interwoven

part one || the girl wakes

part one ||the girl wakes

"She had waited all her life for something, and it had killed her when it found her.

― Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

Mystic Falls, Virginia

Death was something that Bonnie Bennett had feared for most of her life. She remembered the moment that she had discovered what death was. When it became less of an ill understood concept and more of a reality. It was the day that Sheila Bennett had told her that her grandfather would not be coming home. She'd been seven years old when her grandmother had lost the love of her life in a to a sudden heart attack. When she'd seen her grandfather in his casket, so cold and so still, she'd realized that life was not as permanent a thing as it seemed.

After Sheila herself passed, well, death became a sort of inevitability. A pattern that people like her, witches, couldn't seem to escape. Like some cruel twist of fate, the very cost of their existence. Once they discovered what they were, once the world discovered, they'd be burned one way or the other. At the stake, or in their life experience. "It never ends well for people like me," she'd told Jeremy, and she'd meant it.

She'd buried her grandmother for that reason. She'd read it in the pages of Emily Bennett's grimoire. She'd heard in the screams of agony in the hundred dead witches whose powers she'd channeled. It never ended well. As much as she wanted to escape the world of the supernatural, it was not something that she could do. It came for her again and again. Like some cruel twisted answer to all the times she'd complained that nothing exciting ever happened in her small town as a child.

She was no longer a child, but still just a teenager, but she didn't feel like it. At seventeen, she had suffered more than most. Lost more than most. Not just her Grams. But the mother that had abandon her. The grandfather that had been more of a father to her than the one that she loved, but was never home. She'd lost her innocence. She'd lost a bit of her humanity as well. It made her feel much older than her years.

She had her friends, and she had Jeremy. She couldn't lose them, and so she did what she could to protect them, even though the fear of death never left her.

From the moment she channeled the power of the hundred witches that had died before her, she'd known death was close. She hadn't even needed their warning. And the fear she had felt all her life had ebbed, because what she had been waiting for, what she had accepted was coming, had come and she found that she was ready and willing to face it. Or she had thought she was.

Using the power would kill her, but it would also protect her best friend. Her life would be over, but she'd finally be free of the supernatural. She'd even be able to see her Grams again. She told Jeremy she had a fifty percent chance of survival to protect his feelings, because like her, he'd lost so many people that he'd cared about, that he'd loved, already. But she knew that in the end her fate would be her fate.

Then the night of the decade dance came. She felt a sense of foreboding from the moment Elena flashed her the flier. Still, she'd put on her red boots and psychedelic dress. Fixed her hair and forced a smile. Forced the ill feeling down. But even as she reassured Jeremy, when she hugged him, she felt as if she were saying goodbye. When she looked at Damon over his shoulder, saw his eyes narrow at her, she felt that perhaps she wasn't the only one that felt something thick and cold in the air.

She wasn't lying to Jeremy about being able to feel the witches whose power she was channeling, about feeling empowered by them. But she also felt their unease. Felt that they could see and hear and know things that she wasn't able to know yet.