Chapter 2

You've Left Me in the Dark


A numbness settled over her. Bonnie couldn't even feel the tears that began to fall from her eyes. Sorrow twisted in her gut, and she fell to the couch beside her. All that earlier dread was encompassed by the onslaught of grief swallowing her whole. It had made sense why she was feeling the way she did. Even if her mind hadn't known, her heart had, but she still couldn't accept anything that Caroline had said as truth. In her mind, it wasn't possible. "What do you mean he's been dead for a long time? How is that possible when he was just here!" Her voice was laden with anguish. It was easy to tell she was crying and two seconds away from hysteria. "He was just here, Caroline!" She insisted.

There were rustling noises in the background, the sound of papers moving and fabric brushing against fabric. "Don't do anything, Bonnie. I'm heading over there right now. Stay calm until I get there. We'll figure out what's going on, okay."

She wiped the tears from her eyes, trying to pull herself together. "Okay," Her voice was small as Caroline hung up the phone.

Running a hand through her hair, she stood and paced the room and then looked around again. She found herself wandering through the house once more, searching for any sign of him and finding none whatsoever. It was as if he had never lived there, as if their life together had never existed.

She returned to the living room and picked up her phone. Scrolling through her contact list again, she paused when she passed D, going back up to search for Damon's number and not finding it in her phone at all. Another piece of evidence against her sanity. She sat back down on the couch, her eyes wide, her hands gripping her hair tightly at her temples as she struggled to accept the apparent reality of things. This was insane. She was going insane. How was he suddenly gone from her life? And if what Caroline said was true-

No, no, no. She backtracked from that. It couldn't be true. This was some sort of spell. It had to be. All she had to do was figure out what it was, and then she could reverse it.

Bonnie was in the study frustrated while looking through a grimoire that was proving to be useless when Caroline finally arrived. The door was still unlocked from this morning, and Bonnie was startled when she heard it opening and her best friend's voice call out to her. Standing up and closing the grimoire, she walked out of the study and down the hall to find both Caroline and Stefan in her living room. Caroline was hanging her jacket up in the closet while Stefan waited beside her. Their heads both snapped towards her when she appeared.

In the second Caroline took to assess her state, she was walking over to her and wrapping her into a hug. Bonnie hadn't looked at herself in the mirror, but she knew that her eyes were red-rimmed and puffy from crying and that her make-up was a mess. The moment Caroline's arms went around her shoulders, she wanted to start crying all over again.

"Thank you for coming. I don't understand what's going on," Bonnie mumbled over her shoulder.

Caroline squeezed her reassuringly. "I know," Bonnie latched on to the calm in her voice. "We'll figure this out. I brought Stefan to help too." Releasing Bonnie and grabbing her hand, her best friend guided her over to the couch. She sat down, keeping Bonnie's hand in hers while the other adjusted the end of the long-sleeved navy blue suit dress she wore. Leave it to Caroline to drop everything at her job to be the supportive friend. Bonnie wasn't sure what she would do without her.

Stefan followed them and sat on the other side of her, a sympathetic hand on her shoulder and a gentle look in his eyes. "Walk us through what happened," he said.

Bonnie turned towards him, leaning slightly into Caroline's shoulder. Her voice shook as she explained the events of that morning. "Damon and I woke up and got dressed. He made me a bagel and coffee, which I ate, and then we were saying goodbye to each other before I left for work. I was about to walk out the door when I felt something like an earthquake, and when I turned back to look at him, he was becoming transparent. I couldn't really feel him when I went to touch him, and then he just…" His face flashed in her mind, the confused look in his eyes as he vanished. "He was gone. After that I experienced an intense headache for a few minutes and when it finally died down, he still wasn't there. And now it's like all traces of him have disappeared from my life. His clothes, his things, the blood in the fridge, the photos of us that were hanging on the wall, my wedding ring…" She looked down at the ring finger of her left hand where it should've been and let go of Caroline's hand to rub at the spot. Earlier, when she realized that was gone as well, she'd almost had another break down.

Both Caroline and Stefan followed her gaze. "So you're saying, up until this morning, you and Damon were happily married?" Stefan sounded as if he was struggling to wrap his mind around the concept.

Bonnie frowned at him. "Yesterday was our anniversary, Stefan. You should know that. You called him and he mentioned that we were going out to dinner last night."

His disbelief showed in his expression and Bonnie's frown deepened. She turned away from him and back towards Caroline who'd been silent. Bonnie took a deep breath and told herself to focus on the facts, on figuring out what happened to Damon.

"What exactly did you mean when you said Damon had been dead for a long time? When did he supposedly die?"

"He died in our senior year of high school, right after Elena became a vampire," Caroline answered.

Bonnie took a breath, trying to absorb that information, but it wasn't computing. "You're telling me that Damon's been dead for nearly thirty years? How am I supposed to believe that when he was standing right over there this morning, saying goodbye to me before I left for work?" She looked at the last place he stood blankly, so confused as the knot of grief hardened in her chest again.

Caroline ran her hand down Bonnie's arm in a soothing gesture, and Bonnie caught her and Stefan sharing a worried look.

"Are you sure," Stefan started, his brows slanting inward as he turned his gaze back on her, "and you may get upset with me for saying this, but are you sure it wasn't all a dream or some hallucination?"

Her glare was staunch, offended even though it was only natural they might have trouble believing her. "You think I could dream twenty-nine years of a life where Damon lived after when you think he died and fifteen years of marriage with him? I think I'd remember waking up from that, and I don't. Besides, how would I know things about his childhood. Things like how his favorite sweet when he was child was cherry pie or how Damon can play the piano beautifully, but he doesn't like to because he hated the lessons when he was younger. And if that doesn't convince you, I even know about how your father treated both of you, and that Damon used to try and protect you from him. And that one of his biggest regrets besides spending so much time antagonizing you, was what he did to Gail and thought he did to Sarah on May 10, 1994."

His eyes widened over the last few words. "How do you know about..." he trailed off. Bonnie had gotten her point across. Stefan looked shocked that she knew any of that, and she was sure she erased some, if not all doubt that this was at least real for her.

"Whether you believe it or not, he was here and then he disappeared."

With a look from Caroline, Stefan smartly kept his mouth shut while Bonnie tried to reign in her emotions. "If you don't think this was a dream or a hallucination, then what do you think is going on? A spell?" Caroline asked.

"I don't know. He's gone from my life like he never existed and now you're telling me that he died twenty-nine years ago. I'm not even sure what kind of spell would be capable of something like this." She put her head in her hands, digging the heels of her palms into her eyes. "God, I feel like I'm going insane, and I'm sure you two probably think I'm having a psychotic break because there's literally no evidence that Damon was even here except my memory of him."

"You're not going insane," Caroline tried to reassure, "you're just…"

Bonnie stood up abruptly. Caroline's attempts at placation were wearing on her and she was sick of the doubt still emanating from the both of them. "If neither of you believe me, that's fine. You can leave. But I have to find out what happened to him." She moved to step around Caroline who stood up after her.

"Calm down for a second, Bon. Let's talk about this."

Bonnie whirled on her best friend, her hands balling into fists. "Don't tell me to calm down. Imagine if Stefan suddenly disappeared or the twins and no one believed you. The last thing you would be is calm."

"The twins?" It took Caroline a moment to realize who she was talking about. Her brow furrowed. "Do you mean Alaric and Jo's twins?"

There was something about the way she said Jo's name that gave Bonnie pause. "Wait, is Jo still alive?"

"Yeah," Caroline dragged out the word as if it was odd that she thought otherwise.

"Kai didn't kill her and the Gemini coven didn't put the twins into you?"

Caroline eyes bugged out. She looked utterly perplexed by that question. "What are you talking about?"

She should've understood the moment all traces of him had disappeared from her life, but it only just clicked. If none of that happened, it meant that Damon dying didn't just change her life and the repercussions of his death went far beyond her. To not only change the physical world, but to affect people's minds and alter people's memories was unheard of. If this world, one where Damon died twenty-nine years ago, was a dream, hallucination or even an illusion, she was positive no spell could be this far reaching. And if it was, she should be able to tell, shouldn't she? But Bonnie wasn't able to sense any magic at work whatsoever.

"How did Damon die? Who killed him?" she finally asked, even though just thinking about him being dead made her heart sink and sorrow twist in her gut again.

"Stake through the heart," Stefan answered. "We thought it was one of the Originals, but Klaus and the others gave their word that it wasn't them and none of us were able to figure out what happened. There were no trails and no one saw it. They came, killed him, and went like a ghost. After things quieted down in Mystic Falls, I spent three years searching for leads on hunters that could've done it, and I still found nothing." It was plain on Stefan's face that the unresolved murder of his brother still bothered him. She had been so wrapped up in her own emotions. She couldn't imagine how he must've felt when Caroline told him about her suddenly thinking his brother had been alive this entire time.

Bonnie walked over to him and placed a hand on his. "I'm sorry."

His hand balled into a fist underneath hers. "It's fine. I got over my brother's death a long time ago." He didn't look at her as he said that, and somehow Bonnie doubted it was true. This time it was her placing the comforting hand on his shoulder.

"Could both of you tell me what you remember in the months before his death and after?" She asked them.

Stefan nodded.

She sat back down on the couch next to Stefan and Caroline sat back down beside her as well.

He started from the moment Klaus forced him to become a ripper again. Caroline also filled her in on what was going on with her at the time and everything was as Bonnie remembered up until Damon died the day after Elena became a vampire. Things started to diverge then, Elena wasn't sired to Damon, but the hunter still came and they ended up searching for the cure and releasing Silas. Bonnie still died, and they had managed to bring her back, but not as the anchor and so there was no getting stuck with Damon in 1994. There was no Kai. There were no heretics and Lily Salvatore, but Bonnie had still been chased by the Armory, still been the huntress, and had still fallen in love with Enzo who she divorced ten years ago. Caroline and Stefan, on the other hand, were still together and still happily married. Many things were very different, but their lives seemed far more peaceful than Bonnie's.

"Do you not remember any of that?" Caroline asked her.

"Everything before Damon's death I remember, but after that, things are a bit different for me." She launched into her version of things, and Bonnie told them certain details, like how they dealt with Silas, the Travelers, Kai, and the heretics, which Stefan had a lot of questions about when she mentioned his mother's involvement. Then she moved on to the Armory and the huntress, explaining how it all ended. When she finished, she explained her life after, falling out of love with Enzo, realizing she loved Damon and that Damon was in love with her. She had found a way to unlink her and Elena, and even when she awoke, Damon had still chosen her and Elena had gone on to finish medical school and marry one of her colleagues. She and Damon tied the knot a while later, and they had built their life together here in New York.

She thought of last night, of the tender way he looked at her across the dinner table, of how she wanted nothing more than to be able to see him look at her that way again. Tears started to well up in her eyes for the umpteenth time, but she blinked them away.

"What about current events?" Stefan asked, distracting her. And they went over everything that happened outside of Mystic Falls, things like who was elected president, what wars were going on overseas and anything else major that happened. None of it had changed.

"It's like I've been put into a different world, an alternate reality where the only thing that's different is Damon dying," Bonnie said.

"Like we've lived alternate timelines that diverged when he died," Caroline added thoughtfully.

Bonnie went through that line of thought in her head. If that was the case, then this wasn't simply her being transported into a different reality. Every change stemmed from Damon's death, and taking into account the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death, a thought occurred to her out of nowhere. It was ludicrous, impossible as far as she knew and yet she couldn't help but entertain the idea. "If it all changed when Damon died, what if- what if someone went back in time and killed him?"

Caroline looked skeptical. "Is that possible?" Stefan asked.

"I don't know, but if it is and that type of spell actually exists, it would require massive amounts of power. I can't say it's not somehow within the realm of possibility though. I mean it explains everything aside from why I'm the only one who remembers Damon being alive."

She thought of the pain in her head, the feeling of holding on to Damon's existence and how it felt like her brain was being ripped in two before pulling back together again. Maybe if she had let go, she wouldn't remember her life with him and she would have become this Bonnie who, as far as she knew, had everything except for a husband or a partner in the way she had Damon before he disappeared. The thought of becoming this Bonnie and not remembering made her heart ache in a strange way. She couldn't imagine not knowing her life with Damon, of never becoming best friends and falling in love with him. Thank goodness she listened to her instinct and didn't let go. Thank goodness she remembered so she could fix this, because she was going to fix this. If a spell did this, a spell could undo this. There was a possibility she could get him back.

Newly determined, Bonnie grabbed her phone off the coffee table in front of them.

"What are you doing?" Caroline watched her unlock the device with another worried look.

"I'm calling a few witches."


These days, when Bonnie called for something, witches answered. Luckily, her contacts had mostly all been the same. She had garnered some respect in the witch community simply off of her name alone, and it only increased after doing people favors and inserting herself into the massive organization of New York witches.

From the time she first started making calls, it took four days before a friend of a friend gave her the number to a witch that had extensive knowledge of time spells. In those four days, Bonnie ignored all calls and messages from her work and any number that wasn't Caroline or Stefan. Based on who'd been calling her, her job and immediate friends were apparently still the same, and she stopped herself from wondering if anything else was different. It wasn't important. There was only one thing on her list of priorities and that was getting her husband back. So she stayed inside her home, and when she wasn't doing her own research, she was lying in bed, wallowing. Caroline and Stefan had left her alone at her insistence, but Caroline had been calling her everyday to make sure she was okay. Every time she answered, Bonnie told her she was, but every day she spent in this world where Damon was dead made her feel emptier and emptier, like she was a shadow of herself drifting through darkness.

It didn't help that they still didn't seem to really believe her. Maybe they believe that she believed she lived a separate timeline, but they both remained doubtful. It was hard for her to blame them. Without evidence, of course her story was crazy, but she knew it had been real. The loneliness of losing him cut deep, and everyday she woke up thinking he would be beside her only for the confusion, loneliness, and grief to hit her all over again.

It was an odd feeling.

Bonnie was no stranger to loss. She had been abandoned by her mother at a young age. Her grandmother and her father had died. She had even died. And now her husband was dead, but it wasn't supposed to happen like this. They were supposed to grow old together, or rather she was supposed to grow old with him. But he was ripped away from her so suddenly and so out of the blue in such an unusual way that everything about losing him felt unreal and completely wrong. It had been so long since she felt a loss like this, and now that she was slowly beginning to accept that he was actually dead in this world, she wasn't ready for how the emotion cut at her insides, carving out all other feeling until there was nothing but a desolate longing lingering above a vast, barren void inside of her that his presence had once filled.

At one point on the second day, when she thought about everything she had just lost, she fell into that void, and she could swear her heart was literally breaking. Her tears turned into quiet heavy sobs, and her chest hurt so badly that she wanted to pull her heart out and shelve it so that she wouldn't have to feel anything for a while. But Bonnie knew better than that. To cope with the loss of those you love, you had to let yourself feel, you had to let yourself cherish every moment you had with that person, and you had to hold on to how they would want you to carry on. That would be her light in this seemingly infinite darkness. That and the smidgeon of hope that she would be able to undo all of this.

On the third day, she no longer allowed herself to cry. All that mattered was focusing on how she was going to get her husband back. There was no time to lie in bed and wallow anymore.

Then on the morning of the fourth day, she first received a call from Enzo. She'd stared at the phone as it rang, not picking it up. When it finally stopped ringing, he left a message, and she stared at the notification for a long time before she deleted it. Admittedly, she was afraid of delving deeper into this life, of a life without Damon, of trying to flesh out the details of this past. A few days before, she had also stumbled across some scrap books in the study, and she couldn't even bring herself to open those and see the changes. She didn't want to know anymore details about this life, and she didn't need to. Not if she was going to return to her old one.

Another call came through later that morning. It was a witch friend of hers named Iris who informed her that she knew someone who knew about a reclusive witch named Prairie from Iowa who might be able to help her. Iris gave Bonnie Prairie's number and she called her right after.

Prairie answered the phone after the first ring. "Hello?" She sounded young, at least younger than Bonnie, but her voice had an edge to it, a sadness.

"Is this Prairie?"

There was a long pause. Bonnie opened her mouth to check if she was still on the line, but the woman spoke before any words came out. "Yes, it is, and I think I can help you. I think I'm supposed to help you."

"What?"

"Sorry. I have a tendency to…nevermind. You've lost someone very important to you, and you think I can help you get them back." That was not information she had told anyone. When she called the other witches, she had simply expressed a curiosity about magic that manipulated time and asked if anyone knew someone who might be able to do something like that and if they could ask around about it. The fact that she knew that detail meant this witch was a seer and a powerful one if she was able to read her through the phone.

"How?"

"Come visit me and we can talk." Prairie gave her an address in Des Moines, Iowa, then promptly hung up.

The mystery of it all made her distrustful, but she couldn't afford to pass up this chance. Bonnie left immediately, not even bothering to pack a bag.


A/N:

Hello beautiful people,

Firstly, thanks for reading, and thanks to those who left comments last chapter!

Secondly, in case anyone was wondering, the events of season 8 never happened in this fic and probably never will happen in anything I write because I reject the existence of that season with my whole soul lol.

Thirdly, I want to mention that there's a song lyric thing going on with these chapter titles because, like the obsessed person I am, I already have a whole playlist of songs that remind me of this fic and give me Bamon feels. The first chapter title was from Beyoncé's XO, and this chapter title is from Florence and the Machine's song, Cosmic Love.