Chapter 3
Leave the Wasting World Behind Us
Parking on the curb, Bonnie stepped out of her car and walked up the pathway to the small house in the city. It was a typical contemporary style house with a red tile roof and light blue sidings, a unique design from all the other plain white houses on the block. The other unique thing about the house was that it radiated magical energy from where she stood, and when she opened the gate to the iron fence surrounding the property, the energy only increased. Bonnie had only ever felt this sort of power from massive hot spots and a few witches she'd met before, so it automatically made her uneasy and put her on her guard.
On the porch, Bonnie stared at the dark blue door for a second, adjusting her purse on her shoulder before she raised her hand to knock. Her knuckles met air as the door opened before they reached the wood, and a thin young woman stood there with a short brown bob and eyes a blue so pale they were almost white. "You must be Bonnie," she said, her voice airy and weighted at the same time, still holding that edge Bonnie heard over the phone.
The woman opened the door further in invitation and Bonnie walked inside, glancing around at the older traditional décor. "And I'm assuming you're Prairie."
"I am," she confirmed. "We talked over the phone."
Prairie closed the door behind her and locked it before offering to take her coat. Bonnie shrugged the beige duster off her shoulders and handed it to her.
"Have a seat in the living room and I'll be right with you." With Bonnie's coat still slung over once of her arms, she motioned over to the room towards the back of the house, and Bonnie walked further in, wincing as the old wood floors creaked with her every step. The living room was sparsely furnished with two chairs, a couch and a rug. She took a seat in one of the chairs and waited, letting her eyes wander around the room. There were a few photos on the wall of what Bonnie assumed were family, but her eyes hung upon the collection of grimoires on the bookshelf across the room.
A few minutes later, Prairie walked out the kitchen with a tray of tea and a sandwich. She placed it on the end table beside where Bonnie sat. "I hope you like Chamomile tea, and we should get some food in you. I can tell you haven't eaten properly in days."
Her bare feet were quieter on the floors, and she plopped down onto the loveseat beside the chair, smoothing her hands down her denim jeans. "Thank you for inviting me," Bonnie said politely. Her eyes were haunting, the unnatural shade making Bonnie suspect that she was blind, but she moved around like she wasn't. "Have you lived here all your life?" Bonnie asked as she grabbed the cup of tea.
"What remains of my family has moved away, but this home has been in the family for generations."
"I can tell," Bonnie said.
She smiled mysteriously. "Yes, I was born into a line of rather powerful seers, but that power does have its caveats." She raised a finger to tap the space underneath her eyes, pointing out her seeming blindness. Her hand returned to her leg and she leaned forward a little bit. "So, tell me about what happened to you."
"I suspect you already know." Bonnie brought the tea cup to her lips, taking a sip. Almost immediately, the chamomile had a calming effect on her.
"Now that I see you, so to speak, I do, but a lot of people are put off when I don't allow them to participate in natural conversation. I know you're here about your husband, and that you lost him recently in a strange way."
"I have a theory-"
"About alternate timelines," she finished for her.
"Is that possible?"
Prairie folded her hands across her lap. "Anything is possible with enough magic. You just have to figure out the rules and find the balance. Even you've done the impossible and brought people back from the dead before." Her eyes narrowed. "I can see it in your aura."
"So you're saying it is possible that someone could go back in time."
"That's exactly what I'm saying."
"How?"
Regarding Bonnie with a cool expression, she slightly changed the subject. "I wasn't always blind you know, but my abilities as a seer have been exceptional since I was a child. Strong enough that when someone touched me, I could see their past, present, and a bit of their future. As I grew older, my sight worsened, but my power only grew to the point where I get impressions from any sort of interaction with a person, and now when people touch me their entire lives play out before me, and sometimes I see beyond this life."
"What does that mean?"
"I see bits and pieces of different lives a person could live or could have lived if they do or did things differently. Those visions are all a jumbled mess though and very hard to piece together, but they made me fascinated with time. If I could tell a person to do something or not do something, would it change their future? So when I tried it on a few people and it completely changed their readings, naturally, I began to wonder about changing the past as well.
"I started to research spells that would allow me to do so and came across quite a few in one of my ancestor's grimoires. That ancestor, Roman Azarov, was an exceptional seer, saw visions of alternate realities like me and spent a lot of time being obsessed with manipulating time. I won't bore you with explaining all of his research, but one of his spells allowed a person to send their consciousness back to a specific point in time, and like you, there was someone that I wanted to save from dying. So, I used the spell to travel back into the past. Until a few days ago, I thought I had only done it just the once, but…" She looked at Bonnie pointedly, then stretched out her palm towards her. "Give me your hand, I want to do a reading."
Bonnie looked down at her palm and placed the tea cup back on the tray. Slowly, she slid her hand into Prairie's and the seer gripped it tightly in both of hers. The woman's magic enveloped her as she stared off into the distance, seemingly looking at nothing. It could have been a trick of the light, but there seemed to be a slight glow to her eyes as they widened. She sat there, staring at nothing for a full minute. Then she clenched her eyes shut. Her magic retreated back into herself, and she leaned forward, bringing her hand to her head.
"Are you alright?" Bonnie asked, concerned.
She shook her head as if to clear it. "I'm fine. I just haven't done any readings like that for a long time. The amount of information I receive through touch is a lot for me to handle. But I can see that you do remember the timeline changing," Prairie said, letting go of Bonnie's hand. Her face fell into a frown. "And this means that my dreams are probably real."
"Your dreams?" Bonnie questioned.
"My abilities as a seer...they normally don't work on myself. I can't see my own future or past, but lately, for the past few days, I've been having these hazy, disjointed nightmares about my sister being murdered and my brother being threatened by someone who wanted me to do something, but I didn't know what. Now I'm starting to think these dreams are visions or echoes of an alternate reality as my ancestor liked to call them. And I have a strong feeling that it's all connected to what happened to you." She gripped her chin with her thumb and index finger, looking down in thought.
The puzzle pieces started to come together for Bonnie. "You think the person who threatened your family wanted you to send them back to the past, and that you did." That meant this person could be the one who killed Damon. "Do you know anything about them? What they look like at least?"
"I'm sorry. Their face is a blur and their voice is muffled in the vision. I've tried to make them clearer, but nothing works."
"But it really is possible to go back?"
Prairie's gaze hesitantly went to her. "It is."
The little bit of hope inside her began to flourish. "Will you teach me the spell then?"
There was a long pause where Prairie stared at her in silence as if she were assessing her. "I've read your past. I know how much pain and frustration you feel, I know you're a good person, and I know you don't deserve what happened to you. I do feel a sense of responsibility for everything since it's partially my fault that you're in this situation, so I will help you do the spell. I'll help you save your husband from being killed thirty years ago. But in exchange, there's something I want you to do something for me too."
There were three main ingredients involved in the spell, a sunstone, a moonstone, and a piece of a meteorite. Unlike any sunstone or moonstone she had seen before, an otherworldly energy radiated from them. The meteorite especially radiated a lot of energy, and apparently it was what Prairie had used as the main power source when she did the spell before.
All three stones had been kept hidden by her family for a long time, but she had happened upon them by luck. Her vision was slightly better than it currently was at the time, and she'd been trying to clean out the basement. She told Bonnie something drew her towards them, and she found the stones hidden in a box in a hollowed-out space behind the wall. It was after touching the stones that she began to experience greater visions and began to lose even more of her eyesight, and soon after that, she became interested in time travel and found her ancestor's grimoire. Only then did she understand what the stones had been for.
Bonnie thought about what Prairie had said earlier. "So, if you see visions of other realities, do multiple realities exist at once?"
She paused in gathering vials of herbs to answer the question. "I've often wondered about that as well, but according to Azarov's early notes in his grimoire, with the existence of magic, it's hard to tell because the rules of the universe can be expanded in unnatural ways. We don't know if only one timeline can exist and the future that you lived ceased to exist the moment your husband was killed, replaced by this one…or if a new timeline branched off from the moment your husband died and there is still a you out there living happily with him in the timeline you came from. His findings leaned towards the former and I think what happened to you is further evidence that it might be the former. If it were the latter, your memories probably wouldn't have clung to this version of yourself, and you would still exist in the reality you remember."
She considered what Prairie said. "Why exactly do you think it is I remember the other timeline then?"
Prairie was busy mixing the herbs as she answered. "Love is the strongest emotion, and it can bend the rules of any spell, so the only explanation I can think of is the strength of your bond with your husband. When I touched you, I could feel a part of him still with you, embedded in your soul, and I could feel the way you cherish every memory with him, the good and the bad. That's probably why you still remember." Her expression took on a wistful look. "To be honest, I've rarely felt a love that deep before, and I can only hope I'll find a person who loves me the way he seemed to love you."
"You're still young."
She shrugged her shoulders. "Thirty-three is not that young."
Bonnie's eyebrows went up at that. "I never would have guessed. You look twenty."
She merely smiled and patted her cheek. "You know as well as I do that we witches have our beauty secrets, and it helps that I've always had a baby face."
Prairie stirred the mixer a bit faster, and Bonnie looked back down at Prairie's grimoire. She had let her look over the spell in question, but it was very difficult to understand. It was written in Latin, but many of the words were foreign to her and the complexity of it all was beyond her. This was a level of witchcraft Bonnie had never seen before, and she considered herself a knowledgeable witch. Prairie's ancestor had undoubtedly been gifted.
However, there was one thing Bonnie noticed was missing from the spell. "There is a way back, right?"
The other witch's mixing slowed. "To the future you had with your husband? Well, Azarov never came up with a way back. He was content to relive his life from the moment he went back, but lucky for you, I did."
Bonnie let go of the tension that had risen in her shoulders. Thank god. Getting stuck the day after Alaric died and Elena became a vampire was not a good time to be stuck. She wasn't sure if she could deal with everything that came after that again.
Prairie interrupted her thoughts. "Though I should mention that neither the spell to go forward nor the spell to go back is a one hundred percent guarantee of accuracy, there's still a chance you might get stuck in the past." Staring Bonnie down, her face fell into a serious line. "Knowing that, do you still want to do the spell?"
Bonnie hesitated to answer for a moment.
"I'll continue the preparations while you decide."
Bonnie shook her head, deciding she would cross that bridge when she came to it. She didn't need any more time to decide. "No, I'll do it. I want to go back. Nothing feels right in this reality, and I don't want to live here with all these memories of a different one. I have to fix this and make things right again." Then she paused, frowning. "But you already know I'm going to do it, don't you?"
Prairie's smile returned. "I do."
Bonnie's phone buzzed in her pocket, interrupting them. It was Caroline calling and she stood to leave the room, taking the call in the hallway.
"Hey," Bonnie greeted.
"Are you doing okay?" Caroline always sounded so worried when she called.
Bonnie leaned against the wooden paneled wall, holding the phone to her ear. "I'm fine. Good actually. I…I found a way to save him. I found a way to go back."
"To go back in time? To thirty years in the past? Bonnie, do you realize how crazy this sounds."
"I know Caroline, but I can't give up on him. Damon didn't just die. Someone killed him and ripped apart my life. I can't accept that, and I know he wouldn't either if our roles were reversed."
She blew out a long breath. "I wish I knew the Damon you knew so I could understand."
"I wish you did too. You probably wouldn't believe it, but you two actually started to get along after a while."
"Did hell freeze over?"
That earned a short laugh from Bonnie, the first laugh she'd had since he disappeared. "No, but caring about Stefan gave you two common ground."
She was silent for a moment. "You must really love him." Her voice was soft.
Bonnie let her head fall back against the wall, staring at a spot on the ceiling. "More than anything."
Her best friend let out a long sigh. "As much as I wish you weren't doing this, I have a feeling that I won't be able to talk you out of it."
"You won't." Bonnie assured.
"Then is there anything I can do to help? Do you need me to be there?"
"No, you don't have to come. But I need you to get Stefan to send me every detail he can remember about Damon's death."
"Okay. Call me before you do the spell?"
Bonnie nodded. "I will."
They hung up and Bonnie, put her phone back in the pocket of her jeans.
She rejoined Prairie in the other room. Glancing up at her, the other witch gave her a satisfied look. "With this the preparations are almost complete, but I need a bit more time to prepare the spell to travel back into the future and it's best to do everything in daylight, so we'll do it tomorrow morning."
Hesitantly, Bonnie let a small smile lift her cheeks. Anticipation and hope welled inside her. Tomorrow, she would make her future right again.
Tomorrow, she would save Damon.
Morning came, and Bonnie woke up disoriented. It took her a few seconds to remember the events of yesterday and that she was in Prairie's guest room, and when her mind cleared, her thoughts inevitably turned to Damon. The ache in her chest whenever she thought of him was still filled with anguish, but since yesterday, Bonnie had grown more optimistic. That wasn't to say there was no apprehension. Bonnie was inherently practical and realistic. She wouldn't allow herself to fully embrace the optimism until the spell worked.
Stefan had called her the night before. He'd expressed his disapproval at her attempting the spell out of concern for her, and Bonnie appreciated that he worried about her, but her mind was set. When he realized how pointless it was to try and convince her to stay, Stefan gave her the details surrounding Damon's death. Before he let her go, he wished her good luck, and hoped that she would be able to save him. Afterwards, Bonnie spent an hour memorizing those details.
In a pair of pajamas that Prairie lent her, Bonnie got dressed in the same clothes she wore the day before. She hadn't brought anything with her when she came to Iowa except her purse, but she supposed it didn't matter since she would be going back to the past. She took her phone off the charger on the nightstand, and went to call Caroline, but she hesitated. Was there any point to saying goodbye? With any luck, she would be seeing the Caroline from her future again and this Caroline, if she still existed, would have no memory of Bonnie sending herself back. Bonnie put her phone back in her pocket instead. She loved Caroline, but she didn't want her best friend to cast any more doubt on whether or not she should do this.
She made her way downstairs where Prairie was already up. She could smell breakfast and walked into Prairie's kitchen to see a plate of waffles and eggs laid out on the kitchen table. The younger witch appeared a moment later with some papers in hand. "That's for you. I already ate earlier."
Bonnie thanked her and took a seat. Prairie took a seat across from her. "You're not having any second thoughts, are you?" the younger witch asked her.
"No." She began to cut her waffles into smaller pieces.
"Good."
"But I do have another question."
Prairie raised her eyebrows.
"If my consciousness is the only thing moving through time, then what will happen to my body once it's gone?"
"Assuming there is only a single timeline, then this version of the timeline will break from the moment you go back, disappear entirely, and reshape based upon the actions you take in the past."
"And the me of the past? What will happen to her?"
"Well, you are her and she is you. There isn't an overlapping divide like the one between the experiences of the current you and the you that was supposed to have lived this future. She is merely a part of your past, so your minds should merge."
Right. All of this was so complicated.
"When you're done, meet me in the living room. I'm going to start setting everything up."
Once she finished, Bonnie met the other witch in the back room. The younger witch was busy drawing white lines on the floor with chalk, creating a large circle with three more smaller circles connected by a line along the radius. Perpendicular to those circles she drew another line along the bottom. Inside the three small circles, she placed the sunstone, the moonstone, and the meteorite. "It's to simulate a syzygy, one of the more powerful celestial events," she explained. "Of course a real one would be better, but between the two of us, we should have more than enough magic to offset the balance."
"Is that all that's needed?"
"Yes. Do you remember everything I told you last night?"
Bonnie nodded. The night before, Prairie had given her instruction regarding her request in exchange for helping her. "I promise I'll save her."
Prairie nodded. "I trust you." She moved towards the lower half of the circle, across from the line of stones. Inside the circle were the papers she had been holding earlier. She pointed to them. "That is the spell to come back. I'll be sending it and the stones along with you."
Moving to the window, she drew the curtains back, allowing the sun to pour into the room and over the lines on the ground. Bonnie realized they had been drawn so the sunlight would hit them, and the lines of the circles aligned with the angle of the sunlight.
"The sun and moon stones are replaceable, but I have bound the meteorite to the earth and it will serve as your anchor to this present. You need it to get back."
Bonnie nodded again. She reached for a cup of something that sat on the table. "Drink this. It's the herbs I mixed yesterday, and it will loosen your mind and enhance your memory." She handed it to her and Bonnie smelled it. Her nose scrunched at the scent. It smelled terrible, but she downed it anyway and put the cup back on the nearby table.
"Now come stand in front of me with your feet on the lower line facing me."
She stood outside the circle across from the line of circles that held the stone.
When she looked at Prairie again, she was suddenly nervous. The other witch must've been able to read it on her face. "Are you sure you want to do this Bonnie? Once the spell begins, there's no room for doubt." She thought of Caroline, reminding herself that she would see her again. Then she thought of Damon, and her resolve strengthened all the more. She focused on him to drown out the nervousness. Her head felt light, airy almost, and the memory of his warm gaze was seemingly at her fingertips, exceedingly vivid in her head. The herbal mixture was taking effect.
"I'm sure." The mission was simple, go back, save Damon, stay a few more days, fulfill Prairie's request, then come back. She could do this.
"Are you ready?" Prairie asked, holding out both her hands.
"Yes." Bonnie took her hands.
"Okay. You'll repeat after me, then you have to imagine the moment you want to return to and hold on to it."
Prairie started with a breakdown of the spell in short Latin phrases which Bonnie repeated. She repeated them until she was able to say them along with her. Then the magic activated, pulling from Bonnie's core. Around her, the white circle on the ground began to glow, and the stones began to rise. Bonnie was aware she was one of the more powerful witches in existence in terms of raw natural magic, but she could feel that power amplified far beyond its limits as Prairie's own magic mixed with hers.
Nothing changed though and all Bonnie could feel was the heavy weight of magic permeating the air around her. She frowned through the chanting, half a second away from saying that it didn't seem to be working when her head began to burn the same way it did five days ago. Fire lit her mind, white light flashed behind her closed eyelids, and the earth rumbled beneath her feet. Bonnie fell to her knees. Something broke internally, and she was no longer sure where she was. The earth stopped rumbling. Her mind began to disconnect from her body, and the seams of her consciousness came undone. She was inclined to resist the unraveling on instinct, but somewhere far away, she heard Prairie encouraging her to let go, to imagine the moment, and to remember.
Everywhere and nowhere at once, she latched on to the thought of Damon. Suddenly, before her, she could see the memories begin to form. Like a movie on a reel, her mind scoured through her memories of him at lightning pace, so fast she wasn't sure what she was looking at. So she reached out and it slowed. At a snail's pace this time, she watched herself see him for the first time, pulling up with Caroline in the car outside cheerleading practice. A skip forward, and then she watched him try to take Emily's talisman from her. Another, and she saw him tearing into her neck. With each memory she could feel her consciousness moving closer, inching towards her past self. But this was too far back. She tried to focus father into the future, but Damon was still on her mind, and it jumped again, all the way to the moment they died together and ended up in 1994. Too far. She panicked, backtracking too much again to the party at the Lockwood Mansion where she first saw Katherine and spoke with Damon in the sitting room.
She was so close to that memory, she could feel the brush of her senses. The way his gaze felt on her, the need to be contrary with him. She lingered in the tension between them before she pushed forward, to the memory of them teaming up to take care of Mason. Her mind became sluggish then, searching for something to grasp onto as the magic of the spell faded. Distress rose in her as she tried to push her memory further forward, but everything became jumbled. Her thoughts of Damon were lost as things slowed down to a snail's pace once more. Time warped, and she swirled into darkness.
When she came to in that darkness, a wall that extended forever stood before her. Stepping towards it, the moment Bonnie thought to touch it, a crack spread, severing the wall into pieces until it crumbled. Piece by piece it fell, until Bonnie stood before her younger self. She looked innocent and world weary at the same time, tilting her head as she regarded the older version of herself.
"This is a strange dream. Are you me?" The younger Bonnie asked.
Yes, her voice echoed in the space around them until she found her mouth again. "I am you from the future."
Skepticism radiated from the young her, but she decided to play along. "Why are you here?"
"To change the past. To fix things."
Her brows pinched together. "To fix it? What happened?"
"If you let me, I'll show you."
The older Bonnie held out her hand, and the younger Bonnie took it. She let her see her experiences, from the moment she first saw Damon until now. By the time they made it to the beginning of the time spell, the younger version of herself was keeled over in tears and clutching her chest. There was no doubt she was feeling the same heartbreak, pain, and longing the older Bonnie was currently suffering. "Do you see why I've come?"
"Was that real? Is this real?" The younger Bonnie asked, looking up at her older self anew. She wiped her eyes. In moments, she had lived a lifetime, experienced years of contentment and happiness only to have it ripped away. Their shared devastation permeated the space between them, and she could see in her eyes that no more explanation was necessary. The truth of it all was understood when Bonnie shared her life with her.
Still, the pain on her younger self's face made her regret inflicting that knowledge upon her, so Bonnie gave herself an out. "Do you want to remember? Do you want to change things so this never happens? Do you...want to become me?" If she said no, Bonnie was unsure of what would become of this version of herself. Perhaps her consciousness would disappear into a void or maybe she would return to her body in the future. The uncertainty made her nervous, but she didn't let it show on her face.
Her hesitation stretched into a long silence where they simply stood across from one another until the younger Bonnie blinked, and another tear fell from her eyes. "After what you showed me, after letting me feel what you feel, it feels almost impossible to not want what you want. I know what you think of me, and I know that you hate how I've allowed myself to suffer for them and how I will continue to allow myself to suffer. And to be honest, I'm beginning to hate myself for it. But knowing what you've lost is almost a relief because everything you showed me I went through would be worth it if it leads to what you had. And what you feel for Damon of all people…knowing him as I do now, it makes me feel strange to admit it, but I want to know that happiness, and I don't want to forget what you showed me. I…I want to change things."
With that Bonnie's worries were laid to rest. It seemed she was herself after all. "Then let me in."
Locking eyes, the elder Bonnie held out her hand again and this time, when her younger self touched her, their hands faded into one another. They blended together, and Bonnie stepped forward into her. Just as Prairie said they would, their minds merged. Her knowledge and experience were sewed into her younger consciousness, embedded into her being until there was no line between them and in essence, they were the same person.
The darkness turned white, and at once, Bonnie felt her senses return to her. The world trembled again, and she clenched her eyes shut until she no longer saw white behind her eyelids but normal darkness, and the shaking stopped.
A/N:
T_T My brain legit melted in the process of coming up with the time travel explanation, so forgive me if it doesn't make any sense or confused you. I know magic is magic, but hopefully it wasn't too too complicated. If somebody smarter than me wants to give me advice about it, then I'm all ears, but in the meantime, back to the past we go! Based on the end, I'd love to hear guesses as to where exactly people might think she arrives in the past :)
Chapter title from "Plan the Escape" by Son Lux
