Here you are again.
Bonnie sat unladylike in a bar stool at the lowly lit Mystic Grill, suckling from a full, dark glass of wine.
Weeks. Weeks alone.
She refused to stoop to a locator spell. Let the evil bastard come back from wherever he was whenever he dared.
Yet sometimes her ribs ached as if they were cracking apart.
The loneliness whispered in her ears each day, telling her it was her fault that he left her. And maybe he lied when he said there was no way out. Maybe that part was a test. Maybe she didn't pass, and he went back to reality. Maybe he really left her.
Of course, he couldn't have done that. She stole the ascendant from him after she killed him.
It was a little test of her own. If he went back into her house to retrieve it after waking up, it meant the ascendant was still valuable. If he didn't, it meant he was confident in the impossibility that Bonnie might ascend home without him.
He wasn't lying. When she slit her palm and dribbled blood over the ascendant, said the spell while watching the red droplets roll over the spherical glass and glanced from that to the full moon above…nothing happened. And the next time she opened her front door, he was gone. She couldn't feel him either. He was far gone, somewhere unknown. He left no note, never texted, never called. So it was true. So they were stuck as fuck.
Yet some part of her knew better than to trust him, even when he declared his worst. Some part of her still hoped that he left a loophole. Meanwhile, the ascendant slept in a basket of dirty laundry. And Bonnie drank herself at the town bar.
She grimaced just thinking of it. She hated that ascendant. When she held it in her hand it invoked the worst of feelings from her; it vibrated of faithfulness to its wielder. That was mainly why she hid it out of sight, cushioned on all sides by clothing. It was less to give a potentially snooping Kai some trouble than it was to get it out of her mind. Still, the thought of it screeched in her brain.
She supposed it felt a little better, knowing the truth. What before was an uncomfortable anxiety was now a resolute misery. She'd felt that Kai was keeping something from her; well this was it. And it did explain some things, particularly her lack of menses. There was no moon cycle to push and pull her body. In another sense, despite this world being like a diorama of the real one, she couldn't deny that she always felt connected to it. When she was dropped into 1994 with Damon, there was an obvious disconnect and neither of them knew where they were, why they were there, or how to feel okay. Here, she felt an unmistakable sense of belonging, no matter how hard she tried to fight it with how much she wanted to leave. But it was a perfect prison, wasn't it? Everything was there; her up-to-date belongings, favorite movies, music, and more. Damon was going to kill her back home. In a way, her prison was protection. In a way, even though half of it served his evil plan, Kai made sure she got to live.
Remind me to thank him, she scoffed at herself and swallowed wide mouthfuls of wine until her glass was empty. Blurry, she twirled the glass in her hand as if to notify a ghost bartender that she was dry, and she frowned when she realized she would have to accept for a long time that no one would refill her. Only him, if he was there.
Weeks.
She wanted him to come back so she could brutalize him again. Punch his teeth in and watch them regrow. Or rip his heart out and make it permanent. No, she couldn't do that. Because then, well…disaster. Then it would just end.
She found it poetic. To kill herself, she would have to kill him.
She threw her glass into the liquor shelves just to hear it shatter, just to watch the shards sprinkle upon the floor, followed by one whiskey bottle cascading. She had to hand it to Kai: destruction was empowering.
She didn't know how she was only just beginning to like it so much. She'd been a captive to prison worlds more time than not in the last two years. All of her time spent alone had amounted to a certain mentality. It would've come sooner if not for having a roommate those first few months of prison world life in 1994; she couldn't get time alone then. Even when she was the aggressor in their fights, Damon came moseying around for bittersweet bad company. She was shocked to find that he was less tolerable of solitude than she. But she accepted it because her tolerance was only slightly higher. And she acquiesced to his companionship.
Would that happen with Kai? The two of them had bad history, less in amount than Damon but worse in trauma, to get past. But in time, as with Damon, wasn't it inevitable that she would mold to his company? Even by the time Bonnie made it out of 1994, when she reconnected with Damon and he was so proud of her and so relieved and so glad that she made it, their bond held true and strong. The things they went through after only so much time were thicker than any of the terror that happened before that. That was why it hurt her so much when, as if a switch flipped, he could just betray her.
At least in this world she was somebody's number one.
It was obvious, wasn't it? He liked her. She couldn't tell whether he even figured that out yet. But why else would he land himself there, with her, in domestic dream land?
He was improving, admittedly. Most sociopaths just kill the ones they love when the ones they love hurt them.
Love.
She doubted he was capable.
A bad idea had been burning inside her. Burning for days.
If there was some way back home, something he wasn't telling her, maybe she could play along. Play nice, elicit from him the kinds of pleasures he never imagined, the kinds of feelings he wouldn't understand, and use them against him. Maybe she could fuck the truth out of him. Maybe she could love it out of him. She could win her ticket home, turn around and leave him with a mouthful of her dust. Suck on that for eternity.
She liked this plan. The more she thought it out the more she missed Kai, only because she was eager to make his new heart her plaything.
A clock on the wall struck midnight. 11:59 on her phone flicked to 12:00. Like magic, the wine in the bottle on the bar beside her raised up two glasses worth. Everything in its right place. Everything but the glass on the floor. That was hers to undo.
12:01. A new day in damnation.
Maybe it would be the day Kai came back.
Bonnie smirked. It was dark out. By real world standards, all stores would be closed. But right then, nothing sounded better than shopping. Decidedly she stepped down from her stool. On second thought, she poured a little half glass from the now full wine bottle, downed the entire pour in just a few gulps, and on third thought, she refilled the glass again and carried it outside with her. After all, it was her world. Wine in hand and evil plan in her front pocket, Bonnie proceeded to stumble her way to the shopping strip.
It took a good half hour, but she eventually did find herself at her destination: the town's best lingerie shop. She let herself in. All in a blur, she navigated through the back room until she figured out the lighting system, as well as the music so that she had something to listen to. When all was set to her liking, she fulfilled a dream she never thought she would: stuffing a large bag full of the prettiest, most expensive underthings, some for herself to enjoy, some for someone else to enjoy on her. Seeking out the sexiest underwear for the purpose of impressing Kai was a sobering thought, so she drank to it, and she was sure not to lose track of her wine glass as she continued filling up her bag. By the time she felt finished, she was sufficiently drunk enough not to care about the weight she was about to pull on her walk back home. In her dizzy mind, it was worth it.
Kai frowned at the sun just settling into the ends of the earth.
He'd slept in the airport and now waited for darkness to fall. He needed absolute certainty that he wouldn't burn to death if he was going to pilot a plane with any sort of concentration. Plane crashes in 1994 weren't such a big deal; that was his prison; he wouldn't die. This time, being a vampire of course he'd survive the crash but, the threat of daylight coming while he was still swimming to shore was enough to keep his head screwed on straight.
He wanted to kick himself every day for designing this world just for her and not the two of them. At the time, he liked the art of it. And he hated respecting Bonnie's daylight; he hated not having a daylight ring. But for how much he hated the inconvenience, the risk enticed him. The fact that one wrong move in the cockpit might mean the ruin of him, Bonnie's prison and any chance of having sex with her again…well, it was dead exhilarating. He really liked himself and his masterpiece of a prison world, and he liked sex with Bonnie a lot… anyone who liked anything as much as he liked those three would be crazy to risk losing them all. But that was why they were running fool's errands of lives, and why he was about to eat a croissant and go fly a fucking airplane.
He sighed and grinned stupidly at the sun's last light fading from the sky.
"Night night," he cooed, and rose from the chair in his gate. It was time. Time to walk down the gangway. Time to flip switches. Time to fly. And as he walked, he thought of what he was heading for and a sweet warmth spread in his chest, a feeling so saccharine he smiled wider and he had to close his eyes to contain his soul.
The life ahead of him.
As he steered the speeding plane to flight, he watched the lights and countryside grow smaller. He said, "Au revoir." Paris had been great, but twenty six days away from Bonnie was plenty.