It started when she woke up. Like a fly buzzing around her ears on a sweltering summer day, Bonnie couldn't ignore the feeling that she would do something horrible when she got home.
She'd fucked Kai, and while that was great, her hormones inevitably dropped her from the orgasmic high, dropped her hard on her ass, and it seemed that she had hit the ceiling. They got too close too fast. Now their relationship or whatever it was happening between them was going to rot before it could ripen.
Refuge in the unexplored was possible.
Geographically, there was still more to see in his prison. It was essentially a copy of the world, most of which she hadn't yet traveled. Tokyo, Nepal, London, Rio, Paris and especially places linked to her family history still called to her. Even without locals to fatten the experience or her friends to share it with, the world still existed. And if she was truly stuck until her dying day, only one thing held her back from trying to make the most of her shitty situation.
Elena.
Bonnie thought of this as she walked home, after fucking Kai for the second time in what was definitely the most extreme circumstance. Even though they were alone and nobody was around to witness the animalistic session they had over the counter at the café, it still felt a little wrong. What's worse, when he finished her off, he left. Kai, of all people, didn't stick around to rub her mistake in her face. He reaffirmed the depravity of it all and abandoned her at her most vulnerable; naked, in a compromised position, leaking the cum he filled her with and grappling for a sense of comfort between being finally apart from the bastard and needing him to return to distract her from the ideation frothing in her mind.
Rather than feeling angry with him, the sadness took full control. But she knew how to move on and she was in the right frame of mind to do it.
She was full of vampire blood.
Was it so awful to do what she knew would awaken Elena, so that she herself could live a little?
An artificial death for an artificial life.
Her excitement at this resolution terrified her, ashamed her. She could only behave sullen and dry, unable to face Kai knowing that even he would be disappointed. What he might do to her in the event of her success… Would it be worth the punishment? More, would it be worth losing magic? And it would be eternity without it.
She'd only been a realized witch for a few years anyway.
As she reached her home, she noted every color for its vibrancy. The teals, dark purples, royal blues. The inside of her house was grey with counterfeit winter. Still the color of it struck her and she felt that she would never even see grey the same way.
Though she wanted not to be interrupted, she wished Kai would intrude. To hear him knock would be to know a part of him was still human, and that he was neither ignorant nor insensitive to the despair consuming her.
Maybe he cared anyway. But he wasn't there. Nobody knocked. Bonnie shut her brain off, selected a butcher knife from the kitchen, sat on the living room couch. She admired the grooves in the wood of the coffee table before plunging the knife in her belly.
He loved her. That much was certain.
Exactly why she killed herself was not.
That she was damaged was also obvious, and it was his fault. But how was he supposed to know she would take things so far? He guessed he should've known this part of her existed. He should've known since the day he tried to rescue her from 1994 with Jeremy, when they found her crying, drinking herself into sentence, ready to die. Bonnie was the strongest person he had ever known, but she was still human.
He could smell the blood from her front door. Tentatively, he turned the handle and swung it open to peer in. She was there, he knew by the scent, but he couldn't see the details from where he stood on the porch.
The invitation barrier.
"Fuck it," he said.
He took a step inside.
He'd only been in her house once before, when the need to see her couldn't be resisted. It was before they saw each other officially, before she started feeding him. He'd been hiding out in town debating when and how to show himself, what best way to insert himself back into her life. The dark and probably bad idea of standing ominously at the foot of her bed until she woke up occurred to him. He went forth with that plan until, clumsily, he knocked over a pile of books and realized Bonnie might not like it if he was there, and he fled. Normal people were complicated.
His heart stopped when he entered the living room. There she was, slumped on her couch with a knife sticking out her belly.
"Hardcore," he muttered to himself, only a little impressed. The wetness in his eyes began to dry up as he wiped it with his sleeves and sniffed back. As much as he wanted hug her to him and weep days away, familiar coldness began to spread its comfort within him.
This image wasn't the one he expected to see the first time he sat in her house with her. Times when he fantasized about being welcome in her house, he always envisioned it would begin awkward and horrible, but not quite so horrible as Bonnie being dead. Approaching her body with apprehension, he stepped lightly until he could crouch down before her and stare, too closely, into her half-lidded eyes gazing unfocused into nothing. She wasn't in there.
Kai sighed. "I'm sorry it came to this, Bonnie," he said. And seeing with little salivation the wide stain of blood soaking onto the couch from her clothes, feeling not only irritated but hurt again by her clear disregard for how much he needed that blood of hers, he felt it. The emotion he couldn't before identify. He didn't love her. That was far beneath them.
He was in love with her. That was what they called this feeling.
He hated thinking of it in those terms and he doubted he would ever say it to her in that way. Not that she needed to hear it in any way he could express it; she would laugh, or puke, or hit him, or all three. Even if he said it to her and he waited long enough to the point where she wouldn't hate it, what then? Marriage? Overrated, and pointless in this Hellscape. He already knew her opinion on moving in together. He had to ask himself what more he wanted from her, and why allowing himself to feel officially in love meant anything. He was used to everything meaning nothing; it was easiest.
He reached for the handle of the knife jutting from her body. He felt energy in the wood.
With his other hand, he tilted her face upward. He eyed momentarily her still features, taking the time to feel the nothingness when he touched her, before he kissed her still lips. He deepened it with an affectionate nip to her top lip, knowing she couldn't feel the pain or the love. He released her mouth from his just before the desire to use tongue turned the kiss creepier than he intended, and he backed to eye her again.
He drummed his fingers along the knife's handle in thought.
"Well," he sighed. "Good of a time as any." With his fingers tightening, he yanked. His mouth hung open in pleasure of the blade crossing her flesh on its way out but he couldn't decide whether he still liked this sensation or not, the trembling of a weapon in someone's body. Bonnie's especially.
Fully unsheathed from her gut, he set the knife in the center of the coffee table. He felt a vibrational teetering in the room and looked around. There wasn't much time left.
"I'll be back," he whispered to the lifeless lump of formerly Bonnie, and then he left to retrieve the ascendant.