AN: Heya, so in my rush to post the previous chapter I left out some information I think is relevant. I should have shared it at the beginning of the last chapter, but like I said I was rushing. Sometimes if I don't complete a task as soon as I think of it I just...don't get to it so instead of being thorough I just hit 'post' #ADHDLyfe
ANYWAYS, this story is a cross-post. It is on AO3 so if you read fics there you may have seen it before. I also posted it here around Halloween, but like a dope accidentally deleted it. Like I said I am bad with tasks and don't possess executive function for shit so...that's why I am only getting around to posting an already finished story like... 4 months later. TL;DR this story may look familiar for a few reasons.
Anyway here is what you came for...
Double, double toil and trouble...
When Kai sleeps he dreams of Bonnie.
She comes into his room, kicks the things off his nightstand: the water, the lotion, the bat-shaped alarm clock he's had since he was 8, the bottle of Adderall, and she makes a mess all around him.
It's a metaphor. Like all his dreams it's revelatory.
He's had prophetic dreams, premonitions, and more since as far back as he can remember.
The only thing new about these dreams is their Guest Star.
In his dreams, she climbs on top of his furniture and dances just for him. She looks at him as she creates a mess of his life, making sure to stare at him as she does.
She watches him and he watches her, and she watches him watching her and so on, and so forth; the voyeurism is another new aspect of his dreams.
While Bonnie is above she usually speaks, typically after he prompts her.
Tonight is like every other night and he leads with an observation his waking self has mused since first they met.
'Bonnie is kind of a weird name for a demon,' his dream self remarks.
'Twin murder is a weird ritual for a coven,' she dream volleys back.
'Touche.'
Dream Bonnie glides her hands down her dream sides and over her dream hips to tease him.
He loves when she puts on a little private show and he wishes she'd do it more often.
When he's below her like this, watching, waiting (commiserating) he feels like they are the only two beings in the universe, just him and Bonnie.
When it's the two of them alone his dream wonders who is the demon.
After all, Malachai sounds much more infernal than 'Bonnie' does.
He wonders, between the two of them, who is cursed and who is not?
He dreams of his own name; Malachai: from the Hebrew meaning, "My angel." But not just an angel, Malachi was also a prophet in the Old Testament.
Kai wonders what his name originator prophesied about, perhaps destruction, perhaps Bonnie.
He rolls his own name around his mouth- Ma-la-chai.
It sounds damnable like he's some dark angel, fallen from grace.
Who is the demon? Who is the angel?
Maybe Bonnie is divine…
But will she save him? Or be his undoing?
He doesn't have time to answer, the dream is already fading...
They'd finished most of their fucking hours ago, save for a few extra rounds they fell into purely by way of proximity. After the second hour, when her clothes spontaneously rematerialized and she wandered into his kitchen to help herself to his pantry, it became clear she was hanging around just to keep him company and steal his snacks. At least it seemed.
Bonnie returns from eating her third Snack Pack sans spoon and there's a sneaky gleam in her eye; he can tell she's up to something. There are several faces she wears, this one usually means she's holding something back. An errant thought says she looks 'Slicker than hog snot on a radiator.' It comes courtesy of the disembodied voice of his Aunt Jeanie down in the Southern Faction of The Gemini, but he can't spend too long in reverie. He's got Holy company, after all.
"I have a confession for you," she says casually turning to look his way, eyes dancing about his body in quick assessment. Whatever she's about to reveal must be juicy, he gets the sense this is the calm before a storm.
Her tongue swipes out to catch stray chocolate from her cheek before she speaks, "you actually didn't summon me all those moons ago." Aaaaaand there it is, boom goes the dynamite.
His throat goes dry.
Kai can recall that night vividly.
He'd been trying to find a spell for weeks, pouring through grimoire after grimoire searching for something to help him take down the latest Big Bad in a string of Big Bads that had attacked Mystic Falls in rapid succession since….well, about as far back as he can remember. He'd combed through The Gemini library and exhausted all his options there before resorting to breaking into his father's study to find the books the Gemini patriarch kept carefully hidden away.
These grimoires belonged to every Merge failure, including Joshua's own twin. Every Gemini in line for The Merge was given a personal grimoire at the age of 10, the point being for them to spend the next 12 years growing in their prowess, finding their specialties, and eventually crafting their own spells. When the victor gained the power of The Coven they were also gifted the personal grimoire of their dead twin, and all dead twins who preceded. It was supposed to be some comfort for the new leader, but Kai just found it all gratuitously macabre.
His uncle, according to the whispers and hushed tones of other coven members, was into some Pretty Dark Shit. Kai didn't know the extent of it because all his life it was something people were determined to keep as secret as possible. After he exhausted all his other options searching for spells he decided to try his luck with the darkness his uncle had sought, maybe it would save him even if it couldn't save his uncle.
Fortunately, finding his slain relative's grimoire was easier than he anticipated. His father was not nearly as adept at secrecy as he thought, or perhaps Kai was just better at it. Either way, after little searching, Kai found what he'd come for.
'E. Parker,' he gently stroked the spine of the book before pulling it from the shelf. The hum of magic it held felt familiar, yet different. It made sense, this belonged to his Uncle Ezrah Parker who had since, allegedly, been absorbed by his father, albeit some 30 years prior. If his father really did gain his twin's power all those years ago it made sense that holding this magic now wouldn't be so foreign to him. Upon winning The Merge Joshua's magic became inextricable from Ezrah's, weaving with it to grant him new power. Instead of wasting more time thinking about the ethics of killing your twin for magic and glory, Kai set to work.
He recalls how desperate he had felt as he sat arched on the floor, fingers stinging and eyes burning from all the pages he'd flipped through trying to find something, anything, to help.
Hours of searching passed by the time he got to a hidden section about Expression, veiled under Gemini magic he'd somehow managed to notice. He pulled back layer after layer of cloaking spells and wards until it felt like his very essence was being stripped from him, not the tome in his lap. Eventually, he felt the book yield its secrecy to him; there were at least several dozen newly uncovered pages for him to browse. It stirred something inside of him and gave him a small burst of energy, but it quickly died the more he looked.
Something about these new pages felt...off.
Merely looking at them caused his vision to swim and black spots to blink in and out of his sight, nonetheless, he pushed forward. Reading each page seemed to exhaust him exponentially, as if the words themselves were pushing him away, warning him to desist.
He'd never experienced anything like it before and he was terrified beyond belief, but behind it all was that heavy and acrid desperation.
It pulled up from his belly and sat at the back of his throat, it's taste biting and pungent. He'd been getting accustomed to it more and more these days. Sometimes he woke up to the taste of bile already nestled on his tongue.
Desperation colored his days and then his nights, which is how he found himself hunched and bleeding as he wracked his shelves, his brain, and his body for a solution. Elena and Damon had been on his case for WEEKS demanding he craft a spell to hide the town from some Djinn that they (Damon) had angered during a recent expedition to retrieve some artifact for another spell they wanted him to pull off.
Apparently, Damon had stolen the artifact and unwittingly triggered a curse, the specifics of which meant Damon and everyone he ever knew would be hunted by this creature and destroyed. Since Damon had been alive for over 200 years this meant unforeseeable death and destruction, which is exactly why the disastrous duo was demanding Kai clean up the vampire's mess before it could get messier.
As if it was that easy.
As if he could just *snap* his fingers and cloak an entire town from a homicidal genie on a warpath. Wasn't it just like them to create more work for him? When that wasn't bad enough they'd roped Caroline, Stefan, and Matt in on it; soon the entire Scooby gang was breathing down his neck.
He was also spread thin with his coven, between Envoy training, studying spells, practicing hexes, his duties as Young Adult Liason on The Council, not to mention preparation for… He hated thinking about it- about The Merge.
He hated that Jo, his twin, and in so many ways his other half, would die by his hand. And Kai wasn't foolish, he was many things: self-righteous, judgemental, masochistic, altruistic to a fault, stubbornly loyal (often to his detriment), but he'd never been naive. Jo was going to lose and she was going to die.
He knew it, his siblings knew it, The Council knew it, Joshua knew it, and perhaps most haunting- Jo knew it. He ruminated on how deeply painful and humiliating it must be for her to confront her own mortality this way.
It tainted every single interaction they'd had over the past year, and probably even further back than he cares to admit. She barely spoke to him anymore and he understood her distance. In the last year or two, all of their interaction had been overshadowed by the imminent fratricidal ceremony. Every moment of laughter, every room they sat in together, every bit of joy shared between them as fleeting as his twin's own life. He wanted to reach across the divide and console her, tell her they'd always be together, nothing would change that.
Of course, they knew the merge was, in myth, about togetherness. From the time they were knee-high, The Coven had impressed upon them that The Merge was just that, a merging.
"Two becoming one."
Even then Kai remembers being doubtful. 18 years later and he feels the same as he did when he was three.
He loves his family and he hates his coven.
It hit him harder than it ever had as he read his dead uncle's spells. He couldn't tell if the way his body quaked was from anger, terror, or exertion. Anger at never getting to meet the man who was now helping him save his friends, terror at realizing he'd soon have Jo's spells himself, at the expense of her existence, and exertion from the amount of magic he'd already expended so far. A splatter of blood hit the page and he realized his nose was bleeding, the slight trickle of blood soon becoming a heavy and continuous stream.
That night as he sat crouched over the grimoire he remembers feeling resigned as the blood poured from his nose. He remembers welcoming the death he could see growing closer and closer from the periphery.
More than anything he felt relief.
Relief that it would all soon be over, relief that he wouldn't have to save everyone yet again, relief that he wouldn't have to kill his sister, that she would get to live; relief that the weight of the world was finally, finally lifting from his slumped shoulders. He was ready to embrace the ether. Then, when he'd given up everything, she appeared.
At first, he thought maybe she was some angel, some divine being sent down to console him and make sure he had a smooth transition. He imagined she'd commend him for a life well lived and congratulate him for his continual selflessness, but one look at her impish visage and he quickly shook that thought. No, he knew very early on she was a demon.
Now she was telling him that...he didn't summon her? There was only one question left to ask and it leapt from his mouth before he even consciously decided to speak it.
"So then who did?"
"Well, well, well that's the Million-Dollar Question, now isn't it, Malachai? If not you, then who? " It seems she's about to answer him, but she only flashes her trademark grin.
"That's for me to know and you to find out," she says giddily as she uses her finger to boop his nose.
Something wicked this way comes
Something in the air is changing.
Someone is coming.
Kai can sense a new presence phasing into being and he braces himself.
There is something about this aura, it registers as something he should recognize, but his mind won't hold onto it. He can't tell what it is, so he readies himself for anything; another demon, his sister, the International Gemini Council Leader. He can tell when they, it, fully arrives and he gulps audibly.
Bonnie is still giggling to herself when she crosses her arms and turns to look over her shoulder.
"Come on out, Nora, I think the poor fool has learned his lesson."
Wait, that can't be, he can't have heard that right, did she just say-
A quiet, triumphant, voice breaks through his thoughts and he sees the girl fully appear across from him waving daintily with her fingers, they pull forward one by one, a cheeky smile unfolding across her face.
"Hi, Kai."
AN: Who'd a thunk it! Nora was the (wo)man behind the curtain the whole time!
Also, I really enjoy making playlists for my fics, it helps me write and I just think it's neat. If you're whatsoever interested in the playlist made for this fic here are the songs, I tried to link it, but apparently, that's a no-no here so... yeah. This is on Spotify as BK LMD if you'd like to search for it there. The order is deliberate, but not like a big deal. One song does repeat and that is deliberate too.
Daisy- Ashnikko
I Put A Spell On You- Screamin' Jay Hawkins
Magic Man- Heart
Saturday Night- The Misfits
Closer- Nine Inch Nails
Until We Bleed- Kleerup feat. Lykke Li
I Put A Spell On You- Creedence Clearwater Revival
No One Like You- Scorpions
This Is A Trick- Crosses
Under My Skin- Jukebox The Ghost
Love Me Dead- Ludo
Love Galore- SZA
Seven Devils- Florence And The Machine
The Devil In I- Slipknot
Hatef-k- The Bravery
Samson- Regina Spektor
I Put A Spell On You- Nina Simone
