The last thing she remembered was a pinhole of light. Or was it the first thing she saw?
Little time existed in death. One second she was feeling her energy drain out in waves of blood and the next she felt entirely renewed. The evolution was so quick she couldn't discern whether the sense of renewal was a hallucination of death or the beginning of her transition.
She had died before. This death felt different.
She opened her mouth first, not her eyes, expecting the infamous ache in her gums, feeling out for a pounding in her temples, dryness in her throat, hunger. Her tongue slid over the tops of her teeth, searching for unusual points, recoiling midway at the thought of herself baring a set of fangs like Kai's. While frightening, part of it seemed okay; a way to appear as threatening as she wanted to wouldn't be so bad at all.
But nothing. Nothing stood out. She let her eyelids flutter open and thought her vision would be jagged, would be unsteady like watching her life through a handheld camera. Or would it be easier already to see through the dark? For her house was pitch with night.
All was still except a minor sensation that another witch was present. Another. She sensed him like always.
Bonnie sat up, marveling at the lack of lethargy in her muscles. She felt incredibly hydrated and undoubtedly alive, but in a fresher way than ever before. It was like waking up from the perfect amount of sleep with the sense that she'd had good dreams.
The shadowed shape of a man in the chair across from her caught her eye and she jumped. She held her chest in surprise and noted the spirited beat within and secondly the dampness of the bloodstain on her clothes. She really wasn't gone for long.
"Welcome back," Kai said.
Bonnie moved her hand to her forehead, as if she could physically still the slew of thoughts rising to her consciousness. Among sensations coming to light, Kai's magic reaching for her. This she could feel. Inwardly, she cursed.
"For a minute I considered feeling offended that you didn't at least leave me a note. Then I realized you didn't plan on dying for good, did you?"
"It didn't work," she murmured, half asking and half knowing.
"Nope," Kai shook his head, an awful smirk coming to play at his lips.
"Did you heal me?" she asked, ready to hit him with a spell for daring to save her life. Although, how sweet would that be of him to save her from herself?
Don't think like that.
"Oh, no, you died. No worries."
"Then how...?" she began, and something struck her. "Wait… What are you doing in here?"
Kai was in her house. She never invited him into her house, but he was in her house. Kai Parker, ruiner of her life, sitting in her Grams' chair, starting to smile at her like he knew her thoughts and she wanted to smack him.
"I didn't say you could come in," she said, starting to spit her tone. And when he just kept smiling at her, she pressed. "Kai? What happened to the invitation barrier?"
"Yeah, that… Definitely siphoned that up my first night back in town."
Bonnie couldn't close her mouth. Her jaw hung open and her lips pulled down into a panicking frown and she thought she might hyperventilate. She felt like an idiot. The invitation barrier, the very thing which she believed kept her safe from him for the last weeks, the thing which she held to be symbolic of her choice to be with or without him, was an illusion.
"And you just acted all this time like it was there? You let me think I was safe when you— What is that?"
A kind of trinket set on the coffee table reflected a moonbeam in her eye when she moved her head. For a millisecond it didn't strike her as the kind of thing to let herself be distracted by mid-sentence, until a double-take confirmed a familiar little something to the object. It was antique-like, a glass sphere with some kind of delicate, planetary set-up inside of it. It looked like something that would react in a mathematical way given the right elements: a chant, a celestial event, Bennett blood.
"Is that what I think it is?" she asked in awe, suddenly forgetful of trespassed barriers both figurative and literal.
Kai nodded.
"Where'd you find it?" she asked eagerly, reaching out to pick it up and examine. Kai swiped it up before she could and held it teasingly.
"In my closet," he answered nonchalantly, rolling the ball back and forth between his hands for her to see.
"Kai. For real. Where was it?"
"Bonnie. For real. I've had it this whole time."
She glared death at him, but he continued on some kind of introductory speech.
"You know," he said, "You're the only person I've ever known to be so selfless it's actually selfish. What was your plan? You were gonna transition and then what? We'd both feed off blood bags for the rest of eternity? Does that sound at all appetizing to you? Did you consider for a second that I don't feel half the nourishment or contentment from a blood bag than I do from you? Did you consider that maybe in a place like this your transition wouldn't work and you would just die, and I'd be stuck alone again? Or that your attempt to break the spell on Elena would just kill you both?"
"Is she…?"
"I don't know, Bonnie," he snapped. "We're here. She's there. I don't know if you killed her. But she sure as hell isn't awake, so suck on that."
"But if I'm alive—"
"You're alive because that's how it works here."
"What do you mean?"
"There was a little more to my grand plan where I link your life to Elena's. I did a lot of thinking in 1903. I hoped it was temporary, what you did to me. I hoped it was a good trick to teach me a lesson, because I learned. Trust me. And when you didn't come back for me… Well, I had time. I had materials to work with. I had anger. Pain. Like-minded inmates. Seems at this point, given how close we've become that I should regret it, but I don't. Not even for a second."
She shifted uncomfortably, running her fingers through her hair and leaving them there, closing her eyes in effort to blacken and to silence for better understanding.
"I don't…what?" she almost whispered, lifting her eyelids to watch her world turn upside down yet again.
"And the planning. Holy hell. Literally. Having to magically insert the memory of me being upset when we got here…. Having to act all this time like it was an unfortunate accident… Lying can be so exhausting. But now that you've gone and done this to yourself, you're gonna figure out something's up. So I might as well come out with it, right? You might ask, 'But how did you do it all by yourself?'" he mocked a girlish tone. "To that I say…I'm just that fucking good. Also I channeled a little bit from my big dead coven. And you might ask, 'But why?' Same reason any of these places are made. To punish. And you're probably gonna ask me like a thousand times if I can just please pretty please get you out of here. And a thousand times back, for the rest of forever, which you in fact can experience, I'm going to say no way in Hell, babe."
"Kai…" she warned between grinding molars.
"My coven didn't make this place for me, Bonnie. I made it for you."
He waited patiently with gleefully glaring eyes, not afraid to keep them trained directly on hers. He seemed so confident in his crime.
"I'll kill you," was the first thing she said, and she said it without theatrics. She meant it.
"I wouldn't. I'm the leader of the Gemini coven, may they R.I.P., so prison worlds are linked to me, remember? Kill me and this place will detonate, with you in it. But please, put that to the test. Everyone's crossed off my To-Kill list, I got to bang you and I finally ate Fool's Gold the other day, so now I can welcome oblivion."
"Fuck you!"
"Hey, at least I gave you an escape clause."
"You just get to punish me for punishing you for the complete fucking nightmare you put me through?!"
"Uh, you stabbed me first. Like when is that fact going to penetrate the fortress of your saintliness? Being Bonnie Bennett doesn't exempt you from blame."
Bonnie stood and prepared herself to say it for the first and last time, because she refused to fall in line with his assumption. This one time had to be good. It had to be visceral. Not too pleading, but not too meaningless. It had to convey strictly in tone and facial expression how much she needed him to say yes.
She hung her head and let her eyes fall sadly into him, the fuller and rounder for them to appear. She let her lips quiver. "Kai…take me home," she pleaded with a little too much grit in her teeth and it sounded all wrong. There was no way she would get the answer she wanted.
As expected, Kai just shrugged and gave an offhand, "No." And her heart pounded and it was harder to breathe, and she wanted to both scream and gasp for air. "Not even if I could," Kai concluded.
"What does THAT mean?" she shrieked.
"Whoa," he said in reaction to the outburst. "I might've tweaked the prison world spell a little bit. Even with the ascendant, a full moon and a bloody Bonnie, we're stuck as fuck. Hah, get it? 'Cause we're stuck and we fucked. And it rhymes."
The tears of lost dignity announced themselves. Bonnie felt that she couldn't catch up with her reality, with herself. Everything Kai told her needed more time to be processed yet time did not wait. Kai stood to join her and she felt as though she was watching him through a future lens and certain ways that she wanted to react could not be honored. She wanted to kill him and she couldn't break from her mental plane to the physical; she wanted to call him the worst names imaginable and she didn't think she would be heard.
"I never lied to you when I said we can't get back," he said softly as he approached her. He reached out and thumbed a tear from its roll down her cheek. Too enveloped in digestion, she couldn't move to shoo him off. Fortunately he knew better than to evolve the comforting gesture into an embrace. After the one tear, he kept his hands off.
"I know you hate me right now. But I think you're gonna learn to like it here."
"Oh my god," she mused, because it was clearer now why he never seemed bothered by imprisonment, regardless of who put them there. Being stuck here, forever, with her, in a fucked up domestic fairytale, was just what he wanted. "You're not just punishing me. You're retiring, and I'm the fucking retirement cake. You like this. Otherwise you wouldn't be here."
Kai displaced his jaw, bit his lip and tilted his head in a teasing way that made her livid. With the foulest satisfaction, he said, "Sue me."
"Get out," she commanded gutturally.
"Don't you think we should settle this? I really feel like if I just leave now, things will be awkward next time we see each other."
"Get. Out."
"Seriously, Bonnie. I'm open to punishment. You can stab me with most things. Or batter me with something, whatever sounds more fun for you is fun for me. Or I could make it up to you some other way. How many bouquets do you want? Fancy dinners? We could eat out. Or I could just eat you out. Even though I can't get over how cannibalistic that sounds."
"Get out, get out get OUT GET OUT GET OUT GET OUT!" she screamed in loudening succession, all the while feeling a vengeful black magic congregating in her veins, rushing toward her hands which cocked in Kai's direction. In little time he began droning in what appeared to be a correct amount of the pain she wanted him to feel; his face was turning pink, the vessels in his forehead rising while he squeezed his palms against his temples, fingernails digging into the skin as if he needed to claw his own face off to end the suffering. She willed herself to ignore, rather expertly, the crooning between her legs, not knowing whether it was the thought of his face down there or how much pain he was in that turned her on in that moment. She could feel her own heart hammering toward the brink of arrest; it was either too thrilling to break him down or too much for her to watch. Breathe. Kai's body curled and while he remained staggering on his feet, he looked about to drop any moment. Just die already.
Tired of his squirming, she twisted her fingers like taking the cap off an invisible bottle and a harrowing crack filled the room.
He awoke outside, alone, close to daybreak.
Apparently willing to risk the collapse of their world in a deadly game of Kai vs. The Sun, she had dragged his dead, broke-neck body out of her home and left him on the porch where he belonged: unwelcome.
Despite the brisk baby-blue wind cutting his face, there remained a tiny flame in his chest and he knew that she was still inside. He would've expected her to run. To disappear into a far-off corner of the world and play catch me if you can for the next year or two until the inevitable desire for company drew them back together. No. She stayed. But he couldn't be sure whether it was because she knew she'd have to forgive him eventually or because she was attached by sickness and sadness to the ghost town replica of her home.
Whatever the reason, she knew the truth. Truth club, party of two. And it felt good, but he'd been brutal about it. While waiting for her to come back to life, he ran through versions of speeches in his mind, rehearsing, planning to tell it gently. But it was a hard truth to tell and no manner of kindness would soften the blow. And predictably, he found that he could not make his mouth say words without being a snippy snarky snake. It was pathological.
She needed time.
Why not reject the version of events where he pines for pardon two blocks away over a stubborn number of months, and instead just go on a blood-bag-bingey vacation?