Note: Well, shit. It's been five years. Forgive me? While you're at it forgive my typos, too, because you know they're doing their best.
[It's true, ForEverBamon, this one's for you, because yes, we can totally be friends.]
"That [which] will never come again, is what makes life so sweet."
- Emily Dickinson
The Battle PT III
Bonnie Bennett took the odds in her hands and balled up her fists and ran.
She drew on the memory of her grams, her mother, the witches that lead to her, and the ones that would one day follow in her stead. She took the notion of their power and manifested it as her own. She looked at the creature in his eyes and took his power from him, too.
"I'm going to kill you!" She swore, leaping into the air with hands splayed, flashing light at her fingertips.
Lucy felt it. Like a tilt in her equilibrium.
Somewhere, in the place, wherever they were - Stefan had come for her.
The two of them had kept it secret well enough, the deal they'd made to keep Bonnie and Damon safe. It had started them off on common ground; they both had a person they considered the last of their family when it really came down to the details of it, and they both understood what that person deserved, whether that person believed it too, or not. Loving people like Damon and Bonnie had put them both in a unique, but exact same situation.
When Lucy had begun practicing tethering her mind to Stefan's, it was for that reason only. She wanted to be sure that they were always on the same page, and that they were always able to check in with each other, to keep whatever plan there was afloat. Stefan's mind had begun to bleed into her consciousness at some point, and well, Bonnie and Damon weren't the only ones having telepathic conversations with each other.
It was strange, to share the same thoughts unprovoked, laugh with the other while they were in another room, dream together now and then.
Their little world that they'd built between them had become sacrosanct, a sanctuary for Lucy when she needed Stefan to just be there in the moment, beside her, taking it all in too. And Stefan sought her thoughts out every time someone commented on him and Fahada, as though to gauge her reaction. They'd stare one another down, daring the other to admit as to 'why'. The game grew more dangerous as they grew more familiar with each other.
The small smile that played at the corner of their mouths always belonged to the person at the end of their thoughts. Having Lucy with him in his head, where all of him tried to hide, was an unexpected gift. Her mind drew up an oasis of space for him to be free of himself, to take some of that 'magic' into his own head, and rid himself of the past so that he could finally become the person who deserved the endless future laid out before him.
What he felt for Lucy had been forged there, between the two of them, without the interference of anyone else, even his own brother. It was something that belonged only here, only now and only to them.
When she'd dropped unconscious, his body went stiff. She would have been the first person he'd sought out.
How on Earth was he going to save her without her?
"Stefan," Lucy muttered under her breath and shut her eyes to hone in on him.
When she opened her eyes he was standing in front of her like she'd conjured him in a dream. "How? Why?..."
His hands found the small of her waist as his eyes searched hers desperately.
"I think you've come here to die," Lucy said, suddenly so sad. "I'm about to give my powers to Bonnie, and probably turn to dust, so that she survives."
"Will Damon make it, too?" Stefan wondered, his heart being tugged in every direction at that moment.
"She'll make sure of it," Lucy said certainly.
"Good. Because... then I've come to die with you." Stefan said.
"What? Are you insane?" Lucy gawked. "You can leave, there's-"
"If what you're telling me is true that means this is what it comes down to." He sounded so sure. "I know what I feel and I know what I want."
"I don't think you do," Lucy said, cupping his cheek, because she didn't either, not really.
"I think you've forgotten how long I've been alive. Wanting forever is a selfish indulgence I've trapped myself and my brother and our lives in for years, but it's literally just now, looking at you that I realised what I really want."
"Yeah? And what's that?" Lucy stepped closer to him, letting him hold her, and relishing the act of holding him.
"A happy ending." He said simply, and then leaned in to kiss her.
She kissed him, she pulled the moment and him as close as she could.
He pushed back against her mouth, curled his tongue past her lips.
Lucy wanted to keep this moment fresh in her mind as long as she was conscious.
When their mouths separated, he pressed his forehead to hers.
"I don't want to move on from you," He said with his eyes closed. "I don't want to deal with no longer getting to love you, or hear your voice. So, if you go, I go."
"I can't ask-"
"You're not asking." Stefan interrupted, tilting her chin up and looking down at her with a million emotions swimming through him to pool in his eyes. "I am. Lucy, will you let me die with you? I didn't want you to die alone, and I don't want to live without you. Can we take this, whatever it is now and whatever it could have been, and can we keep it with us when we leave the rest behind?"
Her eyes shone as she felt the weight of his words, and how it shaped her choice with a fresh perspective.
To throw her life away was one thing, but to take a life along with hers simply because Stefan didn't want it without her - was...
"What kind of love is this?" She wondered, feeling her magic pull tight to a whirlpool behind her sternum.
"I've never felt it before." He admitted with a feeble, adorable shrug.
"You don't want to fight it?" Lucy wondered.
"I'm already where I hope to be when it ends, what about you?"
"I've wanted to stop running my whole life," she said, cupping his face in her hands, "I just never expected someone to be with me when I finally did."
Their world fell apart as Lucy released all her magic to Bonnie, standing on her toes to kiss Stefan one more time as the fire enveloped him as well.
"Something's happening," Caroline gasped.
When she and Bonnie had decided to be best friends forever as children, the word forever was only a wish.
Then, when the Salvatore brothers moved back to Mystic Falls, and Caroline was turned, the two of them realised forever was possible, but maybe only for one of them. The circumstances had almost torn them apart. But even after that, when they re-tethered themselves to each other; with new words for the love they had, and new memories to give them hope for what was still to come, they could never have expected this.
And here they were again, toying with the idea of forever; gambling with their fates as they tried to make sense of who they were in and amongst it all. Bonnie had never wanted to be a vampire, not after Caroline, not after her mother, and yet, it had seeped its way into her bloodstream anyway. And by the hands of magic, no less. It made the vampire's heart ache as if beating under a bruise.
"Please come back," Caroline whispered, but a split-second later a wall of power moved them all across the wide room; a portal curling into view.
"The Superior's legion has come!" Fahada yelled over her shoulder, ducking down into a roll and sprinting towards the wall of weapons.
Everything slowed as the witches stepped into view.
Cloaked casters stepped into the house with their arms raised.
They hadn't anticipated more fighting, they had barely healed.
"Wait!" A loud voice boomed, a figure moving forward.
Spinning around their hands lifted and dropped, and the other witches did the same.
Caroline, Alaric, Enzo, Jeremy, Amelia, Fahada, and Imran all dropped to the floor from where they'd hung suspended.
"He is not here," the person spoke again, lifting their cloak. "Apologies for the intrusion, we're here to help you defeat the Superior."
"Aren't you his kin?" Imran asked, flashing upright.
"Families disagree most of all, don't you think?"
Damon felt like he was running against a tunnel of wind blasting right at him.
Every effort felt futile, but he pushed on.
It felt bizarre how this metaphor always played out with Bonnie: that the closer they became, the harder the circumstances tried to test that connection; try it for its durability. It reminded him that love was a choice: a continuous choice. Even before, the i-love-you's and the limbo-life and dying, and dying, when he was presented with a choice, he chose Bonnie.
Bonnie was as easy to love as she was to lose, and, well, Damon knew that in loving Bonnie, he had to face her nature head-on, as well as his. They hadn't followed any pattern he'd seen before, either for himself or those in his orbit, including her.
Putting the two of them together in any capacity meant uncharted territory; no assumptions, only assurance, only communication, connection, and for lack of a better word: magic. Not power, not casting, not even something that could be satisfied with the word love.
No, what they had was what people, mundane, unknowing, hopeful people called magic.
The stuff that lights up a lifetime with a single moment; that spreads its arms across and out, enveloping you in the overwhelming feeling that for once, you made the right choice.
Bonnie was the right choice. Which meant that whatever came his way, Damon had to stick to his choice of loving her, because it meant that he got to be loved by her, too. There was nothing like it, her love, and he'd lived about long enough to know at least that.
Pushing, he hurtled through luminescent, and glassy walls, bounding up and around him like electric bubbles, sharp and dazzling in the overbearing white light.
When he heard Bonnie's words: No matter what, Damon, I love you. He knew he was too late.
What he also knew, was that for him, it meant he was right on time.
"How can we trust them?" Jeremy gaped.
"Do we have a choice?" Enzo griped, "I say our odds are shot at this point." Alaric looked torn.
Taking Enzo's hand Caroline swallowed down her every fear and looked the new, cloaked woman head-on. "Are you here to hurt them? To hurt the ones that stopped your...Superior?"
"We're here to help them," the woman swore again, "We've been praying for a way out of this hell for years. Please,"
"We really don't have time if they've been trapped by his consciousness," another stepped forward, palms up.
"I believe them," Amelia said, looking first to Fahada and then Caroline. Imran hadn't taken his eyes off of the first one that spoke.
"I do, too," Fahada said, nodding to the blonde vampire.
"Okay, but if I lose Bonnie all bets are off," Caroline said, jutting her chin out, "Odds be fucked."
"Ditto," Enzo said, lifting her hands to kiss her knuckles quickly.
"Help them," Imran said, "but understand what happens to you if the situation worsens even a little."
"Understood," the woman jerked her head for three more to follow. "The rest of you draw at his magic as you've always wanted to, you three, with me."
The group began to chant, low enough, but the cadence fell swiftly into a rhythm that stirred a vibration in the very foundations of the house.
The four dark-casters stood at the foot of the gurneys laid out before them. A witch each.
"Are you ready?"
"Ready," they all said in unison.
Without warning, they slit their throats open, the blood pouring out at the feet of each makeshift bed.
"Oh my fu-" Jeremy yelled, Alaric pulled him back.
"Those who are hell's closest, sacrifice first," was all the first woman said, before her body dropped to the ground.
"...Is it getting brighter in here, or is it ju-"
Bonnie was pulled suddenly, plucked from her trajectory towards the old man, to above and over him, landing awkwardly on her side.
Damon appeared next to her.
Chanting filtered in from above them, somewhere.
"Lucy?"
The old man withered and jerked, blood spraying from his limbs as they snapped off and hovered like he was being crushed by pressure in outer space.
"Who's magic is doing that?"
They looked over, and saw Lucy and Stefan, before the other two twisted into the bright light, vanishing.
"Lucy!" Bonnie yelled.
"Come on, we have to go too," Damon urged, handing her the written note with the spell on it.
"No, but that wasn't Lucy leaving...it wasn't,"
"How do you know?" Damon asked, fretting, as the dimension began to cave in, in earnest this time.
"I felt it," Bonnie choked back a sob, "I felt the magic come to me."
Bonnie and Damon were the first to wake.
The first wave of hysteria was upon their awakening.
The second wave came when they realised Lucy and Stefan weren't joining them.
The third came when everyone else realised it, too.
The other witches that had come, bowed, and started leaving, after declaring their rescuing of the chosen ones, done.
"When you are ready to lead, come find us," They said to Bonnie.
"My cousin is still gone, and my brother, can't you help them?" Bonnie yelled.
"It is only your fate that matters," was all they said.
"Bullshit!" Bonnie yelled, even as they'd dispersed. "What the fu-no, no, no-"
"Lucy?" Damon cupped the other witch's face, "please, I'm begging you!"
Bonnie began to hyperventilate.
All the magic inside of her began to pulse and undulate, with a violent vibration, that was making it hard for the hybrid to stand up.
Her limbs started bending at strange angles, her skin prickling over with sharp spikes.
"Bon?" Caroline caught Bonnie quickly before she'd even started to fall. Damon snapped back to reality at the sound of her name.
A crack of lightning came off of Bonnie's body, slapping Caroline across the room, Damon's attempt followed suit soon after.
"Bonnie!" Fahada called to the hybrid, "what's happening?"
"Is it the magic? Was it too much?" Amelia wondered as she clung to Imran.
A vortex had been kicked up around Bonnie.
"Bonnie!" Jeremy cried out, "You're hurting them!" He knew that would always matter to her, no matter what.
He watched her eyes, while glowing white, turn to him.
"If Lucy is gone, then...Lucy is gone," the boy said, voice cracking.
"No!" Bonnie roared.
"Bonnie, please-"
"I can't, Jer-" Bonnie's voice sounded hollow amidst the chaos of her powers.
"You're not this feeling, Bon," Caroline called with a wince as she righted her bones, "you're not even this magic, reign it in and we'll figure out what's next."
"Bon?" Damon's voice cut through the power like a bucket of cold water to the scalp. "This is the last thing Lucy would want and you know that."
A loud scream came from the small hybrids body as she took in their words, their well-meaning, and tried to marry it with the losses she'd already suffered. If she could save Lucy, if she could bring back Stefan, her life, as it stood, would be remarkably more bearable.
Old magic curled around Bonnie, and new.
She held Lucy's face in her mind's eye, and Stefan's and came to hover by their heads as they lay side by side, holding hands.
"If they don't survive this, then there is no happy ending here," Bonnie said, "and they deserve it as much as the rest of us."
Pouring the erratic power into the witch before her, and the vampire she'd chosen, Bonnie split her magic in half, exactly half. She knew that if anyone was going to be able to bear the burden of the last of the Bennett power with her, it was Lucy.
The more magic lifted out of her and into her cousin, the more her senses returned, and her sense of self.
The others could only watch as Bonnie hung like an angel over the beds of the dead and tried to bring them both back.
Bonnie's form twisted and shifted as the magic bent to her will.
As it left her and filled its new host, it's new home.
Light poured from Lucy's fingertips to Stefan's and both of their forms began to shimmer.
Lucy's eyes opened and she turned to look at him, at Stefan.
His eyes were already on her.
"Is this heaven?" She asked, her neck craned as she looked down from where they were now hovering too.
"Better," Stefan said, breaking into a wide grin.
The Aftermath
Bonnie Bennett was a changed woman.
In that, she was significantly less woman than she'd been before she and Damon had died together.
To think the universe would let it slide that a vampire and witch would turn to one another for comfort at death's door and have that be 'it', was laughable in hindsight.
Bonnie wasn't a girl from Mystic Falls anymore, or a woman back from the dead.
No, she was a force to be reckoned with, a feared name, a mythical imagining like no other.
The first of her kind, a vampire-witch hybrid, with her beloved: her perfect match.
They stayed in Cape Town for a few more days after everything had cooled off.
Mostly because none of them could believe it was actually over.
Alaric and Jeremy were the first to leave, the original vampire making sure to remind Bonnie once more, to call home and assure Matt that she was still alive and kicking.
"I'll be home soon, Matty, and I love you for wanting to be here. I'll see you soon," Bonnie beamed before hanging up.
Caroline and Enzo made it official.
Lucy and Stefan did, too.
Bonnie and Damon mocked them all for taking so long to catch up.
Fahada decided to look into the Superior's legion; to piece together Keira's story, and finally put it all behind her. She left next.
"Look after each other," She said, "I'll see you all soon."
"Well, I mean there's bound to be a wedding to attend any day now, so, keep your phone on," Damon teased.
"Who the hell is getting married?" Lucy gawked as Amelia handed her a note.
"It slows down your aging," the other witch explained with a quick brush of her fingers over Lucy's head. "I'd keep it in mind."
"I wish we didn't live so far apart," Lucy said, sighing sadly as they embraced. "I'm going to miss you."
"You have enough magic to portal yourself anywhere in the world and back, remember? Just give us enough time to get your rooms ready."
They laughed.
Stefan and Imran stood in front of each other, the smile passing between the two of them more nuanced than explicable.
"You've surpassed even your own expectations this time, I can tell," Imran said, patting Stefan's cheek. "I'm proud of you, my friend."
"No more friend nonsense," Stefan pulled him in for a hug, "I've always wanted another brother, did you know?"
"Does that mean I have to laugh at all of his jokes, brother?" Imran grinned.
"Only the ones no one else laughs at, preferably," Damon chimed in, wiggling his way into their embrace.
Bonnie stood watching everyone saying their goodbyes and felt overcome with emotion.
She'd never, ever imagined she'd find her people.
She hadn't felt more loved, more protected, and cared for since before she found out she was a witch. Her human life seemed eons away, honestly, so did her witch life. This one, this one fit perfectly. This one proved that there had been trajectory; that there had been meaning all along.
Caroline had been standing beside her, and suddenly took her hand.
"Damon's not the only one never letting you go," was all she said, and Bonnie used her free hand to pull her best friend even closer by the arm she was holding, and lean her head on her shoulder.
"Best friends, for ever," Bonnie said, smiling.
"And ever and ever aw, men."
When they got back to Mystic Falls, it seemed almost dull with peace.
There was no weekly-villain-expose, or threatening midnight call.
Unless you counted Caroline demanding a sleepover for 'old-time's-sake'
Elena tried to apologise for the words she'd never even said to Bonnie's face, but they died on her lips the minute she saw Bonnie and Damon together.
Hell, everyone seemed different - happier. You'd swear they'd all gone on a sunset cruise and not narrowly escaped the most terrifying warlock in the modern history of magic.
Lucy and Stefan moved in together in Bonnie's grams' old place, at her request.
"She would have wanted this," Bonnie swore, "I mean, Stefan's always kind of loved it here, and there's an attic full of archives of our family, memories that are a part of your life and magic, too. Plus," Bonnie grinned widely now, "You'll only be ten minutes away. Two if I run."
"Thank you, Bonnie," Lucy's eyes welled up. "You've literally given me a place to call home."
"It's always been an option," Bonnie nodded. "I'm just so fucking happy you're staying."
"Me too," Stefan swooped in behind Bonnie and lifted Lucy up and over the threshold of their new home.
"Cheeseballs," Damon scoffed, carrying up a few boxes. "Notice how I'm the only one helping."
"I'm coming, baby!" Bonnie promised, giggling as she went to grab a few things from the pile in the driveway.
Caroline and Enzo made a habit of hosting dinners and parties after she learned he was as good a cook as she was a planner.
No one threw a better anything than them, and it wasn't long before they began hunting for somewhere to call their own, as well.
One particularly spectacular no-reason-at-all-party was where Jeremy met Tyson, the first person to give him butterflies since Bonnie had.
Alaric was so happy Jeremy had started dating again, he dove into queer readings to have something to talk about when he and Jeremy went camping, or hiking, or fishing, or whatever dad-thing the original vampire concocted for that weekend. Jeremy, as much as he moaned about it, not-so-secretly loved it and was thankful for someone always having his back no matter what came next.
Bonnie, Amelia, Lucy had decided to start their own coven of sorts. It was a serious agreement between the three witches made out of mutual respect, but the three of them weren't mad that most of their video calls lately simply involved 'catching each other up'.
Where they had been chaos and destruction and hysteria, there was calm and sense and togetherness.
Bonnie was the happiest hybrid in the world.
Well, let's call it a tie with Damon.
Six months later
"...Wow, so that whole wedding-any-day-now thing was serious?" Fahada smiled into the phone. "Of course I'll come. Consider me on my way."
A/N: WHO'S GETTING MARRIED?!
I'd say there's about one or two chapters left here? (I'm deciding what to do with the dark-witches, and whether or not to throw a bachelor/bachelorette party with these characters, plus there's the matter of the long-overdue Bamon LEMON so hmu with those reviews!)