when she falls, she wears their bones in her hair | au | bonnie bennett
Title: when she falls, she wears their bones in her hair
Character(s)/Ship(s): Bonnie Bennett, appearances by the ensemble
Rating: pg13 for violence and gore
Spoilers: the entire show, and then it goes rapidly into AU
Warning: a darker portrait of Bonnie (i do what i want i guess), death fic
Written for: ever_neutral for the prompt: Bonnie - This is a good a place to fall as any at softly_me's fantastic comment ficathon, found here.
Words: 1907
Summary: she is the last one standing, and there isn't much time until she falls. will she take everything that remains with her?
Notes: the title comes from the Egyptian goddess, Mafdet, the deity of justice, possibly execution or vengeance. She was often depicted as wearing the bones of the creatures she killed in her hair. And she was vicious and ruthless and basically: my kind of person.
when she falls, she wears their bones in her hair
She doesn’t think there is a distinction in her life or inside of her, a line between the sun-glare of day and the darkest point of a shadow. Perhaps she has always been falling. And that’s the natural state of things.
-
Bonnie’s mother leaves in a cascade of light. At six, she thinks that it seems like Christmas-or something like it, with bright beams that flicker red, white, blue and yellow through the curtains.
Her mother comes into her room, and whispers, her breath warm and clammy on her cheek, taking her in a bone-crushing hug. “I love you, baby, remember that.” She doesn’t come back, no word, nothing. Her father responds to her questions with a closed-off stare and a clenched jaw.
For two years she expresses her anger, her lack of comprehension of why all these things are happening around her and why she has no choice in any of it, in the form of six year-old tantrums-ripping Christmas lights to shreds, throwing glass cups on the floor so they break into millions of shards, watching cranberry juice stain the carpet dark red like blood, tipping candles over onto the tables and letting them burn.
Those stop eventually. She grows up, and tucks the feelings away, in a hidden place.
-
When Caroline is turned, Bonnie forgets how to breathe.
She sees herself as if she isn’t in her own body. There is the Bonnie who is standing there silently in the deserted parking lot with the corpse of some boy who smiled at her just hours earlier cooling on the bed of a truck, there is Caroline calling to her with blood-smeared fingers and eyeliner dripping blackly down her cheeks, and Stefan dragging her away, murmuring in her ear.
And then there is her, watching it all, as if it’s a strange pantomime where faces move, and lips glistening blood make soundless, wordless shapes, and figures lurch in the dark just outside of her vision. The lights from the town fair glint madly in the distance, and the sounds of it-the tinkling carousel, the shouts of laughter, the murmur of voices, the mechanical grinding of the Ferris wheel come at her muted, submerged.
It’s Damon’s laughter that pulls her out of the underwater-trance. She winces at its loudness, the grating sound of it as he tosses the dead boy’s arm across his chest like trash. This Bonnie feels. A fist of pain and grief and anger that hasn’t unfurled since the day she held her grandmother’s body in her arms and even before that.
He is still laughing; the corner of his mouth tilted upwards, a callous remark thrown at her.
The words slip from her lips, rhythmic as water that eddies and ripples into waves, and then a storm, rage-filled and bloody-all of it focused on a single person. She clenches her fingers tight enough that she can feel her nails dig into her palm and the skin break beneath them. She can feel his blood vessels, the strips of flesh and striated muscle surrounding them, and she squeezes down tight until her knuckles burn. He is falling like a beast cut down at the knees, screaming.
Her head sways, her body with it, as the magic settles heavy in her gut, a nauseating sensation. She reaches out with invisible fingers and the rusty tap whistles quietly in the night, a piercing counterpoint to the pained grunts of the man-the thing writhing on the ground. The water splatters and runs along the gravel, an oily mass. And then she spits the words out and flames lick along the surface of it. The incantation is an old one; she wraps her tongue around it and fills each arcane verse with the fullness of her intent.
(Kill him-kill it-kill this-)
The fire sizzles along his clothes and skin; he is rolling around like a blazing worm, trying to put it out.
The other Bonnie-the quieter one who is watching-smiles.
-
The feel of bones breaking beneath her fingers is fascinating-as is holding all of this power inside. Power enough to make hundred year-old trees kiss the ground, and rouse gale-force winds. Klaus is contorted in agony, the joints in his body pointed at unnatural angles, canines extended, blood (Elena’s blood) streaked across his mouth.
She could kill him now, they don’t need Elijah. She can feel his heart beating furiously in the palm of her magic and she presses inwards, his panicked palpitations vibrating against her fingertips.
(Justiceisvengeanceisjustavengeisjusticeisvengeanceisjusti-)
But it doesn’t matter because in the end, after everything, they still fail. She can’t even pick up the pieces because there are hardly any left. And those that survive are barely whole.
Dawn encroaches warily on the scene, hindered at first by heavy clouds. The great grey cumulus soon clears so the sun bursts out in unseemly brilliance. It all seems shameful now, in the daylight. The ruins of the sacrifice strewn about them, the werewolf’s body arched unnaturally, impaled on a fat stake through the heart. The witch, Greta, her neck ripped out and blood thick and coagulating on the makeshift altar. Jenna’s body, a broken marionette on the ground, her eyes frozen forever in a look of pained surprise, her fingers curled into sharp talons.
Inside, her ancestors’ magic is wild, beating at the cage of her body to be let out, unleashed, to restore balance. (Or perhaps to just destroy it all)
But she knows. There is absolutely nothing she can do-not turn back time, or make it right.
-
Six Years Later
She flicks the silver lighter, heat slashes across her palm. She is standing on the highest point in Mystic Falls, below is the dark expanse of the forest, and beyond the sea of evergreen lays the town.
(There are no clean lines, a voice whispers)
Mystic Falls has become something of a ghost town or a town full of dead people walking-literally. The spirits have returned; they hover invisibly, more clamorous than ever, as attuned to the imbalance as she is. The gaping maw that is this town, filled with rot and decay.
She flicks the lighter shut, and transfers the flame to her hand without even the slightest flinch.
She’s surprised she’s held out this long, and she wonders if there’s any worth to that accomplishment, the hollow victory of living. She has remained while all her friends have fallen. Matt now lies beside his sister rotting; the last time she saw Elena, she was crouched over two dead children, blood pooling from her mouth, and a confused mix of guilt and pleasure at what she had done written on her face; that she had to drive a stake through Liz Forbes’ heart as the woman begged her to do it even as her teeth extended and her eyes turned to dusk. Tyler is dead, she watched Damon rip his heart out with bare hands, his body swayed indecisively for a moment before falling into a dead swoon. Caroline is gone too. She plunged the dagger into Klaus’ heart herself for that; smiled, while he looked on with an expression of almost indignant anger. And when it was done, she cried as if she might never stop. Her father, her mother, Jeremy, even Alaric-dead, all of them, or some form of dead.
Yet she still remains. She is like something out of a book, a lone woman with a shotgun, clinging to a patch of land with claws for hands. There is no frontier-that’s one thing they never tell you about frontiers-how messy they are, porous, there is no line to hold back. The darkness rests within as much as it does without, it’ll eat you up either way.
The town is cursed. Before the last humans died or left (and she’d made sure that as many as could leave, did), the truth came out. Everyone in Mystic Falls knew that monsters walked amongst them, wearing a father’s face or a child’s or a sister’s. There are still humans down there. Whether they’re crazy Twilight-obsessed blood hags or not-she doesn’t care to know. They’ll all die too. She doesn’t let her heart ache at the inevitability of it.
She closes her fist over the flame, swallows the heat and life of it, and feels the power ripple through her once again. It wasn’t easy wresting this level of power back from the elders. She was tested, she has the scars to prove it, the thin marks of a whip down her back, and burns made from magic that will never heal.
You must understand what it means to hold this power in your hands, to know this pain, our pain, they’d said. As if she didn’t know what it was to lose and to suffer and to watch everything you loved die or leave or fade into nothing. There is a price, of course. She knows without a doubt that this time when she uses this old magic in the way she intends to use it-it will kill her. But this was a choice she was ready to make when she was seventeen; she hasn’t changed that much.
When she begins the chant that forms the invisible cage of magic around the entire town, the lighter is still in her hands. She flicks it open and shut in a clipped rhythm that matches the words stuttering out of her mouth. And then the fire starts, creeping in a jagged line out of the forest. It’s a fire like no other, inextinguishable except by her hand or her death. She can feel the vampires and the hybrids falling to the ground as she twists their blood vessels with her fingers. The fire has grown into a blazing inferno, ripping through the city at an uncanny pace. There’s beauty in it too, she thinks, in its destructiveness, in its rage and vengeful intensity, reds and yellows and whites and blues.
They are screaming. She can hear them. A few are trying to bypass it, they throw themselves at the invisible barrier, emitting animalistic growls and whimpers as the fire eats them alive. She thinks those wails, those broken sobs, those screams of pain should make her feel something for these people, these things-pity, sadness, anything. But there isn’t-not even for the humans among them.
(She’s doing what she was born to do-restore balance; she wasn’t born to float feathers after all)
When the magic starts to rip at her body, welts on her arms and face, and that old, familiar feeling of nausea and a heaviness in the pit of her stomach, and blood dripping from her eyes so she can barely see through it; when the roofs on several buildings cave in and a belch of fire and smoke follows their collapse; when she feels the last pieces of bone on every Original’s body disintegrate into ash, and vampire hearts lie like gnarled fists beside their bodies; when the town echoes with the last whispers of dying and death, she breathes a sigh.
Rain begins to fall, pelting at her relentlessly. She opens her mouth to greet it; it’s salty on her tongue, acrid like the taste of ash, and also sweet.
-
We fall, sometimes, until there’s no space to fall any further.
Fin
Character(s)/Ship(s): Bonnie Bennett, appearances by the ensemble
Rating: pg13 for violence and gore
Spoilers: the entire show, and then it goes rapidly into AU
Warning: a darker portrait of Bonnie (i do what i want i guess), death fic
Written for: ever_neutral for the prompt: Bonnie - This is a good a place to fall as any at softly_me's fantastic comment ficathon, found here.
Words: 1907
Summary: she is the last one standing, and there isn't much time until she falls. will she take everything that remains with her?
Notes: the title comes from the Egyptian goddess, Mafdet, the deity of justice, possibly execution or vengeance. She was often depicted as wearing the bones of the creatures she killed in her hair. And she was vicious and ruthless and basically: my kind of person.
when she falls, she wears their bones in her hair
She doesn’t think there is a distinction in her life or inside of her, a line between the sun-glare of day and the darkest point of a shadow. Perhaps she has always been falling. And that’s the natural state of things.
-
Bonnie’s mother leaves in a cascade of light. At six, she thinks that it seems like Christmas-or something like it, with bright beams that flicker red, white, blue and yellow through the curtains.
Her mother comes into her room, and whispers, her breath warm and clammy on her cheek, taking her in a bone-crushing hug. “I love you, baby, remember that.” She doesn’t come back, no word, nothing. Her father responds to her questions with a closed-off stare and a clenched jaw.
For two years she expresses her anger, her lack of comprehension of why all these things are happening around her and why she has no choice in any of it, in the form of six year-old tantrums-ripping Christmas lights to shreds, throwing glass cups on the floor so they break into millions of shards, watching cranberry juice stain the carpet dark red like blood, tipping candles over onto the tables and letting them burn.
Those stop eventually. She grows up, and tucks the feelings away, in a hidden place.
-
When Caroline is turned, Bonnie forgets how to breathe.
She sees herself as if she isn’t in her own body. There is the Bonnie who is standing there silently in the deserted parking lot with the corpse of some boy who smiled at her just hours earlier cooling on the bed of a truck, there is Caroline calling to her with blood-smeared fingers and eyeliner dripping blackly down her cheeks, and Stefan dragging her away, murmuring in her ear.
And then there is her, watching it all, as if it’s a strange pantomime where faces move, and lips glistening blood make soundless, wordless shapes, and figures lurch in the dark just outside of her vision. The lights from the town fair glint madly in the distance, and the sounds of it-the tinkling carousel, the shouts of laughter, the murmur of voices, the mechanical grinding of the Ferris wheel come at her muted, submerged.
It’s Damon’s laughter that pulls her out of the underwater-trance. She winces at its loudness, the grating sound of it as he tosses the dead boy’s arm across his chest like trash. This Bonnie feels. A fist of pain and grief and anger that hasn’t unfurled since the day she held her grandmother’s body in her arms and even before that.
He is still laughing; the corner of his mouth tilted upwards, a callous remark thrown at her.
The words slip from her lips, rhythmic as water that eddies and ripples into waves, and then a storm, rage-filled and bloody-all of it focused on a single person. She clenches her fingers tight enough that she can feel her nails dig into her palm and the skin break beneath them. She can feel his blood vessels, the strips of flesh and striated muscle surrounding them, and she squeezes down tight until her knuckles burn. He is falling like a beast cut down at the knees, screaming.
Her head sways, her body with it, as the magic settles heavy in her gut, a nauseating sensation. She reaches out with invisible fingers and the rusty tap whistles quietly in the night, a piercing counterpoint to the pained grunts of the man-the thing writhing on the ground. The water splatters and runs along the gravel, an oily mass. And then she spits the words out and flames lick along the surface of it. The incantation is an old one; she wraps her tongue around it and fills each arcane verse with the fullness of her intent.
(Kill him-kill it-kill this-)
The fire sizzles along his clothes and skin; he is rolling around like a blazing worm, trying to put it out.
The other Bonnie-the quieter one who is watching-smiles.
-
The feel of bones breaking beneath her fingers is fascinating-as is holding all of this power inside. Power enough to make hundred year-old trees kiss the ground, and rouse gale-force winds. Klaus is contorted in agony, the joints in his body pointed at unnatural angles, canines extended, blood (Elena’s blood) streaked across his mouth.
She could kill him now, they don’t need Elijah. She can feel his heart beating furiously in the palm of her magic and she presses inwards, his panicked palpitations vibrating against her fingertips.
(Justiceisvengeanceisjustavengeisjusticeisvengeanceisjusti-)
But it doesn’t matter because in the end, after everything, they still fail. She can’t even pick up the pieces because there are hardly any left. And those that survive are barely whole.
Dawn encroaches warily on the scene, hindered at first by heavy clouds. The great grey cumulus soon clears so the sun bursts out in unseemly brilliance. It all seems shameful now, in the daylight. The ruins of the sacrifice strewn about them, the werewolf’s body arched unnaturally, impaled on a fat stake through the heart. The witch, Greta, her neck ripped out and blood thick and coagulating on the makeshift altar. Jenna’s body, a broken marionette on the ground, her eyes frozen forever in a look of pained surprise, her fingers curled into sharp talons.
Inside, her ancestors’ magic is wild, beating at the cage of her body to be let out, unleashed, to restore balance. (Or perhaps to just destroy it all)
But she knows. There is absolutely nothing she can do-not turn back time, or make it right.
-
Six Years Later
She flicks the silver lighter, heat slashes across her palm. She is standing on the highest point in Mystic Falls, below is the dark expanse of the forest, and beyond the sea of evergreen lays the town.
(There are no clean lines, a voice whispers)
Mystic Falls has become something of a ghost town or a town full of dead people walking-literally. The spirits have returned; they hover invisibly, more clamorous than ever, as attuned to the imbalance as she is. The gaping maw that is this town, filled with rot and decay.
She flicks the lighter shut, and transfers the flame to her hand without even the slightest flinch.
She’s surprised she’s held out this long, and she wonders if there’s any worth to that accomplishment, the hollow victory of living. She has remained while all her friends have fallen. Matt now lies beside his sister rotting; the last time she saw Elena, she was crouched over two dead children, blood pooling from her mouth, and a confused mix of guilt and pleasure at what she had done written on her face; that she had to drive a stake through Liz Forbes’ heart as the woman begged her to do it even as her teeth extended and her eyes turned to dusk. Tyler is dead, she watched Damon rip his heart out with bare hands, his body swayed indecisively for a moment before falling into a dead swoon. Caroline is gone too. She plunged the dagger into Klaus’ heart herself for that; smiled, while he looked on with an expression of almost indignant anger. And when it was done, she cried as if she might never stop. Her father, her mother, Jeremy, even Alaric-dead, all of them, or some form of dead.
Yet she still remains. She is like something out of a book, a lone woman with a shotgun, clinging to a patch of land with claws for hands. There is no frontier-that’s one thing they never tell you about frontiers-how messy they are, porous, there is no line to hold back. The darkness rests within as much as it does without, it’ll eat you up either way.
The town is cursed. Before the last humans died or left (and she’d made sure that as many as could leave, did), the truth came out. Everyone in Mystic Falls knew that monsters walked amongst them, wearing a father’s face or a child’s or a sister’s. There are still humans down there. Whether they’re crazy Twilight-obsessed blood hags or not-she doesn’t care to know. They’ll all die too. She doesn’t let her heart ache at the inevitability of it.
She closes her fist over the flame, swallows the heat and life of it, and feels the power ripple through her once again. It wasn’t easy wresting this level of power back from the elders. She was tested, she has the scars to prove it, the thin marks of a whip down her back, and burns made from magic that will never heal.
You must understand what it means to hold this power in your hands, to know this pain, our pain, they’d said. As if she didn’t know what it was to lose and to suffer and to watch everything you loved die or leave or fade into nothing. There is a price, of course. She knows without a doubt that this time when she uses this old magic in the way she intends to use it-it will kill her. But this was a choice she was ready to make when she was seventeen; she hasn’t changed that much.
When she begins the chant that forms the invisible cage of magic around the entire town, the lighter is still in her hands. She flicks it open and shut in a clipped rhythm that matches the words stuttering out of her mouth. And then the fire starts, creeping in a jagged line out of the forest. It’s a fire like no other, inextinguishable except by her hand or her death. She can feel the vampires and the hybrids falling to the ground as she twists their blood vessels with her fingers. The fire has grown into a blazing inferno, ripping through the city at an uncanny pace. There’s beauty in it too, she thinks, in its destructiveness, in its rage and vengeful intensity, reds and yellows and whites and blues.
They are screaming. She can hear them. A few are trying to bypass it, they throw themselves at the invisible barrier, emitting animalistic growls and whimpers as the fire eats them alive. She thinks those wails, those broken sobs, those screams of pain should make her feel something for these people, these things-pity, sadness, anything. But there isn’t-not even for the humans among them.
(She’s doing what she was born to do-restore balance; she wasn’t born to float feathers after all)
When the magic starts to rip at her body, welts on her arms and face, and that old, familiar feeling of nausea and a heaviness in the pit of her stomach, and blood dripping from her eyes so she can barely see through it; when the roofs on several buildings cave in and a belch of fire and smoke follows their collapse; when she feels the last pieces of bone on every Original’s body disintegrate into ash, and vampire hearts lie like gnarled fists beside their bodies; when the town echoes with the last whispers of dying and death, she breathes a sigh.
Rain begins to fall, pelting at her relentlessly. She opens her mouth to greet it; it’s salty on her tongue, acrid like the taste of ash, and also sweet.
-
We fall, sometimes, until there’s no space to fall any further.
Fin