Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Bonnie wakes with her heart already climbing. 

The dream she was having—something random and nonsensical—rips away like wet paper, but the feeling it leaves behind is a hook; something tugging low in her chest, an ache that isn’t pain so much as instruction.

It’s like a magnet behind her ribs, tugging her south, tugging her forward up out of the comfort of her bed. Her room is dim, the digital clock bleeding red numbers that highlight the ungodly hour. 

Her father’s door down the hall is closed. Silent. He isn’t home, and for once Bonnie is grateful for his absence. Grateful for the fact that there’s no need for her to sneak around. 

She’s moving before she can even think about it.

Sweatshirt, keys, the creak of her front door; then the night air, cool and tickling as she slips outside, the late summer Virginia air pressing warm and damp against her skin. 

The pull in her chest tightens when she looks toward the road, towards where her car sits idle in her father’s driveway. 

What the heck is going on? 

She tells herself she’s not sleepwalking because her eyes are open and she’s choosing every step. But the pull she feels makes choice feel like a courtesy, not a truth.

Her car coughs to life once she gets inside and turns the ignition, yellow headlights slicing through the dark. 

She’s not sleepwalking, she’s not sleepwalking, she’s not—

…

But then what the hell is she doing? 

Her hands are steady on the wheel, but every other part of her body twitches in slight agitation. 

The last time something like this happened, the last time she felt like the movements of her body were not her own, she woke up in a forest bloody with the imprint of Damon’s teeth in her neck. 

Yet now the county roads unspool beneath her, just a blacktop with pale dashed lines, the world thinned to deer-flash eyes at the tree line and the occasional ruined billboard. She passes the old bridge, the last gas station for miles, then nothing but night and the dull pressure behind her spine insisting that she needs to go, go, go.

By the time she finally arrives at her destination, turning down the long gravel drive, her shoulders ache from how tightly she’s been holding them.

The house at the end of it looks like it’s trying to sink into its own foundation; porch slumped, paint peeling in strips like sunburnt skin. 

Bonnie swallows. 

This was the house they had only just saved Elena from the day before...

And now it seems like fate has seen fit to lead her right back up to the front door of a haunted Barbie dreamhouse. 

Bonnie hesitates before finally killing her ignition and getting out of her car. She walks up the driveway until her fingers graze the edge of the door, where paint flakes into her palm like ash.

But her magic hums in answer to her progress, a low electric buzz that intensifies the tug, as if the house itself is inhaling and beckoning her inside.

...

So she goes inside. And inside, the air is stale with the smells of old dust and wet wood, the plaster peeling off the walls in sheets. The floor gives a complaining creak under her first step, moonlight slipping through the broken windows and laying pale bars across the boards. 

God, this is so creepy…

But Bonnie tries to ignore her mounting anxiety, closing her eyes for a moment before following this weird pull down the hall, past a room full of collapsed furniture, past a collapsed settee and a chandelier that died gracelessly on the floor, all the way to the parlor with the ruined fireplace before—

…

—before she stops. Halted in her steps by the sight before her. 

"Oh my god..."

He’s staked to the wall like some kind of weird pinned specimen, a length of wood disappearing between his ribs and burying itself in his chest. He’s upright, head bowed as though he fell asleep standing. And there’s nothing panicked about him, nothing frantic; even immobilized, he still looks composed and elegant. 

He has the kind of profile that looks like it belongs carved into an old coin...

And really...he shouldn’t be beautiful to her like this, but he is.

Her pulse does something ridiculous that isn’t even the tiniest bit helpful, and a laugh bubbles up her throat because the alternative is a small, undignified scream. 

But Bonnie is just barely keeping her sanity wrapped tight around her fist like a leash. And her pulse has settled into a strange counterpoint, something that is both hers and someone else braided beneath it. 

The tug has quieted the closer she's gotten, satisfied now that she’s found its source.

She can hear the house breathe.

She can hear herself breathe.

…

She can hear him breathe.

…

His eyes fly open, and for a heartbeat, neither of them moves. 

Then his gaze—dark, lucid—checks the distance between them, the ruin of the room, then fixes on her with an intensity that has her arrested. 

Bonnie’s right wrist prickles with a telling heat, the ink there seeming to pulse in time with her fluttering heart. 

She doesn’t look down. She doesn't want to. 

This can't possibly be...

...

No. It can't. No way. 

She doesn’t look away from him when his mouth shapes around a voice that sends a shudder down her spine. 

“Who are you?” His tone is low and wary, yet still one-hundred-percent creepy with him being pinned like a sacrificial goat to cracked drywall. 

However, her name still leaves her mouth before she can even think to guard it. “Bonnie…my name is Bonnie.”

“Bonnie?” The stranger tastes it, repeating her name softly as if testing the weight. 

Her response is slightly breathless. “Yes…”

“Do you have a last name, Bonnie?”

Her spine straightens, some reflexive edge of pride flaring deep in her gut. “Bennett. Bonnie Bennett.”

“Interesting.”

“Is it?” The word comes out a touch drier than she intends, but sarcasm is easier than admitting that being studied by him right now makes her nervous in ways she doesn’t want to understand.

The stranger's head tilts, and she can see the faintest narrowing of his eyes behind the gesture. “Why have you come here, Bonnie Bennett?”

“I don’t know.”

…

He doesn’t seem to like that answer. 

“You don’t know?”

Bonnie drags a breath in, and is slightly surprised when the truth comes out with it. “I had a dream. I was drawn here…I was drawn to—t-to…” Her words fail her, and she can feel the tug returning in her chest, insistent like the palming of a hand. 

It’s both steadying and strange…

Bonnie wets her lips, finally forcing the words past them. “I was drawn to you…”

“And why would that be?”

She stares at him, at a loss for words to say. 

Or rather, avoiding the words she knows she needs to say. 

...

Because she knows what this is. 

Has seen it experienced by others, even without ever having experienced it for herself until now. 

It's the mark at her wrist that pulls her towards him still...

And there are a dozen safer lies that she can come up with, but her wrist burns again, insistently warm, and the urge to name the thing between them is sudden and reckless. 

“I don’t…I don’t know, I—” 

God, why can’t she just say it? 

Bonnie exhales, then lifts her right hand, turning it so the inside of her wrist catches the moonlight. Because his name has been inked there since the day she turned sixteen; ELIJAH in a precise, elegant script, a stunning black baccara rose beneath it so finely etched she can count the layered petals. 

It's one of six marks that lay scattered across her body. One of the first she'd ever gotten when she turned sixteen. 

She remembers thinking back then that the flower by his name looked old-fashioned and boring, lacking any real excitement. 

But now…

Bonnie flips her hand to make sure he can catch both his name and the mark. “Is this…is this yours?”

She knows it is. Yet a part of her still feels the need to ask, as if she doesn't do so, then the night might show itself to be some kind of wistful dream.

He follows the line of her wrist like it's something he intimately recognizes, and something minute shifts across his face as he reads his name upon her skin. Not surprise exactly, because he seems far too controlled for that, but a flicker of recognition that lands like flint in dry grass. 

“Ah…” His gaze assesses her mark with something like reverence and something like resignation. 

And then—because apparently this night has suddenly decided it wants to start juggling knives—he moves.

He plants his palm against the broken coat rack speared through his chest, fingers splayed, and with a steady inhale, he wrenches it free.

 ...

The sound is disgusting to her ears.

Like wet wood tearing.

And the smell of iron is so strong that it leaves Bonnie feeling a bit unsteady on her feet as it quickly fills her nose.

The bloody makeshift stake thuds to the floorboards between them, and the house seems to flinch with it. He staggers forward a fraction, bracing a blood-slick hand against the wall, and her heart slams so hard against her chest that she hears it in her ears. 

The hole in his chest knits itself back together as she watches with a morbid fascination, his skin pulling tight around the wound like a stitch, the worst of it sealing in the time it takes her to blink.

Then this man, this vampire, this Elijah, smooths his ruined shirt out as if nothing happened at all, oozing unhurried precision as he loosens his left cuff and rolls the linen back.

...

And there it is.

Her proof.

Her name written starkly on his skin, each letter shaped by a hand that predates hers by centuries. “And I’m guessing this is yours?”

Bonnie jerks as if she’s about to move forward, only stopping herself within the last second. Because there, on skin so pale it reads as porcelain in the moonlight, is her name.

BONNIE.

It's written in strong, sure strokes, and beneath it, a small amaranth blossom that lies there like a promise, simple and lovely and absolutely so jarring to see up close. 

Her breath catches, and the room suddenly feels smaller, the sight of it sparking something hot and startling in her chest that she isn’t prepared to name. 

Bonnie’s throat works around nothing. “Well then…” She drops her arm, shaky humor flicking through her like static. “That explains the sleepwalking. And being pulled to this decrepit little mausoleum of a house.” 

She nods to the splinter of wood that was once braced through his chest, at the dark smear on the wood. “But I was under the impression that they’d killed you…”

He studies her the way a historian might examine an artifact whose provenance both intrigues and offends him. “You know of my two would-be executioners?”

“I do…I was the one who helped them find you.” She sets her jaw. “To be fair, you gave me a very bad first impression when it came to the safety of my friend.”

“Ah yes…the doppelgänger.”

“Her name is Elena.”

“And where is the lovely Elena now?”

Bonnie folds her arms to hide the way her hands want to tremble. There is no version of this where she blurts out Elena’s location to the man who just shoulder-pulled a stake out of his own heart like he was untacking a poster. “Why would I tell you that?”

Elijah’s tone is patient, almost courteous. “Contrary to whatever story you’ve been told…the safest place your friend could be is in my care. I’ve no intention of harming her.”

“Then what do you want with her?”

“Retribution. Revenge.” He lifts his eyes to the fractured ceiling, as if considering which stars he’s left alive to name. “But those are only two verses in a much longer tale I don’t have the luxury of recounting.”

“I’d beg to differ,” she counters, gesturing at the dead fireplace, at the corpse of a chandelier, and at the fact that she’s even here at all. “We have all night.”

A ghost of amusement touches his mouth. “Will your friends not panic when they realize you’ve vanished? When they learn whose company you’re keeping?”

“That’s not my immediate concern.” Bonnie parries, determined in a way that has become very familiar to her. “They don’t even know you’re breathing yet.”

A dark brow raises in response. “And what is your immediate concern, Bonnie?”

Technically she currently has too many to count. 

But Bonnie thinks for a moment, counting her many reasons, before finally giving him a simple shrug.  “Figuring out your intentions. Your motives.” Her eyes hold his. “Deciding if I can trust you.”

Because this man might be her soulmate, but she has no actual idea who he really is.

And what she does know are facts that do not currently hold him in the most favorable light. 

Elijah scoffs at her words. “Trust…such an elusive little currency.” The words are fond and bitter all at once. “I find it near impossible to maintain…”

She wonders what he might mean by that. Wonders what betrayals he’s gone through that have cast such shadows across his face and eroded the idea of honor and trust within his heart. 

“So do I.” Bonnie agrees, letting out a shallow breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. “But I’d like to think I was brought here for a reason. That this—” Her gaze flickers to her wrist and back to his eyes. “—means something.”

“Well, of course it does.” Elijah's tone is full of courtroom certainty, and he speaks like a man enumerating a contract he has drafted, signed, and litigated all in the same breath. “It binds us in one of the most sacred ways known to man. A bond that is unbreakable and absolute.”

Bonnie blinks, processing his words, and then just barely resists the urge to roll her eyes. 

“Okay,” she says, drawing out the word like it’s a question. She suddenly feels very young and very stubborn, “but what does it mean to you?”

...

It’s then that Elijah gives her his first real smile of the night, gleaming white teeth winking at her playfully. “Clever girl…” The praise lands exactly where it's meant to, curling somewhere deep inside her gut. “To me…it means potential. I know little of you, Bonnie Bennett, just as you know little of me. There is potential here…but whether it becomes squandered or fulfilled is yet to be seen.”

She takes a step closer before she can think better of it, and the tug tightens again, approval warm under her breastbone. “Look…work with me here? Please? Maybe I can help?”

For a moment, he just stares at her, bewildered, as if the idea of her helping him is something utterly foreign and impossible. Then, slowly, his posture eases, his hands slipping into his pockets as his gaze settles on her. “Helping me will demand a great deal of compromise.”

“I’d like to think I’m a pretty good negotiator.”

His brows jump again. “Do you?”

“Only one way for you to find out.”

He considers her for a long moment, then changes battlefields without warning. “What do you know…of the sun and moon curse, Bonnie?”

She blinks at the sudden change in scripture. “Absolutely nothing?”

“Then the first thing you should know is that it’s a fabrication. A story dressed in glitter and promises meant to send others chasing the prize we truly want.” His mouth shapes the word with precise distaste. “The moonstone.”

Bonnie perks up at the word. 

The moonstone?

That, at least, she knows about, and that simple word cuts through the fog of half-truths and legend, pulling her back into something tangible, something she can actually touch with her own hands. 

But with it also comes the memory of where it is, who has it, and just how dangerous it makes the people surrounding it. Still…for the first time since this conversation started, Bonnie finally feels like she has a foothold.

“That I do know about.”

Elijah’s gaze sharpens at her words, a flicker of interest cutting through his otherwise composed demeanor. “Do you know where it is?” He watches her closely as he asks the question, as if waiting to catch her in a lie. “Elena seemed to have some idea.”

Now she’s just relieved that they managed to save Elena before Elijah had the chance to force a location out of her.

Every so subtly, Bonnie tilts her chin in response. “I do.”

His tone hardens, not cruel, but implacable. “Then this will be our first point of negotiation. Tell me where to find it, and I’ll tell you exactly how precarious your friend’s life really is. Don’t…” His gaze cuts to the stake on the ground, a reminder and a threat all at once. “And our conversation ends here.”

The house is very quiet, and Bonnie can hear the thundering of her pulse in her ears.

She pictures Elena’s face, stubborn and too brave for her own good.

Then she feels the steady heat of the name on her wrist and, lower, the cool brush of ink-petals against her skin. 

He has her name...he has her flower.

And she has exactly nothing but a choice.

“Trust…has to start somewhere, Miss Bennett…” he murmurs, almost gently, as if coaxing a skittish animal to take food from his palm.

Bonnie hesitates for a second. 

And then a second more. 

The silence stretches as she balances the risk against the pull of her own integrity, her pulse drumming with the decision she already knows she has to make. At last, she exhales, letting the truth win. “It’s underneath the church…in an old tomb…with a vampire named Katherine.”

Elijah goes very still, and Bonnie watches as something flickers across his expression, too quick to name, but sharp enough that she knows the words she just spoke mean something to him.

“Katerina…” The name leaves his lips like a ghost resurrected, his mouth curving into a brittle smile that doesn’t reach his eyes. “Of course. In the end, everything always circles back to her.”

Bonnie blinks, caught off guard by the familiarity in his tone. “You know Katherine?”

“I know her intimately.” His gaze drifts, as if paging through a ledger of old sins and older debts. When it returns to her, it’s sharpened to a point. “But my history with her has little to do with your real question. The moonstone is something Klaus needs.”

The name crashes over her like a tide, lodging sharp in her mind.

Klaus.

The way Elijah says it—so heavy, so deliberate—makes her pulse stumble. She recognizes the name, but clearly not in the same way he does.

“Klaus? Who’s Klaus?” Because she has an idea of who Klaus might be, and the new pulse thrumming against her ankle lets her know that whatever answer she gets is not going to be one in her favor.

“A nightmare made flesh. The devil’s right hand. The mad vampire king—” He ticks the titles off like rosary beads, then lets them fall. “Just a sampling of the names he’s earned through centuries of cruelty and bloodshed. But I…” He looks like a man about to plunge his hands into a river he knows will be ice-cold. “I simply know him as my brother.”

The way he says it makes it clear that it’s that one title that cuts him deepest, yet still he doesn’t flinch from the word.  

“Your brother?” The word feels wrong, dangerous, a truth balanced on the edge of a knife.

The momentary silence between them sits as thin as glass, the house itself seeming to lean in closer to hear what comes next.

...

Or to simply wait for the rest of it to shatter. 

“Yes…my brother.” The syllables are clipped, neat, like he’s practiced filing the edges off his rage. “My conniving, faithless, bastard of a womb-mate.” The disdain is lacquered so thinly over civilty that she almost misses the poison underneath. “And he needs that stone. And your friend. And a dozen other variables, each crucial to breaking his curse.”

Again, that name sits in Bonnie’s mouth like a coin, heavy and cold. 

Klaus. 

...

Klaus, Klaus, Klaus—

Her ankle prickles traitorously once more, and she resists the urge to curl her foot inward, as if doing so will hide the ink beneath her bone.

She doesn't want this to be what she knows it's inevitably going to be.

“What curse?”

“The hybrid curse.”

The word hybrid skids through her so fast it leaves marks. She hears herself say, “Wait—hold up. Hybrid? What are you talking about?” and it sounds so small against the century of betrayal that yawns behind his eyes.

But Elijah only measures her the way he’s measured this room: where the exits are, where the floor might give. “Do you know exactly where that tomb is?”

Bonnie barely holds back her frustration with him. At the way he changes the topic between them once more.

But then she has to remind herself that this is the deal that she has made. A game of equal give and take. “I do.” The answer is out before doubt can dress itself.

“Can you get me inside?”

“I could…” The tug beneath her sternum ratchets tight in approval—yes, yes, yes! It screams. “I will.” She amends. 

Elijah tilts his head, reading her closely like a book he doesn’t want to put down. “Will you?”

“You have my word.”

He studies her for a fraction longer than is polite, and she has the absurd sense of being placed on some antique scale. “I hope you know I don’t take such declarations lightly. You’ll take me to her once we’re done here.”

“Fine.” She can hear the unspooled night right outside this house, the moth-slap at the glass, the crickets working like a thousand tiny sewing machines. “Now tell me more about this hybrid curse.”

“It’s not so much a ‘hybrid curse’ as it is a curse placed on a hybrid, my brother.” Elijah’s voice becomes a blade, careful and clean. “My mother…strayed, shall we say, from her marital bed when I was young. Before Klaus was turned into a vampire, he was born of a bloodline of wolves. His father…was a wolf. We share only a mother.”

Bonnie’s mind tries to hold two creatures at once and can’t quite make them fuse. “But then he became a vampire…”

“And the witches made certain he could never trigger his dormant abilities.” No triumph threads his tone, only tired precision. “They feared the chaos it would unleash…the power it would give him…”

“So Klaus is both a vampire…and a werewolf…”

“Indeed.”

“And the curse…the curse is—”

“A lock on his true nature.” Elijah doesn’t blink, as if blinking might soften the severity behind his words. “Lifting it allows him to embrace his wolf side…to control his shift and become the first ever hybrid to walk this earth.”

For a heartbeat, her magic recoils, an instinctive flinch, as if something enormous has passed too close. “Oh my god…”

“Indeed.”

“How does—how does Elena factor into this? And the moonstone…a-and—”

“The curse was bound by the blood of a doppelgänger. We called her Tatia then.” Something almost human shadows his expression at the name. Regret, maybe...or a door closing swiftly. “To break it requires the blood of another doppelgänger. The moonstone—” His palm turns up, gesturing between the two of them. “is simply the talisman that bound the spell in the first place.”

“So he wants the moonstone…and he wants to kill her. Elena. In some…freaky ritual sacrifice.”

“Yes.”

A picture unfurls despite her not wanting it to. Elena on a stone floor, Elena’s hair pulled back from her throat. 

Elena screaming. 

Elena bloody.

Elena de—

Bonnie cuts the vision to ribbons before it can finish. “How do I stop him?”

“You don’t.”

The finality lands like the broken coat rack that pierced him. A blunt, irresistible fact. “Elijah—”

“You. Don’t.” There’s no rise in his voice, no theatrics as he repeats the words. Just a stubborn refusal set like a keystone. “I told you…the safest place for Elena is with me.”

“And yet you never explained why you believe that.” She hears the tremor trying to slip into her tone and irons it flat. She won’t show weakness here. 

She won’t. 

Not even in front of her soulmate. 

...

Especially not in front of her soulmate.

“Because I want this curse broken no more than you do, Bonnie.” Elijah continues, stepping the faintest bit closer. The mark on her wrist warms, listening. “And to stop my brother…I need the two key pieces he can’t succeed without. The moonstone…and the doppelgänger.”

Bonnie imagines handing Elena over like collateral and feels bile stain the back of her throat. 

She can’t do that. 

She could never, would never, cross that line.

The whisper of her magic coils restlessly beneath her skin, agitated and eager, forcing her to steady her breath and keep her composure. “Then how do you plan to stop him? Klaus.”

Because what she needs more than reassurance right now is answers. And Bonnie isn’t the kind of girl who swoons for pretty words when the stakes are too high.

She’ll be damned if she lets Elijah spin her in circles rounded with omissions and half-truths.

“I have my ways…” His pause has layers to it. Older plans harbouring even older grudges. “None of which will make you sleep easier.”

...

There it is...

Bonnie’s lips thin into a straight line. “Then I can’t give you Elena.” Saying it out loud steadies her like bracing a palm against a wall, though also makes her squirm with the uncomfortable implication of Elena being a 'thing' that can be traded and bartered. “You can have the moonstone…but you’re not getting her without telling me exactly what you intend to do.”

...

She can see it in the way his expression stills, in the faint narrowing of his eyes, that this Elijah guy isn’t used to being told no. 

Not by enemies, not by allies, and certainly not by someone he calls his soulmate. He clearly has a goal, a timeline, a purpose that her stubbornness is only hindering, and though he doesn’t raise his voice, the weight of his disapproval presses against her like a hand at her throat.

“Your friend is doomed, Bonnie.” He doesn’t look away from her when he says it, and somehow that feels worse than a dismissal. “Whether by my hand or my brother’s…she will not survive this.”

The words should shake her, yet Bonnie only feels her heart hardening even further in her chest. “I won’t accept that.”

“You may have no choice.”

“There’s always a choice,” she fires back, heat blooming under her skin. “There’s always another way. A loophole.” The next thought arrives on a breath that feels stolen. “Take me to Klaus instead.”

...

The house holds still, and Elijah does too. 

It’s a stillness that reads as disbelief, then slides quickly into refusal. “Excuse me?”

Bonnie swallows, her palms sweaty as she rubs them against the soft cotton of her pajama pants. “Take me to Klaus instead of sacrificing Elena.”

The words leave her mouth before she can stop them, reckless and raw. 

Why is she even saying this?  

She doesn’t know if such an offer would matter, if it would buy Elena even a second more of safety. 

Probably not. 

But she knows one thing with absolute clarity, and that’s that she isn’t going to stand by and let her best friend die to satisfy some ancient curse. Even if it means throwing herself into the fire to stall it. 

“As valiant as that sounds…” His gaze travels down and back with the unsentimental efficiency of someone cataloguing his assets. “I’d be remiss if I didn’t remind you my brother would see little value in you compared to that of the doppelgänger. What could you possibly offer him that would rival spilling Elena’s blood?”

His words strike deeper than they should, unsettling something she’s fought hard to keep buried. 

Because the truth...the unbearable, impossible truth, is that Klaus is hers too. 

His name is inked into her skin, bound to her by the same cruel magic that has tethered her to Elijah. She’s managed to ignore it until now, shoving it into the dark corners of her mind where denial could keep it quiet. 

The name Klaus could’ve belonged to anyone. It could’ve been short for anything. 

But it would be just her luck that the name on her ankle would belong to the same man who apparently wants to kill her friend. A man who seems to be more monster than human, if anything Elijah says is true, no matter how exaggerated the words may be. 

But at the sound of Elijah weighing her worth against his brother’s obsession with Elena’s blood, the mark seems to burn cold, pressing against her ankle like an iron shackle. 

She hates it, hates the reminder that no matter how much she wants to fight for her friends, she’s already ensnared in the orbit of these two…brothers. Chained to Klaus as much as she is to Elijah.

“It’s not what I can offer, okay? It’s—” Bonnie’s throat is suddenly tight, and for a moment she doesn’t think the truth will leave her lips. 

...

But it does. It always does. “You’re not my only soulmate…”

...

Something flickers in Elijah's expression at that, small but unmistakable. Not surprise exactly, not even disbelief, but like he knows the words she’s about to say next. Like he can predict the thread she’s about to pull on, and knows that it will unsettle him in ways he can’t quite hide.

“I have your brother’s name too.”

The words finally land, and she swears that's when she finally sees it: the fracture in the mask he wears so well. It’s resentment she sees there, maybe even a kind of grief, all twisted into something much sharper than she can name, but still knows it’s not the reaction of a man indifferent to her confession.

“Where.” The single word is low, stripped of ornament, and for the first time, she isn’t sure if it’s a demand or a plea.

Bonnie hesitates, her pulse loud in her ears, fumbling to explain herself when she doesn’t even know what it is she’s explaining.

“My left ankle.” The name KLAUS in that same striking script, with oleander wrapped around each letter.

The perfect flower for a supposed Tyrant. She thinks bitterly. Beauty and danger reflected so starkly in such toxic nature. 

Elijah's restraint finally slips, his expression growing tighter, like something he’s kept pressed down too long has finally forced its way through. Not anger, not exactly, but the kind of reaction that makes her wish she could take the words back, or at least soften them. 

“Difficult for me to verify that.”

“I know. I know, but please—” She has a stupid flash idea of yanking her pant leg up her calf to prove it, like this is a PTA meeting and not a war council with some strange, ancient vampire. Klaus's mark has always felt colder, like it was pressed to her skin straight from the snow. “I have to try.”

For a moment, he doesn’t speak, and Bonnie can almost see the effort it takes for him to pull himself together. His jaw works once, a faint shift of breath betraying something sharp beneath the surface, and then it’s gone, tucked away behind that frustratingly polished exterior.

“Try what exactly, Bonnie?” His voice gentles, which somehow doesn’t help the way she thought it would. “To talk a madman down from his perch? To reveal yourself in some inane, fanciful bid to stir his humanity? Neither will work.”

But Bonnie only shakes her head, arms crossing over her chest. “Appealing to his humanity would be my absolute last move.” She squares herself to him, clawing her composure back into place, piece by piece. “I’m not going to him with some fairytale about soulmates melting hearts. I’m going to him…as a witch from a powerful line, offering another way. One that doesn’t involve killing my best friend.”

Elijah walks backward to lean against the wall of the hallway they stand in, assessing her like she's a puzzle piece he's forced into the wrong shape. “And why would he choose your way over the easy, bloody path to victory he already has?”

Her tongue licks along her teeth, eyes staring right through him as she speaks. “Because he doesn’t know how close he is to winning yet…does he?” Bonnie hears steadiness return to her voice and lets it anchor her further. “That buys me time and gives me leverage. Like you said…we have the two things he needs most.”

...

There's another long pause of silence after she says the words, and she can tell that Elijah is moving pieces around a chessboard she can’t quite see, and she hates, viscerally, that it thrills her to be considered against those pieces.

“Your idea holds a lot of risk and yields little reward.”

“And your idea involves serving Elena up like glorified bait,” Bonnie snaps, that same young petulance rearing its ugly head. “Besides…you plan on killing him, don’t you?”

She doesn’t exactly know how she comes to this conclusion, but it doesn’t seem far off from the truth.

Elijah speaks of Klaus, speaks of his brother, like a man waiting to swing his sword against the neck of an enemy. 

There’s clearly more to the story that she can’t quite read, but the conclusion seems way too precise for it to be anything other than what she just said. 

Elijah doesn’t deny her accusation, merely tilts his head further with a small smile that sends a shiver down her spine. “Are you against that?”

“He’s my soulmate.”

Scoffing, he leans up off the wall to approach her closer than he’s been all night. “You hardly know him.”

Up this close, the details of him are impossible to ignore. The faint flecks of blood still marring his suit, the fabric ripped open at the chest where pale skin shows through in fractured glimpses. 

He’s a dangerous figure carved out of ruin…

…

…and God help her, he is handsome. 

That much Bonnie can’t deny, and the heat that crawls up her neck at his nearness feels wildly inappropriate, especially when the subject between them is about death and betrayal, not desire.

“And yet I’d still like to have at least one conversation with the guy before I get comfortable with the idea of him being dead.” She continues, clearing her throat slightly as she cranes her neck upwards to meet his gaze. 

The mark at her wrist hums like a live wire, the one at her ankle stays as cool as the water at the bottom of a well. “Call it my due diligence.”

Elijah laughs, the deep baritone of it sinking right through her. “You have a bleeding heart, Bonnie Bennett…” There’s no smile in the words, but there is a strange, reluctant respect. “It will get you killed.”

...

Well, that’s nothing new. 

Everything she’s done—and continues to do—since the Salvatores arrived in town risks getting her killed.

The idea of death is becoming a very new normal for her, and Elijah’s words hold no new risk that she hasn’t already weighed herself. “Do we have a deal or not?”

Elijah assesses her for a moment longer before turning away. “No. We don’t have a deal.” He doesn’t make a show of it; the refusal sits between them like a well-set stone. “What we have…is another opportunity to compromise.”

Bonnie almost stumbles to the ground with relief at his amendment, following after him as he moves towards the entryway of the abandoned house. “How?”

“By moving our timeline up a bit quicker than I intended.” He answers, rebuttoning his cuff, restoring order with small, deliberate motions like he’s resetting a chess clock. “You’ll bring me to Katerina tomorrow evening instead of tonight.”

“Okay—”

“And in that extra time…you will find yourself a plan.” His gaze fastens to hers, and her pulse stutters before relearning its new rhythm. “I will not take you to my brother without one. By tomorrow night, either you have it…or we do this my way. Fair?”

A mosquito whines and then gives up; somewhere outside, a night bird throws its name against the trees. Bonnie thinks of Elena’s voice saying it’ll be fine when it never truly is, of ink that ties her to two men who have turned the world into their board. 

The thought is terrifying…

…

Yet also strangely clarifying.

“Fair. We have a deal.”

Elijah nods his approval at her agreement. Perhaps the one thing they’ve managed to agree on all night.  “Good. Now…I believe it’s well past your bedtime, Miss Bennett. Which means it’s high time you returned home.” A breath of something like humor softens his words. “Still…meeting you was…unexpectedly pleasant. You’ve given me much to think on. Goodnight.”

And then he’s gone. Swallowed whole by the dark with a speed that knocks the air from her chest.

All that remains is the front door yawning open in his wake, the only real tangible proof that he’d been here tonight with her at all.

“Night…” Her words are lost in the night like a whisper of wind, and she wonders, for a moment, if he’s still close enough to hear them.

You’ve given me much to think about tonight…

And he’s given her much to plan.

Backing into the hall feels like backing out of a spell. Light reasserts itself, the house remembers it’s just wood and rot. 

She'd just met one of her soulmates tonight...her soulmate.  

The air seems to thin around her. For years, she’d wondered what it would feel like to finally put a face to the mark carved into her skin, to know without question who fate has tied her to. But she hadn’t expected awe to ache like this, or for dread to follow so quickly on its heels.

Because it isn’t just him.

It’s his brother, too.

Two men bound to her by the ink on her skin, and from the look in Elijah’s eyes, brothers locked in a hatred older than she can imagine. They're everything she should hate...everything she should fear. 

Nightmares not soulmates...and yet they're still hers. 

Two down...four more to go...

...

...Jesus Christ...

She doesn't want to think about her other four marks. The other four names attached to her skin in a way that now feels more like a threat than a promise. 

Perhaps her next soulmate will be an evil wizard king intent on destroying humanity. 

Or perhaps some demonspawn who will write her name in blood and call it romantic. 

Knowing her luck, she'll get both with the added cherry on top of immortality and familial issues. 

...

When she walks back outside to her car, the air is simply ordinary and the tug in her belly looser than it has been all night. Gravel complains under her shoes with each step, and when she sinks into the driver’s seat, she has to rest both hands on the wheel and breathe until her heart believes that she’s okay. 

Then her engine thunders to life as she turns her keys, headlights washing the driveway with pale yellow light. She begins driving back home with her mind caught in a whirlwind of thoughts, and in the rearview mirror, the house shrinks into a silhouette of simple angles and shapes.

Her wrist tingles. 

Her ankle stays cool. 

And the other four marks scattered across her body give her nothing at all. 

Chapter Text

Morning chews at the treeline, bright and ordinary where the town is concerned, but the deer path down to the ruins keeps its own hush, the kind that presses on your ears and makes you feel like you should whisper even if you don’t have to. 

Bonnie steps over a half-buried root and tells herself the banded ache at the base of her skull is just the migraine announcing itself. 

Not dread. 

Not the tasteless afterbite of too little sleep and too much Latin.

Her backpack thumps against her hip as she walks, heavier than it has any right to be. 

She has her grimoire, some spare candles, a stub of charcoal, matches, and salt. 

The sort of things a normal junior does not bring with them to school. The sort of things that make your reflection look older in the bathroom mirror, even if you’re still just a girl tapping concealer over the bruise-dark bags under your eyes.

Ahead of them, Caroline eats the trail with these snappy little strides, ponytail bouncing with every impatient step.

It’s almost funny how even her exasperation looks choreographed. 

She slaps a branch out of her way with more force than necessary, and the branch snaps back to sting Bonnie’s shoulder—right, okay, she deserved that for not paying attention—and Caroline’s voice spikes the air the way it does when she’s trying to pin her troubles beneath a layer of commentary, leading with complaint first because that’s how she manages fear, by giving it dialogue. 

“Ugh! I don’t like this. I don’t like any of this!”

Elena sets a branch aside and glances over her shoulder, calm in that stubborn way that means the decision’s already made. “Caroline—”

Bonnie absorbs their voices like weather, even though she knows she should be cataloguing the area for threats.

Weighing sigils, checking for the shimmer of a perimeter spell someone else might have laced into the soil.

But her mind keeps sliding sideways, back into ink and smoke and her kitchen table at three in the morning with a chipped mug of herbal tea gone cold. 

Elijah had vanished into the night like a match going out, and when she’d returned home, she’d started tearing through pages like a girl trying to outrun a clock.

She’s been searching her grandmother's grimoire for spells all night. Anything to figure out how the hell to circumvent this hybrid-curse bullshit so her friend doesn’t have to die.

She’s already found a scatter of possibilities, yet none of them feel like they could be enough. 

A dispersal weave that snaps the tether to a curse but risks blasting the magic into shrapnel. 

A siphon array that starves a curse valve by valve until it dies ugly. 

But that last one required so much body horror that she hadn’t been able to even finish the page. 

...

But there is one spell that won’t stop tugging at her sleeve.

The Severence Rite.

Old Bennett magic apparently, more verdict than spell: trap the curse’s power, uproot it, and plant it back into the life that cast it.

Seems simple enough...but there are also holes. Dangerous ones. 

She has the scaffold, the components to hunt: blood of the cursed; an item from the origin point; something living to bind the curse; a thing that stands for the curse’s nature. But the warnings from those few torn pages won’t leave her alone. That, without the true origin of the curse, the magic will scatter…hurting everyone tied to it.

Bonnie lets out a quiet, tired sigh. 

Her head hurts. Her eyes hurt. And juggling all these risks, holes, and theories is beginning to make her feel like her very sanity is being put through a paper shredder.

However, Elijah will want something real when he comes tonight. He’ll stand in her doorway with a straight spine and quiet eyes, and he’ll listen, but it won’t be enough to hand him hope dressed as theory.

And it shouldn’t be, her mind argues. Their plan should be iron-tight. 

She thinks of the neat ink on his wrist, the impossible tenderness of it, her name a truth he carries like a secret on his skin…and her own mark steadies and trembles at the same time.

But now Caroline’s voice is rising again, her phone clacking against her palm in agitation. “No! You know I’m a terrible liar. Stefan’s going to see straight through me. And when he finds out where you are and who you’re with, he’s going to—”

Elena throws a look over her shoulder, sunlight catching in her hair, and Bonnie has the ridiculous urge to yank her back toward the safety of daylight and locked doors. “He’s gonna what? Lecture me?” Her mouth tips, humorless. “Stefan’s not my keeper, Caroline.”

Brave words, Bonnie thinks. Or necessary ones. 

The witch can feel the tension coiled between Elena’s shoulder blades like it's her own. That stubborn courage that makes terrible options sound like reasonable plans when they’re the only plans left. 

Elena’s marks—Stefan’s and, inconveniently, Damon’s —are covered by denim, but Bonnie thinks about them anyway. Soulmates are supposed to make you wiser, softer, but mostly Bonnie thinks they only serve to make everything messier.

“Yeah, but he’s your…” Caroline fails for a label, her hand making a helpless circle in the air as she searches for a word big enough to hold history before giving up with a groan. “He’s your whatever-the-hell you two are right now. And he’s going to lose it when he finds out the danger you’re walking into.”

They pass the broken stone lip of what used to be a churchyard. 

Katherine is sealed in the tomb beneath the ruins— the place she should’ve been all this time anyway —and Elena wants information only her she-devil twin can give.

But they all know that Katherine doesn’t need open ground to be dangerous. She only needs breath and a voice.

Elena hops a root like she’s dodging a puddle instead of stepping toward a place built to eat girls like her. “Danger is a little dramatic. Katherine’s locked in the tomb; she can’t touch me.” She cuts Bonnie a look, a baton pass if there ever was one. “Besides, Bonnie will be there with me.”

Huh?

Bonnie’s name snaps her back into her body so fast her stomach flips. She blinks, finds both girls staring at her like she’s missed her cue—because she has, because her head is so full of Elijah’s voice and the math of how many ways she can fail the people she loves.

“I will?” The words tumble out on reflex, heat climbing up her cheeks when she catches up with herself and nods a bit more firmly. “Right. Yeah. Of course I will.”

Caroline throws her hands up like the air itself is to blame, bracelets chiming as she pivots toward the broken stone steps. “Great, so now I get to come up with a story for why Bonnie’s gone, too?” Her heel grinds against foliage as they angle down. “You just made my job a hundred times harder!” She stops momentarily to plant a hand on her hip, glaring. “He’s going to know something’s up, and you know I hate this cloak-and-dagger crap. I’m terrible at duplicity.”

Bonnie almost smiles, and it takes a lot to keep her face in check because, really, she shouldn’t find amusement in her friend’s panic like this. 

But Caroline’s convinced the world can see the lies she makes written on her forehead in permanent marker, and to be fair, Stefan is annoyingly perceptive, especially when it comes to Elena. 

So he will try.

Soulmates always do. 

And Bonnie can see it already; Stefan following Elena's thread the second it starts to pull, Damon setting the in-between on fire if it gets him closer to her.

But none of that helps right now, because the clock is ticking and panic is not a plan they can afford to follow blindly. 

“Sure, but what are the odds he figures out where she is fast enough to actually stop her?” Bonnie slows until the three of them are shoulder to shoulder, elbows brushing, trying for reassurance by proximity, by osmosis, by I’m here. “Just don’t give Katherine room to run her little mind games,” she adds, eyes on the steps. “She’ll talk you into knots if you let her.”

“I won’t. I know exactly what I’m here to ask.” Elena’s certainty lands clean as she tucks a flyaway behind her ear and keeps moving. “I just need you to stall him long enough for me to get a head start. With luck, by the time he comes looking, I’ll have what I need.”

Caroline mutters something into her scarf that sounds like a prayer with bite. 

Soulmates haven’t made any of this easier for any of them. 

Elena being soul-bound to both Salvatore brothers, and on a different track entirely, there’s Tyler, a new wolf, and Caroline trying to be gentle with her soulmate while also keeping half the town’s secrets clenched behind her teeth. 

Finidng your soulmate is supposed to make you feel found. Whole. Like the perfect puzzle piece has finally slotted into your chest and finished the picture.

But lately, Bonnie thinks they just make her friends look tired and older than they really are. Like it drains them of all their colors. Like it's feeding on what little remains of their current peace for the sake of some fantastical 'promised' future happiness. 

...

And it makes Bonnie think of how much her soulmates might take from her...

How stressed she's already become juggling their different wants and needs.

And isn't she just oh so very lucky to have six marks of her own?

“I still think it’s a terrible idea,” Caroline says, but softer now, as if the woods might overhear and tattle to the Salvatores.

“Then we can agree to disagree.” Elena doesn’t slow down; if anything, she moves faster. “Look, I get it—both of you. But this is the only way I’m getting the truth about this whole ‘Klaus’ situation. Everyone else is fumbling in the dark. Stefan and Damon know next to nothing. Rose knows more, but still not enough to let me sleep at night.”

“Pretty sure knowing an ancient vampire wants you dead isn’t great for sleep either way,” Caroline shoots back, but it’s more reflex than actual fight.

“Maybe. But knowing even less about why makes it worse.” Elena stops, finally facing them, hands braced on her backpack straps like she’s grounding herself. “So can I count on you? Both of you? Please? You’re my best friends and the only people I can trust with this.”

The ask lands where it always does. Somewhere soft, warm, and impossible to deny. 

Bonnie exhales and feels the press of the ink on her skin.

Elijah warm at her wrist, the other mark on her ankle cold and quiet.

Compromise…Bonnie thinks bitterly. This next chapter of her life is meant to be filled with compromise.

Then that same persistent tug pulls low in her belly again, the same magnetic ache that dragged her out of bed and into Elijah’s grasp in the first place.

Move, it says. Decide.

Caroline groans, but the surrender is already softening her mouth. “And there she goes with the girlfriend code.”

“Our true Achilles heel,” Bonnie agrees, letting a thin smile tilt her lips for all three of them because it’s easier than admitting that they'd follow Elena into worse places than a crypt. “For what it’s worth, as long as she stays clear of the actual tomb, it’s not the worst idea she’s ever had.” She lifts her chin toward the run of broken stone through the trees. “She deserves answers, Caroline.”

Elena glances back, and there’s that set to her jaw Bonnie recognizes, the one that means Elena has already made her decision and is humor-listening to any argument that isn’t a solution.

“So?” 

Caroline tips her face toward the sky like she’s begging for patience, a resigned breath leaving her lips. “Fine,” she eventually groans, scrubbing a hand down her face and already shifting into logistics. 

What hallways to stalk at school, which teachers to charm, how to keep Stefan pointed anywhere but here. “Fine. I’ll help you drop in on your creepy, evil twin.”

They take the stairs slowly, shoes whispering against the stone. The temperature slips a few degrees the deeper they go until the air is earth-cool and wet at the back of their throats.

Bonnie pauses on the last step, palm flat to the wall, magic waking under her skin like a cat that lifts its head when you enter the room. 

This is the place where her Grams gave more than she had to give and smiled anyway, insisting she was fine before sleep took her forever.

Now every time Bonnie comes here, she thinks of her grandmother...of fingers that smelled like sage and old paper, of the way Grams said 'magic is balance' and then tore herself open to restore it.

Fell’s Church has always been a Bennett legacy and a Bennett warning in equal measure. They opened the original seal here and paid for it. 

Now, some days, Bonnie feels like the bill is still coming due.

Today, the debt looks like keeping Elena alive long enough to outrun a name that makes vampires talk like there are knives in the air. Because Rose couldn't have been clearer enough: Elijah is bad, Klaus is worse.

And because Katherine has outlived both for whole centuries by knowing where the exits are, if there's anyone who has the truth Elena wants, it’s the vampire waiting under their feet.

“You should not be alone in this…” Her Grams would say, if she were here. 

And she would’ve said it while lighting a candle and fixing Bonnie with that look that makes you straighten your spine.

...

But Sheila Bennett is gone, and most days it feels like Bonnie is cramming a decades worth of lessons into a semester while the final is already on the table. 

“Okay,” Caroline says, squaring her shoulders like she’s about to walk a runway instead of a crypt. “I move the stone. You go in. And then you ask your suicidal questions while I go back to school and stall Saint Sulkypants before he notices you’re not in class.”

Elena nods, knuckles tight on her strap. “Exactly.”

“Last chance to bail,” Bonnie offers, because she has to put the door there even if it’s one that Elena refuses to use. “We can find another way to get you answers.”

“This is the other way,” 

...

Of course it is, Bonnie thinks. And with the quick, unyielding way Elena responds, she knows there’s no chance of steering her friend off this course now. 

…

It’s the last time that she’ll ask.

“Ready?” Caroline questions, bright eyes gliding over them both. 

No. 

And Bonnie wants to say it plain, because she isn’t ready to watch Elena test herself against Katherine’s tongue.

Isn’t ready to be the wall if Katherine decides to prove a point with her usual brand of cruelty.

Isn’t ready for the second errand that the night already has planned for her.

Coming back here with Elijah...same steps, the same door...and her pulse doing that little jump it always does when it remembers she’s putting everything on the line for mere possibility. 

But she says none of this, too used to holding her tongue and keeping her vulnerabilities locked tight inside a box because she can’t be seen as weak. 

Because weakness kills, and Bonnie’s not ready to see her friends mourn her corpse from the other side.

So she squares her stance, rolls her shoulders, and nods once in a way she hopes looks braver than she feels. “On three.”

They count together.

One, two, and on three Caroline plants both hands and shoves, vampire strength making the slab look like it’s a mere paper weight. Then the pressure shifts as stone grinds, the slab inching open as damp breath spills over their faces.

“Bon?” Her name is said like a question, Elena’s fingers closing along her forearm.

Bonnie clears her throat, absorbing the steady heat of her palm as she tries to focus her magic. 

“Gimme a second…” She lets her sight skate the threshold one more time: no glamours humming, no fresh sigils scratched into the lintel, no trace of someone else’s work layered over hers. “Okay...we’re good.”

“Okay,” Elena echos, drawing a breath she doesn’t quite let go. “Rules?”

“Watch your surroundings,” Bonnie says, her arm slipping from Elena’s grip. “Don’t get too close or cross the threshold. And if Katherine starts monologuing, don't let her pick the topic.”

Caroline grunts in agreement, bracing the door as sunlight dies at the line like it hit glass. Beyond it, the tomb breathes that older air, the kind that remembers 1864 and every unpaid debt since. 

Somewhere in there…Katherine is waiting for them with a smile that never means anything good…

Their blonde friend cuts a look at Elena, measuring resolve against risk. “But are you sure about this? You’re about to interrogate the world’s most pathological liar.” She lets out another little breath to keep her temper even. “I don’t think she’s ever told the truth in her life.”

Elena doesn’t so much as flinch; she never does once she’s decided. “She’s the only option I’ve got. I’m not counting on her being helpful, just hungry and pragmatic enough to give me something real.” Her eyes flick down the black mouth of the corridor, then back to Bonnie. “One way or another, I need to know what’s coming. I’m not just gonna sit around waiting for him to show up.”

Bonnie folds her arms, gaze darting toward the shadows like they might jump and attack them at any given moment. “And what if all she does is spook you into doing something stupid?” Her voice drops, edged with the protectiveness she never bothers to hide. “Katherine thrives on mind games. Right now, she’s got every reason to worm her way into your head. “

Elena’s jaw settles. “Not happening. Nothing could convince me to get in that tomb or let her out. And if she does manage to get under my skin…that’s why you’re here.” She tips her chin at Bonnie, a quiet trust threaded through the words. “If I’m emotion, you’re logic. You’ll keep me safe.”

The compliment lands heavy in her chest and steadies her anyway, and Caroline’s mouth softens at the words as well, her fight loosening just a notch.

“Yeah, no doubting yourself, Bonnie. You doubt, then I doubt, and then the whole thing collapses.”

Bonnie squares her shoulders.

She can be the scale, she can be the brake, and she can be the line. “Don’t worry. I’ve got you.”

Elena’s smile flickers, quick and fragile. “See? We’ll be okay.”

“Alright,” Caroline exhales, breath fogging the air like surrender. A drip ticks down somewhere behind them, and the space seems to breathe back. Just earth, stone, and old grief.

Caroline shivers and tries to iron it out with attitude. “God, this is so creepy.”

Elena steps to the inner edge of the ward without crossing it. “Katherine?”

For a moment nothing greets them but silence, then Bonnie hears bare feet whisper over stone, and every fine hair at her nape lifts. “Is she even—”

A silhouette peels out of the dark, interrupting her words, the movements lazy like a cat taking a stretch in the sun. “Well…what a lovely surprise…” Comes a voice honeyed with venom. “I knew you’d come here eventually.” 

Katherine’s gaze skates past Elena to count bodies as she finally comes into the light, the picture of her dirty, exhausted, and gaunt in a way that shakes her prior image of being dangerous and untouchable. “Didn’t expect you to bring an entourage, though.”

Elena doesn’t bite, thank god. She just breathes and turns towards Caroline, giving their blonde friend a short nod. “We can take it from here, Caroline.” 

But Caroline hangs suspended for a moment, duty tugging her one way and instinct the other.

Sensing her inner turmoil, Bonnie walks over and touches her wrist, a quick press that she hopes conveys her reassurance. “She’ll be fine. I promise. Go.”

Caroline shudders, her gaze darting back and forth. “Yeah, well…” she swallows, eyes glossy in the low lighting as she pins Elena and then Bonnie with the same look. “You be fine too, okay? Promise me.”

“I promise.” The words come easily to Bonnie, and she means them with every bit of sincerity that she can muster. 

She won’t let Katherine turn them loose. She won’t allow either of them to lose their heads down here. 

Katherine’s laugh scrapes low, delighted, and ugly. “Touching. So touching I could almost cry.” She flutters a hand, the movement mock-dainty. “Too bad I ran out of tears in my ducts a century ago.” Her smile knifes wider. “Now I’m all dried up.” 

“In more ways than one,” The insult snaps quickly from Caroline’s mouth like muscle memory, even as she begins backing away with her chin up. “Good luck.”

Then her footsteps retreat, and the absence tightens the chamber until Katherine sighs like a hostess happy to see the guest list trimmed. “And then three became two…Hi, Bonnie.” Her gaze slides over Elena and lands on the witch like a pin. “What are you today? Her bodyguard?”

Bonnie simply raises a brow, shifting her body to lean against the stone interior. “Can’t be too careful with you.”

“Does Stefan know you’re here?” Katherine purrs, all feline interest now that the room is smaller. “I’d have thought he’d play chaperone.”

Elena still refuses to rise to her doppleganger’s baiting, instead reaching into her bag with careful hands. “I brought you something.”

There’s a predator’s glint in Katherine’s eyes at the sight. “Bribery…how predictable.” Then her smile thins to nothing. “What do you want?”

“I want you to tell me about Klaus. The vampire you’re running from.”

“Mmm,” Katherine hums, savoring the name like a wine she pretends to miss. “Someone’s been busy.”

Elena produces a weathered book from her backpack, leather gone soft from hands that aren’t hers, and sets it where the ward hums, out of reach but close enough to itch. “I also have this book on your family history. It’s been a while. Thought it might jog your memory.”

Bonnie wonders where Elena might’ve gotten something like that, then promptly—when she realizes how obvious the answer to her question is—switches gears to wondering why the Salvatores would’ve ever kept something like that lying around at all. 

Katherine wrinkles her nose, seeming bored already at all the pretense as hunger, and spite sit thin in her voice. “Returning my family heirlooms…how sweet. But still boring. I don’t care.”

“Yeah?” Elena’s gaze hardens, mouth sharpening with calculation. “Then maybe you’ll care about this.” 

Bonnie watches as her friend pulls a bottle of blood out of her bag, and just barely manages to hold back her flinch when Katherine all but throws herself against the barrier in an impossible attempt to grab it. 

Jesus…she thinks, and then she really lets her eyes trace the lines of Katherine’s drawn face for the first time since their arrival. The hollowing that sits there is too stark for any amount of arrogance to hide. 

The other vampire is hungry. Starving. 

Gotcha, she thinks, silently praising Elena’s foresight to be this prepared. 

Her friend looks different when she's playing the game, and the calculation she sees in those brown eyes lets her know that Elena has more to gain in this battle of wills than some might think.

“You look terrible. I can’t imagine decades of starving in here will be kind to you.” Elena continues, tilting her head, her tone faux-casual as she turns the bottle in her hands. “How long before a vampire begins to mummify, Katherine? Ten years? Twenty? Sounds slow. Painful.”

There’s a telling pause at Elena’s taunting, the vampire before them slowly reigning herself in as if realizing just how badly she’s already given herself away.

A weakness spotted is half a war won, and Katherine's hunger has made it clear just were all the soft parts of her are exposed.

“Insolent little brat.” The lash lands, but under it, something like respect uncoils alongside it. Then Katherine’s smile returns, smaller but more honest. “But I do enjoy your fire, Elena, that’s maybe the one thing I can respect about you right now.” 

Elena doesn’t even blink. “Good,” she replies, uncapping the bottle and pulling out a small, plastic cup. “Now tell me about Klaus.”

The day tastes like iron long after the tomb door grinds shut, a tang that lingers behind her teeth like she’s been biting coins. 

Back home, Bonnie props Grams’ grimoire open with her wrist and stares at spells she already read a thousands times.  

Katherine’s crumbs keep ricocheting through her skull despite her attempts to focus. The centuries that Klaus has hunted the Petrova line, the pretty lullaby of a “sun and moon curse” revealed for what it is, the truth of Klaus’s hybrid nature and the ritual that seeks to free it.  

The doppelgänger dies, a vampire dies, and a werewolf dies while a witch stitches it all together with her own hands.

Bonnie rubs two fingers over the page until her nailbeds blanch. 

Caroline and Tyler flash across her mind then, their faces too bright and too close. 

Katherine didn’t just wreck one life; she set off a chain. 

Caroline was smothered in a hospital bed because Damon had already made her a vessel for vampirism on Bonnie's demand, and Tyler was pushed toward his first kill at the masquerade so his curse would trigger, because that’s what Katherine needed the night the masquerade spun out. A new wolf to replace the one she lost in Mason.

The cruelty of it is almost elegant, the way a single hand tips three dominoes and calls it strategy.  

She thinks of Elena’s pulse under her fingers, of the way it stuttered when Katherine said the word sacrifice. She thinks of her own wrist, where ELIJAH sits warm like a small sun, and the other mark at her ankle that refuses warmth at all.

Chapter one of her new life was awe curdling into dread. 

...

Chapter two is all about pressure. 

Move, or become the expendable numbers in someone else’s math.

...

So she moves.

She crosses out ideas that will only waste time: the sympathetic dampening ring that would burn itself out mid-ritual; the binding circle that needs a second witch she doesn’t have; the harebrained thought of pinning Klaus's curse to the phases of the moon like a butterfly under glass.

All of them are too clever. None of them are enough.

What’s left is the ugly, promising thing. The Severance Rite. 

The Bennett scraw of the spell is half-gone, mildew chewing through sections that matter, but the spine of it remains. 

Turn the curse back on its caster. Trap it, uproot it, and re-root It back by binding the wound to the witch who cut it. 

It wants blood from the cursed, a vessel that lives— thorned vine, rose, bramble—an element that mirrors the curse—stone, ash, water, bone—and the true origin of the magic to hold the tether. 

However, as promising as it sounds...the warning in the margins is plain. Miss the origin and the backlash won’t choose its targets. It'll come for all of them.

Elena. 

Caroline. 

Tyler. 

Any of them. 

Which is why the plan feels like striking lit matches in a windstorm.

Bonnie laces her fingers on the desktop until her knuckles ache and admits the part that isn’t strategy at all.

…

She loves these people. 

Elena with her impossible hope. 

Caroline, trying so hard to be gentle with a boy whose whole life just shifted under his feet. 

Stefan, who will stand between Elena and a hurricane. 

Even Damon—the devil's chaos in a leather jacket—who would burn the world if it meant protecting the few people he cares about.

...

But love is not only an emotion here. It’s pressure. 

Pressure, pressure, pressure…and she has no real way of knowing how much it will take to crush her beneath the weight of the names on her skin.

The clock crawls.

There’s still one more thing she needs to do before Elijah arrives. 

Bonnie crosses to the window, pulls the drapes shut until the room is a hollow, dark cave, and sets four candles at the cardinals—north, south, east, west—breath catching as the wicks take. 

A shallow bowl goes between them along with a knife, and it takes a couple deep breaths before she is able to slice that metal against her palm, her blood dripping down into the bowl.

She won’t be a girl waiting for a knock...and she refuses to be nothing with Elijah on his way. 

When the chant leaves her mouth it feels like she's speaking underwater.

Sanguinem sicut filum coniunge: si unus cadit, ambo cadant; dum unus vivit, alter numquam peribit.

Bind blood like thread: one dies, then both shall die; while one lives, the other shall not perish.

She tips a small vial of Elena’s blood into the bowl, one she’d managed to snag earlier under the excuse of needing it for a protection spell. Not exactly a lie so much as it was an omission of exactly how that protection would actually be done.

…

She can feel the moment the thread cinches, like it’s a seatbelt in a hard stop, her lifeforce now tied to Elena’s in a way that allows her to feel her friend’s pulse beneath her own like a steady drum. 

She doesn’t look away from the bowl when the last syllable fades, when the spell hums a thin wire through her chest and down the line she just knotted. 

Elena’s heartbeat now answers to the pulse of hers, faint, steady, and very much alive.

For a beat, Bonnie hates herself for the relief that brings. What she’s doing here is creating a bluff with an edge.

If she dies, Elena dies. If Elena dies…so will she.

It’s leverage, a shield shaped like a threat, and the fact that she can even imagine saying so to Klaus tells her exactly how far she’s already wandered for these people.

Leaning back, Bonnie lets her eyes burn, lets the room breathe with her as she gives herself over to the game she’s just now learning the rules to. 

The Severance Rite is still the way to go. 

It has to be. 

Elijah will want a concrete plan, not a theory dressed up in idealism, and she will give him bones to hold the best she can while allowing what confidence she does have to speak towards the rest. 

She pictures his sleeve sliding back, her name written on his wrist in clean, implacable strokes; pictures the way his gaze sifts through what she says and what she doesn’t. 

He is her mark, yes, her soulmate, yes. But he is also a man who has lived long enough to be patient with truth and ruthless with lies.

And Bonnie shudders to think of what he’d do if she chose to play the latter with him…

A couple of hours before sunset, the bowl is washed clean and turned upside down to dry, the wax scraped into a tidy curl at the edge of the desk. 

The house goes quiet in that particular way where you can hear your own blood pulsing in your ears, and it steadies her for a moment. Allows her to take a deep breath and remind herself that she’s already in this neck-deep, and that deep is exactly where she’ll have to be when the doorbell finally rings.

…

She feels him before she hears him, the mark at her wrist tuning itself like a struck string, a quiet, impossible hum that threads through her bones and tells her the knock is already on its way. 

So she’s standing when it comes, smoothing her palms down her jeans like that will teach them not to shake, unlatching the door into an evening the color of violets after rain. 

…

And there he is on her porch…framed like a portrait that chose to walk off the wall, his suit immaculate where a night like his should have left seams tattered in shadows.

She wonders…idly…where he might’ve gone shopping for a new suit after the Salvatores ruined his old one.

Elijah inclines his head when she greets him, something courtly that belongs to something centuries older than her being. “Miss Bennett…”

Her mouth moves before caution can lace up its boots. “Elijah—”

He drops his gaze to the threshold, apology folding into posture with the kind of ease that says he was always raised on having good manners. “I apologize for startling you.” His head moves a fractional tilt toward the entryway. “May I?”

…

Bonnie’s never invited a single vampire into her home outside of Caroline. Never. 

Withholding invitations is her greatest protection, the thin line between her home as a sanctuary and her home as a war chamber.

God…is she really about to do this?

Bonnie steps back and opens the door a bit wider, and the warmth under her skin where his name lives trips over itself to meet him. “Yeah…you can come in, Elijah.”

...

Nothing monumental happens.

He crosses her living room without making a single board complain, eyes sweeping windows, the hallways, the turn to the kitchen, the way out. All her angles and exits are cataloged with military-like efficiency as his fingers find his cufflink, retightening nothing with patient care in a way that feels more like a ritual than a need. “You have a beautiful home, Bonnie.”

She tucks a curl behind her ear, suddenly aware of how domestic everything looks against his presence. The family photos she has on the walls, the scuff at the baseboard she keeps forgetting to magic away, a mug on the table that she didn’t rinse from a couple nights before. 

“Thank you.” She hears herself say, and she’s so distracted that for a moment it doesn’t even feel the words really left her lips at all.

She needs to get herself together. 

Now is not the time to be losing herself to her thoughts. 

“Of course. Now…” He stops at the back of the couch instead of sitting, gaze returning to hers with the steadiness of a question that expects an honest answer. “What do you have for me?”

She crosses to the coffee table and lays her palm on Grams’ grimoire as if it’s a living thing, the ragged spine warm from the lamp. In that moment, confidence fits on her like a coat she’s shrugged into. 

Even though underneath, her ribs still feel like a birdcage with something fast and zipping trapped inside. “I couldn’t find a spell that would undo his curse exactly.”

One brow lifts a fraction at her words, approval maybe that she’s not selling him miracles. “Not surprising. The grimoires that held such things are long gone by now. I didn’t expect you to find anything exact.” Elijah’s attention flicks from her hands to her face and then holds. “Did you find anything else?”

Bonnie turns to the ribboned page she’s studied like a hawk, the writing she knows memory already a ruin of loops and mildew-soft lines. “I found a start.”

He closes the distance without crowding, not a prowl so much as gravity deciding she’s the only fixed point in the room. “And what start is that?”

Her finger rests on the heading. “It’s a torn-up page in my grandmother’s grimoire. A spell called the ‘Severance Rite.’ It’s old Bennett magic meant to turn a curse back on its caster. Trap it, uproot it, and bind it into the originator’s life force.”

Elijah extends his hand. “May I?” And when she gives him the book, his eyes move fast and exact; a thin line carving itself between his brows. “I’ve never heard of something like this before.”

Bonnie folds her arms around her middle loosely, not to shut him out but to keep herself from coming apart. “It’s family magic, so I doubt it’s universal knowledge.”

He reads a few beats more, then lifts his gaze with that quiet, unsettling certainty of a man who often arrives at conclusions before people speak them aloud. “There are gaps here. Missing pages. And one fatal flaw.” His thumb hovers near the warning, as if underlining it through the air. “The witches who cast the original curse are dead, and it needs their lives to anchor the binding, doesn’t it?”

She lets her breath out slowly and leans one hip into a nearby desk, meeting his steadiness with her own because anything less will sound like fear. “That’s just where I have to get creative.”

The corner of his mouth tilts, skepticism dressed in courtesy so that it’s not quite a smile. He closes the book without a sound and sets it back on the coffee table like returning a blade to its sheath. “Creativity doesn’t always guarantee a masterpiece.”

Her fingers find the edge of the desk, worry it once, then still. “No, but it’s better than leaving the canvas blank.” The words taste like a dare, so she eats the fear and gives him the one thing that will change how he looks at her either way. “Besides…I bound Elena’s life to mine.”

...

His whole body stills. A sharpened quiet that changes the air pressure around them dangerously. “Come again?”

She keeps his eyes because if she looks away, the courage will leak out of her like water through a spaghetti strainer. “I linked Elena’s life to mine. If I die, she dies. And vice versa.”

…

The silence in her home is so still you could hear a pin drop.

Elijah angles his head a fraction, studying her with an expression she can’t quite name. “And you thought this was wise…why exactly?” The civility in his voice stretched thin, masking a judgment he doesn’t bother to soften.

Bonnie’s hands open and close once, as if releasing something invisible. “Leverage.”

A breath leaves him, soft enough to be imagined, and he moves to her living room window, parting the curtain just enough to let the night put its face to the glass like it might offer a second opinion. 

When he speaks again, the words are clean and cold. “You expect to tell my brother this and he’ll…what? Spare you?” He looks back at her, the focus of his gaze narrowing with a surgeon’s precision. “Or do you perhaps mean to bluff him with a threat you’d never carry out?”

…

Clever. Bonnie thinks, but then feels stupid for ever thinking he wouldn’t be able to catch on to what she had planned with that last-minute move in the first place. 

The new thread between her heart and Elena’s still hums, a small undeniable proof that the spell held, and it steadies her in the same breath that terrifies her, which feels like most of her life lately. 

“He doesn’t know that. For all he knows, maybe I’m exactly that crazy.”

Crazy enough to use her life to threaten the life of the person Klaus needs most. Crazy enough to ever let someone think she’d be that ruthless. 

Elijah lets her curtains fall and turns fully, expression composed enough to read as mild if you didn’t know what mildness costs men like him. 

The bond under her skin warms for a single beat, and she can’t help wondering whether he feels anything like it or if centuries have taught him how not to flinch when he feels the strings of fate tugging at him. 

“Threatening Elena’s life by taking your own seems counter to your ‘protect Elena’ mission.”

“Maybe.” Bonnie steps closer until she can see the fine stitching of his suit, until it feels like honesty is the only distance left between them. “But maybe forcing the choice will make him listen.” Her chin lifts because if she can’t borrow strength, she can at least pretend. “He seems like the kind of guy who would understand a little ‘my way or the highway.’”

There’s another beat of silence between them. One in which she swears she can see how the calculus moves behind his eyes. The weighing of risks, the map of loyalties, the old griefs with a brother she hasn’t met yet stacked like glass somewhere he won’t let her see. “You’re gambling dangerously.”

Her pulse ticks hard at her throat. “Yes, but am I gambling well enough to make you take me to him?”

This silence pours itself into a mold, and she watches as he adjusts his cuffs again, a ritual reset that she thinks is meant to steer control back in his hands. "Take me to Katerina first. I want to see her.”

Her fingers tighten around the grimoire’s spine until the leather complains, relief and nerves braided tight. “Alright.”

She clicks off the lamp and pockets her keys, the house falling into the kind of hush that makes the outside world hum louder. And when she opens the door the night meets them, it's with a promise that feels like it has jagged edges.

Same ruins, same path, new stakes.

The path to the tomb remembers her footprints from this morning. It's the same hush under the trees, the same burrs at the hem, the same breath of damp stone waiting up ahead.

Bonnie matches Elijah’s stride without meaning to, the bond between them rising and falling at their nearness.

It should comfort her...

Instead, it makes everything feel more precarious, like walking a wire with a hand on her back that could either steady her or shove.

She points out the stairwell cut into earth when they near the old church, the scent of old dust breathing up to meet them. “She’s down here. The tomb’s spelled, so vampires can go in, but they don’t come back out so be careful.”

Footfalls whisper on stone as they descend, and the wards skims her skin like a prickle.

It's darker down here than it had been earlier...but there’s enough light spilling in from above ground that she can see a shape shifting in the dark beyond the boundary line, a smile preceding the woman who wears it like a weapon.

“Elena…back to renegotiate my—” The name dies on Katherine’s lips the second she spots what stands at Bonnie’s shoulder. “Elijah…”

His reply slides into the chamber with him, calm as a blade laid flat on a table. “Hello, Katerina.”

Katherine’s mask cracks just enough to show the fear behind it, though she attempts to quickly recover with a brittle laugh that doesn’t go anywhere. “What the hell is this?”

Elijah doesn’t bother raising his tone, he only uses his speed to get as close to the threshold as he possibly can, and lets his compulsion ride out the rest like a law handed down. 

“It’s your reckoning, my dear.”

Katherine’s throat works, and for a heartbeat, both fear and pride war on her face. “Elijah, please—”

His eyes hold hers, unblinking. “Where’s the moonstone?”

Her jaw slackens under the weight of his command, answer spilling clean and automatic before she can even think to stop it. “In here with me.”

His fingers make a small, precise motion toward the floor. “Slide it over.”

Katherine crouches, feral grace dented by starvation, and drags a loose stone aside to pull free the pale, veined rock.

It looks smaller now than it did in all the stories, Bonnie thinks, watching as Katherine gives the stone a little shove, skittering it across the floor until it comes to rest just past the threshold.

Close enough for a human hand but still a world away from a vampire’s.

“Elijah, please.” The plea is weaker now, defanged by obedience.

“Repetitive…that mouth of yours.” He lets the faintest exhale pass for disdain. “Let’s keep it sealed. Sit.” A flick of his fingers closes around her voice and she immediately sinks down to the dirty ground, a harsh breath trapped behind her lips.

His attention then slides to Bonnie, the invitation needing no words. “Bonnie, if you would.”

She’s already moving.

Sleeve tugged over her fingers, she slips one careful step into the tomb’s cool breath, the ward prickling across her skin like static.

Don’t think about the last time you crossed a line down here.

Don’t think about Grams.

The moonstone is colder than she expects. River-rock cold, old-magic cold. And she scoops it into her covered palm and backs out as quickly as she can, pulse loud in her ears as if waiting for Katherine to strike.

...

She doesn’t.

The other vampire physically can't 

Bonnie forces her face to stay still and her hands to lower, handing Elijah the stone the moment she makes it back to his side. 

“Thank you.” Elijah’s attention then returns to the caged predator in front of them, and he studies her like a curator cataloging his damages. “I appreciate your good sense in being afraid, Katerina. You’ve caused my brother and me a great deal of trouble; it’s satisfying to know your comeuppance is finally within reach.”

Katherine glares, breath hissing through her nose, the lines of her starved face now sharpened by fury.

She looks small for the first time since Bonnie has ever had the misfortune of knowing her...and Bonnie files away how that looks in the back of her mind.

How even a century-old storm can be reduced to simple weather behind a glass...

She hates how satisfying this is.

“Still,” Elijah goes on, smoothing the sides of his suit with a precise thumb as he pockets the moonstone Bonnie gave him, “I’m going to ask you to stay here until I decide otherwise. My brother and I will sleep better knowing exactly where you are when the time comes to cast our judgment.”

His eyes take hers once more, and the chamber seems to narrow around that single lock of attention.

“You may speak now, but you will not tell anyone we were here tonight, nor what I've asked of you. Enjoy the solitude Katerina. Your miserable company is all you’ll have for the next few nights.”

Compulsion pours through the words like clear resin and Bonnie can almost feel it set. His power is so different from her own...not a bargain with nature but rather a law laid down.

...

All of it makes her just the slightest bit uneasy and, god help her, a little grateful he’s on her side tonight.

“Bonnie.” His voice warms a shade as he addresses her, head tilting towards the entry way they came.

Bonnie swallows and nods, stepping back from the line as she begins her retreat. 

Every instinct says not to turn her back on Katherine.

Every instinct also says not to blink around Elijah.

...

She listens to both.

Katherine’s eyes flicker to Bonnie, ugly and bright. “Bonnie Bennett, you have no idea who you’re dealing with. Whatever deal you made, he won’t keep it!” She’s got her rhythm back now, always needling despite her ovbious fear. “You’re playing a very high-stakes game with a dealer who always cheats.”

“Bonnie.” Elijah doesn’t look away from Katherine when he says her name, and the steadiness in it is as pressing as a hand at the small of her back. “Let her run her mouth to madness. We have more important things to do.”

He turns, already moving on, already leaving Katherine behind like a haunted memory, and the quickness of it brushes across her like a change in the wind.

So she follows him as quickly as she can, leaving both Katherine, her words, and the tomb behind her without a second thought.

Because really...what has the other vampire told her that she doesn't already know? That she hasn't already thought of? 

She knows what she's signing up for, and she at least has some idea of the man who's games she's begun playing tonight. 

For her that's enough. 

It has to be. 

Neither of them truly trust the other yet, and that little bit of skepticism will ensure that her guard stays up and that her head stays on her shoulders. 

“We leave tonight.”

His voice startles her slightly out of her thoughts, and a quick glance his way lets her catch him assessing her like luggage he intends to carry across a battlefield. “Pack light.”

Her heart misfires; her voice doesn’t. “You’re taking me to him.”

“I am…” He keeps a quick pace as they make their way back to her home, “…and we’re going to hope that my investment in you isn’t a waste.”

The words land heavier than she expects.

An acknowledgment and a warning braided tight.

Bonnie breathes once, twice, then turns her face away from him with a small nod, the decision already made.

When they get back to her home she does exactly as he asked, packing light, killing all the lights.

She snatches a pen from the dish by the keys, and braces the scrap of paper against the doorframe, handwriting slanting quick with adrenaline.

Elijah waits on the porch, a patient silhouette in the violet-dark, while she tapes the square at eye level where anyone who matters will see it.

Sorry. I’ll explain everything when I get back. Just trust that I know what I'm doing and that I'm safe.

The tape smooths under her thumb, and the paper flutters once in the night air before settling. Then she pockets her keys and pulls the door closed behind her, falling into step beside Elijah and towards the next line she’s about to cross.

She cradles the grimoire tighter to her ribs as she enters her car after the vampire who had been all but a stranger to her the night before. Marking the beginning of a time with no more room for hesitation.

Chapter Text

Their third day on the road is long enough to make the white lines feel like a spell.

The landscape around them has shifted from coal-dark hills to flattening farmland, then to the endless, orderly rows of the Midwest.

Virginia had given way to West Virginia sometime before dawn, then West Virginia to Ohio with its long, straight roads, and now the signs flirt with Indiana as they get closer and closer to Illinois.

Elijah drives while Bonnie reads, a routine they’ve stuck to since leaving Mystic Falls despite Bonnie’s many offers to take turns.

"It's my car. I don't mind driving."

"That seems a bit counterproductive, considering you have no idea where we're going."

"You could always just tell me you know."

"You're suggestion has been noted. Unfortunately for you, I've already decided otherwise.

She’d stopped arguing with him the moment she realized it was like being humored by a parent. Always kind, faintly amused, and absolutely immovable once he’d made up his mind.

The Severence Rite sits open on her lap, the notes of her ancestors threaded through the margins in an achingly familiar hand.

Bonnie traces a line of ink with the side of her thumb and forces her eyes to focus.

Anchor, symbol, origin, cost.

Her skull gives a small, dull throb behind her left eye, and she pinches the bridge of her nose until the ache backs off.

She’s running off 3-hour car naps and cheap gas station snacks.

Nothing fulfilling, but just enough to keep her functioning somehow, her age making it easier for her body to accept less than it needs and still operate.

So she continues working the pieces the way she has been for the past couple of days—identify the origin, build an anchor, control the backlash—churning all the variables over in her mind until the logic either finally clicks or her eyes give out.

...

Her eyes are giving out.

Elijah glances over without taking his hands off the wheel, catching her head tilt as she begins to nod off. “You should rest, Miss Bennett.”

“I’m fine.” The answer is automatic, her eyes blinking rapidly as she jerks upright in her seat. She turns another page, re-reads the same two sentences, and knows he can hear the lie in her voice. “I’ll just…nap in a minute like I have been.”

“You’re exhausted,” he continues, voice even. “And uncomfortable. This car of yours doesn’t exactly foster good rest, and there’s no virtue in pretending otherwise.”

“Yeah, but we can’t afford to lose time by stopping either.” She argues, tapping her pen against the margin—one, two, three—then stopping because the habit annoys him and she doesn’t want to give him the point. “I'm trying to be prepared.”

“And what good will that do either of us if you end up making mistakes because you’re pushing past your limits?” His eyes return to the road, and Bonnie feels strangely like some chastised child. “Close the book, Bonnie. We’ll make a rest stop.”

She means to argue, really, she does. But what actually comes out of her mouth is just another big yawn, and this one ends up pulling her jaw wide enough to pop.

Okay. That’s embarrassing.

She presses her mouth shut and stares at the ink until the letters double, but then, when she goes to blink, the darkness lasts for about half a mile. 

By the time she opens her eyes again, he’s already taken the exit off the main road.

Signs flash before her: fuel, food, a handful of chain hotels. But Elijah doesn’t head toward any of them.

Instead, two turns later, a glass-and-stone tower rises from a sea of parking lots like it was dropped there from a better city.

Bonnie huffs under her breath, rubbing her eyes as she sits up straight again in her seat. "We could've just booked a motel.”

Elijah cuts her a look that makes her feel like the suggestion she just made is one of the most insulting things she could've ever said to him.

“I prefer to be comfortable,” he answers simply, pulling under the portico. “Besides, I’ve had centuries to refine my tastes…I see no reason to begin changing them now."

But Bonnie can hear the subtle attitude beneath the words, the quiet "Do I really look like the type of man who sleeps in motels?” And it’s so rich-boy obvious that she has to bite back a laugh.

Inside the hotel, the air is cold with the lingering scent of lemon oil, a piano track playing so softly in the background that she only notices it when it stops for a beat, and her ears search for the sound again.

The receptionist—NIA, her name tag says—looks up, her smile bright and practiced, as she watches Bonnie and Elijah approach. 

However, before she can even think to greet them, Elijah is already doing that thing he does before his compulsion takes hold, his attention honing to a fine point as two of his fingers place themselves on the counter like he’s steadying her world as much as his own.

“Good afternoon,” he begins, his voice dropping in half a measure that allows Bonnie to feel the rumble of it in her bones. "We’ll need your best two-bedroom suite."

Nia’s pupils pull wider, just a fraction, and there’s that soft lag in her smile as her brain rewrites the next five minutes of this conversation.

“We want no disturbances,” Elijah continues. “No calls put through to this room. No one knocks for any reason short of a fire. You’ll see to it personally, and you’ll forget we discussed it. Do you understand?”

The receptionist breathes in slow and breathes out on the words, “Of course,” like it was her idea, fingers already moving across her keyboard as the printer behind her chatters to life, cards sliding into their sleeves. 

“I understand, sir,” she murmurs, her voice carrying that slightly underwater tone Bonnie’s learned to recognize too well.

Compulsion…such a neat little trick that vampires have…

…

Neat but terrifying. 

And Bonnie clocks all the little details with wary fascination—the tiny sway of Nia’s posture as her mind makes a new groove and commits to it—and even though compulsion has saved all of their lives more than once, it still pokes at the part of Bonnie that hates how easily a vampire can reach into someone’s mind and rearrange it like furniture.

Elijah leaves a platinum card on the desk even though they both know it isn’t necessary, and then tucks a folded tip into the little tray by the keyboard because he’s a gentleman even when he’s cheating—or maybe especially then—and the contradiction scratches at Bonnie’s nerves and also, unfairly, makes him more bearable.

“Thank you, Nia,” he says, this time in his normal tone, and Nia blinks, resets, and hands over the key folder like nothing about the last thirty seconds was out of the ordinary.

“Of course. Enjoy your stay.” 

And that’s that. 

Easy.

Simple.

Bonnie falls into step beside him as they head for the elevators, the marble ground eating the sound of their footsteps as the fountain behind them becomes a hush.

“You make it look so easy,” she says as they step into the elevator together, and the words themselves are not exactly praise.

“That's because it is.” He presses the call button with a knuckle, and the doors close them both inside. “But that doesn’t absolve me of having any manners.” 

She can’t help the snort that leaves her at that, pressing her grimoire closer to her chest and shaking her head as she attempts to shift her thoughts to something less morbid. 

With the elevator doors now closed, Bonnie catches her reflection in the little mirrored wall before them, a version of herself staring back that she doesn’t exactly love. 

Her travel-tired eyes…the shadows beneath them just a shade darker. 

Her hair is bundled up with the elastic from around her wrist in a way that would make Caroline tsk and attempt to fix it in two seconds, and there’s an ink smudge on her thumb from tracing margins way too often like a child. 

But the way Elijah stands just behind her...tie still straight, jacket unlined by a single crease, not a hair out of place; it would be obnoxious if it weren’t also kind of a relief. Because one of them should look like they have their shit together, and it isn’t her today.

…

When they eventually reach their floor, their suite has floor-to-ceiling windows that hold a slice of the city grid within their frame, and there’s a bowl of green apples on a table that neither of them will eat, along with a couch that looks like it could swallow you whole. 

“Left room or right?” Elijah asks, already sliding the key sleeve onto the little silver hook by the door. “Pick one.” 

“Left,” she answers, because it’s closest and her knees have started doing that soft little wobble thing that means that she either needs to sit down or fall down. 

Bonnie sets her bag down just inside the doorway and keeps a hand on the grimoir for a beat longer than necessary. 

The bedroom smells like starch and something clean she can’t name, the bed like a dare as she toes her shoes off and sits, meaning to test the mattress and immediately miscalculating how heavy her body feels. 

Plus, the duvet has that hotel slickness; cool for exactly one second before it warms, sheets crisp enough to make a sound when her legs slide under them. The pillow smells like whatever fancy detergent they use, and when the AC kicks on, it feathers a curl across her forehead; one she tries to push back only for it to fall right back where it was.

“You didn’t have to do all of this.” She blurts aloud, needing to make conversation even as her exhaustion keeps pulling her forward. “I’ve never stayed anywhere this nice before.” 

Elijah stops in the doorway, already loosening his tie by an inch as he rolls one sleeve up with precise fingers. “I gathered.” 

God…Even dressed down a fraction, he still looks camera-ready…

But if anything, Bonnie is at least glad the universe sought to give her a soulmate who looks like he could be a front-page model for GQ magazine. 

“We’ll leave at dusk. Until then...sleep.”

But guilt gets there first, riding shotgun with pride as she rubs her palms against her grainy eyes. “I don’t want to be the reason we’re not already on the state line.”

She doesn’t want to be the reason they fall behind schedule.

“You’re not,” he says, simple as a door swinging shut. “You’re making sure we arrive with you thinking clearly. That’s the only part that matters.”

Bonnie exhales and laughs once, tiny, because his version of comfort always seems to be dressed up in practicality. “Fine. But only for a little bit,” she yawns, eyes already trying to drift even as her mouth keeps moving. 

She means to grab her notebook to write some things down, but she ends up lying back instead, and when the bed tilts in the exact right way, the duvet tucks around her hips and sinks her even deeper. 

Her next breath comes deeper than the last, the ache behind her eye unwinding a little as the hum in the room lowers a notch. 

…

And then she drops, falling fast asleep as time finally loosens its hold. 

When she surfaces, it’s to a different color of light painting the ceiling, thinner and evening-blue.

The room has cooled a degree since she shut her eyes, and there’s condensation on a glass of water now sitting on her nightstand that definitely wasn’t there before she knocked out. 

The hinge gives a soft tick that draws her sleepy attention towards the doorway, where Elijah’s shape now fills the frame as if he’s been there long enough to decide not to wake her twice already. 

A small heat blooms in Bonnie’s chest at the thought of him checking in on her while she slept. 

But weren’t they supposed to be leaving now?

His jacket is gone at the moment, sleeves cuffed on both arms, and his hair a little less perfect, like he ran a hand through it and then thought better before doing it again. 

“How long?” She hears herself ask, the gravel in her voice making her wince. 

“Not long enough,” Elijah answers, stepping in just far enough to set a new glass of ice water within reach, occupying space with the type of calm that takes the oxygen out of her panic. 

“Drink.”

The water is cold enough to make her teeth complain, and perfect for exactly that reason, too. But it clears the last bit of cotton from her head, and she catches him watching. Not like she’s fragile, not like she’s prey, but just like he needs to know if she’s going to say she’s fine and mean it this time. 

Her muscles unkink in a slow chain reaction, calves first, then shoulders, then the stiff line at the base of her skull.

“Better?” he asks, watching the transformation happen.

“It’s quieter in here,” Bonnie whispers, tapping her temple with the side of the glass. “Still stubborn on the page because it wants what it wants, but now that I can think about it, I think I can cheat the vessel I need for the spell with some ingredients we’ll need to get at some witch shop in Chicago.”

She sets the glass down and rubs the heel of her hand under her left eye, pushing up further on her elbow so she can sit up a bit straighter on the bed. “I can’t do the same for the symbol, which is still the biggest issue because we’ll need to be exact and—”

Elijah hums while she talks, that low, polite note people use when they’re humoring someone rambling about something beyond them and nonsensical. Pleasant on the surface and carrying just enough amusement to make her want to stop talking.

The thought makes Bonnie’s face heat, and she purses her lips against the faintest ghost of humor she can see on his face. 

“Rest for ten more minutes.” He eventually responds, the corners of his lips tilting around the words as he ducks back out of her doorway, taking both glasses of water with him. “I’ll wake you when it’s time.” 

She slides down again before her brain can even begin to remind her of her pride, and the duvet has a heat now that cups her like it knows where she belongs. “Wake me in five,” she mutters, already losing the edges of her words. 

He pauses at the doorway, hand on the doorknob, before leaving it and stepping closer, the faintest trace of his cologne catching in the air as he moves. 

The sound of his feet is soft against the carpet, unhurried with precision as he adjusts the duvet where it’s twisted at her hip, smoothing the edge so it falls neatly along her side, then lifting the pillow beneath her head just enough to ease the angle of her neck. 

His hands are careful, reverent in a way that she’s too tired to clock.

“Sleep,” he whispers this time, lower than before, gentled into something almost private. His knuckles brush the curve of her cheek as he draws a single line along her skin, a touch so light it could be mistaken for an accident if not for the stillness that follows.

Bonnie mumbles something against the pillow, words slurred into a half-thought she won’t remember, the kind of sleepy ramble that never makes it past the threshold of consciousness. 

He answers her anyway, voice pitched just for her, the syllables smoothing out like a promise she won’t recall when morning comes.

By the time he finally straightens, she’s already surrendered to her dreams for a second time that night. 

Morning eventually finds her like a rock in a river.

Same clothes, same tangle of curls, same stale taste in her mouth from a lack of hydration…

And the light is too clean to be dawn because it isn’t. 

It’s late. 

...

They're late. 

Way past what “five more minutes” is supposed to look like, which means Elijah didn’t wake her, and he did it on purpose.

“You said ten minutes,” she grumbles as she pushes upright, voice sandpapery, sleep creasing her cheek as the duvet slides off her hips.  

Her wrist is warm where his name sits, like it’s annoyingly pleased with itself, and from the other side of the suite—as if he were right there on the pillow beside her—Elijah answers. 

“And you needed an entire night. You’ll do better with more than four hours of sleep in a real bed.” Which is not an apology, not even close.

Bonnie groans and scrubs at the wrinkle on her cheek with the heel of her hand, staring at the stripe of light on the carpet until her eyes stop protesting. Then she slides out of bed with that careful, quiet shuffle you do when you don’t want to admit you feel good. 

When she pads into the living area, he’s exactly where his voice came from, at the small table by the window, chair angled toward the glass, the city stacked and humming behind him. 

He’s reading a newspaper, an actual broadsheet, one knee bent, and the top buttons of his shirt undone. His hair is even less disciplined than it was yesterday, and when it catches in the sun, it looks softer than it has any right to be.

“It’s not Sunday,” she tells him, because if she says what she’s actually thinking, he’ll be insufferable for the rest of the morning.

She should not be thinking of the word ‘soft’ in reference to a thousand-year-old vampire at eight in the morning, and yet…here we are. But her gaze lingers longer than it should because she’s still booting up, drawn in by how different he looks without his usual suit and tie. 

Without his usual mask and stone...

“News is not beholden to the calendar,” Elijah answers, the corner of his mouth moving up like he heard all of what she didn’t say. He glances at her over the paper, lowering the edge of it just enough to catch her eyes and let her know that he’s aware.

Bonnie feels heat flood her cheeks as she immediately pivots on her heel and walks quickly towards their small kitchenette. 

Right. That was mortifying. 

She keeps herself busy by making some tea because motion is the cure for embarrassment and because she needs heat in her hands to wake the rest of her up. 

She busies herself with the kettle because staring at Elijah like a sleep-drunk idiot isn’t an action she wants to repeat. Nor does she want to let her brain continue looping on the image of how he’d looked at her over the top of the paper. 

Real smooth, Bennett. 

The red light clicks on as steam curls up in a thin ribbon, and she rubs her thumb along the counter’s edge while she waits, hip resting against the cabinet until the soft hiss tells her that it’s ready.

When she finally returns, he’s folded the paper in half and set it down like her presence commands his immediate attention, and on the table waits a spread that could’ve come from a five-star kitchen rather than normal hotel room service. 

There are several pastries and a coffee cake with its sugared crust catching the light, along with mango sliced into neat little fans, and a bowl of strawberries already neatly trimmed and powdered with sugar.

Her stomach answers before she has the chance to.

“You replaced my ten minutes with a buffet,” she drawls, narrowing her eyes as she takes a sip of her tea and sits down across from him.

“You’re welcome.” His tone lands somewhere between smug and matter-of-fact. “Eat.”

She thanks him first because manners were hammered into her harder than habit, and then does her best not to act like a gremlin while she serves herself several slices of the coffee cake, exactly two pieces of mango—okay, maybe five—two scoops of strawberries, and a pastry torn in half so it feels less like she’s on a bender. 

The fork clinks on porcelain, and she almost rolls her eyes at herself because who is she trying to impress? 

He can hear her joints crack, smell her farts, and count every single breath she forgets to take.

So really…worrying about ‘eating pretty’ is pointless here. 

Nonetheless, the sugar takes the last of the grit off her mood, and the peppermint tea wakes up the edges of her head that were still snoozing. 

“Sleep all right?” Elijah asks, breaking their momentary silence as he takes a sip of what must be his coffee.

“I slept like I got compelled,” she mutters, and even that tiny bite sounds half-hearted because her body feels…good, heavy in a way that doesn’t mean tired anymore, and she hates that he was right about her needing real rest in a real bed. 

“Consider me an accessory to your better mood then,” he replies, and his eyes do that smug flicker for exactly one second before his gaze releases hers. 

They eat without talking for a while, which should be awkward but weirdly isn’t. So she chews and tries to keep her mind on the road ahead of them. 

How many hours are left, how many state lines they have left to cross, how many chances for things to go wrong before they ever see…him. 

The unfinished spell weighs heavily on her mind, but Bonnie can't help the way she thinks about Klaus again, the man she’s never seen in daylight and isn’t sure she wants to. 

She tries to think of him as less of a myth and more of a person, wondering if he’ll treat her like leverage first and then learn her name later, or if he already knows it and will instead try to charm her before becoming the threat. 

Because Bonnie has learned that men like him love to pretend they have two gears when they really only have one and a half. 

Would he laugh in her face when he saw her? Or treat her like prey? 

Every version of him her brain builds feels wrong, but he’s still there waiting at the end of the tunnel, no matter which one she imagines.

She glances up mid-thought and realizes Elijah still hasn’t touched his second plate. “Are you going to eat anything?” She asks, too blunt, too obvious, heat crawling up her neck a second after the words land. 

But whatever. She asked. 

“Or are you just going to watch me commit to all these carbs?” 

He lifts one eyebrow a fraction, eyes dragging across her figure in a way that almost makes Bonnie want to duck and hide. 

“I don’t have much interest in human food at the moment.” 

And he leaves the words there just long enough for her mind to take the bait.

…

Oh. 

Of course. 

Because it's a blood thing. 

Because he’s a vampire and they all turn a little wolfish when they’re hungry.

Suddenly Bonnie finds herself very aware of the exposed line of her throat, and the sound her pulse would make to someone like him if he were to—

She watches as Elijah's mouth curves, and there it is, amusement he doesn’t bother to hide. “You’re too easy,” he drawls, mild and maddening. “To rile up.”

…

Was he…? 

She catches the joke a second too late and scowls on principle, mostly to distract from the fact that her face can’t decide whether to blush or behave.

He’s enjoying himself. 

…

So her soulmate isn't a total brick wall like she originally thought. 

Fine. That's fine. Good even. 

Bonnie doesn't know what she would've done if she'd been fated to be with a man whose face could only hold three expressions. 

“You’re the worst.”

“Mhmm... ” he hums. "Of course I am." And the dry patience in it knocks the sting out.

“I ate earlier, by the way.” He nods at the plate she’s excavating. “Half the coffee cake and some of the fruit. The mangos here were less offensive than I originally anticipated.”

“Wow. A rave,” Bonnie deadpans, and then, because reflex wins, “Ass.”

He accepts the title with a tiny incline of his head and lets the quiet return, the good kind, the one that doesn’t ask for performance. 

Bonnie finishes the fruit and pushes the last bit of her pastry back toward him, her tea now cooled down enough to drink without caution. She wraps both hands around the mug and lets the warmth soak her fingers.

“Tell me something about yourself,” she blurts impulsively, because the quiet between them suddenly feels like an invitation, and she’s grown tired of the click of her own thoughts. “One thing. A story. A hobby you like. You're favorite color. Anything.” 

A brow goes up again, but she refuses to take it back. “We’re bonded for eternity,” she continues, flippant because the alternative is letting her shyness make her double back. “We might as well do more than swap to-do lists.”

Elijah watches her for a beat that stretches long enough to make her wonder if she’s misstepped. But then he leans forward, eyes holding hers as his mouth begins to move. “A court in Florence,” he begins, and the word alone opens a window. 

“Lorenzo was entertaining a room that included Leonardo and Michelangelo, which meant peace was impossible on principle. Leonardo had designed a little ‘heaven.' Painted clouds rigged to the ceiling, a basket of petals meant to drift down at the height of a toast. Naturally, Michelangelo couldn’t resist mocking the mechanism, but Leonardo insisted it would perform flawlessly.” 

Elijah’s mouth curves faintly, as though he already knows how much his words don't belong in the same breath. “However, during his trial period, the winch did, in fact, end up jammed. And the entire contraption dropped like a stone, sending the basket and every last petal crashing onto one unfortunate guest.”

He pauses, expression turning wry. “That unfortunate ‘guest’…was me.”

Bonnie stares at him for a beat, caught between awe and disbelief. 

Leonardo. Michelangelo…

...

...like THE Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo from the fucking RENISSANCE???

…

And he just drops their names like they were his old drinking buddies. 

Pshh...they probably had been, Bonnie thinks, slightly irritated by his apparent nonchalance. With how old Elijah claims to be, it's no surprise he's managed to meet more than a few big historical figures in his time. 

Still, it's insane to picture him old enough to have brushed elbows with history’s greatest minds. More insane still is that the story feels less like some untouchable piece of art history and more like the setup to a slapstick joke. 

Eventually, the absurdity gets the better of her, and her laugh ends up bursting out early before he’s even finished.

“I stood there like a statue,” Elijah goes on, tone deliberately flat, because he seems to understand that the driest telling makes it funnier. “Petals in my mouth, plaster dust in my hair. Michelangelo had walked past me at one point and patted my shoulder. He said, ‘Finally, a subject worthy of that fool’s marble.’ And my brother Niklaus had laughed at me for a month and insisted that I be called the muse of Primavera.” 

Bonnie laughs the kind of laugh that kicks the insides of her stomach because the picture is so clear—Elijah standing there like the world’s most polite statue while geniuses bicker and his menace of a brother wheezes—and the joke lands exactly where it needs to for the audience that she is. 

“Please tell me you spent the rest of the night shedding flowers like a cursed Disney prince,” she giggles, wiping under one eye.

Elijah hums, leaning forward slightly to lace his fingers together on the table. “Every time I moved…” he drawls, face absolutely straight, “Something fell out of my hair.”

Bonnie continues to cackle, hiding her smile behind the rim of her mug, but the heat in her cheeks betrays her anyway. 

It’s absurd how hearing such a story makes the vampire before her feel less untouchable…

More human in a way that charms her thoroughly. 

Elijah watches her amusement play out, the faintest hint of a smile threatening his lips, though he reins it in before it can bloom. “I trust my humiliation has been sufficient entertainment,” he notes dryly, then leans back in his chair with the kind of quiet finality that passes for invitation. “Now, Miss Bennett. Surely you can match me with something of your own.” 

Bonnie freezes for a moment, eyes wide, before she snorts, setting her mug aside as she shakes her head. “I don’t think I can come up with anything that good.”

Elijah shrugs, a motion that looks so strange on him. “It can be simple. You said anything remember?”

Simple, easy...

...

...anything...

There’s no need to perform here…he isn’t some god that she has to impress. 

…

But still…those nerves curl inside her stomach anyway, like butterflies fighting for an escape. 

She rolls the mug between her palms because the movement helps, because she didn’t think this far ahead, and now she has to make what she says sound like a real thing and not like she's on stage for an audition. 

“I’ve been…making things.” It comes out with the wry tilt of someone half expecting to be laughed at. “Jewelry. Started with my friend’s daylight ring, and then it just…stuck. Crystals, chains, wire, the whole ‘witch in a bead store’ experience. It’s soothing. Useful.” She swallows, embarrassed at the way her voice softens. “I like looking at pretty things so…”

Then she mirrors his earlier shrug, heat threatening to overwhelm her again because admitting she likes making pretty things feels weirdly intimate in the moment. “But yeah. Sorry, I don’t have any super funny stories like your Leonardo thing. You’ll have to give me more time to think about something that can match that one.”

Elijah doesn’t answer her right away. 

Instead, his gaze lingers, steady and unguarded in a way she isn’t used to. For once, it isn’t calculation she sees there, or the cold reserve he wears like armor, but something quieter, contemplative... almost fond. 

The weight of it knots in her chest, and she has to look down at her mug again before she forgets how to breathe.

“May I see?” he eventually asks, no pressure in it, only interest.

Bonnie hesitates for a moment, her fingers brushing the rim of her mug. 

Showing him feels oddly personal, like handing over a piece of herself, and for a moment, she nearly waves the request away. But then she pushes to her feet before she can think better of it, padding into the hotel bedroom to dig through the outer pocket of her bag.

She fishes out a small velvet pouch that she keeps meaning to replace, and returns to him carrying it carefully, as though her hands might shake if she thought too much about it. 

Inside is a faux-gold chain, a citrine stone glowing warm as honey at its center, wrapped in a wire cage she had shaped herself. 

It isn’t perfect—one coil goes a hair wide, the kind of flaw her eye always catches—but it looks good enough to hold and good enough to wear. “It’s spelled against bad dreams,” she explains, offering it out, “And to amplify stuff like creativity too…”

Elijah takes the necklace as though it were glass, careful because she’s made it important, and he clearly respects that. The chain slips over his knuckles, the citrine catching light and throwing it back. His thumb hovers near the stone, like he can feel the spell humming through it. Maybe he can, maybe not, but he acts as though he does, and that’s what matters. 

“It’s beautiful,” he says simply, without the empty politeness people so often use to soften the truth, or rather their disinterest. He meets her eyes. “And clean. You’ve done well.”

That stupid, treacherous warmth unfolds again under her ribs, a little spill of pride that she can’t hide as easily as she wishes she could. “Thanks,” she says, trying for casual and hitting soft instead.

Time presses in on them as they sit there. 

The light on the floor has shifted; the AC has cycled twice without her noticing; the road is still waiting with its lines and miles, and the brother at the end of it. 

“When do we have to go?” she asks, quieting the part of her that wants five more minutes of this. Of food, talk, and the not-terrible company of a vampire who can sit with her in silence without making it worse.

“I’ll give you time to shower and change,” Elijah answers, checking his watch with that neat flick of motion he always uses. “Then we leave.”

She nods but doesn’t move. Inertia, yes, but also because he's still looking at her necklace, and she likes that more than she should. 

When he stands, the movement is unhurried, graceful in a way that makes her pulse trip over itself. She has to remind herself not to give in to the quiet gravity of him. He folds the chain into her palm and closes her fingers over it, his own brushing hers long enough for the stone to press warm against her skin. 

Then he leans down, just enough that his voice lowers, just enough that it feels like it’s meant only for her. “Go get ready, Bonnie.”

It shouldn’t land the way it does. 

…

But it does. 

The sound of her name on his lips like that should be illegal. 

Heat curls low in her chest, and her mouth parts to tell him to stop weaponizing his courtesy. Except he’s already gone, the blur of him stirring the air, and the door of their hotel room sighing shut behind them as though to mark his exit.

She looks down at the citrine still burning softly in her hand, and shakes her head because danger is one thing when it’s teeth and violence and another when it’s this. 

Patience, gentleness, the way he makes a slow effort of studying her. 

“Don’t start,” she mutters at herself, padding toward the shower with the necklace catching every thread of light, the weight of his voice lingering just as warm as his name that sits at her wrist.

Lake air threads through the vents as the skyline starts cutting into the horizon, all glass edges and clean lines. 

Bonnie keeps Grams’ grimoire open because her hands need a job while her head loops the same problem: the spell will only hold if she can pin the curse to its true origin. To the person who originally cast it.  

And the witch who laid it down is probably dust by now. 

Bonnie sighs, resting her head on her hand. 

She can get most of the ingredients they need, she can figure out how to draw a symbol that actually fits what the curse is, but she can’t hitch a living spell to a person in a grave. A person she doesn't even know.

You just can’t. 

So the margin gets another note—will find a proxy that is living to replace the original one?—and even writing it feels like lying to herself about her capabilities.

“How are you faring?” Elijah asks, steady over the quiet hiss of her car's tires. 

“Far enough to hate the parts I can’t figure out,” she answers, eyes still on the page. “It’s the anchor bit. I’m assuming that the witch who cursed your brother is gone, so I can’t tie this curse back to her like it wants me to.”

“That’s because it was our mother,” Elijah reveals, making Bonnie freeze mid-note, the pen balanced uselessly in her hand. “Our mother Esther was the one who cast the hybrid curse on Niklaus and bound his wolf form. If you’re looking for names, that’s the one. If you’re looking for help, there isn’t any in it.”

She feels her thoughts begin to spiral fast.

His mother...Esther...

Even the name feels heavy and old. 

And it makes her throat tighten because nothing about that sentence fits cleanly together. 

Why would she have done that?

What did she have to gain from doing it? 

…

And what kind of life did it take to make Elijah say it so simply, as though it’s just another stone in some ever-growing pile she doesn't know the half of? 

...

The idea unsettles her more than she wants to admit.

Eventually, Bonnie nods, her jaw tight, tapping the pen twice against her knee before forcing it still.

The road hums under her tires as she holds her silence, gathering the questions that pile sharp at the back of her tongue until one pushes free anyway, smaller than the others but still weighty in its curiosity. 

“What happened to the two of you?” she asks at last, voice quiet and slightly hesitant. “Before all of this? Why do you hate him so much? Beyond the obvious, of course...”

Elijah keeps his eyes on the lane, but his voice shifts into something older, steadier, like a man telling a story that’s lived in his mouth for centuries. “We were human once. Centuries ago, in a village our family settled in, now known to you as modern-day Mystic Falls…” 

Bonnie watches the sharp set of his jaw reflected in the window, trying to keep her surprise in check. She’s heard stories that stretched back generations, but never anything like this, never straight from the mouth of someone who had lived it.

“Vampires didn’t exist then,” he continues, one hand easing the wheel as if the memory itself might jolt the car. “Only wolves. And one night, our youngest brother went out with Niklaus to watch the wolves turn." He keeps his eyes on the road, but the weight of centuries seems to lean across the console. "He didn’t come back whole. He'd been slashed to pieces by one mid-transition, and he didn’t make it back soon enough for our mother to heal him.”

Her stomach twists at his words, thinking of a boy on the ground, the moon hanging indifferent above him.

She knows grief; she knows the helpless way it gnaws at the edges of your heart and sanity. Still, the image of a boy torn apart under the moon makes her press her nails into the leather binding of the grimoire until her fingers ache.

“Niklaus was devastated,” Elijah continues, his voice lowering, softer in a way that makes it clear he remembers the shape of his brother’s sorrow. “He believed it was his fault alone that our brother had lost his life. And after that, our father demanded a way to keep us all safe from the wolves.”

“And how did he do that?” Bonnie asks, though the tension in her shoulders already knows the answer. 

“By getting our mother, a witch, to oblige him.” His words come measured, deliberate, as if he’s reciting a liturgy he’s had to repeat too many times. “She brewed wine mixed with a doppelgänger’s blood, and when we drank it, she had him drive a sword through our hearts.” 

He glances at her then, just for a breath, and in his eyes there is only the dark shadow of memory. “We died. And then we woke differently. Stronger. Faster. Hungrier. We were the first of our kind. There were no models before us, no rules written to govern what we had become.” 

His mouth tightens, like the word tastes bitter even now. “‘Originals’ was what the world settled on, because even when more vampires were eventually made…they needed a word for those of us that came before them.”

…

Originals…

It makes so much more sense now. 

The way Elijah wasn’t so easily killed. His strength. His terror. The way even a vampire like Katherine found herself weak in the knees at the mere sight of him. 

Bonnie feels herself fly into his memories; she imagines drinking blood disguised as wine, the cold weight of steel through her heart, a mother forcing her children into something unnatural. 

The word Originals hangs between them like a brand, heavy and absolute, and Bonnie can’t decide if it makes them sound like monsters or martyrs.

His hand tightens on the wheel, and only after a long beat does he let it go again, as though memory has to be pried loose finger by finger.

“However, when Niklaus made his first kill, the wolf in him answered. The truth of what he was could no longer be hidden, and so our mother sought to bind it away, sealing his werewolf side, so that our father would never see what his son truly was.”

Bonnie sits very still, fighting the urge to lean closer and demand more details. 

It tracks…too neatly, in fact. 

A mother trying to protect her son. 

A father who’d never forgive him for what he was. 

But the solution wasn’t kindness; it was a curse. The kind of curse that echoes a thousand years later and costs a thousand more lives. 

“And Katherine,” she says carefully, because she knows that name, knows the string of wreckage it left behind, “that’s where you and he—”

“Elena’s ancestor,” Elijah corrects her instantly, crisp as if the word Katherine doesn’t belong in his mouth. “Niklaus needed the doppelgänger’s blood to undo his curse. Miss Pierce ran. She turned herself to make the sacrifice useless, and I—” He exhales through his nose, the faintest trace of disdain aimed inward. “I failed to bring her back to him. That was the beginning of the fault line.”

Of course it was. Bonnie can almost see it: Elijah’s loyalty stretched to breaking, Klaus enraged at losing the one thing that could make him whole, a woman clever enough to play both sides and cruel enough to vanish when it suited her. 

The kind of story Mystic Falls was built on, except this one stretched back to before the town even had a name.

“And the rest of your family?” she asks.

For the first time, there’s a pause. 

His jaw works once before he answers. “Over the centuries...whenever we defied him...he would find a way to deal with us, to make us less of a threat to his authority. Not all at once, of course, but rather one by one. For years, I alone remained in his favor; the rest, he daggered and stored away.”

His voice doesn’t shake as he says the words, not even dip. But there’s a new sharpness under it, like skin scraped raw with a stone. “When Katerina betrayed both of us, he'd been so angry that our relationship forever changed due to the feelings I had for one woman. We got into spats more often, he sought to punish me more often, and I defied him more often. When at last I begged to see our family again, he told me he’d had their coffins buried at sea, scattered where I could never reach them.”

Bonnie feels her stomach turn cold. 

She pictures coffins sliding into black water, lids sealed, and the faces beneath them lost. 

She’s never met them, doesn’t even know any of their names, and yet she can feel the weight of their loss all the same, the way family becomes nothing due to the wickedness of another. 

She swallows. “And you believe him?”

Elijah’s eyes don’t leave the road. “I have no reason not to.” His voice doesn’t shake, but something raw lives under the control.

And isn’t that something? Bonnie thinks. That he thinks and believes his brother to be so terrible that he wouldn’t question his ability to ruin their family this way…

“I get why you want him dead,” she says finally, quiet but steady. “I do.”

Elijah’s gaze stays on the road ahead, but there’s a sharper intent in the set of his shoulders. “Then answer me this...if it comes to it, if every other option fails, will you let me do it?”

...

Bonnie feels her throat constrict. 

The easy answer is yes. 

It’s clean, it’s brave, it sounds like the kind of thing a witch who knows her own worth should say. 

But the mark at her ankle burns like a flame pressed too long against skin, and when she tries to imagine Klaus’s death, the picture slips away, refusing to hold. Like trying to sketch a shape her mind won’t let exist. 

“I don’t know,” The words come raw and quiet...damning. “I…I just don’t know.” She admits, hating that it feels like weakness when it’s just the truth.

“Niklaus has earned what’s coming to him.” Elijah guides the car up an incline that spills them into open sky, the lake stretched wide and steel-blue at their side. “And nothing about that mark on your ankle erases his ledger.”

Bonnie feels the urge to tuck her ankle up underneath her. 

You never truly understand a debt until the day you realize what part of yourself it intends to collect...and it’s always easier to bargain when you can’t yet see the blood.

“But I have also seen what becomes of someone whose soulmate dies violently. The people around you will call it survival. You'll go on, you'll speak, you'll smile when prompted, but inside...something vital will have been cut out, and it doesn’t grow back, it doesn't truly heal. And all that remains is a body that remembers what was stolen from it.” 

His voice doesn’t harden; it simply flattens into something factual. “But I can be patient. I can be creative. We have eternity, and I don’t lack for time.”

Her pen slips in her fingers, and she sets it down before it betrays the tremor in her hand. Two knuckles press against the corner of her eye where the ache always blooms when fear and grief mix too close together. “I’m sorry he’s hurt you like this,” she says, because the weight of it demands acknowledgment.

“That isn’t yours to say,” Elijah replies, gentle but firm. “Don’t carry debts that belong to someone else.”

“Okay.” She lets the breath out. “Then if everything goes wrong and we run out of clever ideas, you have my—” she grimaces, because permission isn’t the word she wants, “you have my word I won’t hold it against you. Whatever happens.”

Elijah exhales, not quite a laugh, not quite a sigh. “I’m not certain that’s a promise you’ll be able to keep if it comes to that,” he says, and before she can bristle, he adds, “You share something with him, you cannot outthink Bonnie. The same as you share something with me. If he dies, a part of you goes with him to the grave. This isn’t about willpower, my dear. It's about the possibility of losing a third of your soul.”

Bonnie's gaze jerks back to the lake because she needs something bigger than herself to look at, something vast enough to pin her fear on. She isn’t new to horror, or to losing pieces of herself for other people, but the way Elijah says it...so absolute, like gravity...makes it feel less like a choice and more like a law of nature.

Her stomach goes hollow, and the fear sits low and heavy, refusing to move.

The car goes quiet again for another couple of miles, this one different and more tense than the comfortable silences they've been able to share up until now. 

It's because she doesn't know what to say. 

How to respond to Elijah's words about following Klaus to the grave should that be the decision that's made in the coming hours. 

She doesn't know what she's risking...she barely even knows what she's signed up for...

And yet it's too late to turn back now. Too late to take the words back, her promises back, or to even just travel back in time and make it so she never got out of her bed that night at all. 

Yet...

The choice to get out of her bed that night and make this deal with Elijah is what's going to end up keeping them all alive. 

And she needs the people she loves to be okay. To be safe.

...

But what about you, Bonnie? Who's going to keep you safe?

She glances towards Elijah, a quick flick of motion she hopes he doesn't catch. 

Who's going to keep you safe?

She's never been one to bank on someone else taking care of her. Not since what she's been through with vampires coming to Mystic Falls and turning all their lives on their heads. 

No. 

...

But maybe...just maybe...

...

“My dad’s barely around,” Bonnie says at last, the words leaving her lips like they've been scripted, like they need to be said in the moment to complete the scene, “And when he is, we stick to safe topics. Work. School. Weather. Nothing real. We don’t talk about my mom…we barely talked about my Grams.”

Her throat catches as it always does when she thinks of Sheila Bennett, like the woman is still a living presence in her chest, a ghost that refuses to fade. “She died after we opened the tomb we thought Katherine was in,” Bonnie continues, her voice thinning at the edges. “The spell tore her apart, and I was the one who asked her to help me.”

Elijah doesn’t look at her, but the faintest shift passes through him, a change in the atmosphere more than in motion, like a room holding its breath after something fragile hits the floor.

“When he found out,” she says, quieter now, “my dad sent me away to stay with his family for a couple weeks. I don’t even think he really understands what happened to her...or what it did to me.”

She huffs out something that isn’t quite a laugh, and tucks her hair back as she settles further into her seat, tilting her head against the cool glass of her car window. “Half of what I know about being a Bennett comes from other people telling me what I’m supposed to be, not from my family showing me who we are.”

The car hums beneath them, that low highway rhythm filling in what she doesn’t say.

Her thumb traces the worn spine of the grimoire in her lap, following the indent of age like it might give her an answer. “But most days,” she admits, “I just want to forget all this Bennett witch business and leave Mystic Falls altogether. Go somewhere no one knows my name. Greece. Romania. Anywhere. Learn the kind of magic that isn’t tied to someone else’s emergency.”

Elijah’s eyes flick toward her then, only for a heartbeat, but the look is full, something like understanding in his gaze...something like pity, but still softer than either. More true. He hums under his breath, the sound so low it almost blends into the road.

“I’m telling you this,” Bonnie says, her voice steadier now, “because you told me about your family and fair’s fair. But I'm also telling you because…” She hesitates, fingers tightening on the book. “Because I know my problems are smaller than yours, but I understand the way love makes you weaker than you'd like to be.”

He doesn’t answer, and the quiet stretches between them once more, not tense, not fearful, but just full of everything neither of them knows how to name.

When he finally moves, it’s to merge into the next lane, taking the next exit with his usual precision as the city finally grows nearer.

Chicago...

The city lights bleed into her windshield, and Bonnie's breath hitches slightly when she catches his hand settling on the console between them, not touching hers, not even reaching. Just there. A simple act of presence, like he only wants to exist closer to her, like the gravity between them finally remembers what it’s for.

The lake disappears behind glass and concrete, and the hum of traffic replaces the stillness of the road, but the space between their hands feels warmer than it did a mile ago.

She closes her eyes against the glass of her car window and lets her hand slowly reach out to rest against his on her center console. 

Not touching.

Not yet.

But close enough.

They turn off the wide avenue into a street that feels owned.

Brick dark with old weather, iron balconies pretending at charm, a wash of voices that thicken and then thin again as doors open and close.

Elijah slows in front of a chrome-edged diner with fogged windows and a neon sign that hums like it’s been awake longer than the sun. He doesn’t cut the engine right away; he just watches the glass for a moment, the sidewalk behind them, and then finally her.

It takes everything within Bonnie not to begin fidgeting under his gaze. 

“We’re in his quarter now,” Elijah eventually murmurs, his voice low and even. “Keep your eyes up. If anything feels wrong, stay inside and keep your composure. I won’t be far.”

“I know,” she whispers back, because she does and also because she needs to hear herself say it. “Be careful.”

His mouth tilts, a silent acknowledgment of her words rather than a verbal one. Then he steps out of her car, circling to open her door like they’re arriving at a reservation instead of a line in the sand, and the brief weight of his fingers at her wrist says the rest.

He leaves on foot, hands in his pockets, posture relaxed in a way that somehow makes the street take him seriously; she watches him fold into the city until he’s just another coat and turns, making her way into the nearby diner to wait. 

The diner smells like hot coffee and fryer oil, a jukebox in the corner dripping out an old guitar line under the clatter of plates and the soft sizzle from the flat-top.

She takes a stool two in from the end so she can see the door and the reflection of the booths in the chrome, and a server in a black apron, the name HANS stitched slightly crooked on his tag, wipes the counter with careful circles and looks up when her shadow lands.

“Can I get you something?” he asks, voice warmed by a thousand repetitions.

She gives him a small smile, so he knows to leave her be. “I’m all set, thank you.” 

He nods and slips away, the soft rhythm of the diner resuming around her. But eventually the waiter comes back, surprising her by setting a glass of water down for her anyway, condensation already tracking the side with a lemon wedge sitting neatly on the top. 

Bonnie blinks at the gesture before sharing her thanks with another small smile, watching as Hans tucks a napkin beneath it with the kind of neatness that says he takes pride in the small things before moving down to check on a couple sharing a plate of fries.

She keeps one hand on the counter as the other brings the glass of water to her lips, letting the room’s noise settle into something her nerves can file as she recites the facts she knows. 

Elijah left to go meet one of his contacts. 

He'll be back soon. 

She knows the plan. 

Everything is set to go exactly as it should be. 

She's safe.

...

...for now...

...

The bell over the door rings again, not that Bonnie bothers to turn and look at who's come inside.

Instead, she continues drinking her water, picking the lemon slice on the edge and tucking it between her tongue and the top of her teeth, allowing the sour flavor to keep her alert. 

Someone takes the empty stool to her right with the smooth, unhurried ease of a regular who knows he won’t be asked to wait, and the first thing that lands isn’t his face or the coat or even the way he sits like the counter owes him space.

...

It’s his voice.

“You look lonely, love.”

His voice is English, rounded and warm around the edges, the kind of cadence that invites you closer and dares you to say no. She doesn’t turn right away because strangers don’t get that for free, instead taking the wedge out of her mouth and dropping it into her mostly empty cup of water.

“I’m not,” she replies dryly, keeping her tone mild as she pushes her glass away. “But thank you for the concern.”

The man beside her hums. “Mm. Are you certain?” His elbow rests lightly on the counter, and he angles his body just enough that she can feel his attention in a way that makes him difficult to ignore. “You’ve the air of someone new to the neighborhood... a bit lost, perhaps. It’s an unfriendly town if one chooses poorly. A friend or two can make the landing softer.”

Bonnie lets out an irritated puff of air from her nose. 

Is this flirting? 

Was he flirting? 

Being approached when she has no desire to be...it's every girl's worst nightmare. 

At least the space was crowded...

Lest the man get ideas about the rejection she's more than ready to dole out.

She cuts him a look then, just to be polite, and gets an eyeful she wishes were less effective. He has good bone structure...this stranger of a man...a mouth that looks permanently on the verge of saying something inappropriate, and eyes such an alluring shade of blue-green that she knows he barely misses much.

Annoying? Yes.

Beautiful? Unfortunately.

Dangerous?

...

...

Very likely.

The combination is irritating in its efficiency, and some small traitorous part of her that hoards pretty things notes how this might've worked on her had her current situation been anything other than what it is.

“I think I’m pretty decent at knowing the right sort from the wrong sort,” she answers, letting the corner of her mouth move because humor helps the line land without a fight. “Your concern isn’t necessary, but again, thanks.”

The man smiles without showing teeth, a quick flash that reads more delighted than offended, and leans back enough that the warmth at her side loosens. “As you wish. I can recognize when my help isn’t wanted,” he says, with a little flourish that makes the sentence feel like a bow, “or my attentions.”

“Glad you can tell the difference,” she says, and lets her mouth twitch in something close to a smile before she turns back to her water.

Hans arrives again to top off someone’s coffee and sets a second napkin near Bonnie’s glass before turning towards the stranger beside her, his eyes lighting up with a recognition that lets Bonnie know that the man beside her isn't much of a stranger to Hans at all. 

“Evening, Hans,” the man greets, his tone easy and familiar.

Hans’ face opens with a smile, nodding towards him before reaching over to begin cleaning up Bonnie's discarded glass. “Evening, Klaus. You want the usual tonight?”

...

...

The name drops into her stomach like a coin into a deep well, and the effect on Bonnie is immediate and quiet.

The mark at her ankle flares hot and sharp as if a switch has been thrown—late, jagged—a thin sting running up her calf that makes her toes press hard against the rung of the stool.

Why was she only noticing this now? 

With Elijah, she had known almost instantly. Had been drawn to him even. 

What did her have wrapped around himself that smothered the pull when he first sat beside her?

Klaus turns his attention back to her as if he’s been waiting to see the recognition spark, his grin showing teeth now as his charm becomes something more sinister. “Are you quite well?” he asks, pleasant as a Sunday, eyes bright with the game he’s enjoying. “You look as though you’ve seen a ghost, love.”

“Niklaus Mikaelson,” Bonnie repeats, more breath than she meant to give it, and the name tastes like metal on her tongue because saying it feels like it makes the room change.

The air grows tighter...and she wonders how many of these eyes have been watching her the moment she entered.

Had they been followed? 

Were they tracked? 

Because it feels like Klaus meant to meet her here. Had known she would come and had set up the game for her arrival. 

Which is what they had been hoping for...but at the same time...

Bonnie meets his gaze once more, her lips pursing into a thin line. 

He'd arrived early. 

“In the flesh, love.” The grin widens, slow and pleased. “I hear you and my brother have been asking after me. How industrious of you.” He taps a knuckle lightly on the counter, a tiny percussion to punctuate the shift in power. “If you’re looking for a conversation, let’s have a proper one. My home is considerably more comfortable than a greasy spoon.”

She doesn’t stand because standing feels like making a declaration.

Instead, Bonnie keeps her palms flat on the cool metal lip of the counter and makes her breath go long and low where panic can’t easily reach, remembering Elijah's words.

Keep your composure...

...

...we're in his quarter now...

The air changes without the bell this time, a different man walking up to stand beside Klaus’s shoulder, close and still, with the kind of composed stare that doesn’t need weapons to communicate his

purpose. He smells faintly of smoke and something herbal, the fine hairs along Bonnie’s forearms lifting the way they do when a witch's magic triggers her own.

She observes him now with new eyes, knowing what he is, and the message in his silence is as clear as a palm to her throat: don’t do anything foolish.

Klaus’s smile doesn’t falter as he watches her understand the choice before her. If anything, he looks entertained by the thought of her choosing badly. “Do be sensible,” he drawls, voice going gentle in a way that is not at all kind. “I’d hate to distress Hans.”

Bonnie takes a deep breath, tilting her head back as she reaches into herself and pulls her magic up from where it rests inside her, gathering it tight and quiet the way Grams taught her. No sparks, no theatrics, just a steadiness in the bones and a thin, invisible pressure against the skin like a protective hand placed over her heartbeat

All right then.

There's no buffer between her and the man whose name is on her ankle. Which means she has no choice but to accept the terms of his first play. 

“I’m not here to cause trouble,” she says, voice even and clear. She glances at Klaus's witch and then to the hybrid himself. “So if you want to talk, let’s talk.”

...

The smile that splits across Klaus Mikaleson's face is something unholy.

And so the games begin...

She hopes Elijah finds her quickly.