Chapter 4

Where Soul Meets Body


With a deep long breath, awareness came back. There was a bed beneath her. She was lying in it, and it didn't take her long to figure out that she had been sleeping. Blinking her eyes open, Bonnie found herself staring at the familiar white ceiling of her bedroom in her old house in Mystic Falls.

Dizziness overwhelmed her as she sat up too quick, and she clutched at her head. It throbbed, and she remained still until the pain passed. When it did, she rubbed her eyes. Her purple comforter came into focus, and with a glance to the left she saw on top of it beside her were the stones and the paper with the spell of how to get back written on it. It took her a moment to process that it worked, that she and Prairie had been successful.

Bonnie was in the past.

She pushed the comforter off of her, slipping one of her feet off the bed and onto the carpeted floor when she caught sight of the calendar on her wall. The month stopped her in her tracks. It was on April, nowhere near the right month. She stood, stumbling a little as she moved towards her dresser and picked up her old cell phone. Marveling at the relic for a split second, she flipped it open and checked the date to make sure, reading it twice before it sank in that it was only April 9, 2010.

Her stomach dropped. This was all wrong. According to the dates Stefan had given her, she was eight months farther back than she was supposed to be. A string of expletives left her mouth as she immediately tried to remember what happened on this day. Luckily, with the phantom of her younger self in the back of her mind, she found the memories of the past few days closer at hand than she expected.

The most recent situation they were dealing with was the deaths of Luka and Martin, the warlocks who had been working with Elijah to save a witch from Klaus. While using a projection spell to try and undagger Elijah in the basement of the boarding house, the son, Luka, had been burnt to a crisp by Damon with a flamethrower, and the father, Dr. Martin, had been killed by Katherine and had given Bonnie back her powers after taking them a few days before. The original hybrid Klaus was merely a looming threat who would make himself known soon.

Her phone vibrated in her hand, and Bonnie snapped back into the present. She looked at the screen and her heart stopped when she saw Damon's name. It was only a text, but her face lit up instantly. Opening her phone and reading the message, he was simply confirming that they were still meeting at the Martin's place in a few hours, but she read it again and again and again, tempted to call just to make sure this was all real, that he was real, and she wasn't hallucinating.

Before she could stop herself, she was pressing the button to dial him and putting the phone to her ear.

It rang, and her heartbeat echoed in her head, beating out of her chest as she waited for him to answer. When he did, she held her breath until he finally spoke.

"What is it, judgey? Is there a problem?" His voice filled her ears, her head, and then her heart. The coldness of his tone was a sharp difference to the warmth she was used to from him, but she was relieved and glad to hear him all the same.

She let out the breath she'd been holding. "No problem," she said lightly. Her fingers tightened around the edges of her phone. Hearing his voice had loosened something inside her, making it easier to breathe. There was still a weight in her chest though, a sense of apprehension anchoring unease, but the hope was firmly there alongside it despite having come too far back.

"Then why did you call?" He questioned, impatient.

To hear your voice.

That was the truth, but if she said that, she would sound crazy. She came up with an excuse instead. "To… say that I'll see you in a few hours."

"You could've texted that. I'm a bit busy here."

She cleared her throat. "Right. Next time I'll text." She pressed the end call button.

Gripping the phone in her hand, a smile slowly spread across her face. She let herself feel it then, the full force of the hope she had been so hesitant to let in. He was alive, and she would save him. She could do this.

She placed her phone back on the dresser, and walked back over to the bed, staring at the materials for the spell. For a moment, she contemplated doing the spell to jump further into the future, closer to the day Damon died, but there were a couple of problems with that. First, as a consequence of returning to her older self, her magic had weakened drastically from its state in the future. Secondly, after reading the spell, she was certain she wouldn't be able to accurately go to the specific time she wanted without the meteorite anchored to it. The risk would be steep. She could over jump and end up after Damon died. And after the way coming back went, Bonnie wasn't sure the risk was worth it.

With that thought, it was decided she would stay. Her best option was to go along with whatever happened in the past and follow the timeline of events. It was only eight months. She could wait it out or at least that's what she thought at first. But the more she thought about it, the more she realized that also came with a whole host of problems, the main one being that she was mentally a forty-six-year-old woman, and everything that happened in 2010, happened twenty-nine years ago. Her memory was bound to be a little hazy.

She gathered up the materials and stashed them away in her nightstand, spelling it shut until she could find a better place to keep them. Then she supposed she should start getting dressed.

Intending to take a shower, Bonnie walked into the bathroom and couldn't help but pause when she saw herself in the mirror. She stared at the younger image of herself, bringing a hand to the smooth skin of her face. Running her fingers along her cheek, her hand moved to grab tendril of curled hair. She turned to look at it then back at her reflection, letting it fall back across her shoulder.

This entire situation was surreal. She was seventeen going on forty-six. Or forty-six going on seventeen depending upon how you looked at it. The differences were subtle though. Everything about her figure was slightly smaller than it used to be or would be. The older she'd gotten, the curvier her curves had become though she had still been slender. Damon had been obsessed with those curves, could barely keep his hands off of them. Hell, he'd been obsessed and head over heels with her in general. But she needed to prepare herself for this Damon to be the opposite, for him to be utterly disinterested in her. She would barely even be on his radar.

Trying not to fret any more over her current relationship with Damon, Bonnie moved over to bathtub and turned on the water. Her shower was a quick one and afterwards, she found herself in front of her closet with a frown on her face. What had she been thinking when she was younger? Bonnie flitted through the hangers, taking in all the earth tones and odd styles she had once thought were cute. Eventually she settled on one of the simplest things in her closet, a plain dark green shirt and a pair of dark blue skinny jeans. She went back into the bathroom and fixed her hair, but whatever she did to it didn't quite feel right either. It ended up in a low side pony-tail, the long curls neatly hanging over her shoulder. She finished up getting ready with a light coating of make-up and once again stared at herself for a long time in the mirror.

Bonnie couldn't get over how the spell had actually worked and that she was young again. It felt like she was herself and not like herself at the same time, like she was wearing a skin that didn't quite fit her. The dichotomy left her feeling almost displaced, like a stranger to herself or maybe a friend she had once known, but had grown apart from.

Being trapped like this for a while was definitely going to take some getting used to.


The drive over to the Martin's' place was a quick ten minutes, and she could see Damon's car already parked outside. Through her windshield she saw him leaning against the side of it, alive and radiating aloofness with his arms folded across his chest while he waited.

Her nerves descended into a mess on the ride over, and a burst of anticipation flooded her chest as she pulled up behind him and got out, slowly closing the car door behind her. He looked the same as ever, deadly, beautiful and insanely attractive. His hair was a little longer than she liked it, and he wore a black leather jacket, dark jeans, and black boots, a typical ensemble of his. He watched her approach with a neutral look, and she became self-conscious all of a sudden. Heartbeat loud, her body thrummed under his gaze like it always did, and her muscles tensed as it took everything in her not to run to him. Still, without thinking, the corners of her lips turned up, which earned her a strange look, and Bonnie quickly corrected herself. It took some effort, but she managed to school her expression into a neutrality that mirrored his.

Their mirrored expressions only lasted a second until he blinked at her, his head cocking ever so slightly to the left, considering as his blue eyes bore into hers. When he spoke, her heart skipped a beat. "Is it just me, or did you actually look happy to see me for a second?"

She was happy. She was overjoyed really, and she basked in the sound of his voice. Her husband was alive and breathing in front of her. It had only been six days, but it felt like much longer since she'd last seen him, since she'd felt the empty hole his absence had created. She wanted to touch him. She wanted to hold him and feel his steady heartbeat against her cheek. She wanted to kiss him until she couldn't feel her lips anymore, until she couldn't breathe anymore. But she wasn't supposed to want any of those things because he wasn't her husband yet. At this point, she and Damon didn't like each other. They were simply allies, frenemies at best. Their goal was to protect Elena.

Her eyes dropped from his, and her fingers pressed into her palms. "It was just you."

Thankfully letting her blunder go, he looked behind her towards her car as if he were expecting someone else to appear. "I thought you were going to bring Jeremy."

Following his gaze, she cursed internally. Jeremy had been here the first time around, hadn't he? How could she forget? They were in a relationship, and she kept him in the loop with everything. She'd been so distracted by the thought of seeing Damon again, he hadn't even crossed her mind. She wanted to facepalm. Already, she was fucking things up.

"He was busy," she coolly supplied as an excuse despite her slight inner panic.

Damon thought nothing of it and inclined his head towards the building. "Let's make this quick then."

He walked ahead, expecting her to follow.

Bonnie did so, watching his back as she climbed the stairs behind him. More than hearing his voice, seeing him had settled her, lifted more of the weight inside her, and quieted a bit of the ache in her heart, but she hadn't considered how hard it was going to be to remember how much she wasn't supposed to like him or want to be around him.

They reached the apartment door and Damon broke the lock with a twist of the doorknob, swinging it open. The smell of burnt flesh wafted out into the hall, and Bonnie scrunched her nose up in distaste. Checking to see if he could enter the apartment, Damon waved a hand through the threshold.

"Yep. Everybody's dead," he affirmed as he stepped into the room.

She entered into the apartment to stand beside him in front of Luka's body, the vast collection of grimoires on the bookcase catching her eye the moment she looked around. "We should pack up the grimoires. It's clear they've spent years collecting them." In fact, some of them were still in her own collection in the future.

Damon looked over to the burnt corpse in the middle of the floor. Then leaned slightly closer to Bonnie, almost brushing her shoulder. "You know," her head snapped towards his at the proximity of his voice, and all at once she was made aware of the lack of distance between them. Against her will, her body went tense again. She held her breath. Her green eyes momentarily dropped to watch the lines form around his lips as they curled upwards, and she waited for him to say something that would probably be inappropriate. "We could just get another match and cremate him."

She rolled her eyes at the smirk on his face, knowing his intention was to make her uncomfortable and rile her up. He once told her he'd always enjoyed trying to get under her skin, even when they hated each other. "Don't be disrespectful," she admonished, nudging his leather-clad arm with her elbow in a disapproving gesture that was maybe a little too friendly. The old her was never so free with touch around Damon.

He quirked an eyebrow in slight surprise, and she hardened her frown in response. Letting him linger in her space, she held his blue eyes without backing down until his expression dropped. "Fine," he conceded. "I'll bury him." He finally looked away, and the tension released. She turned back towards the bookshelf.

Based upon her memory of the previous day, Bonnie knew what she was supposed to be looking for. She stepped around the room, moving towards the shelves upon shelves of grimoires. But a vibration in her pocket distracted her, and she pulled out her phone to check who it was. When she saw it was Jeremy calling, she held back a sigh. He would have to be dealt with later. Turning her phone to silent, she put it back in her pocket.

"So what is it you needed?" Damon asked.

She motioned towards the wall of grimoires. "One of these has the spell that'll let me harness the energy that's left behind when a witch dies violently. Luka's dad gave me a message saying that if I can find the spot in town where the old Salem witches were burned, I can harness their energy to use when I need it." And if she was going to reenact facing Klaus for the first time, doing that spell was a must.

"Great. We'll have to put that on our list of things to do today. Harness ancient dead witch power," he said.

In the back of her mind she was aware that she wasn't supposed to know where the witches were burned yet, but Damon obviously did. "Since you clearly seem to know where they were burned, it shouldn't be a problem then."

She moved to stand in front of the bookshelf and closed her eyes. Lifting her hands, she mumbled a spell under her breath. A few of the grimoires tumbled from the shelves and fell onto the floor, one of them opening to the page with the harnessing spell. The simple use of her magic took considerably more effort than it should have though, and it irritated Bonnie. She should be stronger than this.

"And there we have it." She picked up the grimoire from the floor, skimming over the spell to refresh her memory of how it worked.

"Great. I'll take care of the body. You grab the rest of the grimoires."

There were a lot of them and carrying them all would be a bitch. She turned to Damon as he was carefully wrapping Luka's burnt body in a blanket. "You won't help me take them out to the car?"

"You should've brought baby Gilbert for that. And besides, can't you just use magic?" She did know a spell that she wasn't supposed to know yet, but she didn't want to test the limits of her energy just to use it.

"No, I can't. It will literally take you less than five minutes." Bonnie folded her arms across her chest, staring him down. He stared right back at her, seeing the stubborn look in her eyes, and she knew that he was thinking about making her do it herself, but she saw the telltale shift in his shoulders, a sure sign that he would relent.

"Fine," he sighed dramatically, and in the three minutes it had taken her to gather one stack and head down to her car, the rest of the books had already been put inside her trunk. When he finished loading up the last of them, Bonnie gave him a perfunctory thank you.

Damon slammed the trunk closed and stepped into her space, her heartbeat drumming a tad faster when their eyes met once more. "You're welcome," was all he said, and in an instant, he was gone, probably not sparing her a second thought.

Bonnie stared at the space where he disappeared and sighed, a forlorn feeling settling in her chest.


Not wanting to take any more chances with changing the past, Bonnie went to pick up Jeremy from his house after school was over. As she waited in front of the old colonial style home, just being in the neighborhood brought back so many memories of her childhood. It had been years since she'd been back in this part of Mystic Falls, but even longer since she'd last seen the Gilbert House intact. If she remembered correctly, it would only be a year or so later when it's inevitably burnt down by a humanity-less Elena.

She had only been parked outside for a minute when the front door opened and Jeremy bounded out and down the steps, walking towards her car. He looked exactly as she remembered him at this age, boyish and cute and shaping up to be teen heartthrob. He was so different from the last time she'd seen him in the future which was more than ten years ago at Alaric's fiftieth birthday party where Caroline had gone crazy with planning and invited basically everyone Alaric ever knew. He'd had some girl on his arm then and looked good for thirty-two, and their brief conversation at the party was the last time she talked to him. Afterwards, they fell back out of contact.

Opening the passenger side and getting in, he said a quick greeting and immediately leaned over, going in for a kiss. Bonnie panicked, turning her cheek so his lips landed there. Trying not to make the moment any more embarrassing, she ended up giving him a long hug, which felt equally wrong to her. Half because she only saw him as a friend, and half because she only loved Damon. With so many other things on her mind, she hadn't even begun to think about how she was going to deal with being in a relationship with him.

Just yesterday, she could remember her younger self being attracted to him and thinking she could see herself falling in love with him, but today those feelings were null and void. And she would be with Jeremy for a while yet, all the way up until he cheated on her with Anna's ghost. Just thinking about it made Bonnie upset with herself for ever taking him back afterwards. Now she had to sit through months of a relationship with him, stringing him along until he cheated on her. On some level, it was cruel of her, but it was either that or risk changing the timeline, and she wasn't sure how much her relationship with Jeremy mattered in the grand scheme of things.

"So what happened this morning?" Jeremy asked her as she pulled off.

Bonnie relayed the information of everything that happened at the Martins earlier, and while she spoke, she could see in Jeremy's expression that he was trying to pretend he wasn't upset that she forgot to bring him along. Bonnie ended up apologizing to placate him. "You didn't miss much, but I'm sorry. I said I was going to bring you with me and then I completely forgot."

Thankfully, he seemed to let it go.

Eventually, they met up with Damon who led them through the woods towards the place where the witches were massacred. Bonnie found Jeremy's presence was useful then. He provided a buffer between Damon and herself. With him around, it was easier to remember how she was supposed to act around Damon, but still, she found herself glancing at him more than she should.

"Is this the spot Emily Bennett was killed too?" Jeremy asked Damon as they moved through the trees.

"Founders thought it was poetic burning her where the other witches burned."

Descending into silence, a minute later, they came upon the house where the witches were massacred. The dilapidated building was just as Bonnie remembered, eerie, decrepit, and wreaking of ancestral magic.

Walking through the door, they made their way further into the house when Damon halted in his tracks, unable to move. He looked to Bonnie immediately, chuckling sarcastically. "Whatever witchy prank you're playing, don't. It's not funny."

Bonnie merely stared at him. "I'm not doing anything."

He struggled against an invisible force. "I can't move."

A sizzling noise started in the space where sunlight streaked across his skin, and Damon winced. His face was burning.

His eyes flicked down to his hand. "Uh, my ring's not working." He looked back at Bonnie. "Do something," he demanded with an edge of panic.

She closed her eyes, focusing on Damon and counteracting the witches' magic. A moment later, he was able to move.

"I guess this is the right place," Jeremy said.

Irritated, Damon motioned towards the door. "I'm going to go wait outside." He turned and Bonnie's own irritation spiked at his lack of manners.

"Aren't you forgetting something?" She couldn't stop herself from asking him.

He stopped in his tracks and turned back towards her. "What?"

"How about a 'thank you, Bonnie, for not letting me burn to death'," she mocked his usual tone as best as she could.

He eyed her for a long moment, then turned back around and waved his hand dismissively. It was his flippant way of acknowledging her, of him saying thanks without saying thanks because Damon, at this point, was incapable of saying words of gratitude. Please and thank you were not in his vocabulary. At least as far as she was concerned anyway. "Don't you have a spell to do?"

God, he used to be such an ass.

Eyes narrowed at his back, Bonnie watched him until he disappeared through the door, then returned her focus to the task at hand. She asked Jeremy to hand her the grimoire.

They moved to the basement where Bonnie successfully did the spell and harnessed the ancient witch power. The spell itself was taxing, a drain on her psyche as she physically felt a muted version of their fiery deaths. But after she finished, she could feel the undercurrent of power flowing through her, running over her own magic, and it felt good. It felt natural to feel this much magic at her disposal, and yet unnatural that it was not truly hers.

Unfortunately, one of the side-effects of absorbing the witch's power that Bonnie had forgotten was that the surface level of her mind was open to their spirits, and they probed, curious and questioning. Bonnie knew the witches could sense that something was strange with her, that she wasn't exactly who she was supposed to be. And the moment she felt it, she put up a wall, blocking them from her mind. Still, she could feel their suspicion and hear their whispers, one message echoing above all.

If she used too much of their power at once, she would die.

Later, Jeremy ended up prying information about the warning out of her and once again got upset with her for not telling him there was a possibility of her dying from the strain of using too much of the magic. Bonnie couldn't tell him that she wouldn't end up dead from using the power to kill Klaus or that Klaus wouldn't end up dying at all while he was in Mystic Falls, so she lied and told him that she would do whatever she had to do to kill Klaus even if it meant dying.

In the evening, after she was already home for the night, the stray thought passed through her mind that this power was more than enough to go forward in time again, but of course that came with another whole host of problems. if she used the magic to time travel, it would inevitably change too many things. Klaus wouldn't appear at the dance and try and kill her, which meant he might go after Elena even sooner, and Bonnie wouldn't have the magic to take on Klaus nor bring back Jeremy if he still died. Once again, she was reminded of just how stuck she was.

It wasn't all bad though. When she came home hours earlier, she had been greeted with the sight of her father making dinner for the both of them. He said hello to her as she walked into the kitchen and asked her how her day was, but Bonnie froze and couldn't respond. She had known her father was still alive, known she would eventually see him, but she wasn't prepared for the emotional floodgates it would open. Quietly, tears rolled down her cheeks as she dropped her things and moved to his side to wrap him in a hug. At a loss, he asked her what was wrong and she merely told him that she'd had a bad day, but inside, she was elated to see him alive again. He was distant at times, and their relationship wasn't the best, but his death had been one of the hardest for her to deal with, and she was happy to see him for a while, even if she knew he would be off on another business trip soon.

They ate dinner together, and at her coaxing, they watched a show on TV after, her leaning on his shoulder, refusing to let go of his arm. For the first time in a long time, she truly felt like a child, needy for the parental love and attention she had received so rarely, but after an hour, he left her alone on the sofa and went to bed early, having to wake up for work the next morning.

Being around her father left her in a good mood, but when she cleaned up the kitchen and turned in for the night, she laid in bed for a long time, staring at the ceiling. Inevitably, she thought about Damon, about how different and similar he was to her Damon. They were the same, yet not the same, and as much as she told herself it was fine that he treated her with indifference, it still hurt. In her mind, she understood that it made sense, that they hadn't been close, but her heart longed for him, craved to be close to him because she was and would always be deeply in love with him. Sure, during this time he had cared in his way, but Bonnie was not a priority for him. Elena and Stefan were. And there was so much she would do for Elena and for the rest of this town, so much that had yet to come.

She planned to let it all happen. The face off with Klaus alongside having to bring back Jeremy, letting Jenna die and Stefan become a ripper, and then eventually letting Alaric and Elena die. The more she reflected on what she had to let happen, the more the guilt settled deeper into her bones, but for once, most of that guilt was directed towards what she was going to do to herself, for the things she was going to allow herself to go through even after she went back to the future. Dying, lying to her friends about it for months, becoming the anchor, then dying again with Damon and being trapped alone with that psychopath Kai. And there was only more to come after that. Throughout her life, she had suffered an extraordinary amount, but what was nine years of suffering compared to the promise of twenty years of bliss and normalcy that would happen after.

She pulled the covers over her head, curling up, and wrapping her arms around herself, wishing that she was back in her bed in New York and Damon was sleeping right next to her. When she closed her eyes, she could almost imagine the weight of him dipping the mattress beside her, feel his hand running along her back, comforting her whenever she had a bad day at work. She held onto that feeling as she fell asleep, bracing herself for the things to come in the following days.


A/N:

Lots more show dialogue incoming, but as you can maybe tell, things are already not happening entirely as they did in the show because I don't know about you, but I can barely remember three months ago, let alone when I was seventeen which was like eighty-five years ago, so I thought it was only natural that Bonnie's memory would be a bit sketchy as well seeing as this is twenty-nine years ago for her.

Thanks for reading!

Chapter title from "Soul Meets Body" by Death Cab for Cutie