interwoven

part one || the girl wakes

By the time Klaus was exposed and it was revealed that he had been possessing Alaric's body all along, she wasn't as shocked by the revelation as she should have been. Of course, it's him, she thought. It seemed that the fate that she had long since accepted, the fate that she'd talked about with Jeremy and tried to hide from Elena, again and again, had come for her.

She thought she was prepared. That she was strong enough. And power wise she was. But she didn't have the experience to back it up. Didn't have the knowledge to break the spell that had been cast to protect Klaus while he inhabited Alaric's body. And her body, well, powerhouse or no, she was still human. Still had the body of any normal teenage girl in spite of the power brewing beneath and buzzing in her very blood. Before that night, her fear had turned to acceptance. But then she'd heard Klaus's words on Alaric's lips. When he told her that he had come to kill not Elena, but her, plain and simple, her fear sparked anew.

She'd thought that when she was faced with death, her life would flash before her eyes. That's what the cliché was, wasn't it? But Bonnie's existence had been far from the norm thus far, and she wasn't shocked to find that, that wasn't the way it was. Instead she thought about the things she'd yet to do. The places she had yet to travel. The goals she had yet to reach. She'd never go to Paris. She'd never go to college. She'd never find her mother and get answers. She'd never see the look on her father's face when she graduated. Never make love. Never marry. Never play the piano again. A skill she had abandon after her Grams hadn't been there to sit next to her on the piano bench and sing old jazz standards anymore. She'd never master her Grams chocolate chip cookie recipe. Never get to wear the dress Diana Ross wore when she played Billie Holiday in Lady Sings the Blues to prom. Never master her powers. Never try all the spells she had come across that she'd wanted to give a go, just for the fun of it. Never learn her full history. Never meet another witch that was good and alive and could relate to her and give her that feeling safety and kinship and family that she'd only ever felt snatches of with her Grams and then Lucy, before it was taken away. The list went on and on. The big things and the small things, so quickly it shocked her because it had been so long since she'd thought beyond the moment. It'd been so long since she'd actually thought about what she wanted. So long since her thoughts had ventured outside of the forethought it took to protect those around her.

Then Damon was there, and she could tell as he looked at her that he could see, see beyond the fear and false bravado, was the desire to live. That even though she was willing to do whatever it took to save Elena; to lay it all out on the line, she didn't want it to come down to what they both knew it would.

"No," he said, blue eyes wide and determined as they locked with hers, "Klaus does not get to win tonight, no way. You're not going to die."

Even with the unease still stirring in her gut, she believed him. And with one statement, he gave her something more dangerous than the threat against her life. He gave her hope. Hope that she would survive.

The plan went simple. Developed quickly. A spell that Damon explained to her so fast, in such precise detail and with so little thought, that she knew it was one he had to have read over and over again. Knew that it was one he had found himself. Knew that he suspected from the moment that he took her to the house where all the witches that came before her had been burned, that there would be consequences. Knew that he had thought it might come to that one spell. One spell to fake her death. One spell to save her life. One spell to buy them time, to find a way that she could use all of that power and still live. That the words she had uttered as they danced earlier in the night were true, "Careful, Damon. I might start to think you actually care." That after all of the hatred, the threats, the tolerance, the bickering, the fights and the banter, he did care. He gave a damn whether she lived or died.