stepped out of the shadows.
She halted. "You have got to be kidding me."
"We aren't done, Bonnie," he said smoothly.
"Maybe you aren't, but I am. Excuse me." She tried to walk past him.
He grabbed her wrist. Her skin was already primed with magic, and she felt the sizzle as it burned him.
He winced but didn't let go. "That tickles," he gritted out, trying to pull her closer.
Her left hand struck out, and the motus broke his grip, picking him up and smashing him into the dirty wall. His shout sounded more surprised than pained.
"I'd stay down if I were you," Bonnie advised.
The shock on his face faded into a smile that narrowed his eyes into slits and sent a shudder of revulsion through her.
"I don't think so," he sneered. "I'm going to wear you out witchy, then we're going back to my place to pick up where we left off."
He got to his feet and braced to charge. She readied herself for a Vatos this time, when he staggered back, clutching his head with one hand. His eyes flashed. "You want to play, huh?"
Bonnie stared. This wasn't her magic. She turned around, but the alley was empty. Who was casting the aneurysm?
It was only slowing him down, not stopping him. She threw out her own curse, and he shuddered to a halt. She strained harder and he sank slowly to his knees. He wasn't an Original, but he was close. The pushback on her magic was immense. It had been a long time since she had had to go toe to toe with someone this powerful.
"Woah," he groaned. "I'm impressed. If you're trying to… turn me off… you're g-going about it the wrong way."
"And just when I thought you couldn't sink any lower."
Bonnie and Lucien swivelled to watch Marcel Gerard walking down the alley. He had company, a squad of half dozen vampires flanking him. Bonnie lifted the aneurysm and breathed out slowly.
Lucien laughed. "Do you really think…" The vampires with Gerard stepped into the light and his laughter stopped. "You've made interesting friends, Gerard."
Marcel spread out his arms expressively. "You know me, Lucien. I'm a friendly guy."
Lucien turned to Bonnie. Gave her a slow, once-over. "Something came up, darling. Don't worry. We aren't done yet."
Bonnie didn't even dignify that with a response.
Marcel came to her side and offered his hand. "Come on, Bonnie, let's leave these guys to catch up."
She took his hand and walked out of the alley with him. Behind her, she heard a fight starting. She looked back once, but she still saw no sign of another witch. Whoever had cast that first spell must have been cloaked.
"Don't worry about Lucien," Marcel said, misreading her frown. "The Strix will have a chat with him. He won't be a problem."
Bonnie raised an eyebrow. "I wasn't worried."
"You should be. That guy is bad news and as someone who's bad news myself, I should know."
"Thanks for the 'rescue' but I'm not going anywhere with you either. I didn't ask for your help and I don't owe you anything."
"Of course, you don't 'owe' me. I wanted to stick it to Lucien." He chuckled. "I have a confession. Back at the club, I didn't meet you by accident. Once our mutual friend realized that Lucien would be there, too and sent me over to rescue you." With a flourish, he brought out his phone and typed a message. He handed it over to her as it started ringing.
Bonnie stared at the blocked number, then put the phone to her ear.
"Don't say my name."
Bonnie jumped. "Fre-?"
"I said don't say my name. He has people everywhere. Anyone can be listening."
"Is he searching for me?"
"I don't think so. He's in Switzerland for a business contact."
"How do you know this?"
"Marcel keeps tabs of the influential vampires that enter his orbit. When he told me about Lucien, I knew that would put you in his path and I sent Marcel over."
Bonnie felt her heart clench in gratitude. But on the principle of the thing, she had to say: "I can take care of myself."
Freya scoffed. "Yes, I know that but trust me you don't want the bad memories."
Bonnie eyed Marcel. The American vampire who was a friend to Klaus Mikaelson and had spies in Europe. "I don't ask questions…"
"…I don't ask you questions, either."
Bonnie paused. Despite herself, Caroline's warnings filled her head. As much as she liked the two English witches they had picked up in Spain, the truth was that she didn't know Freya and Nora, not really. And now, she'd just found out that Freya was apparently involved somehow with NOLA and maybe Klaus Mikaelson and it would be stupid, dangerous even, not to push.
"I was looking out for you, Bonnie," Freya said now. "You know that right?"
It was hard to argue with that when this was the second time Freya was saving her from Lucien Castle. Any doubts Bonnie might have had about that first night - maybe her friends had been over-reacting and she had misjudged him - was laid to rest. Did it really matter that Freya, possibly Nora, had a connection to Klaus Mikaelson? The Originals had literally existed for centuries. It would be harder to find people of the Night World that weren't involved with them in some way, than the opposite.
She looked at Marcel Gerard, waiting patiently beside her. The smarmy grin was off his face. He looked open, sincere.
She let her misgivings go.
"Your friend is cute," she told Freya.
Marcel laughed.
"He is, isn't he?" Freya said, sounding relieved. "Changed your mind about the ménage à trois?"
Bonnie took in Marcel's smile, and she smiled back. "You know what? I think I have."
They walked to the portal, leaving Pandemonium and its denizens behind.
June 2014
New Orleans
Bonnie discreetly leaned against the wall and fixed her face in what she hoped was rapt attention as a werewolf subject rattled her life story while the scientist in charge of her explained all the wonderful things they were discovering with their research. She was trying to remember if this was the sixth or seventh team that they were speaking to, and realized she'd lost count.
Ethan Crane had been taking them round to meet different teams. Each team was a group of scientists and researchers, studying at least one test subject who were either vampires or werewolves. No witches so far, which was interesting. Gerard and Sister O'Connell established a pattern. The nun interrogated the subject, asking if they were here of their will, treated humanely and adequately compensated. While Gerard asked the scientists about the nuts and bolts of their research, and the all-important question – funding.
"The Foundation bankrolls everything," Ethan explained the first time it came up. "The Augustine has no sponsors. I know what you're thinking – military funding, government contracts, private corporations. If they're paying for your research, they own your research. Everything here belongs to the Augustine and the decision to share our knowledge is entirely up to us."
"You mean you," Marcel said. "It's entirely up to you."
Ethan shrugged in the uneasy style of a man who didn't like talking about his wealth. He was more comfortable talking about the research; he had more than a surface-level knowledge of the work being done here; and he confessed that he was a supernatural geek long before he realised his legacy.
"It's kind of fate, you know?" He said, winking at the stony-faced Heels beside him. "All my life I believed in things that everyone else around me thought was fantasy. It's like the happy ending of a fairy-tale, when the faithful gets his reward."
He certainly acted like his rags-to-riches backstory was true. But that was the problem, wasn't it? It could just be an act.
Everything in this place could be staged. From the subjects's reassuring answers to the nun's questions. To the lead scientists who varied in age from just-graduated-college-aged to middle-aged and spoke with enthusiasm and respect about their research. Even Caroline would be hard-pressed to find anything wrong with this place.
Caroline.
The tour had kept Bonnie so engaged, she hadn't thought of her friend until now. She hoped Caroline was OK. She had to be. Matt was with her, and Josh and Aiden were responsible for them. Idly she wondered what the story was with those two. She got a strong bad breakup vibe. She remembered Josh flirting with Matt and giggled internally. Then she remembered the look on Matt's face when he picked up that strange vervain gun, and she shivered.
By association, her mind went to Rebekah Mikaelson. The Original in her hotel room. Again, Bonnie wondered what Rebekah was really up to.
And why had her clothes been so bloody?
There was nothing she gained from worrying here. She shook her head as if that could clear her thoughts and tried to pay attention to what was happening around her. The discussions had split. Marcel and Ethan were still talking about finances. Cami O'Connell had gone into a tangent with the werewolf and Kaleb was now the one dealing with the scientists. Without meaning too, she blended the sounds of their different voices in her head and tuned them out. The white noise of background machinery and distant generators seemed to grow louder, blocking out everything else.
How far below ground are we?
Bonnie didn't have a vertigo problem. She had gone hang-gliding in Tuscany and scuba-dived off the coast of Greece. But now that she was thinking about it, the realization of how far below ground they were was alarming. All that oppressive weight on top of them, and held back by steel and concrete alone? Would it bear? And for how long?
Was it her imagination or had the air become thicker? And that dull machine roar, did it seem louder now? Yes, it was. Louder. Deeper. Wetter. Sounding less and less like rotating equipment and more and more like loud breathing. No, not loud. Immense. The respiration of an enormous… thing. Unimaginable vastness. And they were standing on it, waiting for it to shift and send them hurling through the abyss. Or were they already inside it? Like Jonah in the proverbial Whale, while they just waiting for digestion?
Bonnie.
"Bonnie!"
She started, staring into Marcel Gerard's face which was suddenly inches away from her own, and creased with concern. Over his shoulder, Cami O'Connell and Kaleb looked just as worried. Ethan, Heels, the scientists, and even the werewolf were also gathered around her.
"Give her some room," Marcel said, and they backed up, leaving them a little privacy. "Are you OK?"
"What happened?"
"The tour is over. We were about to leave, and you weren't moving. We tried to wake you, but you were… frozen, staring into space."
"What? For how long?"
"Seven minutes," Crane said. He walked around Marcel to stand near her. "How do you feel?" He sounded concerned, and his brow was furrowed with an expression to match. But his eyes were glittering; the corners of his mouth twitching like if he was trying to suppress… a smile?
Bonnie stiffened. "I'm fine. I was just woolgathering."
"You looked like you were in a trance."
She felt like she had been in a trance, but she wasn't going to admit that to this man. "I was thinking about Caroline," she said testily.
Ethan looked abashed. "Your friend will be fine, I promise you." He shifted uneasily. "Would you like something to eat? The refreshments for our guests are aboveground but we can stop at the rec room for snacks."
"I just want to leave and make sure my friend is OK."
"Of course. Of course."
"Are you sure you're OK, Bonnie?" asked Cami O'Connell as she and Kaleb drew nearer. The wizard gave her hand a squeeze.
She smiled at them. "I am, really." Her eyes glanced at Ethan, and she caught his expression before he masked it.
He had been smiling.
July 2013
Brussels, Belgium
Caroline burst into the room, her eyes flashing and halted at the sight of Bonnie, still in jammies, sipping coffee by the window.
"H…hi," she stuttered.
Bonnie hid a smirk behind her cup. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
"Maybe I have," Caroline retorted. "The Ghost of my best friend slash roommate, who rarely turns up before noon these days."
"And that attitude right there is why I don't."
Caroline opened her mouth to snap something back, and instead snapped it shut. Bonnie could tell from the way she was basically grinding her teeth together that it wasn't because she lacked the words.
Instead, she took a deep breath and walked to her side of the suite. "So… how was this Pandemonium?"
Bonnie shrugged. "It was fun. Until Freya sent her friend to chase away my date."
"What?"
Bonnie considered elaborating about how Freya had offered a threesome, which was technically a trade up, and decided against it. As fun as it was to provoke her friends, she didn't want to remember why after a few moments in Marcel's chateau, she had turned down their offer.
It wasn't so much the novel sex but the intimacy between Freya and Marcel that turned her off. The way those two had navigated around each other, like they knew each other that well. They had used similar phrases, fricking finished each other's sentences. Marcel had known what to mix for Freya without asking, and Freya had slipped off his watch and known where it went. Watching them together had struck something inside Bonnie, something lonely and empty. Before the sexytimes could start, she cried off with a sudden headache. Her friends were already asleep when she snuck into her bed.
Now Bonnie told Caroline a carefully edited version of how the night had gone down. She downplayed her encounter with Lucien Castle. She had never told them about the first night; and now she pruned off the gory details like the alley encounter and Gerard's rescue. Even with the PG retelling, Bonnie could see from the way Caroline was struggling to control her face that she was itching, badly itching to give Bonnie a lecture…
But once again, she surprised – disappointed – Bonnie.
"Well, I'm glad you're OK," Caroline said stiffly.
Bonnie shrugged again. "I only have Freya's word for it that I was ever in any danger," she lied.
"Why take the risk?"
"Why not?"
"'Why not' indeed," Caroline mimed, frustrated, then schooled her features to mask it.
Bonnie coughed to hide a snicker. Wow, Caroline and Elena must have really sat down and plotted out ways to 'deal' with Bonnie's behaviour. Avoidance seemed to be the strategy of the day. Don't reward bad behaviour by giving it attention. Those Psych 101 classes that Bonnie hadn't got to take were really paying off.
Talking about Elena, the same just walked in.
"Hey guys, I brought breakfast." She was all smiles as she placed the tray on the table, and started arranging the assortment of pastries, eggs and juice.
"There's coffee in the machine," Bonnie said, since they were all getting along and being domestic. She helped herself to a waffle and hummed. Hotel food was the main reason she put up with living with her friends. There was no five-star room service at Freya's and Nora's crappy dorms.
"Nice sandals, Bonnie," Elena said.
Caroline looked over. "They're gorgeous! Where did you get these?"
"A while back in Milan. Freya picked them out."
Caroline looked like she'd swallowed a lemon.
"Obviously, Tervuren is out," Elena announced. To Bonnie's quiet horror, she realized that Elena was checking the Schedule. "After the Museum of Natural Sciences, we have a few hours to kill. What do you say we take a train to Ghent, and then Bruges and then an overnight into Germany?"
It sounded exhausting. Bonnie looked over at Caroline, hoping for a like-minded ally, but Caroline had checked out of the conversation. Her laptop was open in front of her, and she was studying its screen with a deep furrow between her brows.
She looked up, when she felt the attention from the other two girls. "What?"
"Elena was wondering-"
"If you spoke to Stefan last night?" Elena finished, her voice careful.
Too careful.
Bonnie's trouble radar pinged.
"I did," Caroline said stiffly. "I've been at the business centre, on the phone with the lawyers for an hour now." Their mobile plans didn't cover international calls so calls back home had to be routed through the hotel's front desk. "Still no sign of the letter. I'm checking my files from that time. I kept records of my mother's-" she cleared her throat -"treatment." Also known as the time that Caroline tried to cure cancer. "Sometimes, I made notes, personal stuff. Maybe there's something in there that will help us find this letter."
Just before they left the States, there had been a small legal kerfuffle with the lawyers in charge of Liz Forbes's estate. Liz Forbes had written a letter to her daughter before she died, and the lawyers had delivered it to her. They needed a copy of that letter now, probably for Last Will and Testament related reasons. Only Caroline hadn't received the letter, or if she had, she hadn't read it. It had seemed a small thing to leave it to Stefan, who had been functionally if not technically in charge of her house, to find the letter and send it to the lawyers.
But a month later, the letter was still missing, and the small thing had turned into a big mystery.
"I'm sorry, Caroline," Bonnie said, genuinely. She knew it wasn't the legal issues that bothered Caroline. It was that her dying mother had written her a letter… and at this rate, she'd never get to read it.
"I'm thinking that I should go back and look for it," Caroline mumbled.
"No!" Elena snapped. When the other two stared, she said quickly, "Sorry, it's just that… Stefan's already looking for it. There's no point rushing back to Virginia."
"I think I can find stuff in my house better than Stefan," Caroline said, her voice strangely stiff. When Elena didn't say anything, her eyes narrowed. "What?"
"Nothing," Elena said, in a voice that meant the opposite.
"Is this about me and Stefan?"
Elena blinked. "What? No!"
Caroline kept staring.
"Care," Elena said tiredly. "I don't know how many ways I can make it clear that you have my blessing to date each other."
Bonnie choked over her eggs. Oh no, she did not?!
"I don't need your blessing to see Stefan," Caroline said through gritted teeth.
Elena raised her hands in surrender. "Caroline what do you want me to say? Every time we try to talk about this, you bite my head off."
"Then don't talk about it!"
"You're the one who brought it up!"
"You're the one who spent our last night in Virginia with him!"
"What?!" Bonnie gasped.
Elena flushed. "Nothing happened, I swear. Caroline was there the next morning." She glared at Caroline. "Stop being ridiculous. You're a vampire. You would have known."
"Define nothing," Caroline snapped. "Last I checked, emotional infidelity is still infidelity!"
"No one was being- My God, Caroline. Stefan and I are friends. We've always been friends. We will always be friends!"
"I know you, Elena. I know how you get with Stefan when he's with someone else. And that was before you broke up with Damon. You just can't stand that I get a Salvatore and you don't."
The day Bonnie understood the appeal of those brothers would be the day she asked someone to kill her.
Elena snapped. "You're literally talking nonsense now. And you're deflecting."
"I'm not-"
"Yelling at me about Stefan won't bring back your mother's letter, Caroline!"
Caroline recoiled, as if Elena's words had physically slapped her. Elena looked mutinous. A shocked silence filled the room.
Oh, Bonnie thought. Oh!
"I-I'm not…" Caroline said. "This isn't about…"
"Care," Elena started, then stopped. She brushed her short hair back reflexively. Her face and voice were careful, so careful. "I know it's hard to think you lost your mom's letter…"
"I didn't get the letter!"
"I never said you did."
"But you're thinking it. You're thinking I got the letter when I had my humanity switched off and I… did something to it." Caroline's gaze swept to Bonnie. Her eyes were suspiciously bright. "You're both thinking it."
"Hey!" Bonnie said, surprised. "Where's this coming from? I haven't said that and neither has Elena."
Caroline turned away, pressed her knuckles into her eyes. "You don't have to say it."
"We're not saying it because we don't think it." Bonnie stared at Elena, who wasn't meeting her gaze but was looking at Caroline with a stricken look on her face. "Right, Elena?"
Say something!
Elena said nothing.
"If I were you, I'd be thinking it, too," Caroline confessed, quietly.
"Caroline, you didn't destroy your mom's letter," Bonnie said at once. Then she paused. Right?
Because Bonnie didn't know. Couldn't. She hadn't been in town at the end of Caroline's downward spiral. She had gone to see Jeremy because… her mind reflexively shied away from the rest of that sentence. No, no, no thinking that.
Bonnie had never learnt the details of how Caroline's switch was fixed. She hadn't wanted to. She had assumed that Damon's domino effect theory had worked. That it hadn't all been for nothing.
Get the ripper out to put the ripper in. Use the ripper to fix her friend.
The start of everything that went wrong, and he had made it sound so simple.
When had anything in their lives been simple?
Now, she stared at Elena who was determinedly not meeting anyone's gaze. Who was looking like she knew more than she was letting on.
Caroline was still covering her eyes. "When you turned off your humanity switch, Elena, you didn't lose your memories. Everything you did, you still remember doing it?"
Elena flinched. "It's not the same for everyone. I had my vengeance on Katherine to focus on. I also had… a crutch. All those emotions flooding into you, every vampire handles it differently. You figure out a way to live with them."
"Even if it means erasing them subconsciously," Caroline said dully. She bowed her head and started crying.
Bonnie glared at Elena. Go to her. I'm not the one with the shared vampire experience!
Elena glared back. Bonnie could practically hear her say 'You go to her. You're not the one she accused of trying to take her boyfriend'.
So no one moved, and Caroline started speaking again, her voice choked with sobs. "There are things I don't remember. Like how I made Stefan turn off his humanity. I mean, I know how I did it - by making Liam hurt another student. I just don't remember doing it, you know. I don't remember her face, her name, if I still made Liam kill her after Stefan… turned it off." She drew in a sharp breath. "The memory of Mom that Stefan shared with me. The one that made me turn my humanity back on. My memory of that has holes. I remember it was in our house. She gave him a sewing kit for Miss Cuddles and… I wanted to see her. She was going to tell me something but… I don't remember hearing it. It's the last memory of my mom, and I don't remember it."
Tears filled Bonnie's own eyes.
"Care…" Elena said, her voice hollow.
Caroline was sobbing so hard, the words barely made any sense. "I did something to my mother's letter, didn't I?"
Bonnie couldn't help it, she rushed to Caroline. The other tried to pull back. "No, I don't deserve it. Not from you." But Bonnie held on tight and refused to let go; and after a few moments, Caroline broke down, burying her face into Bonnie's shoulder and shaking. "Bonnie, I'm so sorry! I turned off my humanity switch. You had to come home to a soulless monster and I'm so sorry!"
Bonnie felt her heart twist. "Oh Care!" And now that she finally, finally got the apology, it didn't matter. "Your mother died."
It was easy to condemn vampires, but if Bonnie had a switch that could turn off her pain would she be able to resist it? If she could find a way to look back at the last years of her life, or even just the last months,
(or even just those few days after Jo's wedding,)
and not feel crippling grief, won't she be tempted?
"Everyone warned me. Everyone told me. But I felt I was so smart. So perfect. So incorruptible. And I ruined everything. I hurt you. I made Stefan turn it off. We killed so many people. My God! I deserve to lose my mother all over again. I deserve worse."
Bonnie hugged her tighter, feeling like if her arms were holding Caroline together, that if she let go, her friend would fall into literal pieces. And Bonnie couldn't let that happen. For better or worse, she wasn't built that way.
She looked over to Elena. To ask for her help.
But Elena was gone.
June 2014
New Orleans
I hope Caroline is OK.
Bonnie might have brought up her friend as a defence against Ethan's probing, but she was eager to go back to the hotel and check on her friend. Who knew what had been in those bullets?
The Augustine Society was vast - the sheer number of staff they employed, supernaturals they had in their experiment pool, the research areas ranging from medicine to archaeological to deep-sea exploration (scuba diving vampires!). The amount of supernatural knowledge they must have amassed was daunting, and disquieting.
Appropriately, the physical space this building occupied was enormous. It was all one floor. The only elevator seemed to be the one that brought them to this level, no staircases in sight, and they'd been walking steadily down what seemed like a never-ending corridor for almost an hour.
Bonnie kept listening hard for the sound of breathing, but all she heard was the white noise of machinery. Had she just zoned out and imagined the breathing?
"How large is this place?" she asked Ethan Crane.
"And where is it?" Kaleb added.
Ethan laughed. "You don't really expect us to tell you that."
"I thought the Augustine was all about transparency these days," Marcel Gerard said.
"You of all people should know the importance of keeping some secrets to yourself, even from your allies."
Gerard gave him a narrow-eyed look. Ethan just smiled cheerily. Heels - who stayed by his side throughout their tour - kept a sharp eye on Gerard. Bonnie was sure that the woman was more than a PA. She could be a bodyguard as well. Aboveground, Ethan had moved with a pack of Suit & Glasses security team. Now, he only walked with Heels by his side. It would have made sense if Bonnie could ping any magic off the woman, but she didn't. Heels looked to be an ordinary mundane. Yet down here, she was all the protection Ethan Crane felt he needed.
Bonnie recalled the sound of Caroline's scream as she crumpled to the ground. She shot the woman a quick glare from the side of her eye.
A door close by burst open and four young-looking technicians stepped into the corridor, talking in loud voices.
"… convoluted. A doppelgänger sired by another doppelgänger who was sired by the first doppelgänger-"
"-sired by the brother of a doppelgänger. An important distinction-"
"Same bloodline, same difference."
"But the subject's genome analysis confirmed the presence of abnormal fae strains, which-"
"- is inconclusive unless we have a control sample of a genetic sibling-"
They abruptly stopped when they noticed Ethan and the others. Their faces looked slightly panicked.
"Kids, what have I told you about discussing high-level research outside your team areas?" He asked with a grin.
"Sorry, Mr. Crane." They said quickly and ducked back in the way they came.
Bonnie watched them go, feeling slightly sick. "What was that about?"
Ethan gave her an awkward smile. "We have a doppelgänger research team. They track historical connections. It's quite interesting really." His eyes brightened - he was about to geek out. "Ever noticed how the two known cases are so dissimilar-"
Another door opened and two women stepped out. The first woman who wore a white lab coat had turned her head to speak to the one behind her so Bonnie's attention naturally went towards the second. She wore the hospital-like gowns of a test subject, but unlike the clean, crisp clothes Bonnie had noticed on the others, this one's gown was rumpled and dirty-looking. Her hair was a sparse skullcap, and it exposed the sharp lines of her emaciated face. Her gaze was downcast, and her hands were shackled.
The party immediately halted.
The first woman turned, as if sensing the attention, and for the second time that day, Bonnie recognised someone she didn't expect to see.
"Dr. Meredith Fell."
Dr. Fell halted. Her eyes widened. "Bonnie Bennett?"
"Do you know each other? How pleasant," Ethan said, sounding anything but pleased. "Unfortunately, we can't stop to chat. We're running late as it is."
Bonnie immediately turned to Marcel, expecting him to say something about the woman in shackles but he was looking straight ahead. Beside him, Cami O'Connell was staring at the woman; under her wimple, her face pinched with strain.
Kaleb suddenly gasped. "Isn't that…?" But a look from Cami O'Connell made him fall quiet.
What is going on?
"We should start getting back," Gerard declared. He walked on. He moved past the woman as he did. She didn't raise her head, but at the very last moment, Marcel slowed and turned his head to look at her. His face tightened with distaste, then he kept walking. Cami gave the woman one last pitiful look, then followed Gerard.
Heels whispered into a phone and an Augustine escort popped out of a nearby door and hurried after them.
Kaleb hesitated. "Bonnie?"
"Who is she?" Bonnie asked Crane.
Ethan Crane raised his hands, made as if to speak, and Heels cut him off. "Subject names are confidential-"
Bonnie turned to the woman. "What is your name?"
"Ms. Bennett, we really should get moving," Ethan Crane said weakly.
The woman lifted her face, stared at Bonnie with glazed eyes, blinked as if she couldn't see clearly. She opened her mouth, but nothing came out.
Dr. Fell said loudly, "Bonnie, I strongly advise you not to talk to the subject-"
"Are you OK?" Bonnie asked. "Do you need help?"
"She does not-"
"I remember you," the woman croaked. Her voice was raspy.
It was Bonnie's turn to blink. "You know me?"
"You're Shane's protégée."
What?
Someone - probably Ethan - sighed and Dr. Fell swore quietly.
"Bonnie, we need to go." Kaleb put his hand on her elbow. She shrugged it off.
"How do you know me or Shane? Who are you?"
The woman looked up quickly at Fell. She shuddered and bowed her head even lower than it'd been before she raised it to answer Bonnie. "Nobody. I'm nobody. Please leave me alone."
"I can help you."
The woman shook her head, said nothing. But when Fell tugged on her arm, trying to lead her way, she didn't move.
"Are you being held here against your will?"
"Meredith, escort your patient back to her room right now," Heels snapped.
"I'm obviously trying to. Maybe get someone to help me, Sarah?" Dr. Fell snapped.
"I'm not done talking to her-" Bonnie started.
With a cry, the woman threw herself on Bonnie.
"Oh my God!" Crane shouted.
The woman had swung her arms over Bonnie's head, shackling them into an embrace. Her sharp face dug into Bonnie's shoulder, and Bonnie flinched, expecting teeth or worse. Ethan and Dr. Fell were screaming expletives. Heels was shouting something like "Code Orange! Code Orange in 12th Sector!" into her phone. Kaleb was yelling first magic, then just words.
Bonnie struggled to push off the woman's body - with magic and when that failed, with her hands, and then stilled when the woman started whispering furiously into her ear.
"Who are you?" Bonnie whispered back.
But suddenly the whispers stopped, and the woman sagged, her dead weight collapsed against Bonnie. Bonnie staggered, falling onto the wall. Then she felt the weight being lifted out of her arms and Bonnie had one last glimpse of that tired, pale face before Dr. Fell and what seemed like a half dozen of Augustine white coats dragged her through a door and shut it.
Bonnie whirled at Crane but before she could ask the question, Kaleb did it for her:
"What the Hell did you do to our magic?"
July 2013
Wiltshire, England.
Bam. Bam. Bam.
Who the Hell could that be at this time of the morning? Bonnie peeled first one eyelid, then the other back to stare at the peeling ceiling. Her gaze landed on Nora's dreamcatcher. The dormitory, then. It was a relief to recognise her surroundings for a change. Now if only the person at the door could go away.
"Bonnie, I know you're in there!"
Oh, by all things holy! Elena 'Party Pooper' Gilbert! Bonnie knew from sad experience that the pounding would not stop until she presented herself in front of her friend.
"I'm coming…" She grumbled. She put on the first thing she found to wear – some guy's T-shirt. Said guy was snoring in the bed. Bonnie eyed him with resentment, wondering how he managed to sleep through Elena's racket. And wasn't he supposed to be a redhead?
She poked him until he woke up.
Green eyes blinked at her. "Wh-what?"
"Get up. It's time to go."
He sat up. He wasn't a redhead, but with his floppy blond hair, green eyes, and six pack, he wasn't bad looking. He gave her a goofy smile. "Hey, Bon. Last night was awesome."
Bonnie couldn't wait to get rid of him. "Sure um… Frances. Can you get going? My friend's here and she needs to use the shower."
"Uh… actually, it's Fred, and I thought you said your friends were out all day?"
"My other friend. Hurry up!"
He gathered his things, confusedly.
"Bonnie!" Elena yelled.
"I'm coming, dammit!"
She shoved him to his feet once he got his shoes on. He waved his hands in the general direction of his shirt which she was currently wearing – and then changed his mind. He paused at the door.
"So… er… you didn't give me your number yesterday."
"That's OK, I have yours."
"I didn't give you mine."
"I'll find it on Facebook, Fritz."
His face fell. "It's Fred."
Bonnie blinked. "That's what I said." She yanked open the door to the disapproving figure of Elena Gilbert behind it. "See you around, F… F… Fuck it," she murmured under her breath as she shoved F-boy out. The irony did not escape her.
He shuffled down the corridor with dropped shoulders, looking sadly back at her once before turning the corner.
Elena shook her head. "They're human beings, Bonnie."
"Says the girl who broke a bottle on someone's head." Bonnie wedged herself in the doorway. "The answer is still No. I'm not going back to you and Caroline."
"I didn't come here for that." Bonnie raised an eyebrow and Elena chuckled. "OK, I didn't only come here for that. Look, can I come in?"
A couple came out of their room and waved. Bonnie waved back and said through a fixed smile. "No."
Elena didn't even blink. "What did you say about bottle smashing?"
Bonnie glared. "That's not remotely funny."
Elena smiled serenely.
Bonnie rolled her eyes, and moved out of the way. "Make it quick."
Elena smirked as she stepped in. Bonnie shut the door behind them, and watched Elena look around the tiny dorm room with an unreadable expression. "This is cozy."
"It's messy," Bonnie snapped, making a show of tidying up. "And I don't want a lecture about 'slumming it'."
"I wasn't even thinking that. Look, I'll put the coffee on while you shower and then we'll talk."
"I don't want to talk. How did you even find this place?"
"I called Freya and she gave me the address."
"Freya?" Nora barely managed to get along with Caroline and Elena, but there was no love between Freya and them. Bonnie couldn't even imagine how that conversation went.
"I can be very persuasive," Elena said.
"Well, you can't stay. They took a portal to Belgium last night. They'll be back anytime now and if they find you here-"
"I'll risk it." She waltzed into the tiny kitchenette. "I'm making coffee. Take a shower."
"Don't tell me what to do!" Bonnie snapped, then trudged into the bathroom.
The coffee was ready when she got out. The room was tidied, everything put in order. Elena was sitting at the edge of the bed with two mugs.
Bonnie took one by reflex. Sipped it. It was good coffee but a poor bribe. "What do you want, Elena? Money? A referee for you and Caroline's latest fight over, what was the last one about? Stefan? Damon? Klaus Mikaelson? The mysterious letter that you claim to know nothing about?"
Elena looked down. "I don't know anything about that letter."
Bonnie scoffed. "Absolution?"
"You're not going to make me fight you, Bonnie."
Bonnie put her mug on the side table and threw herself back on the bed. "Then please leave. I left you guys because I am sick and tired of your sanctimonious slut-shaming. Don't even bother denying it!" She snapped when Elena tried to speak. "You may have stopped judging me out loud, but I know you're still judging me! Which, by the way, is ironic because of the three of us-"
"I wasn't judging, Bonnie. I was worried about you. We both were. You're getting out of hand. The partying… the risk taking… these girls…"
"You just missed an honest opportunity to call women you don't like 'witches'."
"Bonnie, I'm trying to be serious here."
"And I'm trying to have fun. Isn't that what this trip was about?"
"It was about the three of us spending some time together away from our crazy lives."
"You mean your crazy life. Caroline and I just got dragged along for the ride."
"Bonnie..."
"Oh, Elena." Bonnie smiled insincerely. "I have had it up to here" – she pointed to her chin – "with your fucking drama."
Elena flinched.
Good.
"I've had enough of your drama to last the rest of my life. So no, I didn't come to Europe to get more of you. I came to Europe to make up for all those years I lost being… Let me count…" Bonnie tapped on each finger in turn. "Trapped in a Prison World for 9 months while you mourned Damon. Then forgot Damon. Both times completely ignoring that I died too. Before that, I was the Anchor to the Other Side. My freshman year was supposed to be about changing majors, rushing sororities and making out with my hot high school boyfriend over the weekends. Instead, it was about Travellers and Doppelgängers and making out with my hot high school boyfriend over dead bodies literally passing through me. Oh, did I forget to mention that I fucking died? Twice? For you?"
"I thought you died for Jeremy," Elena muttered.
"Same difference."
"No, Bonnie. You don't get to blame me for everything that went wrong in your life."
"I don't?" Bonnie whispered, dangerously.
Elena said nothing, but her eyes were full of challenge.
We're really doing this then.
Bonnie held up a finger. "Grams died… saving your boyfriend-"
"You wanted to save Ste-"
"My mother turned into a vampire, by your boyfriends, because-" Elena opened her mouth to speak, and Bonnie raised her voice, drowning her words –"you couldn't keep your big mouth shut to Elijah for one fricking day!"
Elena closed her mouth, and Bonnie's lip curled. "Cat got your tongue? How about when you couldn't handle being a vampire, so I killed myself trying to save you. Then I almost went mad with Expression. And Silas woke up. And killed my father. I was a ghost when my father died. Silas opened his throat, in full view of the whole town and nobody said a word. For hours, his body just lay there." Her throat was clogging up. The memory of that night. That nightmare night. "My father died, Elena! He died and I was all alone. No phone calls. No visits. Nothing. 'Bonnie, just wants to be by herself right now'." It was a poor imitation of Elena's voice, but from her stricken expression, it was pretty accurate. "Who the fuck wants to be by herself after her father was murdered? You didn't even realize I was gone until you needed my help! Again!"
Elena wasn't trying to speak now. Her face was stricken. She raised a hand as if to touch Bonnie. Bonnie flinched away, and her hand fell.
"The Spirits took my magic. I watched the torture Grams…" She didn't even know when the tears had started, but she didn't bother brushing them away. The words were coming too fast, too strong. A litany of pain, of sacrifice, of being taken for granted. And the last, most painful one:
"My mother… my mother left me because of you, Elena!"
Elena didn't look away. Later, Bonnie would remember to give her that. Her face was crunched up, her eyes were full, but she stood there and took it.
"Every… horrible… thing that happened in my life, happened because of you."
And oh my God! It felt so good to finally say it all! It poured out of her like poisoned water from a sewer. This was the source. All those fumes of bitterness and resentment that had been seeping out of her in bursts since the 1994 Prison World. Since before the 1994 Prison World. She thought she had got it out when she had the showdown with Damon, with Caroline a few days ago. But this… she was the source. Elena Gilbert, her best friend, her sister.
Her curse.
The most horrible chapter in Bonnie's life hadn't started in 1994. It had started the day Elena Gilbert had been born.
Bonnie rubbed her face, took a deep breath, let it out, and looked at Elena.
"Bonnie, I'm so sorry." The words were a broken whisper.
They were too little, too late.
"Get out of my life, Elena Gilbert. Never come back."
June 2014
New Orleans
"Still waiting for those answers." Bonnie demanded.
Ethan ran his hands through his hair and yanked at the ends. "Just give me a moment." His voice was testy. His easy-going personae was fractured.
"Her name is Andrea," he said finally. He rubbed his hand across his forehead and slumped against his desk. "No last name. She was one of our first volunteers when we reopened. Frankly, I think she was looking for a place to hide. You probably noticed that a lot of our subjects do that. She signed all the waivers and agreed."
"I want to see those waivers."
"Confidential," Heels - Sarah said. "Get a subpoena and we'll hand them over."
Bonnie scoffed.
They were in Ethan's office. One of the few rooms that did not have glass walls, but wooden panels on three sides. The fourth wall was the shiny solid rock that seemed to border the entire building. Bonnie realised for the first time that it was shiny because it was wet. Rivulets of fluid ran down through tiny grooves.
It was a weird thing to hyperfocus on, and not the furniture or any of Ethan's personal effects but her mind was pumping with adrenaline and anger.
"She's being held against her will."
"Is that what she told you?" Heels - Sarah - snapped. She stood behind Ethan's chair, one hand on the backrest. It looked partly proprietary, partly protective.
Amongst other things. "Yes!"
Ethan and Sarah exchanged glances.
Ethan cleared his throat. "I was hoping we could have the tour without going into this, but I suppose I might as well get this over with. Some of our early experiments were… well, experimental. Big risks, big compensations. She took the biggest one. The results were unfortunate. We're trying to help her now, and we keep her here because she doesn't have anywhere else to go. I can give you tapes of experiments on her. You will see how her condition deteriorated." When Sarah started to object, he cut her off. "If that's what it takes to convince Bonnie Bennett, then yes. I trust her to respect the woman's privacy." He levelled his gaze on Bonnie. "I know how the Augustine fell the first time. We forgot the humanity in our subjects, we lost ours, and we lost everything. We are not going to repeat the mistakes of the past."
The tapes won't prove anything. Bonnie didn't doubt the story of experiments damaging the woman. But proof that they were carried out voluntarily wasn't something you could see on video tapes. Not when magic made matters of consent murky.
"What happened to our magic?" Bonnie asked. "I couldn't push her off me. Kaleb's wasn't working either."
Beside her, Kaleb grunted in affirmation. He, Marcel and the nun were sitting across Ethan. Bonnie had also been offered a seat. She preferred to stand. That way she could put her hands on the desk, lean across it and glare them down.
Sarah glared right back. "It's a security precaution."
Kaleb gasped in outrage. Marcel's gaze, which had been idly wandering around the office, snapped to her.
She sneered. "You thought we'd let a group of super-powered people in our space without putting failsafes in place?"
"And the gloves are off," Gerard drawled.
Bonnie whirled at him. "Now you talk! You were so worried about subjects being held against their will and when we finally see someone who's clearly being held against her will, you suddenly want to leave?!" She turned on the others. "All of you!"
Neither Cami nor Kaleb would meet her eyes. Gerard shrugged. "I think it checks out."
Bonnie's eyes narrowed. What's going on here?
Ethan cleared his throat. "We can talk more about this later. Not to be rude, but there are other parties that are waiting for the tour."
"Bonnie." Kaleb stood up beside her, laid a hand on her shoulder.
She shrugged it off. "Fine. Let's go."
This isn't over yet. Her eyes told Sarah.
Sarah cocked an eyebrow and Bonnie could almost read her mind. We'll see.
July 2013
Tallinn, Estonia.
It was a party night, and the hostel was empty except for the most boring boarders. Music played out of Bonnie's tiny phone speakers as she and Nora navigated around their tiny make-shift dressing table, primping their hair, touching up their makeup and retrying outfits.
"I caught a glimpse of Gerard before he left," Nora was saying as she played with different hair ornaments, looking for a match for her signature opal necklace. She smirked at Bonnie through the mirror. "Yummy! You missed out."
"Freya told you?" Bonnie asked Freya, without real rancour, as she applied her mascara.
Nora scoffed. "She narrated the whole thing via emoji text."
Bonnie smirked back. "He was dreamy."
The door opened and Freya waltzed into the room, in her halter-neck pantsuit. "Who's dreamy?" She wondered.
Nora nudged Bonnie. "Marcel Gerard."
"Didn't I say you'd regret turning me down?" Freya crowed.
"Didn't I tell you to stop trying to seduce Bonnie?" Nora scolded, then winked. "I called dibs."
Both of them burst into giggles.
Bonnie rolled her eyes as she put her stuff away. "How long were you in the bathroom anyway?"
Freya scowled slightly. "Miss Attitude in room 5 was hogging the bathroom again. One of these days, I'll smash her head into the wall."
Bonnie blinked. "Oh. Kay."
"Tell us without telling us that you're not used to sharing living space," Nora muttered not quite under her breath.
Freya just smiled good-naturedly. "Help me with my makeup?" She asked Bonnie.
The British girl's previous style was on-point; she stuck with the same two colours and never deviated. At first, Bonnie thought that was by choice but after the second time she caught Freya stealing her makeup, Bonnie realised that it was due to a lack of experience. Bonnie happily took her case back out. It was fun doing makeup on someone with a similar skin tone.
Not for the first time, Bonnie thought of how lucky she was to find these two. Two witches her age that were adventurous, open-minded nature and had no hidden agenda. Just clubs, flings and fun. They talked magic; of course, they did, they were witches. After Bonnie officially moved in with them, they'd formed an informal circle of three; in between busy nights and lazy days, they exchanged knowledge and practised rituals. But the magic they explored were simple, harmless charms that coven-bred witches like Nora took for granted but Bonnie had never got the chance to learn because she was too busy saving Elena Gilbert.
Bonnie had to stop mid-blush application to unclench her fist. She couldn't do anything about the clenching of the muscle under her ribs except breathe through it.
"What?" Freya asked, through stiff lips.
Bonnie forced a smile, and switched the blush colours. "Nothing."
Yes, Europe would have been very different without Nora and Freya. Bonnie and Caroline had finally moved past their differences, but Elena…
Bonnie's talk with Elena felt like something that had happened ages ago. The initial catharsis had ebbed, leaving behind a dull sense of finality. No matter what Caroline said, Bonnie didn't regret throwing away a lifetime of friendship. Not when that friendship was so lop-sided, so parasitical, so exploitative…
"Is it me or is this place getting warm?" Nora said sharply.
Bonnie blinked, and felt the blood rush from her face as she damped down on the heat flaming under her skin. Apparently, one side effect of 'breaking up' with her bestie, were the accidental spikes of magic that happened when she brooded too much. They were rare and relatively harmless but the fire-related nature of the spikes were worrisome.
Nora had figured out that Bonnie was behind the too-hot-coffee incidents, and too-hot shower incidents, and the one fireplace-self-igniting-in-the-middle-of-summer incident but so far, she hadn't said a word; and Bonnie was grateful for her silence.
Freya and Nora understood that things with Bonnie and her hometown buddies had recently gone from strained to estranged. Freya was eager for gossip – she had never liked Caroline or Elena from the beginning – but Bonnie wasn't ready to share.
Maybe she should, she thought as she switched from blush applicator to eyeliner. Everyone said that talking always helped process grief. She had been carrying this inside her for years without acknowledging it. It had defined her. Letting go was like heartbreak; and Bonnie's poor heart had already been shattered…
"Will we be seeing the gorgeous Mr. Gerard again?" Nora asked as she shimmied into pleather so shiny, it hurt Bonnie's eyes to look.
"He has business in New Orleans."
"Business with Klaus Mikaelson?" Nora mused. There was a sudden silence in the room. She blinked at the two girls. "I thought we all knew that…"
"We kind of don't talk about it," Freya muttered, her iris darting to look at Bonnie's face, and away. She fidgeted.
Bonnie rolled her eyes, and held Freya's face in place. "Stay still, or I'll have to start over. And you can keep your secrets. As long as he stays back in the States, and you don't invite me to a threesome with him-"
Freya burst out into a peal of laughter that morphed into a shriek when the eyeliner pencil poked her eye.
She was muttering 'ow's as Bonnie fixed her smudged face.
"That's a No, then," Bonnie said dryly.
Freya snickered, which was too much movement so Bonnie smacked her. "Ow!"
"How do you and Marcel do it?" Nora asked. "The whole swinging, open relationship thing? No one gets jealous or anything?"
"When you've been dating a guy on and off for … as long as we've been together, monogamy isn't the sole expression of love." Freya said simply.
Bonnie thought about that. Thought about if she had someone, the way Freya had Marcel, and they'd been together for a long time, if she would be down with a threesome. She eyed her friend, and imagined herself watching those slim dark hands caressing…
"Bonnie!" Nora yelped, a second too late.
"Bloody hell!" Freya cried, as the mascara tip literally singed her.
"Oh my god, I'm so sorry!" Bonnie quickly grabbed the stick, and threw into the sink. It sizzled when it hit the water.
"Was that you?" Freya cried, cradling her face.
"My magic acts up at times," Bonnie muttered.
"You almost took out my eye!" Freya's eyes widened in shock as she stared at the mirror. "You gave me a fricking burn!"
"I can fix it!" Bonnie reached for the other girl who quickly backed up. "I said I was sorry!" Bonnie said, hurt.
Freya scowled, and started dabbing it with cotton. "It hurts like hell."
"Can you at least heal it yourself? I'll feel bad if I have to look at that all night."
Freya frowned. "You should feel bad. I want Nora to fix it-"
"Don't be a meanie," Nora scolded. "Let Bonnie do it."
"It's OK," Bonnie murmured.
"No, it's not," Nora said firmly. "I'm not enabling bitchiness."
Freya tossed her head back, and deigned to turn to Bonnie. "Fine. You do it. Carefully," she added sternly.
Still feeling remorseful, Bonnie placed a finger on the singed skin near Freya's rapidly blinking eye. She didn't speak, just let the healing flow through her. A moment later, she lifted her finger, and the skin underneath was smooth and unmarred.
Freya looked slightly mollified.
"Not bad," she said, grudgingly. "You should teach me how to do that."
"You don't know how?" Nora mused. When she noticed how Freya stiffened, she quickly backtracked. "That is, if you'd like."
Bonnie and Nora had quickly learnt that Freya was sensitive about her lack of skill. She was one of the few witches Bonnie knew that was mundane-raised like Bonnie herself. In fact, her witch knowledge was even more recent than Bonnie's. She didn't do magic with the ease of Nora, who seemed like a walking encyclopaedia most of the time. The irony was that Nora was more prudent with how often she used magic. This wasn't the first time she had demurred from doing a simple spell. As she explained to Bonnie, her coven-upbringing drilled into her the importance of using magic with prudence.
"I'd like that," Freya said quietly. She gave Bonnie a slightly warmer smile as she snapped a hair pin in place. Then she picked up her purse. "Can we hit the road?"
In answer, Bonnie fluffed her immaculate up-do one last time and twirled so that her bright yellow mini-dress flared, revealing the skorts underneath, and her amazing legs, if she said so herself. The other girls pretended to cat-call. "I think we're ready."
As they gathered their things, and did last-minute checks, Bonnie pushed back the thought that when she'd imagined hitting the clubs in Europe, the girls with her had been different.
Change is good, she told herself. I'm going to have fun tonight, and all thoughts of Elena Gilbert are staying inside this room.
Freya was at the door first, and she swung the door open and nearly walked into Elena Gilbert. The other girl was standing with her fist raised, as if she was just about to knock.
It took an impressive amount of skill for Bonnie not to set anything on fire. As it was, she could feel the actual flames slash under the skin of her palms, before she damped them down.
For a moment, there was an awkward silence.
Freya broke it. "Look what the cat dragged in," she snipped at Elena.
Elena's eyes, which had been locked onto Bonnie's, dark and full, frosted over as she turned to Freya. "Hello to you, too." It thawed a little when she turned to Nora. "Hi, Nora." Then it seemed to dissolve when it turned to Bonnie. "Bonnie, please can we talk?"
Freya crossed her arms. "Haven't you hurt her enough? You're right bonkers if you think I'm letting you near her."
Elena ignored her, still looking at Bonnie who hadn't said a word. Who couldn't say a word that wasn't a shout or a hex. "Please, Bonnie. Just a few minutes and I promise to leave you alone."
Elena hadn't called or texted since that last painful conversation. Bonnie had told herself that it didn't bother her. She had told Elena to get out in every sense of the word. She was satisfied that Elena had heeded without protest. But now Bonnie had to admit the truth to herself. Because despite the anger, and the pain she felt staring into Elena's face, a small, shameful part of Bonnie felt…
Gratified.
Caroline and Elena kept showing up in the same cities that the three witches toured, and Bonnie had just assumed that it was Caroline wanting to stay close. But maybe it hadn't just been Caroline. Maybe Elena had screwed up her Sacred Schedule to follow in Bonnie's footsteps. Maybe even in her silence, she had-
No. That was as weak a gesture as they came; that was nothing; and it wasn't enough to make Bonnie want to talk to her.
Nora glanced at Bonnie. Her face was compassionate. There was no love lost between her and the other girls, but her attitude to them was mostly indifference, and some exasperation unlike Freya's strong dislike. "Do you want to talk to her?"
"No, she bloody doesn't," Freya snapped. "Gilbert, can't you get a hint? She doesn't want to see you."
No, Bonnie definitely didn't want to see Elena. But she recognized that look of stubborn repentance on Elena's face. The first time Bonnie had seen that look was in first grade: Elena had lost Bonne's favourite water-bottle and their friendship had immediately ended. Elena had stuck by Bonnie's side for the rest of the day until Bonnie caved.
Well, Bonnie wasn't going to cave now. But she would give Elena her day in court. The sooner Elena got out whatever meagre defense she had apparently used this time to prepare, the sooner this would be over.
For good.
Bonnie tapped Freya and Nora lightly. "You guys go ahead. I'll meet you at the club later."
Nora nodded, then mid-step, she turned back to Bonnie and gave her a hug, whispering, "We'll be downstairs. Text me right away if you need anything. I'm down anything, cursing her out, hexing her for real, or burying her corpse."
Bonnie swallowed a lump in her throat and hugged back. Nora let her go, then turned to Freya. "Come on."
Freya planted her feet firmly, shifting so that she blocked the door completely. "I'm not leaving Bonnie alone with her."
Nora shrugged, and left.
A long silence followed as Elena and Freya stared each other down. Freya's lean frame was in the way, so Bonnie couldn't see either of their faces. But Bonnie wasn't surprised when Freya's face shifted ever so slightly. Elena walked past her, her shoulder knocking into the other woman as she did so.
"Bitch," Freya hissed. She looked at Bonnie. "Call me if you need help kicking her ass."
She slammed the door behind her so hard, it made Bonnie jump. Elena who was standing an inch away from it, didn't even flinch.
Her attention was entirely on Bonnie.
Now that Freya was gone, the determined, stubborn expression that had been on Elena's face when she showed up at the hostel dorm, softened.
And Bonnie felt all that anger rise up like bile in her throat.
"Thank you for this," Elena said.
"Did Caroline put you up to this?" Bonnie snapped.
Elena's eyes widened. "No. She told me to give you time. She doesn't even know I'm here."
Another pang of gratification. Bonnie stamped it out.
"I'm glad that you've both made up." Elena continued. She wore a clutch that she clutched unnecessarily. "You know you can do things together. We're not joined at the hip or anything. If you want me to move out of the hotel, I can-"
"Ugh!" Bonnie said softly and walked across the room. She stood by the dressed and took a deep breath, trying to bank the rising flames. She looked at Elena, where she stood, still clutching her stupid purse like if it was a hat. "Just say what you have to say and leave."
"I-"
"It's not going to make any difference. Just so you know," Bonnie threw in. "But I'm betting you have a whole speech prepared to make me feel guilty so spit it out already."
"I. am. sorry."
It wasn't a whisper, muttered half under her breath. It wasn't muffled under the sound of tears or whimpering. It was loud and clear and Elena's voice didn't waver. She said it with chin raised, eyes dry and steady.
Something tight and hard in Bonnie's chest unfurled a little.
She sat down at the edge of the bed. "Go on."
Elena's purse was resting by her side. Her hands weren't twitching. "You were right about everything. I got everything I wanted, because you paid the price for it, and I took that for granted. I got used to you saving me, and so I became entitled to you saving me."
Bonnie felt a lump form in her throat, and she clenched her hands in her thighs.
"I stopped seeing you. I stopped seeing your pain. You were dead, and I didn't mourn you. Because well," and she laughed without humour, "you always came back. I stopped thinking about what you lost every-time you did. I never thought what it meant to you that" – and now her voice broke a little, but she cleared her throat and hardened it –"that your mother left because she saved me. I had my mommy issues over Isobel but I didn't even think about you and Abby. How it must have felt to learn why she left you. I was so incredibly selfish," she sounded almost wonderingly. "You were always there for me, Bonnie, so you became like air. I needed you to live, but I never noticed you weren't there until I was suffocating. And I'm so sorry that I let that happen. I take responsibility for the choices I made that hurt you."
Bonnie closed her eyes, so that the tears won't fall. She had wanted this, and like with Caroline, now that it came, all she felt was how much it hurt. The past couldn't be undone. The acknowledgement of guilt didn't erase it. She was grateful that Elena had done this, and maybe she could finally heal properly but-
Elena exhaled loudly. "But-"
For a moment, the word didn't register. Then it did, and Bonnie's eyes flew to Elena's face, now looking harder than she ever remembered, and she recoiled.
"There is no but," she said, and her voice was sharp with more than just words. Something like smoke filled the air. Anger and disappointment burned inside her. Of course there was a but. And I almost thought-
"But," Elena ground out, "the same goes for you, too. Take responsibility for the choices you made."
Bonnie stared. She felt that flicker of fire under her skin. She didn't try to damp it.
Elena continued, her voice getting stronger. "You chose to protect me. You chose to save my life. To save Jeremy's life and to keep me happy. And I am so grateful to you for that." She clasped her hands together. They were shaking but her voice stayed steady. "But those were your choices, Bonnie. I never asked you to die for me or for Jeremy. I didn't ask you to fight Klaus, or to get Expression to make me human."
"You didn't ask. You just expected."
"But I didn't ask. When danger came for me, you shoved me behind you. I never pushed you in front of me."
Bonnie got to her feet. She was trembling, her whole body vibrating with anger. "Shut up! You ungrateful little b-"
"No! It's your turn to listen! I'm sorry you lost so much! I am so, so, so sorry! Oh Bonnie!" Elena said the name with a moan. "I would gladly, gladly apologise, beg, grovel at your feet for the rest of our lives if I thought it would make this stop happening. But it won't! Not if we don't talk about your part in this? "
"My part-"
"I won't be your scapegoat, Bonnie Bennett! If it hadn't been me, it would have been Caroline, or Matt, or Tyler. Whoever took the place of Jeremy in your life. Damon. You were facing down a psychopath in 1994, bleeding through your gut, and you sent Damon back to me when keeping him with you would have healed you, given you a fighting chance. You threw away your magic to save strangers in Portland, for god's sake! Was that my fault, too?"
Bonnie said nothing, her fists opening and closing furiously.
"Someone else would be the altar you sacrifice yourself on. So you fix that, Bonnie Bennett. You fix that thing in your soul that makes you think your life is worth less than everyone else's. Because until you do, there would always be someone or something –"
Bonnie hadn't even known when she swung back her fist. One moment she was glaring at her friend, her head almost bursting with rage. The next moment, Elena had staggered back, staring at her as she clutched her face.
She lifted her hand, and Bonnie could see the red mark on her friend's face.
Bonnie stood before her friend, her fingernails cutting into her palms, her whole body shaking with the effort to just hold it in. Her face was hot and full – with tears or screams, she didn't know. She thought she had poured out all the poison with her outburst in England, but now Bonnie realised she was wrong. So, so wrong, it was almost funny.
That had been a controlled release, a relief valve popping as designed. This was the explosion. When she opened her mouth, all the pent-up rage, grief, agony would rip through her like a forest fire, and she didn't know what would be left when it was over.
Elena brushed her hair back and…
...smiled.
The crazy doppelgänger smiled.
"Finally. Now we're getting somewhere." Her voice softened. "Let it out, Bonnie."
Bonnie opened her mouth and howled.
June 2014
New Orleans
The moment the elevator doors opened, Marcel ran through them as if flames were at his heels. It was a pleasure, he'd love to talk some more but look at the time, he had an appointment. In seconds, he was gone.
Bonnie glared after him. Despite his unflappable attitude, her barrage of questions on their ride up had clearly bothered him. "So much for looking out for the little guy."
Kaleb mumbled something about getting the car and left with less speed but equal enthusiasm.
"Your heart is in the right place, Bonnie Bennett, but you don't know what is going on here."
Bonnie turned on the nun who had been silent up until now.
"Then tell me. Who's Andrea? If that's her real name. Explain to me how you and Marcel cross-examined every single supernatural we met to make sure they were not being coerced by the Augustine, only for you to ignore someone in literal handcuffs!"
"Of course, it bothered me. I'd hate to see anyone like that. Even-" She bit off her words.
"Even what? Even her? Who is she, and why do you and Marcel clearly think she deserves to be left there?"
"We have our reasons. Reasons-" Her voice rose quickly over Bonnie's almost-retort -"that have nothing to do with you, Bonnie Bennett. This isn't your town. It has its own history. Leave well enough alone."
She glided away, her black nun robes sweeping across the floor.
Bonnie let out a sigh of frustration and went to pick up her phone from security. Kaleb was waiting for her at the driveway that led up to the Hall steps. She got into the car and gave him a hard look.
He sighed as he pulled into the road.
"You know I can't tell you anything."
"Why?"
"It's none of your-"
"-my business, so I've been told." She slammed her head back on the chair rest, squeezed her eyes shut with frustration. "She was so scared. She was so scared, and we didn't help her. We didn't even try."
She felt Kaleb's gaze on her. "Look here. Andrea is… She's not the innocent victim you think she is. She doesn't deserve your pity." His voice was uncharacteristically hard.
She opened her eyes and stared at him. He had gone back to watching the road. There was a tension in his features that didn't fit the cheerful, slightly mischievous expression he had won all day.
"Can you tell me one thing-"
"You know I can't-"
"Does this have anything to do with the treaty with the Gemini? Is that why the Augustine have her?"
"What? No! Andrea's drama went down before the Gemini, before the Sire War, back when Dahlia…" He clamped his mouth shut and threw her a half-amused glare. "Stop pumping me. I refuse to be the weakest link here."
Well, if straight questions won't work… "Not the weakest, definitely the cutest."
He laughed at that and threw her another look. There was something wistful on his face now.
"What?"
"Just… you. You're so earnest, so passionate. So 'I have to stand up to the Man'! Then you turn around and act cute but you're a horrible flirt."
Bonnie gasped in outrage. "I'll have you know that my game is impeccable."
"I don't doubt that guys fall for you on the regular, but that's because you give them the time of the day, not the other way around." When Bonnie scowled, he rolled his eyes. "That's actually a compliment."
She guessed there was a part of her that will always second-guess that. "If you like me so much then tell me what I need to know."
"I don't like you. I mean I do!" He laughed. "But what I mean to say is that… you remind me of someone." His voice softened at the last, became almost sad.
"Someone you care about?"
"Someone I love…d."
Oh.
"I'm sorry," she said softly.
He sighed, gave her a cheerful smile that only seemed half-forced. "Life goes on, doesn't it? Now stop asking me questions you know I can't answer and check your phone. Find out if your vampire friend is still alive."
"Oh my God, Caroline!" How could she have forgotten? She turned on her phone - and the screen started scrolling what seemed like a hundred notifications.
She opened Matt's first, which were about half a dozen, reporting a slow and steady progress from Caroline. The last message came from Caroline herself, a voice text saying that she was going to 'kick that bitch's ass!'"
Bonnie sighed with relief. Oh thank God.
Rebekah Mikaelson had sent over a dozen messages. Wondering how she had her number in the first place, Bonnie opened them in apprehension She half-expected threats and instead she got:
"What's ur [popcorn emoji] password?"
"Ordered room service… [coffee emoji] not [blood drop emoji]!"
"So [yawning emoji] [yawning emoji] [yawning emoji] [yawning emoji] [yawning emoji]! When r u coming back?"
"Did [gemini emoji] [eggplant emoji] change after [twin emoji]?"
Bonnie was still half-way through the list of increasingly outrageous updates, alternating from gasping to giggling, when her phone screen switched to an incoming call from an unknown number.
She tapped it on instinct.
"Am I speaking to Bonnie Bennett?" An unfamiliar voice asked.
"Speaking. Who is this?"
"The steward from the Mikaelson Compound. Freya Mikaelson requests your presence."
Bonnie raised her eyebrows. "She does?"
"It's a matter of urgency."
"Well, you can tell Ms. Mikaelson that I am rather tired and busy and-"
"It concerns the Gemini Praetor. He needs your help."
Even as she ended the call, she was already holding her tattooed wrist and reaching out with her magic. It wasn't half-hearted this time. It was a call, a question. For what felt like forever, but was probably just seconds, her heart pounded in her chest as she waited for a response.
Then she felt the pingback - fainter now, blurrier - but she grasped onto it like a lifeline.
She turned to Kaleb. "Take me to the Compound right now."
August 2013
Stockholm, Sweden
It was a beautiful day as they sailed through the archipelago. The weather was slightly overcast but no threat of rain.
Caroline had stayed on the mainland to do some shopping. It was just Elena and Bonnie paddling in sync for what seemed like hours now. They had sailed past dense forests and cliffs, fortresses and ghost islands. They were between stops now, and the only other boats in sight were so far off in the distance that they might have been the only two people in the world.
Years later, Bonnie would recall the dreamlike, surreal quality of that afternoon as she listened to her friend's voice over the sound of rushing water.
"…Turning back my emotions concreted the bond. At least that's how this… random old wizard explained it to me. Before I think I could almost feel it. Like a current rushing around my soul. I couldn't fight it, I couldn't swim against it, but a small, quiet part of me could still know it was there. When everything came rushing back in, it drowned me. There was nothing left of me, only Damon's will."
"So when he asked you to take the Cure?"
"He wanted to believe that I wasn't sire bonded to him, so I made him believe I wasn't sire bonded to him. He didn't want me to take the Cure, so I didn't want to take the Cure. Even though…"
"…even though you'd done everything to get the Cure". Losing your brother. An entire sire line destroyed. "Even though you never wanted to be a vampire."
"He wanted me to embrace being a vampire. So, I did."
The silence that followed was painful. There were ripples in the water. Seals, the guide had said. If they were lucky, they'd see seals.
Bonnie didn't feel lucky.
"If Jeremy hadn't let it slip, were you ever going to tell me?" Bonnie asked quietly.
Elena looked away.
"Jeremy thought I knew. He didn't know it was a secret." An awful thought entered Bonnie's head. "Does Caroline know?"
"Of course not."
Bonnie felt a rush of relief. "Will you tell her?" She asked tentatively.
Elena shook her head. "I don't know. I don't want to. But if I don't tell her, then you'll have to keep it a secret from her. I know what you two've been through. I don't think that's fair to either of you."
She was right. Bonnie and Caroline had only just started mending. And it won't be fair to Caroline either way, to keep this a secret, after everything she'd been through with Elena. For Elena. Nor would it be fair to Matt. Or Tyler. Or…
"Does Stefan know?"
"He was there when… I figured things out. It… It hurt him." For the first time since she started talking about this, emotion creeped into Elena's face, into her voice.
Bonnie remembered how much Elena and Stefan had loved each other, how they had fought for each other - through Katherine, through Klaus, and yes, through Damon. No matter what problems she had with Stefan, Bonnie had never questioned how much he and Elena had loved each other. How much they still cared for each other. It had been so important to Stefan that Damon and Elena stayed happy together.
All that pain and sacrifice for a lie.
It wasn't her heartbreak. Not even close. But it was heartbreaking.
"Can we stop for a while?"
When Elena nodded, Bonnie lifted her paddle into the canoe and covered her face with her hands.
Elena breathed heavily. "Oh Bonnie."
"It's OK," Bonnie said hoarsely, "I just need a moment."
"I thought…"
When Elena didn't finish, Bonnie looked up, and felt her eyes fill at Elena's crumpled face. "I'm so sorry."
"Don't!" Elena choked out a sob, a laugh. "I thought… I was so afraid to tell you. I thought you'd tell me I deserved this."
"What?"
"Jeremy did."
Bonnie almost jolted the canoe. "What?!"
Elena put her paddle across her thighs, and tipped her head, blinking rapidly at the cloudy sky. "When I told Jeremy, he asked me how he was supposed to know the difference." Bonnie gasped. "He reminded me how I asked Damon to compel his memories away. Twice. Reminded me of all the times I helped save Damon's life before I turned. He asked me how anyone was supposed to realize I'd changed when I was changing as a human, long before the sire bond happened?"
"That's not fair!"
"Isn't it, though? Everything Jeremy said was true. I did change. And that's why no one saw it. No one saw it when I didn't take the Cure after a year of searching for it. No one saw it when Damon killed Whitmores, and I couldn't stay out of his bed. No one saw it when I erased every good memory of him and still 'fell in love' with him again. No one saw it when Katherine took over my body. No one could tell she wasn't me because I wasn't me. I hadn't been for a long time." She drew in a deep, shaky breath. "You know what's worse than losing the people you love? Losing yourself. You know what's worse than even that? Losing yourself and not even knowing it."
"I've been so horrible to you," Bonnie said quietly, "and you've had this inside you all summer."
Elena looked at her sharply. "I deserved everything you said. Don't you dare walk back on it."
"Oh god!" Bonnie felt so utterly helpless. "How do you feel, Elena? How are you even… if it were me, I think I would go mad!"
Elena sighed. "For the longest time I felt numb. It just… crept up on me. The realization. After I… after I took the Cure, the block on my memories of Damon was gone. And they were wonderful memories. I thought I would fall in love with him again. I tried to fall in love with him again. But there was this… detachment. It was like I was trying to reconcile the human I was before and what I became after. I couldn't make the two me-s fit together. I thought it was because of…" Her voice trailed off, and she swallowed, "…something else. I would get over it, and then everything would be as it should be. Damon and I would be happy for as long as we could be. But when he told me he was going to turn human with me, I felt like I was drowning all over again." She shuddered. "Every time I thought of spending the rest of my life with Damon, it felt like death. And then… I realised why."
"Do you think Damon knew, all this while?"
"No. It was too important that he 'won' me fair and square over Stefan. 'Won me'." Elena spat the words. "I was his fricking prize."
"Elena, I'm so-" Bonnie checked herself. "You didn't deserve this. I don't care what anyone said. No one deserves this."
Elena's smile was wobbly. "I'm just glad you don't hate me."
"Why would I hate you?! My god. I know we've fought a couple times…"
"We've had a fight almost every week this summer."
"But I love you. You're my sister. That won't ever change."
Elena blinked hard at that. She looked away and so did Bonnie. It had been a long time since they had said those words to each other. There was a time, not too long ago, that Bonnie didn't think she'd ever say them to Elena and mean them.
"You love him, too," Elena said softly. "I saw it when you came out of the Prison World. You were best friends. Don't hate him for my sake."
Bonnie frowned. "It's not that simple. We were the only people in the prison world for months. I'm not trying to make you feel bad about it - again." Both chuckled a little, remembering. "But I thought I was going to die with him there. We made a suicide pact. He didn't become my best friend. He became literally all I had in the world."
"And now?"
"I haven't stopped caring for him. I just can't care for someone and take it back, even if they deserve it. But Damon will be the first person to tell you that he's not a good person."
"When people tell you who they are, believe them the first time," Elena said wisely. Considering that she was quoting Maya Angelou that wasn't too hard.
Bonnie snorted. "Show off."
Elena paused. "There's something else I have to tell you. About Lily Salvatore."
After Elena finished, Bonnie stared sightlessly into the water for a long time.
"Before Jo's bachelor's party, I kept having nightmares about Lily. Foreshadowing that she would hurt me, maybe even kill me."
'This is how I die.' She remembered thinking that as she bled out on the floor.
"After she attacked me, I got scared. I did something stupid because of how scared I was." 'They didn't escape, Bonnie. You still haven't figured it out, have you?' "And all that time, she was dead." A thick lump was forming in her throat, and the last words came out in a whisper.
Elena reached out and grabbed her hand. "You were scared, and you made a mistake."
"Elena-" Bonnie said hoarsely.
Elena squeezed so tight, it almost hurt. "You were scared. Let it go. Lily is gone and she'll never hurt you again." Something in her voice made Bonnie look at her. There was a hard, almost dangerous, expression on her face that Bonnie had never seen before.
Then the canoe jolted, and Elena shifted back on her bench, and held her paddle in place.
It took a moment before Bonnie could speak. "Why keep it a secret though?" she wondered.
"Enzo is sired to Lily."
That made… a surprising amount of sense. "Was, you mean?"
"Is. Death can't break the sire bond, only Change. Death just makes it worse. I should know." She grimaced. "He's unstable at the best times. If he knew about Lily-"
"But if he thinks she's alive in a Prison World, he'll be looking for a way to get her out."
"He'll be looking. Besides, that'll be the Gemini's problem, not yours."
The Gemini. The Gemini leader. Elena had been careful, not to mention anyone by name. But she hadn't been careful with her eyes, the significant way she would glance at Bonnie.
"Damon cares for you, Bonnie. He killed Lily because she killed you."
"It sounds like killing Lily probably saved his life."
And why is that? Elena's face seemed to say, making Bonnie look away. But out loud she said: "There can be more than one reason to do something. He loves you, in his own way. I think it can be more than that if you let it."
It took Bonnie a moment to process, then she gaped at Elena. "Please tell me you're joking."
"Damon is the master of transference. He literally told me he loved me the same day Katherine rejected him. If you don't want-"
Bonnie shuddered. "Hard pass, Elena. Hard. Pass. I can't think of anything less appealing than to become…" She bit her tongue. How to put this delicately?
"Damon's girlfriend? Obsession? Morality leash?" Elena asked wryly. "His idol who keeps him from being evil, only not really because he just does what he wants and hides it from you and when you let him down by not catering to his emotional needs or not live up to the pedestal he places you on, he gets back at you by hurting your friends and family, and tells you it was your fault in the first place? You don't find that appealing?"
Bonnie blinked.
Elena shrugged. "Good for you. I had to ask."
"To give me permission? I'm not being Caroline here," Bonnie clarified, "just confused."
"I want you to be happy. I know you haven't been this summer."
"And you think Damon will make me happy? Or… is this about what you just said?" Her voice went small. "You think he needs someone to keep him in line now that you've dumped him." Bonnie shuddered again. When Damon was having a bad day, he made sure everyone around him had a worse one. And with his relationship with Elena definitively ended… Bonnie remembered her last encounters with him before their trip and wondered what would be left of Mystic Falls after three months of Post-Breakup Damon.
"No." Elena's voice was mild, but with an undercurrent of that something again… "He'll stay in line regardless. I was just… making sure of something."
"What?"
The pause that followed should have warned Bonnie. The way Elena didn't quite meet her eyes. "I've been worried about you, this summer. Caroline and I have both been. All those guys…"
It wasn't that long that this would have been the start of a fight. Now, Bonnie just mock-gasped. "You were worried? No way!"
"You have to admit, that these past weeks weren't like you, Bonnie. I thought you were being reckless. That Kai Park-"
Bonnie froze.
Elena stopped paddling. Her mouth morphed into an O of shock. "I'm sorry, oh god, Bonnie, I'm sorry."
Bonnie's laugh sounded brittle against the background of her heart pounding. "What are you sorry for? For goodness' sake, I won't die if I hear his name. I know you and Caroline figured it out. I picked up the not-subtle hints. Let me just come out and admit it." She took a deep breath, and finally said it out loud. "Yes, after the wedding, I had sex with Kai Parker!"
And of course, it was just then that a family in a boat passed.
"Mamma, cos'è il 'sex'?" chimed a high-pitched voice.
The mother rowed harder, but not before throwing Bonnie a dirty look.
Bonnie sank as low into the canoe as she could without tipping it over. "Did that kid just-"
Elena was laughing so hard, she could barely speak. "Yes, that is exactly what that sounded like."
"This is my cosmic punishment for hooking up with that man," Bonnie said dully. "This is just the first of the bad karmas that will come to me after my literal 'ship in every port' vacation."
"You and I both know that Kai Parker wasn't a one-night fling."
Bonnie pulled herself off the ribs and onto her seat, picking up her paddle with a significant look at Elena. Her friend rolled her eyes and they started pushing through the water.
"It wasn't a fling, Bonnie," said Elena who couldn't leave well enough alone.
Bonnie swallowed hard. "I think I'm the best judge of my own sex life, Elena."
"You can't keep lying to yourself about it."
Can't I?
"Bonnie-"
"Please don't, Elena!" Bonnie cried, clenching her fists around the paddle until the wood dug into her palms. "Just please don't…" She looked away, and blinked rapidly, her heart beating fast.
"OK," Elena murmured. "We won't talk about it."
So they didn't. They sailed and sailed, then berthed at an abandoned fortress island where they made camp. Bonnie's attempt to start a fire was just as disastrous as Elena's attempt to fish, so they ate the sandwiches they'd had the good sense to buy at the last minute from the harbour.
They talked about safe things: Caroline's air balloon disaster, Vespa racing with Freya and Nora, Elena's plans to transfer from Whitmore. Bonnie even looked at the dreaded Schedule, and gave her input. Elena even accepted them.
As they pushed the canoe back into the water, Bonnie said: "We should come back here again, someday. Make camp and everything."
Elena smiled sadly.
On the trip back, the seals returned. The girls rubbed their silky heads, and Bonnie prayed for good luck for all of them. It was way past due.
It was almost nighttime when they parked the canoe at the harbour and signed it off. They rolled their parkas and raincoats into their backpacks and walked down the lighted streets of Stockholm. They passed people talking and laughing. In the distance, they could hear music. The lights from the cafes and early opening pubs seemed to wink at them. A few weeks ago, Bonnie might have gone to a club with Nora and Freya. But this was better. Nora and Freya were fun company, but they weren't the friends Bonnie had known her whole life, grown up with, gone through thick and thin and literal fire with.
"You know I love you, right?" Elena said suddenly.
Bonnie looked at her friend and stupid tears filled her eyes. Today was a weepy day, apparently. "Right back at you," she said hoarsely.
Elena put her arm around her shoulder and Bonnie wrapped hers around Elena's waist. Vaguely, she remembered when they were eight, still the same height and they walked with their arms around each other like this everywhere. It had driven everyone crazy.
"Jeremy's an ass," Bonnie said. Elena barked with surprised laughter. "I'm so glad I dumped him."
"Technically, you died and both of you just never got back together."
"That's how badly I had to end things. I literally killed myself to get out of our relationship."
Elena laughed and laughed. When she stopped walking to pull Bonnie into a tight hug, Bonnie could feel her tears in her hair.
