Bonnie and Stefan went from mild chit-chat to a rowdy party of two in record time. They may have had a rough start, but the party was officially on. It seemed the secret ingredient for making Stefan comfortable was Van Halen, whereas for Bonnie it was bourbon. The latter was an easy-enough guess, but the former required quite a bit of guesswork and several genre-changes before it was discovered. By the time Bonnie had the good fortune to discover "Slippery When Wet" provoked Stefan to reveal yet a third alternative personality, they had crushed an entire bottle of bourbon and were working on the second one.
It could be argued this was a terrible idea, but nobody in their right mind would attempt to argue with them at all when they were in such a state. They had begun their enforced quality time carefully keeping a hush so that their house guest could rest, but that was long forgotten as the night wore on. Stefan was in rare form, regaling Bonnie with incredibly emotive lip-sync paired with suspiciously on-point air guitar. In the face of such impassioned performance, Bonnie was helpless to resist joining in with matching gusto.
They were about halfway through what Stefan would argue in this moment was one of the greatest guitar solos of all time, when the sound system suddenly exploded in an impressive display of pyrotechnics. Bonnie and Stefan snapped into the best semblance of battle-readiness their rapidly sobering drunkenness would permit. Bonnie grabbed the phoenix sword, and Stefan fanged out. It was Bonnie who first noticed Valerie at the top of the staircase looking as judgmental as any person in pajamas had a right to look. Valerie could scarcely believe the ridiculousness before her. There was nothing she liked about any of the terrible racket people in this time called music, but the nonsense blaring in the living room was worse than anything she had ever heard before. Refusing categorically to live on a prayer for another moment further, she folded her arms and proceeded to impose some order. "Oh, lovely! You're drunk," she directed at Bonnie. "I won't bother to ask, I'll simply assume you both are. Can you at least obliterate yourselves less loudly?"
While Stefan had a soft spot for Valerie, Bonnie could live without her if she was going to be a bother. Now she was being a bother. The fact that she was concerned when Valerie was in danger didn't mean Bonnie would magically have an overwhelming font of patience for her deciding to show out. "Is not destroying your host's property too modern of an expectation for me to expect you to know about?" Bonnie countered while waving the sword in her general direction. "I have very patiently tolerated many lapses based on your lack of knowledge of how the world operates in the twentieth century. Are we dealing with another one, or were you just hoping to intimidate us into compliance?"
Under no circumstances would Valerie be cowed by a mortal with a sword, so she held her ground. "Excuse me for presuming that dispensing with the niceties of consideration was simply how things were done in this madhouse," she fumed. "Carousing in the middle of the day, being in the company of a man in a blouse without pants. I walked in on such a ridiculous scene that I could be forgiven for being unsure if appropriateness was still a concept at all."
The only sound in the tense silence that followed that little outburst was the increasingly agitated gallop of Bonnie's heartbeat. Both vampires could hear it loud and clear, but Valerie was very confident she was in the right, so she was blissfully unconcerned. Who is she to be ordering me around? Stefan, on the other hand, was acutely aware of how quickly this situation could turn. Bonnie had gotten up from the couch and was walking towards the staircase and Valerie looked ready to put up a fight. Little did Valerie know, if she was going to do so, she would have to do it physically because a side effect of becoming a huntress was immunity to magic.
Stefan made the executive decision to step in before Valerie learned the hard way, and grabbed Bonnie by the wrist. When her angry green eyes snapped up to meet his own, he swallowed quickly. After the incident yesterday, him touching an armed Bonnie was not necessarily the best idea. "Bonnie, I'm sure Valerie's just upset because she had a trying day," he attempted. "She surely didn't mean anything by it, and I'll replace the sound system."
There was a long, tense silence before Bonnie responded one way or the other. "That was very nice of you to provide an excuse for her increasingly unpleasant behavior, but I think it's high time she excused herself. I'll decide for myself if she had a rough enough day that she doesn't owe me an apology once she tells me what the hell is going on." In general, the heretics had been a bother and she still wasn't sure if they wouldn't have been better off if she and Damon had stuck to their original plan of picking them off one by one then putting a stake in his crazy ass mother as well.
Bonnie's unshared thoughts showed on her face clearly enough for Valerie to decide to go with a strategic retreat. "Forgive me for my impetuousness," she offered. "Stefan is right, the stress of my ordeal has me acting in an embarrassingly overwrought manner. Your blouse is quite lovely."
"This is a sweater dress, Valerie," Bonnie explained with a dramatic eye roll. "And sure, you're forgiven for destroying the stereo. But if you're not going to tell us who is after you, or why, then I'm going to have to politely request that you leave." Even though Valerie was the very picture of contrition, Bonnie was over it.
Stefan and Valerie both turned equally shocked expressions towards Bonnie, but Stefan was the one who spoke. "Don't you think that's a bit much?" he asked. "She did apologize, and you did say that she was forgiven."
Bonnie shrugged, entirely unmoved. Ms. Tulle had officially spent any goodwill Bonnie had left over for her. "If it is, then I'll just leave myself. Call me when Damon returns." To clarify her seriousness, Bonnie immediately set to the task of gathering her things to leave. Even though her buzz was very effectively killed, a bit of sloppiness remained in her actions from the remnants of alcohol in her system. "If I can't even find out what it is that we should be expecting to kick in the door after her, then I have no interest in being here when god knows what arrives to finish the job it started."
Stefan knew that letting her leave would be a mistake. If he was going to keep his promise to protect Bonnie and make her a priority, then now would have to be the time. "Wait! Bonnie. You're right," he called out to stop her as she put the last of her things she was taking with her in her bag. There was no way that Damon was going to be understanding if he came home to find Stefan and Valerie here, but no Bonnie. He would be even less pleased to hear that Stefan allowed her to leave drunk, and heaven forbid him having to explain that while Damon without shedding blood to solve the problem, Stefan couldn't even bring himself to ask Valerie what was going on, or let Bonnie do so.
Bonnie stopped packing her things and turned a steady stare in Stefan's direction, but in lieu of asking him what change his mind, she simply raised a sharp brow. She didn't move to unpack anything or sit back down. She simply waited for Stefan to offer some sort of explanation.
Stefan didn't disappoint. In response, he turned to Valerie. Although what little color was in Valerie's face had already drained with this pleasure, Stefan stayed the course. "I can't ask her to help protect you from an unknown enemy, and experience has taught me not to agree to take anything on blind. If you're going to stay here that we need to know what's going on."
Valerie in a shaky hand through her strawberry blonde waves and sighed. She'd been doing everything she could to avoid answering this question, but now there was no avoiding it. The answer to the question of who was after her and why is just as likely get her tossed out, but at this point better gamble was just to try telling the truth and see what happened. She expected that Stefan would be willing to help her no questions asked, but she hadn't counted on Bonnie refusing to do so. "All right, I will tell you the nature of how this…unpleasantness befell me."
Meanwhile, quite a bit of unpleasantness was about to befall Lorenzo St. James. Although Damon generally preferred efficiency to dramatic effect, torture was the rare occasion he made an exception to that rule. Patience rules the day when that's the method of choice, and the emotional stress of anticipation does as much work as physical pain. Given that he had quite of time to kill before Enzo healed enough from that draining to awake, Damon was already starting to tap into his stores of patience before things really got going.
In the meantime, he busied himself with setting the scene. He retrieved his torture implements from the car and neatly arranged them on tables. He put on a pair of gloves and soaked some of the absurd amounts of rope he had packed with vervain, then set the bottle aside for further use. Not wanting to play it too fast and loose with how much time he passed before securing his charge, he tied Enzo to one of his harder chairs with the vervain-soaked rope. When Enzo was still very much so unconscious after all of that, he started to tidy up Enzo's residence. The clutter was maddening, and if he had to spend the next day or to there, he'd rather not do so with evidence of Enzo's hoarding habit surrounding him.
When there were no more chores to busy himself with, Damon allowed himself to drift off in thought. As exhilarating as draining him had been, torturing him was bound to be a drag. The mix of having enough patience to not simply kill someone before they've given you what you need, and maintaining enough of a sense of urgency to discourage wasting of your time was not his area of greatest talent. Stefan was frighteningly good at that kind of thing, but Damon had stormed out dramatically before considering sending him on this errand and staying with Bonnie. He was well into his brooding when Enzo stirred, and he snapped himself out of his thoughts to give the matter at hand the attention it required.
"Really mate? If you wanted to seduce me and tie me up I'm sure we could have come to an agreement on the matter," Enzo groused, pulling just a bit at the vervain ropes that bound him to his own chair.
Damon smiled in response. "Under other circumstances, who knows? But right now, you're going to answer a few questions or..." he expansively called Enzo's attention to the incredible array of torture devices now scattered around his living room, "you could make things a bit harder on yourself but still answer my questions."
Enzo laughed as heartily as he could while still so weak and in pain from the vervain. "I'm pretty resistant to torture, so you might be here for a while, mate."
Rather than giving another sarcastic response, Damon was dead serious when he responded. "You don't have awhile. If you don't work your way around to being incredibly cooperative by the time the clock strikes midnight tomorrow, I'm going to simply kill you and figure it out for myself."
"If you were simply going to work with the threat of murder, all the...accessories seem rather unnecessary," Enzo pointed out with false bravado.
It seemed Damon was going to start right away because he put on a pair of gloves and stood. "It's not a very effective punishment for failure to cooperate if I kill you efficiently, now is it?" he asked rhetorically.
Enzo just swallowed painfully and decided against baiting him.
"Now, back to the matter at hand," Damon started in a tone that falsely portrayed calm. "My first question is why did they want Valerie. And your first choice is to answer that or select your favorite implement. If you don't choose, I'll choose for you."
This was starting to feel terribly like Augustine, and despite how much he thought he had become inured to the ravages of torture, Enzo's gut was roiling. "After all we've been through, you'd treat me like this, mate? Over a woman you barely know?" he demanded with more emotion in his voice than his pride would usually allow.
That was not the right answer either. Damon glared at him and responded coldly. "After all we've been through I would have thought you wouldn't have made it a point to betray me and go after my family. But luckily for you, that's not why I'm here."
Enzo raised a brow. "I can't recall the last time I've felt less lucky, but sure," he grumbled.
"You're stalling. Don't stall," Damon cut in sharply. He wasn't smiling and at this point, and he was seriously considering whether it was too soon for a targeted application of pain. Splitting the difference between waiting a bit longer and getting right to it, he rose from his chair and slowly approached Enzo. "Answer the question or pick which implement we start with."