The Morning After
Title: The Morning After
Author:
Fandom: The Vampire Diaries
Timeline: Fall of sophomore year
A/N: This fic is a short offshoot of a Bonnie/Caroline fic I'm working on updating (These Memories). If you put on shipper glasses, you'll see Bonnie/Caro nuggets from both sides.
Summary: Clubbing with fake IDs, drinking, and driving while high got Tyler, Caroline, Matt, Elena, and Bonnie pulled over by a Mystic Falls deputy. The sophomores gather in the cafeteria the morning after to discuss the night's damages.
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“Why is time moving so slow?” Elena asked, as she picked excess cheese off her pizza.
“I don’t know,” Bonnie answered, staring at her food and yet distracted. She wished she had an appetite. All she’d eaten before leaving her house this morning was a banana. The day was almost half over, and there was still a nervous knot in her stomach, keeping even the thought of food out.
They’d opted to sit in the cafeteria because Caroline’s eyes couldn’t handle the sunlight just yet.
“I feel like my breath still smells,” Caroline said.
“Every time I look at you, you’re popping a mint,” Bonnie said. The head cheerleader hopeful looked fabulous, actually. No one would know she’d been trashed last night, unlike Bonnie herself who went in and out of a daze and Elena who was sluggish.
Two trays plopped on the table, one next to Elena and across from Caroline and the other next to Caroline and across from Bonnie. They were followed by a cacophony of noise as two chairs were dragged on the red and white linoleum floor.
“Wow,” Caroline said slowly, shutting her eyes and moving her head like she had the combination of a toothache and an ear infection.
“Sorry,” Tyler said happily.
Caroline killed him with a look.
“How are we doing this fine morning?” Matt asked as he tore open his packet of mayo.
“Did you talk to your dad?” Bonnie asked Tyler.
“Wait, you actually talked to your dad?” Elena just realized what Tyler had promised the deputy the night before: favor with the mayor if he let them go. The deputy had grudgingly agreed and driven them home, but she was now wondering why the deputy would believe something like that.
“I talked to my mom,” Tyler specified. “I told her what happened.”
“Like, told her told her?” Caroline wanted to know.
“Yes. And she’s gonna take care of it. Or my dad will.” He hadn’t known whether to disappear to his room while his mother told his father or whether to tough it out and watch his dad absorb the news. He’d realized that hiding in his room would’ve been weak, so he’d leaned on the couch with his arms crossed as his mom had delivered to his father the previous night’s events.
“I am so done,” Bonnie said.
“Done with what?” Tyler wanted to know.
“The fake id,” she said between her teeth, in case, by some coincidence, someone was listening.
Tyler already looked bored.
“I cut it up, put it in my dad’s shredder, and then threw the pieces away in the garbage outside.”
“That’s a little extreme, Bon,” Elena opined while peeling her orange, the healthy part of her lunch, with her fingers.
“Extreme?” Bonnie’s voice dropped ten degrees below zero, and she continued, “Elena, do you have any idea what you looked like when Matt threw up in front of that deputy? You looked like someone just told you none of your dreams would ever come true. You looked like someone just told you you had no future and for some reason you believed that person. You.looked.like.you’d.lost.everything.” Bonnie couldn’t keep it up. Faced with Caroline, Tyler, and Matt’s snickering, she cracked up. “That’s what you look like,” she swore between bouts of laughter.
Elena bit the inside of her cheek to keep from smiling. “It’s all Matt’s fault,” she said in an attempt at self-defense.
“Oh right. You’re completely right, Elena,” Matt said, putting his elbows on either side of his tray and leaning towards her. She was transfixed by his crystal blue eyes and the way his mouth stretched at the corners, and his eyebrows rose on his forehead as he joked with her. “When those lights came on, and I was lost as I don’t know what, thinking maybe Tyler’d put in some different colored lights inside his car, and that deputy pulled us over and I watched in horror as Tyler failed to walk a straight line, I thought,” he said, leaning closer, conspiratorial, “The perfect thing would be to empty my stomach. Not like I knew where we were or anything. I thought it was the perfect time to just let everything out. I have thought about following in my dad’s footsteps.”
Elena knew it was her turn to counter, to give a rebuttal, but Matt had never looked at her like that before. They’d been sharing surreptitious looks and flirtations of the bumping shoulders kind, but this....his smile, his eyes, his hair, his nearness. And all of this was happening while there were other people at the table. There were other people at the table, and he’d made it so it was just the two of them. Her stomach found a trampoline and jumped.
Tyler and Bonnie paid attention to Matt’s joke about his father. He did that sometimes: joked about his father, about being like him, about his upbringing. Vicky once heard him do it and she’d been confused and then pissed beyond words, watching as he’d mocked himself and their dad. But she’d yet to bring it up to him.
“It’s nice that you two can flirt when poor Bonnie’s recovering from near heart failure,” Caroline butted in.
Both Bonnie and Elena knew Caroline didn’t really care about Bonnie’s exaggerated heart failure. The blunt blonde just wanted to bring it to everyone’s attention that Matt and Elena were flirting. So Bonnie grimaced her lips and threw Elena an apologetic look, apologizing for Caroline being Caroline, really, a look that said, I’m sorry she’s like this, but you know.
Caroline’s bluntness aside, Bonnie made a mental note to ask Elena if she liked Matt. She was tired of observing them in order to decide for herself. Why not go straight to one of the sources?
“Caroline, did you even notice Bonnie was standing next to you?” Matt asked.
The answer was no. She’d known Bonnie was next to her when they’d first stepped out of the car, but she’d been so focused on not looking drunk, on standing up straight even though she’d been the most trashed of the girls, that she hadn’t even noticed the death grip she’d had on Bonnie’s arm. Standing straight had done wonders for her head. Her face had been flushed, and she’d been as pink as the cell phone case her dad had sent her as a first day of school present. When Matt had blown chunks on the ground, Caroline had wanted to hold her hands in front of her, ready for those shiny silver bracelets.
“You really destroyed the id? Do you have any idea how much it cost?” Tyler asked Bonnie, astounded.
“Yes. I’m the one who gave you the money,” Bonnie pressed. “Look, your parents aren’t Black. If we’d gotten arrested,” her stomach knotted painfully at the prospect, “If I’d had to tell my dad how I came to be in a jail cell, he would’ve killed me. And then he would’ve told my grams. Who would’ve resurrected me and killed me again. And then both of them would start making phone calls to both sides of the family, telling them about how I screwed up and got arrested and was losing my mind. Every day. Every week. Every month. Any time I made a mistake, I’d hear about that one time I was drunk in the passenger seat of a car while a pothead drove. Family that I’ve only seen in pictures would be talking about me. And....I have family reunions, Tyler. I have family reunions.”
Bonnie had leaned across the table to better make her point. Caroline was smiling, proud, liking Bonnie in this excited state. She thought she was almost glowing.
“So it’s gone,” Tyler reiterated.
“Yes,” she huffed, having found her breath again.
Tyler was subdued after Bonnie’s rant. His parents didn’t tell extended family about his antics, no, but his antics were brought up and picked apart, no matter how minor they were. His father had the memory of an elephant. Richard Lockwood hadn’t said anything about his incident the night before, but Tyler knew something was coming. It wasn’t to the point where he fretted and agitated about it yet, but one of these days he’d mess up, mess up according to Richard, and last night’s incident would be dredged up, probably in front of his mother, who would just stand there and look at him sympathetically, chastise Richard about being too hard on him, but not really do anything effective. Because after she chastised Richard, she’d find Tyler getting ready to go out, almost to the front door, and tell him that he knows how his father is, but that he must remember that he, as the mayor’s son, has responsibilities too.
Tyler wasn’t ignorant. He knew the position his dad held in town. He knew he was expected to behave a certain way. Last night was his first major screw-up. Sure he got in fights (which his dad never ever got on him for), he wasn’t out to tarnish his family’s image. But his screw-ups, no matter how minor or imagined, were never forgotten.
“Lame,” he told Bonnie.
In silent synchronicity, he and Matt took up their trays and went to sit with the next school year’s varsity hopefuls.
Whatever, Bonnie retorted in her head.
End