Note: One of my favourite things about this story was trying to marry Elena with Jennifer Check from Jennifer's Body. To me, it seemed like a no-brainer, and brought a kind of Katherine energy to my Elena, which is like my ideal version of miss girl. Ph Balance, but for succubi, if you will. Another one of my favourite things is that this is the kind of fic that's not for everyone, so, if you're into it, just know we'd probably be great friends IRL.
Chapter Nine
Lover, You Should Have Come Over
When Elena came to, she was splayed haphazardly on the floor of the Salvatore den, with Tyler yanking with all of his might against his restraints.
"Thank fuck you're not dead," Tyler gasped. "This is already way too much." What a sweetheart.
"Yeah," Elena grunted, pulling herself upright, "No kidding."
"Where did your boyfriend go?" The football player wondered as Elena untied him.
"Not my boyfriend, and I don't know," Elena admitted, but then remembered something else, "Where did you go after the morgue?"
"I woke up in some dank place, a cave, maybe? There was this slimy small man and a woman with no face, I really don't know," the boy shrugged, "It's like she was looking for me, but not because of me, because of what happened to me."
"Because of what I did?" Elena swallowed. "...What happened?"
"She asked about you, and knew a lot about this ... stuff. She was kinda mean, like, bitchy about it, too. I could tell she wasn't helping me. She was using me for something."
"The body swap," Elena surmised. "But why would you appear when Bonnie vanished into thin air?"
"Are you, like, speaking in tongues?" Pulling a face, she fished out her cellphone and called Stefan.
Damon was certain that his facade-of-a-life that he'd rather come to enjoy had been blown to smithereens by his untimely departure. Once Stefan figured him out, his brother would never forgive him. Bonnie already despised him and Elena was pretty much always looking for a reason to rip his ass out of his throat.
There was no coming back from his abandoning them. Through a few loops of relocation spells, he bounced across a bunch of state lines to throw off his brother's inevitable tailing of him, and then he flung himself skyward, just as she'd taught him to, before delivering himself to her.
When her magic enveloped him, he knew he'd done the right thing.
...At least by her.
"What do you mean, gone?" Stefan echoed.
"Stefan, would I have called if I already had the answers?" Elena bit back. "What also doesn't make sense to me is the fact that my gut is telling me that it's the same woman who snatched Bonnie that brought Ty back from the dead," the succubus held up a hand to the footballer when he made to interject, "what isn't clicking is why Tyler can remember the interaction, but Bonnie is a blank slate."
"With your wounds littering his body, there's enough magic in him to use him as a conduit."
"God you witches and your weird words," Elena barked. "Is Bonnie okay?"
"Define okay," Stefan sighed. "She's asleep, I think. Her eyes are closed, but I doubt she's resting."
"Why would Damon leave us?" Elena wondered aloud. "He's the one who yanked me across town back to yours to bully Tyler into some kind of confession. When he didn't get that, he knocked us out and pulled a Houdini."
"Is there anything around you that looks out of place?" Stefan wondered.
"Damon's a drunk and an idiot, everything in your entire house looks out of place," She quipped in return.
"Something's not right," Stefan agreed. "Is Tyler okay?"
"I mean, sure," Elena gave the boy a once over. "He's alive and talking and all of his wounds are sealed over. They look months, if not years old somehow." Thanks to Jer, she knew well how to tell about scars, especially on a boy's forearms and wrists. She'd learned that lesson the hard way.
"Give me a few minutes," the witch on the other end of the line said, "I'll call you back."
"Fuck," Elena exhaled at length, snapping her flip phone shut. "What the damn hell is going on?"
"Is Bonnie okay?" Tyler asked after a beat. "You said something about her earlier."
"...I think so," Elena sighed. "I think the woman that brought you back also hijacked her when Damon tried to find you."
"Speaking of..." The footballer kept his eyes steady on her, "when you say 'find me' ... do you mean like neighbourhood watch, or what?"
"Oh right," Elena realised, "Look. I know you're the mayor's kid, and I know I totally murdered you and stuff, but, there are way scarier and stronger and weirder things out there than what happened between us. I don't even know how to explain it, because it's new to me, too. But, magic is real, and I'm a succubus now." She watched as Tyler's expression paged through about a dozen shapes before settling on bulged eyes and a slack jaw. "I know right?"
"Does my mom still think I'm dead?" Tyler realised.
"Everyone does," Elena felt dread sinking in. "What a shit show." She went to Damon's bar and fixed her and Tyler two fingers each from an ostentatious bottle whose label she recognised from Damon's bragging.
"Did you want to hurt me?" Tyler asked after a long moment, swirling the brown liquid in the tumbler.
"I don't know, I don't think so," Elena sighed after a long swig. "I just knew that I was hungry. After my killers threw me down the Hell-Hole, and I lived, I realised that something was, like, I don't know ... sharing my body with me. It's really hard to say no to the demon inside of you, it turns out." He watched a look pass over her features that seemed to dim the sparkle she usually had in her eyes, hollowing out her disposition for too long a moment.
He'd known her his whole life. The way you know all of the inhabitants of your small town off the shit-end of other small towns on the ragged edge of their country. Sure, she was a renowned bitch and hotter than the sun, but she'd lost her younger brother, hell, her whole family in one fell swoop over a particularly cold winter a few years back and she'd never been the same. And yes, she'd killed him. Straight up ripped his throat out. But a group of men had dragged her through the woods after setting The Grille on fire to sacrifice her to the devil. No one deserved that, either.
"Well...shit. It's kind of hard to hold a grudge now."
"Please do," Elena half-laughed, half-sighed. "All Bonnie does is forgive me, and my mother doesn't pay attention to anything I do or say. A little accountability could be good for me." A beat. "I am sorry for killing you, Tyler. It was really fucked up of me."
"...Did Matt really say that, before he died?" Tyler wondered and Elena barely stopped herself from snorting aloud.
"God no, the last time we spoke he tried to finger me at a kegger. There's no way he'd try to put us together. I know you loved him Ty, but Matt was a complete douchebag."
"...He really was, huh?" Tyler's eyes smarted as he swallowed the contents of the glass. "I miss him so much." Elena's mouth quirked to the side.
"Sorry for seducing you, and calling you bestie a douche," she said sincerely, dropping a hand on his shoulder and giving it a quick squeeze before letting go. "I mean it." Tyler nodded and emptied his tumbler, exhaling loudly at the burn scalding down his throat.
"Gilbert, you can apologise for everything but the seduction," Tyler told her as he refilled their glasses. "You wouldn't have needed a story anyway."
"No?" The boy shook his head. "...Noted."
"...Stefan?" Bonnie's voice was thick with sleep as her eyes tracked him in the darkness of her bedroom. "Is everything okay?"
"Damon's not answering his phone," the younger Salvatore fretted, as he came to sit beside her. "Elena said he spelled her and Tyler and vanished into thin air."
"What?" She was immediately awake and alert. "Why would he do that?" He didn't say anything for a while and she climbed slowly onto his lap and held him for another, using one hand to rub circles between his shoulder blades until his breathing evened out. Cupping his cheek with the other, she tilted his face up to hers. "You can tell me everything, Stefan. I promised you that you could and I meant it."
The younger Salvatore took the hand cupping his cheek and kissed Bonnie's palm, even as his inner thoughts were raging in turmoil.
"...If I say it out loud, I'm probably going to lose it," the witch admitted eventually, his voice low and tired. "Because it means I'm a fucking moron and my brother's been playing me for the last decade."
"A decade? Wait. What are you talking about, what do you mean?"
"...There you are," her voice called to him out of the darkness that had swallowed him after the incantation that had delivered him to her. "At last."
"Sheila?" Damon's tongue was thick and his throat was dry. Had he been crying? "How long has it been?"
"A couple of days," the priestess told him, "but to me? Add about twelve years, five months, three weeks, two days and nine hours."
"It hasn't been a few days. Stefan would have found us by now."
"You're either overestimating him, or underestimating me," Sheila warned, finally stepping into view. "Which is it?"
Damon was utterly speechless at the sight of her. Her wild hair fell in long ringlets, well past her waist. Where Bonnie's eyes were a bright green, Sheila's had turned hazel and an unnatural gold over the course of her long life. There were other subtleties, too. A scar here and there, a deeper shade of red over their plump asymmetrical lips. The mark of Sheila's signature smirk dimpling her left cheek. Ceremonial tattoos he'd spent hours of his life tracing in the quiet of their shared breathing.
"Holy shit," was all Damon could manage. "How?" She tilted her head at him. "How are you more beautiful than I remember?"
"Your longing blinds you," the priestess offered, trailing a finger down the side of his jaw. Damon felt the colour rush to his face at the feeling. He'd just about lost count of the times he'd begged Gaia to bring them back together. The gluttony of his wish was for the first mother to take them back, farther than from when they'd first met. To a time where Sheila was free of the lot she'd been burdened with now. Before she'd cast her first spell. Before he'd destroyed his family with his own denial. Damon wanted to take the love of his life and run into the twilight zone, disappearing them both forever. Leaving well enough alone. They'd done enough, they'd broken plenty. They'd burned their fair share.
Trickles of his missing time were already returning, and the dredges were accounting for the rasping of his voice, the dehydration, the shaking of his limbs.
"My memory of you is an injustice to your presence," Damon swore, climbing off of the high bed he'd been lying on, to stand in front of her. As he rose and moved, so did she. Forever in orbit of the other. Reigning in his true reaction, he slowly went down onto one knee before her. "Leader Bennett. What an honour it is to breathe with you."
"I am honoured to share our magic's air, too," Sheila smiled, cupping his cheek as he rose. "My perfect soldier. My dearest caster. My only love."
"This is weird," Tyler said mid-chew. "I feel like I'm waiting to wake up from a dream."
"No kidding," Bonnie agreed, sitting across from him and Elena and beside Stefan as she pushed her lunch around in the cafeteria. "Now that I know my boyfriend can make an entire town forget about something, my brain's kind of broken."
"It's a good thing he's such a do-gooder, or we'd be well and truly fucked," Elena agreed.
"There was no way Mystic Falls was going to survive the mayor's son getting slaughtered, smart ass," Stefan reminded Elena, "and if you think I'm strong-"
"-we get it. Our assess are grasses," Elena snapped. "My anxiety is through the roof as it is, Stefan. I've actually started taking that shit my mom leaves out for me."
"What?" Bonnie gaped. "That shit is strong, 'Lena. It's not a joke."
"Neither is my precious last nerve, Judgy," Elena seethed before exhaling long and loud. "Is this another one of his games, or what?"
"I don't know. Contrary to what you might think, being related to him doesn't make him less of a mystery to me."
"I don't think chewing each other up is going to help," Tyler offered, "as fun as it is to watch, guys."
"You're right," Elena drawled, "I'd rather talk about what we're doing after school."
"Do you wanna come over? My mom has council meetings until late, so she won't be side-eyeing either of us for not doing any homework." The boy's grin was a wicked one.
"Sounds perfect." Elena said nodding, before wiggling her brows at him cheekily. "What are you two nerds going to do? Lord of the Rings omnibus?"
"Spell omnibus," Stefan quipped with a shit-eating grin across the table at her. "Quickly."
Bonnie and Tyler shared a smirk at the bickering. The sound of Colin's jewellery announced the goth before he stopped at the head of their table. Stefan could immediately tell that something was off with the innately strange boy and his smile fell flat.
"Greetings," Colin spoke mechanically, "I am sure the anticipation of her next move has had you all on the edge of your seats." The boy's usually blue eyes were pitch black. The four of them went still. "The time for waiting is over."
"...Colin?" Bonnie's alarm was immediate. "What did she do to you?"
"I think the better question, Bonnie, is what did you do to me?"
Without further preamble, the boy revealed a long curving blade, causing Tyler to jump out of his seat, using his body to guard Elena. Bonnie gasped, but, without thinking jumped onto and across the lunch table and threw herself against Colin's body, smacking the boy backwards and knocking the knife out of his hand, averting it's path to the skin of his throat. She'd felt magic, Stefan's magic, propel her forward and faster to get to the boy in time.
Within seconds the school security had clamoured over to the boy and on top of him, relieving Bonnie of her duty.
Inside of Mystic Falls' only hospital, Abby Bennett was up to her neck in paperwork, as usual.
A knock on her office door redirected her attention, her eyes connecting with the face of her daughter.
"When did you get contacts?" Abbey wondered, her gaze going back to the case file in front of her.
"I'm trying out a new look," 'Bonnie's' voice had a timbre to it now, a mellifluous mischief in its tone. Her mother didn't like it one bit.
"A part of your new rebellious streak, I'm sure," Abbey sighed, tossing the file aside and crossing her arms to give her daughter her undivided attention. "Did you come to bother me, or?"
"A kid tried to kill himself in front of me and Stefan at the school cafeteria, today," Abby's eyes bulged. "He's a friend and they have him on suicide watch now, so, I came to check on him."
"What the hell is going on with you lot these days?" Abby shook her head, aghast, "Is there a new drug? Something we need to know about?"
"Colin's always been a little depressive," Abby pursed her lips, "But no one expected this. Spectacles aren't usually his thing."
"Colin. Colin Gray?" 'Bonnie' nodded. "The kid who was selling Jeremy drugs before he OD'd? Since when are the two of you friends?"
"Jeremy OD'd on his mother's medication, not weed, mom. I know you know this. I know Colin from English class. We're the top two," 'Bonnie' explained. "He says I'm Sylvia Plath and he's Edgar Allen Poe." Abby pulled a face in repulsion.
"I don't care for either of those analogies, given his current circumstances ... and yours," Abby pointed her fountain pen toward 'Bonnie's' eyes.
"...You really can't tell, can you?" 'Bonnie' asked, tone shifting suddenly.
"Tell, what, Bonnie?" The girl smiled a slow, skew, serrated, unnerving smile.
"Mother of the year," Sheila scoffed under her breath before waving a hand over Abby's face and rendering her unconscious.
Damon knew that Sheila had drawn every ounce of Bonnie's likeness out of his observations of the teenager.
Not passing comment on the level of detail he'd absorbed, or how, she'd siphoned the knowledge from him and rewarded him with his only desire before her departure. She'd been the one who'd burned him clean of the last ten years of his assignment. He felt the way he did the day he'd learned about the orders against her. The Parkers, the move to Mystic Falls, the boarding house, Bonnie, Elena ... everything belonged to her now. All that was left inside of him ... was her.
"Did you miss me?" Sheila asked as she gyrated on top of him, leaving him breathless beneath her. He felt torn in two. Even so, both of those two parts were hers. Everything he had was hers. Everything he was ... hers. Thrust after thrust, she scored her name back onto his heart. Renewed. Damon heard himself moaning, panting, begging her for what she was happy to give him.
He was finally free of his yearning, his longing, his wishful thinking. All he'd wanted was this. Ten years for a few hours. A fair trade for damnation.
"No," he growled against her mouth, flipping them over to show her the depth of his gratitude for his liberation. Her eyes sparkled at his fervour as he drove into her, arching his back. "Nothing existed before this moment right now," he swore as she wrapped her legs around his waist, mewling in his ear as she clawed up and down his back. Hard, powerful strokes brought her to orgasm time and time again. From behind, laying beside each other, legs at every odd angle. There was nothing to sate either of them, apart from the words 'again' and 'more'.
Palming her breasts he heard their bodies working together and against each other at once, the feeling of finally having sex with the person he wanted to have sex with, dreamt always of being with, breathing with, doing for ... when she tightened around him, her fingers in his mouth kept it open, letting the priestess enjoy the raw sound that his orgasm called out of him.
She left him like that, reeling, to move forward with the next phase of her plan.
A/N: Well, well, well. If it isn't another bad bitch on the block.