Elijah hasn't been himself since he came back. He doesn't smile as much and his face has lines which makes Bonnie sad, sadder than she's ever been even when he left her on the front steps of his family's house with its rickety railings and peeling blue paint; tears silently streaming down her face and he told her not to wait for him.
He doesn't talk about it, what he's done or seen but she knows it was terrible.
Elijah drinks more and wanders the street at night instead of sleeping, she knows because she's been awoken at 3 in the morning to a drunken man on her front steps with a bottle in hand and a song on his lips. He sings loudly, boisterously and she almost forget that he's not the person she used to know until she hauls him up and into her house and he cries.
Loud, heart wrenching sobs escape him and he clings to her, wetting the front of her robe and she holds him. He needs this. He needs help.
That was the mistake she made, not getting him help and thinking that she could help by loving him and letting him drown his sorrows in a bottle and cry it out of his system. Oh how she was wrong.
She was walking out of the diner where she works when she sees him, sitting on the curb. He looks sober, which is a good thing Bonnie tells herself but her blood turns cold when he looks at her and smiles. It's relaxed and he looks like her Elijah again, the bright eyed boy who she had fallen in love with before he left for the war.
He stands and makes his way over to her like they're back in high school, dating again and he'd wait for her some days after her shift to take her out for ice-cream and walk her home. Elijah walks up to her and kisses her, his artful lips causing hers to tingle and the feeling she gets earlier when he smiles is there again. Incessant. Nagging.
"I love you Bon," He hasn't called her Bon since their sandbox days. "I'll always love you."
Sometimes when he'd come to meet her, he'd bring flowers or wrapped pieces of chocolate but he brings neither this time. Just a gun that he whips out when he takes a step back from her.
"I'm sorry,"
Bonnie starts screaming before he even puts the gun in his mouth and the sound dies in her throat when he pulls the trigger and she's bathed in his blood and brain matter.
It doesn't sink in yet but when it does, she scrambles over to him. Screaming and crying. Her breath catching in her throat and her sobs sound like she's having a panic attack.
Later on she wonders if Elijah's life flashed before his eyes before he pulled the trigger because when she clings to his rapidly cooling body all s he can do is replay their time together.