"The doctor found a mineral and electrolyte disorder of the blood that weakened her heart, the way it happens with anorexia and bulimia. That's why they now believe that she was suffering from an eating disorder. Her tooth enamel was slightly corroded so their guess is actually bulimia," the words are said with a blank tone; it's strange that after walking centuries between mortal lives, so fragile and easily broken, Stefan can still not process the fact that Bonnie is dead.
Damon tries to tune his voice out but words still reach his brain. He would want nothing more than to not imagine her beautiful, soft body sliced open on a morgue table while her cold skin is losing its natural glow, and yet he has this morbid need to know what happened, in details. To know why one moment she was joking with him and the next her lifeless body was all that was left in his arms.
"Her heart was damaged when her body started rejecting black magic; that was what made her feel so often tired and aching, but at least they are pretty sure that she didn't feel any pain. She probably didn't even realize what was happening, she just... fell asleep."
Stefan is trying to find some consolation in the thought that she didn't suffer but Damon is not doing the same. Damon is not doing anything but drinking.
After they realized that there was nothing they could do for Bonnie he picked up a cd from the ground, dusted it with his hand and then picked his glass, which has not stayed empty for more than thirty seconds from the night before. Stefan had to take her body and bring it back to her house so that nobody would suspect they were involved in her death. He had to compel people to remember that she had lived there the whole time and that nothing out of the ordinary had happened, all the while trying to keep Elena from going crazy.
He had had no time to grieve her himself and yet he had held her small body, and tucked her under the blankets, stupidly trying to shield her from the chill.
It breaks his heart to think of the things she will never have, of the things they will never do together. He keeps asking himself if she knew that he thought of her as a kindred spirit; fighting the same battles he fights, loving the same people he loves. Cursed to be different from the rest of the world, forever ahead of everyone else and cut apart in an inevitable, perpetual solitude.
The last thing he told her had been something stupid about grocery shopping and he wishes he had told her something meaningful, even if he knows that there's nothing he could have said to make things better now.
Elena is fighting her pain by crying her eyes out and trying to be of any help to Bonnie's father to organize the funeral service. It's a way like another to react, and to stay by her side, encourage her to not surrender to the pain is the only thing he can do for both Elena and Bonnie.
With his brother is different.
"Stop talking," Damon says, trying to shush him waving his hand in the air as he remains sitting with precarious balance on a chair, "You're ruining my party."
Stefan ignores him and keeps on talking.
"The service is tomorrow morning at 10 o'clock. Elena will probably have to fake strong hysterics to cover the fact that she can't take part to it since she can't be exposed to daylight, but I don't think she will have much to fake," he says, knowing too well that the moment she won't have things like catering and funeral to think about, the realization of her friend's death will hit her fully and she will fall to pieces.
"No problem, if she's so eager to wear black and cry in public she can have my ring," his brother says putting down his glass to take off his ring before Stefan stops him.
"Don't," he says in a rush, "Keep it, I'll find another way."
He doubts it would work on anyone else, but that's not the point. He doesn't want to come back home from the funeral to find a heap of ashes instead of his brother. He's so drunk that he could just fall asleep under an open window, even if Stefan doubts that his death, right now, would be anything else but intentional.
Damon is half stoned and his hand is badly missing his glass of bourbon so he doesn't insist with his offer. Elena can still have the ring if she takes it herself so that he doesn't need to stop drinking.
"You should stop drinking," Stefan says, "It's not like you can stay drunk for more then a minute anyway."
"Don't I know it?" he asks, for a second he sounds almost angry but the bitter note disappears as soon as it showed up "Maybe if you can shut the hell up the job will get easier."
Stefan nods as Damon keeps on ignoring him. He walks to the liquor cabinet, opens it and - calculating that it would take too long to take away his brother stock of alcohol - he just angles it letting the bottles crush on the parquet. His action results into a pool of amber liquid and broken glass.
"What the hell!" Damon stands up outraged but his brother doesn't move.
"I know you hate a messy floor so you better hurry and clean up before this place starts to smell like a blown up distillery."
The worst part, Damon thinks impulsively, it's not that the place will smell like bourbon, it's that it will smell a lot less like Bonnie.
"This is low," he says, as lucidity kicks in fast. Damn healing factor.
"No, what's really low is you... pretending you don't care," Stefan accuses him.
"Oh, please! Some pathetic human being... like I didn't see enough funerals in my life, or better... like I didn't cause them," Damon almost hisses in rage.
Stefan grins bitterly, "Pathetic human being, huh? I guess I'm wrong," he says, with a frustrated edge in his voice, "Then sit on the couch," he dares him, "Go into her room," he says, his voice as hard as stone, "Pack her clothes. Wash her sheets. Use her mug. Throw away her foam bath-"
"Can you stop?" Damon demands raising his voice and gripping Stefan green shirt at the neck with both hands.
"What does it matter? You don't care, do you?" his brother asks, waiting for a reaction, any at all, because he just lost his friend and he feels like he's about to lose his big brother too, "You don't care that she is dead. You don't care that you're never gonna see her again. No more aneurysms for you, right? No more moralizing. That's good! Aren't you happy? Can't you breathe better?"
"I can't breathe at all!" Damon screams in his face and then pushes him away, making him fall on the floor.
Stefan remains there and slowly gets to a sitting position, watching his brother shake with repressed emotions that will end up killing him from the inside if he doesn't let them out. But Damon just shakes and tries to breathe in.
"I-" he takes one hard breath "Elena is waiting for you," he says, before leaving him alone.
#
In his room Damon can finally expect to obtain a little privacy but as he lies on his bed and closes his eyes his hearing, on instinct, strains to catch her heartbeat in the next room. She probably didn't close well the shower's knob because he can hear a drop of water rhythmically hitting the ceramic plate and fabric brushing against something sharp. Must be the curtains, because she has this habit to leave the window ajar so the room is breezy.
Correction. She had this habit, he reminds himself. And his heart sinks a bit more.
He killed so many people that he lost count. After losing his mother and then Katherine he never cared enough for anyone else's loss. He loathed the perspective of Stefan's and Elena's death; he hated that they had that power over him but, at least, he was sure he was safe from anyone else. This knowledge - not counting one single, insignificant incident which left him eager to say aloud a very comforting lie - made him feel in control and powerful. This is why now; hatefully sober and aware he's not going to wake up from this nightmare anytime soon, he can't understand this pain affecting his whole body.
It's an atrocious disease that infected him in one instant. He feels a new kind of emptiness that makes him unstable. It's kind of like a CR.
Losing one's hearing leaves you physically unbalanced, unable to tell where your body is in relation to the gravity and the earth; it makes it difficult for the brain to make adjustments in posture of the trunk and limbs. The simple task of keeping balance on your own feet becomes difficult.
From the moment Bonnie's heartbeat stopped he's been unable to properly function. He became physically unbalanced, unable to feel gravity and earth. He cannot adjust to the world without her.
The only sound he longs for - that was supposed to fill the air around him - is gone.
Humans are stupid creatures, always doing stupid things, like dying, and he should know better than to count on them to stay sane, but he did. Bonnie made him fall into line with her stupid code, made him be conscious with her stupid attitude; she made him worried with her stupid obstinacy, made him burn with her stupid sensuality, made him endeared with her stupid fragility, made him care with her stupid strength. She made him human and himself; and then she's gone and made him die with every passing second.
Tick, tock. Tick, tock. Tick, tock.
He's stupid too, isn't he? He was such an idiot; he was supposed to be safe. He thought he was.
He remembers the pain of losing Katherine; he remembers and this is nothing like that.
He worshiped the ground Katherine walked upon and losing her had been like losing a goddess. She was still superior and unreachable to him, even though he could carnally possess her, and it was fine. Adoring her was such a pleasure, such a pain. Their bond, for how twisted it could be, was the one between master and pet. He had been fighting for her for centuries so that he could offer himself at the altar of her deceitful beauty, ready and eager to live a poisoned, sweet lie for the rest of eternity.
Bonnie was a witch and a human being and yet she was his equal more than anyone else in the world. The bond they shared had come from instinct, but even from days spent biting each other's heads off, giving hell to each other, helping out and pushing away and then pushing back again and digging their places into each other's souls until she was all of it, and now she had left him with this hole. And he does not know how it is possible to miss someone so badly that your bones feel hollow and whatever in you was still alive just stopped waiting; for things to make sense, for the things you were yearning for. Stopped, just like that.
There's this tiny part of him that wants to be there for Elena, wants to lash out at Caroline, take it out on Stefan, hate Jeremy, insult Matt, kill Klaus - again. But the rest of him just doesn't care about anything. All his body does right now is hurt with her absence. All he can do right now is yearn for Bonnie.
#
"You can stop looking at me like some scared puppy," Damon says as Stefan waits on the doorstep.
Stefan is relieved to see that his brother is sober and has stopped trying to make him buy that he's indifferent to Bonnie's death, but he's still not having any kind of real reaction. Going to the funeral would let him elaborate her death but he won't. His blind obstinacy makes him feel closer to him, because he suspects that he cannot accept Bonnie's death the same way he himself would not be able to accept Elena's.
The idea that Bonnie was that for his brother - that kind of love - scares Stefan like nothing else. Because what happens once Damon realizes that too? Once he's able to call that feeling by name? What then?
"Are you sure you don't want to come?"
"One hundred percent," he says "Give my sympathy to her outstanding parents, please."
Damon thinks that, if he steps anywhere near her - always absent - parents, he's going to snap their necks before he can even think about it. But this is not the reason why he won't go. He's just not going to admit she's gone forever because she can't. She can't.
He's not a lucidity champion right now. He has not been sleeping for three days, he's been drunk for almost fourteen hours straight and you won't keep me forever. Tick, tock. She just fell asleep. Tick, tock. Can't you breathe better?
"After the funeral we'll go to her house," Stefan says.
"Lovely plan," Damon comments casually, "And who's going to be in charge, playing the gracious host? Daddy dearest?"
"Elena and Caroline have been helping," he says as he sees his brother grinning with angry bitterness, "They had to use the food brought for her birthday party for her funeral instead."
Right. They're hosting her funeral on the day of her eighteen birthday.
"So very convenient of my little bird to die when everything was already set. Isn't she precious?" he keeps on talking hoping Stefan won't notice he didn't use the past tense "Wouldn't want to bother anyone with her departure," he says; pain is all he can manage to feel right now, because he has no recognition of the form or shape of any other emotion possesses. He can't remember them. And so pain be it.
"Maybe you could come by," his brother suggests, "Stay just a few minutes."
"Formal occasions are too tiring and I don't have a tie," he answers, with irony lost in his voice, pushing his fists into his pockets. Stefan knows that this is the last brick of the wall Damon has built around himself and so he knows that he must not push him further or he's just going to push him away. He'll have to be the one facing this for both of them.
It's almost a relief to hear the door closing because now Stefan looks at him like he's waiting for a catastrophe to happen any moment, and isn't Saint Stefan always right?
The boardinghouse is a symphony of Bonnie; everything smells like her, and it's like she's having fun at his expenses, playing hide and seek. She calls out to him with her honey scent and when he looks she's never there.
Damon starts picking up the books she had read. A few novels she already knew or was curious about, and more that Stefan has suggested her. The last one is a collection of poetries and, as he pulls at the ribbon bookmarking the page, he finds himself facing a page yellowed with time and smelling like vanilla and Bonnie.
"Aren't you a tease?" he whispers with a bitter smile as he let his finger run through the printed black letters.
"I don't want you to go away, pain, last form of love. I feel myself living when you hurt me. Not in you, nor here, far beyond: on earth, during the year where you are from, in the love with her and everything that was. In that overwhelmed reality that deny itself and obstinately affirms that it never has existed, that it was nothing much then my pretext to live."
But as his eyes travel along the page and words reach his brain his voice protests way too weakly.
"I think you're overestimating yourself, Judgy," he says, in a feeble defense as his own heart trembles like a cards castle that's about to fall down.
"If you would not remain to me, pain, unanswerable, I could believe it; but you remain to me."
His hard expression falters, the emptiness of the house whispers with her voice I'm picking you and he's happy and he's devastated, as a feeling of recognition makes him lightheaded.
"The truth that assures me that nothing was lie. And until I will be able to feel you, you'll be for me, pain, the proof of another life where you did not hurt me. The great proof, far away, that she existed, that she exists, that she loved me, yes, that I'm still loving her."
For someone who, in his life, did every single thing in the name of love, or better, the starved need for it, he did not know the first thing about it.
#
Note: The poem is "No quiero que te vayas" (I don't want you to go away) by Pedro Salinas. I had to translate it myself since I couldn't find the english version, so I hope I got it right.