MidnightRain6593
the forest
.
.
'if i don't lean on you, i fall
every single time i'm wrong,
every selfish trip i'm on
if i don't lean on you, i fall
when i think i'm so messed up
and when you think you're so messed up,
gotta keep in mind that we're just us'
- 'lean' by jimmy eat world
.
.
They hit the ground in a tangle of limbs again.
"We really need to try and stick the landing," Bonnie grumbles as she scrambles to get out of the pile up.
She looks at Damon who looks nonplussed, but she knows that inside he's deeply shaken at what they have previously witnessed.
She looks at her surroundings and sees that they were dropped in the middle of the forest. Other than the many trees and the sound of chirping birds, there aren't any signs of life.
"A forest?" Damon snorts derisively. "That's all we got dropped in? I thought Quetsiyah said we would be taken to dangerous places."
"After the hell we got dropped in last time, you're complaining that this is too tame?!" Bonnie asks incredulously. "What the hell is wrong with you?! Wait. Don't answer that. I already know."
Damon chooses to keep his mouth shut. For once.
"Well, what now?" Kol asks.
"First, we should feed. I don't hear any people remotely close to us, but there's plenty of animals."
"You want to feed on animals?" Kol asks, distaste clear in his expression.
"Look, I'm not too thrilled about having to hunt animals either, but we can't exactly start snacking on Bonnie since she's our ticket out of here," Damon says.
Bonnie scowls.
Kol looks disgruntled, but he turns to Bonnie and says, "Let's go."
She gives him an 'are you kidding me?' look and says, "Nuh-uh. I'm not coming. I like animals and the last thing I need to see is you eating Thumper or Bambi."
"We wouldn't kill Bambi," Damon says. He pauses. "We'd be killing his mother."
Bonnie just gives him a look. Ass.
"Leaving you here alone isn't such a good idea, though. If something happens to you, we're stuck here and Mystic Falls is screwed," Damon continues.
Bonnie keeps giving him the look.
"Fine," Damon says, throwing up his hands, knowing better than to try and argue with her. "We'll stay close and if you get into any trouble, use that ear-splitting voice of yours to let us know."
"Just go," Bonnie snaps.
When they leave, Bonnie sighs and shakes her head before going to sit down on a fallen log.
Damon's never liked having to feed on animals.
He's done it before because, hey, sometimes it can't be helped. Like now.
That doesn't make it any less gross, though. Animal blood tasted disgusting and the fur that gets stuck in your teeth is even worse.
They eventually come across a small herd of deer in a clearing. They both silently creep up on them. The must have caught their scent, though, because one of them suddenly raises its head before wildly taking off, the other deer following it.
Damon takes off after them. He briefly glances over his shoulder and sees that Kol is not following him.
He grabs one of the deer and quickly sinks his teeth into its neck, trying to ignore the taste. When he finishes, he decides to go find just where the hell Kol has gone.
He shortly finds Kol standing in a clearing, looking both confused and furious at the same time.
"What the hell happened to you?" Damon asks.
"I can't…" His lips press into a thin line, trying to find the words. "My speed is gone."
"Gone? What do you mean gone?"
"What I mean, Salvatore, is that I went to run to catch one of the damn deer to feed on the damn thing and I found myself running at the pace of a damn human!" Kol snarls.
So now Kol is losing his powers? Between him and Bonnie, this was definitely not good.
First things first, though. Kol still needed to feed.
Without a word, Damon takes off again. He manages to find another and quickly snaps its neck.
When he returns to Kol, he throws it at the older vampire's feet with a, "Here."
Kol looks at him derisively.
"You need to feed," Damon says. "And you currently can't hunt—"
"Not. Another. Word. Salvatore."
Kol grabs up the deer and rips its neck open. When he finishes, he throws it back at Damon's feet and strides away from him.
"We've got another problem," Damon says when they get back to Bonnie.
"Oh God, what now?" Bonnie sighs.
"Kol's losing his powers."
"What?"
"When we went hunting, he didn't have any super speed," Damon informs her.
She blinks at him, not sure what to say. "Uh, okay, well, that's obviously not good…what about you, Damon?"
"Me? I haven't lost anything."
Bonnie looks at Kol who's quietly fuming off to the side.
"I don't know…Quetsiyah never said anything about you guys losing your powers. Maybe it's another side effect of her spell?" She pauses and begins chewing on her thumbnail, getting lost in thought. "Or maybe nature's trying to balance us out? I don't have any powers, so you guys lose some of yours?"
"I haven't lost anything," Damon reminds her.
"Well, I don't know!" Bonnie snaps, throwing her hands up. "All I know is that this is very bad. I already don't have any powers to defend myself with. If Kol loses his, then we're stuck with you defending us and if you do end up losing yours, then we're seriously screwed! Like even more screwed than we already are, which I didn't think was even possible!"
She sees Kol making his way towards Damon and she knows she's going to have a fight on her hands.
"Okay," Bonnie says, sliding between them. "Before anything gets out of hand—"
"Face it, Salvatore. This is all your fault in the first place. Your obsession with the pathetic doppelganger drove you to idiotically look for the cure. And now look what's happened!" Kol snarls. "What you saw, your brother dying. That's on you."
Oh hell, Bonnie thinks.
Before Damon thinks about what he's doing, he shoves Bonnie out of the way and punches Kol in the jaw.
Bonnie hits the ground and grunts in pain when she sees a rock has embedded itself in the palm of her hand. She winces when she pulls it out and blood starts pouring out of her hand.
Without answering, Damon turns around and walks away.
Later that night, Bonnie finds herself sitting, curled up into a ball, her back leaning against a falling log. She's freezing and her hand is dully throbbing in pain. She did her best to clean herself, but she still has some dried blood on her.
Damon still hasn't returned and she's not sure if she should go looking for him or not.
She nearly jumps out of her skin when a heavy coat is dropped on her head.
"Starting a fire is too risky since we don't know for sure what's out there," Kol says, sitting down next to her. "And we can't exactly have you freezing to death."
"Thanks," Bonnie says with a small, tense smile as she wraps the coat around her small body.
They fall into an awkward silence.
"I could heal that," he says, nodding towards her hand where the deep gash in her palm was.
She doesn't really want to drink his blood, but she knows it's a bad cut that could probably use some stitches. And, with her luck, it would probably get infected and catch gangrene and lead to amputation or something.
"Uh, yeah. I think that would be a good idea. Just so it doesn't get infected."
He bites into his wrist and holds it out for her.
She feels so incredibly weird and awkward when she takes his wrist into her hands and tentatively brings her mouth to it. She only takes one small sip since she only needs to heal one cut.
She notices that his blood tastes that same as Stefan and Damon's. For some reason she expected it to be different because he's a vampire. It all tastes gross and metallic to her.
When she pulls away from him, she looks at her newly healed hand and is relieved that the dull throbbing is gone.
"Uh, thanks."
He nods, but doesn't respond.
They fall into an awkward silence again.
There's a rustling in the bushes and Kol tenses up, prepared to attack anything that may be malicious. He relaxes when it turns out to be just Damon.
He sits down on Bonnie's other side and hands her a mixture of berries and leaves.
"I don't know when you last ate, but…here. And no, none of it is poisonous," he tells her. "Tomorrow we can go look for water."
She's silent as she looks at him in surprise. With everything that's been happening, she hasn't given any thought to food or anything of that sort at all. It's a pleasant surprise that the thought actually occurred to Damon. She supposes that this is his way of apologizing.
"Look, I'm not going to pretend that any of it is going to taste any good," Damon says in response to her silence. "But you need to it, so…"
"Thank you, Damon," Bonnie says, taking them from him. When he sees that her hand is healed, his eyebrows raise, but he doesn't say anything.
She tentatively puts one of the berries in her mouth and tries her best to keep the disgusted look off her face when the bitterly sour taste hits her. Judging by Kol and Damon's amused expression, she doesn't do a very good job of it.
Well, Bonnie thinks. I suppose if I make it through this I can go audition for Survivor or something.
She wakes up the next morning with a rock digging into her back. She groans and rolls over, trying to get away from the rock, only to end up with one digging into her side.
Fantastic, Bonnie thinks. I knew there was a reason why I never had a desire to go camping a day in my life.
"Good morning, sunshine," Damon says, looming over her.
"Nothing good 'bout it," she mutters, sitting up and running a messy hand through her curls. Her body is sore and aches all over. When she tries to stretch her sore muscles out, she realizes that she's still wrapped in Kol's jacket.
She slides it off and walks off to where he's standing and holds it out towards him.
"Uh, thanks for this," she says quietly.
He looks at her and then the jacket for a moment before silently taking it from her.
"Come on," Damon says, clapping his hands and rubbing them together. "We need to go look for some sort of water and maybe try to get a better idea of the land."
Bonnie nods and they all begin to walk in silence.
She's too wrapped up in her thoughts of how much her life sucks at the moment to realize that Kol and Damon had stopped, so she smacks right into Damon's back.
She grumbles a bit and rubs her nose that had the misfortune to smash into one of his shoulder blades.
Damon gives her an amused look, but instead of making a comment on it, he gestures towards his right and says, "We can hear the sound of running water this way. It's probably a river or a stream."
She follows Damon and Kol and they shortly come across a river.
She comes to stand in front of it and looks at the water. It appears clear, but she doesn't know if that means it's actually clean. With a sigh, she kneels by the river bank and cups some of the water in her hands. She really hopes that she doesn't catch some sort of disease from this.
She tentatively takes a small sip. The water is cold and crisp and it does feel good about her dry throat.
She thinks about maybe taking a dip in it in a half-assed attempt to clean herself up a bit. She didn't have any soap to wash herself or her clothes, but it would be better than nothing.
Before Bonnie can comprehend what's happening, a set of clawed hands reach out and grab her by the arms and pull her into the river.
The water is freezing and the most she can see of what's grabbed her is claws and scales. Letting out a string of curses in her head, she desperately tries to pry herself out of its grip, but she's no match for it without her powers.
Suddenly, either Kol or Damon is in the water with her, pulling the thing away from her. She automatically kicks her way towards the surface. When she breaks through, a pair of arms grabs her and quickly pulls her out of the lake. When she catches sight of a black leather coat, she knows it's Damon, pulling her onto the shore.
Kol soon bursts out of the river, tightly holding the creature. The thing is about the size of a fourth grader with clawed hands and feet that were also webbed.
Damon rushes forward and grabs it by the head and twists, but its neck doesn't break. Kol pushes Damon's hands away and tips the creature's head forward, causing a water to slosh out from the crater-like depression at the top of it. The creature falls to the ground, writhing and making small whining noises.
"What the hell is that thing?" Bonnie sputters, pulling wet hair out of her eyes.
"A kappa," Kol replies.
"A what?"
Kol gives Damon a look.
"It's a water monster," he clarifies. "They like to drown their prey before they drink their blood and eat their livers to gain more power."
"Oh," Bonnie says, shivering from the cold water. At least the cold's enough to distract her from the bleeding scratches all over her arms.
"Knocking the water from its head renders it powerless."
"Thanks, monster-pedia. Come on, let's go," Damon says, pulling Bonnie up.
Bonnie looks back at the writhing creature. The thing may have tried to kill her, but it looks so sad and pathetic.
Upon seeing her looking at the creature, Kol rolls his eyes and strides over to it. He kicks it back into the river. The creature doesn't resurface for a round two.
"There, happy? Now let's get the hell out of here before something else tries to attack us," Kol snaps.
"I guess this place isn't as harmless as we all thought," Bonnie responds.
Now what?
Review?