Fuck Forrest Gump.
Life is like a box of shit; you know exactly what you're gonna get.
It says 'SHIT' right on the cover.
Damon pulled his knees up, let his head drift back to hit the peeling wallpaper, and exhaled a breath he'd been holding in for God alone knew how long.
"Damon," she gasped as she stepped out of the bathroom looking like an angel. Or a really clean prostitute. The flickering fluorescent light bulb was good as sunshine on her skin. Drops of water in her eyelashes like little liquid stars… The green in her eyes made him think of apple trees and the brown made him think of summer doves. Her lips, nice… pink… frowning… "Lurk much?" she asked with a pout. "Didn't see you there in the shadows."
Don't worry about it. I'm used to being overlooked. "Yeah, I needed a quick word…"
"Uh huh…"
She ruffled her hair with a fluffy towel.
Raspberry shampoo.
Honey and oatmeal soap.
One of Elijah's shirts… A white shirt. Polyester, and way too large for her… Hanging off her shoulder in a way the word 'seductive' didn't even begin to describe.
No underwear, as far as he could tell, but she didn't seem too put off by it. "How's Elijah going with the blood?" she asked as she made her way over to the man's dresser. "The more vampire blood I have in me, the better our chances of pulling this off."
"He's doing it. As commanded."
That didn't earn him so much as a flinch. There was a time, he'd swear, that he used to give her nightmares with only a glance. Now though, Little Bonnie Bennett was hitting her stride, cock-sure and confident. No longer the bashful baby bird… She'd sat there in the restaurant haggling over details and spells with Elijah without so much as a blush. She'd sat right next to him, in nothing but his bed sheet, and acted as though he didn't exist.
Is this what happens? Do I cease to exist to them? Do I ever exist in their universe?
He'd existed for Katherine sometime in the beginning when she'd needed a stepping stone.
Bonnie?
Does she care whether I live or die? Did she ever?
He couldn't tell by the attitude he was getting – the 'eat shit and die' attitude – and he couldn't tell by her face, blank and disinterested as it was.
"Fine, then." She turned one way then the other, watching herself in Elijah's mirror, in Elijah's shirt… "Don't see what else we have to discuss, really. The plan's already hashed out. We're good to go at two. That leaves you an hour and a half to feed or whatever you have to do… Elijah, too, can go feed or whatever. Only I need the blood before he goes anywhere…" She pulled her hair up into a loose, scrappy ponytail and studied him in the mirror. The frown transformed into a scowl. Her annoyance with him became palpable. "What, Damon? Say what you want to say and make it quick."
A strand of hair came loose from the wet bundle and flopped into her eye.
Cute.
Katherine was cute, too.
Do not be fooled by the cuteness.
A bitch is a bitch is a bitch. Be on guard.
"Two quick questions, then I'm out of your hair. Unless you need somebody to help you brush it, or blow dry it, cause I totally wouldn't mind…"
"Two questions about?"
"Well, right off the top of my head… Question number one: why do you smell like Stefan?"
He'd been waiting hours for the chance to ask that one question.
That one million dollar question.
"Do I?" she asked, all innocence except for a little spike in the heart rate. An insignificant increase, two or three extra beats… but the very knowledge that mention of his brother's name was doing anything at all to her heart was fucking irritating.
As fucking irritating as a fucking nail in the fucking eye. "Yeah, you kinda do."
"Still?"
"Forty-five minutes in the shower and you still smell like my brother. Almost as if he's inside you."
"You timed me?"
"With a stopwatch."
"It matters to you how long I bathe? It matters to you who I smell like? Since when does–" Her voice stopped short. She knocked some bottles off the counter, suddenly frantic. He could feel her anger. Her panic. "Where's the chain, Damon?" She knocked over more bottles. Something broke. A ceramic vase shattered and the wilting flowers caught fire. "Where's Mags' chain, Damon?"
He slid the talisman out of his back pocket and jingled it. Look at the spark in her eyes.
She's a black magic junkie. "Answer the question and you get the horcrux back."
"Fuck you, Damon. Give it to me."
"Losers weepers, Bon."
Her lips curled. No fangs… no forked tongue… no smell of brimstone… no static electricity to make his hair stand on end, but make no mistake about it… Danger was in the air.
He'd watched enough National Geographic to recognise the dynamics of a predator-prey relationship. The temperature in the room was up by a couple degrees and he could almost feel an aneurysm coming on.
The line between brave and retarded is drawn with a 0.2 millimetre fine-point pen though, so he repeated himself. "Why do you smell like my brother?"
She responded with frustration, a half smile and a flare of arm-waving instead of combustion. "God, Damon! Does it matter? I'm not Elena - you don't have permission to smell me–"
"Elena never gave me permission to smell her."
"Yet I'm sure you did it all the time. I can imagine you going through her dirty clothes, sniffing her underwear… Give me back the talisman!"
"I've never done that in my life. Panty sniffing? Eww."
"Why? Katherine didn't wear any? I can't deal with your old man pervert shit tonight, Damon. Just give me back the talisman–"
"Why? So you can go wild on Elijah? I didn't give this to you so that you could go slut it up with every vampire topside of the equator. Forget it. This creepy routine you do – seduce and feed? I'm not watching you do that with Elijah, so get it out of your head. You can't control it–"
"Slut?" Her eyebrows disappeared into her hairline, almost. A mirror cracked. By the time the conversation was done, Elijah'd be out of breakables... "I suggested that Elijah give me his blood to increase our chances of survival! The older the blood, the better. He's got a millennium and change on you. Why can't you just be grateful that he's willing to help us out? Slut? He's putting his blood in a bottle and giving it to me. Not like I'm sucking it out of his dick! You dare say something like that to me? To me? I'm Bonnie. You're a man-whore! You stalk out high-schools for teenage girls to sleep with and feed on! You're the slut!"
"Says the girl who teleports across the world hot off a private fuck fest held in my bed!"
That came out with a little bit more bark than he'd intended, but to hell with inside voices, right? Had he lied? Was he the bad guy here for shining the light on how completely fucked up it was for her to have sex with his brother in his bed? By all possible definitions of the phrase fucked up, it was a pretty fucked up thing to do – brother-fucking.
"Give me back the talisman, Damon," she said icily. "I need it if we're going to take down Klaus. I can't teleport without it."
"Fuck Klaus. The topic is Stefan! What did you do? Fuck him and then think – hey, let me go tell Damon the good news? Third strike for him, he's out? Let's go make Damon feel like an ass?"
"Damon."
"I get that Mags is responsible for a lot of the crazy. And I get that I'm responsible for Mags, so if there's any kind of explanation, I'm all ears. You needed his blood and things got out of hand? What? Tell me something, Bonnie."
"You want to know what happened?" She smiled, less angelically than before. "I should have made a video, you think? You like that kinda thing, Damon? Watching videos of your brother?"
Ouch.
Zing.
She's an Ice Queen tonight. The devil with a ponytail.
She'd popped out of the open air, hot from hell, right there, a foot if so much away from him, naked except for his bed-sheet, smelling like heaven and sex and Stefan… and his insides had run cold. Colder than dry ice up his spine. Paralyzing.
He should have grabbed her up and whisked her away to a dark corner… He should have fucked her right then and there in the dining hall, on the table in front of everyone.
Regardless of whose scent was on her.
Regardless of whose strands of coiffed brown hair were stuck to her arm.
What did that matter? They weren't animals, and by the end he'd have put his own scent on her, anyway. Problem solved.
But he hadn't. He'd balked.
Problem unsolved.
Instead of spreading her open on the table and going down on her, his stupid, cock-blocking brain had gone gallivanting down memory lane. Gallivanting all the way back to eighteen something when his father was alive and when Katherine was more subtle with the mind-fucking. She'd strung him along like a brain dead puppy and he'd been glad and gladder for it. She'd crushed him down to dirt. Made him eat shit… and he'd loved her despite it all. Hated Stefan and loved her…
Shit or chocolate? Chocolate or shit? His taste buds couldn't tell them apart anymore. Chocolate-chip shit, maybe.
'Katherine and Stefan, Katherine and Stefan, Katherine and Stefan...' the voices used to torment in the wee hours of the morning when he woke up to find himself alone, or when we watched the two of them having their little jokes at the dinner table, or when the two of them had their little glances in the corridor, or when their hands brushed as they reached for the biscuits. Katherine and Stefan. Katherine and Stefan. Katherine and Stefan.
A century later, Destiny had released the remix version – 'Stefan and Elena. Stefan and Elena. Stefan and Elena.'
And he'd forfeited that.
Just recently, in fact. He'd decided to bow out of that race. He'd defaulted. Surrendered. Yielded. Whatever. He'd lost the battle and decided to settle for third place.
His love for Katherine had gone gangrenous, his love for Elena, cancerous. Both, he planned to have excised, post haste. His little Bonnie - the scalpel…
Now…
Wake up and taste it. Fresh and steaming.
Third fucking place.
I can't have third place? Does Stefan own the podium?
Stefan and Bonnie.
Stefan and Bonnie?
Sounds like the tagline for a horror movie.
A horror movie that's also a biopic.
A Horror-Documentary…
"Tell me what happened with my brother."
"Guess." Hmm, she'd been practising her smirking. In the two days since he'd last seen her, she'd really mastered it. "Work it around in your imagination and see what you come up with."
"I've already worked it around and I don't like what I've come up with, that's why I'm asking you to clarify the situation."
"What situation?" She pulled herself away from Elijah's bureau, giving him the full, brutal force of her attention.
He hadn't felt pins and needles in his skin since… since… since that time in 1905. "The situation with you and my brother." He wound the necklace around his wrist and clenched his fist around it. She'd have to rip his hand off to get it. She would too, he didn't doubt… She'd break him to pieces. "Tell me, or I throw this down a toilet."
Bonnie, or Mags, laughed, like the springtime gurgling of a new-born cherub… She took baby steps towards him. Cute, tantalizing baby steps…"You think I'd let you?"
It isn't fair.
It wasn't. Not fucking fair at all, but she was too close to him now befuddling his senses with her cursed raspberry shampoo and honey oatmeal skin. She glided over to him as graceful as a supernatural ballerina, pursed her lips into a pout and raised an eyebrow as she knelt… just low enough for him to glimpse a hard dark nipple through the sagging neck of Elijah's shirt… "Jealous, Damon?"
Don't.
"I needed blood in order to teleport, so I cut your brother's wrists and drank his. Feel better now?"
No. "You had to take your clothes off in my bed to do that?"
"I take my clothes off to do a lot of things."
"Things like…"
"Give me the chain, Damon," she said softly. Slowly. Wickedly hot and minty against his cheek. "Or I'll take it from you."
"Go ahead and try," he answered, grudgingly. His voice… he couldn't trust it anymore. The next thing out of his mouth might be a moan. A plead. She was just too close. He hadn't even noticed when she'd gotten that close, but she was right there in front of him hovering like a hungry jungle cat. Like a siren. Like a serial killer…
His grip around the chain tightened.
Fucking Mags.
She'd taken his innocent, virgin for life Bonnie and turned her into a harlot. The sexiest, best harlot ever, but still… He'd had something a little different in mind when he'd hatched his master plan. Something a bit more fairy-tailish.
"If I have to do it, Damon," she whispered, "It'll be painful."
"It's always painful the first time, but I'll be gentle."
"I know you'll be gentle," her lips curled. "You're nothing but a big old pussy cat…" She licked him, right across his mouth. "A big ol' puddy tat…"
You know you love a woman when a Tweety-Bird impression makes you hard. He licked her back, swiping his tongue over her top lip. "I'm as gentle as vampires come."
"But what if I like it rough?" she said in his brain. "What if I want to make you scream?"
"Go ahead and try."
Her hand closed over his… Her eyelashes fluttered against his skin… And just like that she was gone. Replaced by cold air and nothingness. Gone, her and the necklace.
She laughed. At him, not with him. "God, Damon." She fastened the thing around her neck, admiring her handiwork back at the mirror again. "Pick your tongue off the floor. I never knew you were this easy. No wonder Elena walks all over you… That was so obvious! What did you think I was going to do? You had the chain in your hand! With Mags in my head, I might come on to you, but seriously? Short of being brainwashed, you know I'd never go for you, right? Short of being brain dead, brainwashed or compelled, I don't think any woman would go for you. Except probably whores… who you'll have to pay extra."
"I get it, Bonnie."
"Do you, Damon?" She folded the collar of Elijah's shirt into a semblance of neatness. Her pretty evil eyes looking at him through mirror… "Cause I'm willing to spell it out if you need me to. I could probably talk to someone about getting it in braille. Tactile stimulation seems to work with you."
"You planning on putting on pants at any point tonight? Or you're wearing that when we head over to Klaus?"
"Do I look like I could fit into one of Elijah's pants?"
"If you used a belt, maybe…"
"Well, I prefer this."
"I realise."
"That it for Question Time?"
"No. I have a follow-up. Pertinent, this time." He stretched and got to his feet. He'll postpone the pity party until he could get a decent amount of alcohol in his system. For the time being, the switch would have to dial down to 'Off'. Or 'Lo'. "Question number two. Can you do this?"
…
Elijah shut the rickety door behind him as he stepped into the ratty, weed infested patch of land behind the house that Damon wouldn't deign to call a backyard. Despite the swing-set.
"Penny for your thoughts?"
"A penny?" Damon sighed, "What's the matter? Recession got to you too?"
"I've got ten pounds on me."
"Wow… I always figured you as one of those aristocratic kinds. When you said you had a house near Heathrow, I thought it was more like… a real house… with multiple bathrooms and guest bedrooms and… all kinds of fancy shit. A bidet, perhaps." He flung the empty beer bottle into a patch of grass, disturbing a humming hive of mosquitoes. "A lawn mower."
"Yeah," the Original shrugged. "The property went to shit while I was dead."
By the colour in the man's cheeks, Damon would guess the vampire had snacked down on twenty, twenty-five humans at least. He was almost ruddy. Like a slim Santa.
There was a time when Bonnie would have taken offense at that, a vampire binging out on the innocent populace of… of whatever shit village they were in… but she was playing it loose with morals recently.
"You look rather pink for a guy who just pumped out two litres of blood."
"You know how it is in the world. Give and take…"
"How's Bonnie?"
"Chugging like a babe at the mother's breast."
"She show you her breasts at any point?" He chucked the beer cap into one of Elijah's windows. Smiled as the glass pane shattered…
"She tried but I resisted," Elijah answered with one of his lazy grins. "Jealousy does not become you, Damon."
"Don't know what you're talking about, geezer."
"I'm a little bit surprised, though, at the switch-up. I thought you'd be licking at Elena's heels for at least a century again."
"Nope." He'd run out of things to throw. "Her heels are ashy."
"From all the dirt she kicks up in your face?"
"Yup."
"And you like you're heels how these days? Magical?"
"And you wonder why people try to kill you… Don't you own a jersey? Sweatpants? Jeans, at least?" Damon surveyed the other vampire in the blazer coolly, not actually caring what he was wearing. "You look like you're going to work. At a night bank."
"Gotta look sharp when you kill your brother, don't you?"
"Yeah? I'm good with slacks and flip flops. All I'll need is something pointy."
"Yeah, no one can deny that you're an easy-going fellow," Elijah sat himself on the swing. "So what's got your boxers in a wedgie, tonight?"
"The usual."
"I'm paying ten bucks here, don't skimp on the details. Come on, it's Sharing and Caring time with Uncle Elijah. I see you didn't manage to make away with the chain."
"Nope."
"Yeah… Once you had it, maybe you should have gotten rid of it? I don't know… Hurled it into the ocean or something, maybe? Sitting there and watching her bathe was maybe the wrong way to go."
"Yup."
"Not too smart, that."
"Nope."
"What happened? She got rough with you?"
"Too rough, and not rough enough, if you know what I mean."
"Sadly, I do." Elijah cocked his head to a side, giving the moonlight a chance to get past his manly bangs and glimmer off his eyes. He sat there, letting he crickets have a turn at making the noise for a while, then slumped himself against one of the chains with a huff. "I've got my own horror story about Magwyr the Red, if you want to hear it."
"Of course, I want to hear it."
"It was–"
"Sarcasm, Elijah. I don't want–"
"It was 1425. Where you in 1425, Damon? Oh no, wait. You weren't alive back then, so shut up and listen to your elders. I was alive an already ancient when Magwyr was born. I was there, on the scene so to say, when she was just a scared young woman discovering her powers in some wayside jungle island. She was intelligent, she was beautiful, she was innocent and I saw the potential in her. I thought that I could take her and make her into more than any witch ever dreamed to be.
"If she's a beacon of darkness today, it's because I made her like that. I was the first vampire to come to her. Her first foray into the night. The first to offer up a vein and promise to lay a kingdom at her feet. I took her as a human and reshaped her to suit my needs. Supernatural and physical needs. Then, like an exotic cat on a chain, I brought her out of the jungle and into the world, showing her off like a prize. I was proud of my masterpiece. I gave her my blood, and she became stronger. Before I knew it, she was beyond my control.
"Too wild… She was too dangerous to keep indoors so like a good master, I set her loose. Loose in Europe, loose in Asia, loose in the world. Free to finish her corruption on whatever vice she came by. Ten years later, I don't think she was even human anymore. She was a monster. A beautiful, beguiling monster all grown up. She'd spent so long watching me, studying me… and the only thing she'd learnt was how to be a monster. How to hunt. How to manipulate people into traps. How to feed off life. A full decade later she'd come back looking for me, catching, feeding on and killing every vampire she could get her hands on in the meanwhile, then she turned to the werewolves and started eating them. Raw."
"What? You think she should have set up the Foreman?"
"There's not a law in nature that Magwyr hasn't broken. She kept me prisoner for fifty seven years, Damon. Fifty-seven years I spent unable to move my body, strapped down with an IV line in my hand, watching my blood drain from me. You know how I got free? Travelling missionaries saw my desiccated carcass in a chair, thought I was dead and had the goodness of heart to put me in the ground. Do you have any idea of the kind of strength it takes for a witch to pull off something like that with an Original?"
"Mags is dead."
"Dead?" Elijah scoffed. "Don't let her fool you. You think you're the first one to wise up and try to kill her? There's a list of vampires long as my arm who have managed to put Magwyr in her grave once and for all. What do you think I did as soon as I got some flesh back on my bones? I climbed through a window, broke her neck while she slept, cut her heart out, roasted it in the fireplace and fed it to one of my dogs. Cassius, the Great Dane, if I remember correctly."
"You sure about that, because she didn't seem too dead while I was fucking her."
"Why do you think she left her charms scattered all over the globe? They're her life insurance policy. She's like a disease. You can cure it, put it in remission, but you can't kill it."
"Mags is dead, Elijah," Damon repeated. He raised a finger to the house. "Bonnie's in control of that. When this is done with Klaus, she takes off that fucking necklace and everything goes back to normal."
"Normal?" The swing set creaked as the vampire shifted. "Bonnie's already gone and you don't even realise it. That thing in there is 95% Magwyr. She's willing to cooperate with us because she wants to get to Klaus. Get some hybrid blood in her system. She knows that I know that she's in there, but she knows that we need her power and that you have a soft spot for the girl. As long as she's in Bonnie's skin, she's counting on you to protect her. Right now she needs a bodyguard because she's not anywhere near her full power. Not until she gets her hands on a werewolf. When that happens though. Heads are going to roll. Yours in particular. Let her catch you with your pants down, and see if you don't get what's coming to you. If it's one thing Magwyr isn't fond of, it's being killed. She holds a grudge for stuff like that."
"Speaking from experience?"
"Yes," he answered flatly. "Every fifty years or so, there's some woman somewhere in the world who stumbles across one of Magwyr's heirlooms. Each time it ends with more bloodshed than the last. Magwyr gets into their brains and reworks every memory, every neuronal synapse until that person ceases to exist and Magwyr alone remains. Immortality, in a sense. All she ever wanted."
"That's impossible."
"Is it? How does life and death work, Damon? How does magic work? Show me where you draw the line between what's possible and what's not. I've gone so far as to have specialists create and analyse neurological maps of Magwyr's victims–"
"Sounds expensive."
"Vampire discount card."
"All I have to do is get the chain away from her. Without the chain, she goes back to being normal Bonnie–"
"When last have you seen normal Bonnie? Because that thing in there isn't normal Bonnie– "
"What the fuck do you know about normal Bonnie?"
"What the fuck do you know about normal Bonnie? From what I've gathered about the girl, I can tell–"
"You can't tell shit, Elijah. Back in the restaurant, that was normal Bonnie. She's a doormat most of the time but when she has to bring the heat, she brings it. She isn't some fly-by-night floozy-Suzy that Mags can snuff out. She's a badass witch in her own right."
"The girl's a vessel, and you can't see that. Yes, she's stronger. Yes, she can do more spells. Yes, she can teleport. Yes, she popped out of thin air, naked and calling your name–"
"End of fucking discussion, Elijah."
"I'm just giving you a heads-up, Damon. It's five to two so times up anyway. We have to do this, but keep your head on and don't let her kill you. Prove, for once in your life that you're not some pussy-whipped, snot-nosed brat, Damon."
"What do you want me to do, kill her?"
"It's not come to that as yet." Elijah stood, straightening his clothes. "As it stands, we need her. And she needs us. When that changes–"
"End of the fucking discussion, Elijah." Damon pulled his vibrating phone from his pocket. Alaric. "I gotta take this."
AN: I'm back… Exams went like spray paint in the eyes… That good.
lol
I actually had to read over this whole story to remember where I was. I should probably make notes or something. OneNote rocks by the way, for that.
Really sorry 'bout the two week hiatus… I'm not going to go into too much of Mags history, so don't worry. Neither Elijah's. This chapter ended up extra-long because my desk is cluttered and I couldn't see the word count… We're about halfway through now, getting to a juicy middle...