don’t forget you’re bones and skin
summary: Bonnie and Jeremy deal with things after a fashion.
warnings: self-harm, suicide, substance abuse, violence, sex.
rating: high R/m
note: Written for the TVD Smutathon, softly_me's prompt, Bonnie/Jeremy, i'm alive, you understand? alive alive alive, (and also partially for a prompt I saw in the Adult Theme Ficathon that I’ve now lost). This isn’t as ‘sexy’ as it should be perhaps, sorry. Thanks to Alta who corrected my crap grammar and whose encouragement is the best.
spoilers: none really, set at some point mid-s4, references to all three seasons
word count: 1666
don’t forget you’re bones and skin
If you live inside the old graveyard
Your skin and bones get kind of hard
You blame it on all of the ones who've left you
Mirah, Bones & Skin
1. “You know, I could kill you,” she says matter-of-factly.
She could be remarking on the weather or the colour of his scuffed sneakers or the cut of his hair.
“I could twist the veins right here, a little too hard,” her fingers are skittering spider-like over his bare chest, nails digging into the skin right above his heart, “Squeeze too tight around your heart until it bursts like a plum.” There’s a dark, dangerous smile on her mouth and he presses his fingers into her hips. The words she’s saying, the careless way she says them, shouldn’t make him this hot-but they do.
And minutes later, when he comes hard with a pained groan while she rocks above him, black veins standing out starkly at her throat, he wonders just how things got like this.
2. One week and three days after Elena turned, Jeremy almost killed himself.
Okay, that’s something of an exaggeration. (Try again.)
One week and three days after Elena turned, Jeremy stood barefoot in the bathroom, sweatpants sagging around his hips, a t-shirt stretched across his shoulders with the name of some obscure 80s band, the kind of shirt hipsters and potheads might wear, and it fits with the image obviously. (Better.)
He stood in front of the mirrored cabinet that hung above the sink. Inside was an innocuous brown container, semi-transparent, a white label with rows and rows of unpronounceable chemical names and bold-lettered warnings. Inside the brown container were roughly twenty white, scored pills each containing about 8mgs of Dilaudid. Remnants of Alaric who’d suffered from mind-splitting headaches and severe blackouts, he’d taken the pills with a chaser of whiskey on some nights (not advised) and it’d often left him drooling and sprawled on the couch in the living room in front of the T.V.
(So, there’s the boy and the gun, the packet of pills, the escape.)
He didn’t have much experience with this brand; it was high-end, a little harder to get without a prescription. But he’d tried it once or twice back in the old days with Vicki. Relatively short reaction time, ten-fifteen minutes max on the first go. A slow warmth in the pit of the stomach like a ball of honey melting under the sun; and then the rush of blood to the head, something like sex but faster, brighter, pin wheeling out of orbit. And then came the bone-melting lethargy, all drooping eyelids and burrowing into the nearest surface like it was a pillow, and then nothing.
He had stared at it and stared. And then softly shut the door, shuffling his way back to his room, flipping off the light.
And that was that.
(That time at least.)
3a. She failed (again).
Bonnie wasn’t stupid. She knew she had something of a saviour complex, which was a ridiculous thing to have when you’d lost as much as she had but still it persisted-all denuded and twisted into something desperate and grasping.
She could write a list but the names would mean nothing because Elena was dead and there was no going back. If she broke it down, it wasn’t really about Elena. But she thought there had to be some symbolism here, some cosmic confirmation of something she’d been learning all along. The one thing she’d set her mind to and it was all for nothing. She’d failed.
After the fact, things settled down absurdly fast. Elena was a vampire, she learned to go on blood bank runs with Caroline, left behind minimal corpses, Bonnie made a ring, winter thawed into spring, and college acceptances or rejections started rolling in-and that was that.
“You can stop looking at me like that, you know, I’m not dead-technically.” Elena said it with a laugh but there was a shadow in her eyes and a little exasperation.
It was early January, cold still, and quiet. Elena was folding clothes into her drawer while Bonnie flipped through a magazine at the foot of her bed, a flat coke in hand. Caroline would be back from the 7/11 with enough cartons of chocolate fudge mint-chip to feed a small village and the three of them would fall asleep to The Notebook. Bonnie would get the middle and crack a bad joke about getting a neck-guard for sleeping around with two vampires. Caroline would punch a pillow or two and complain about how uncomfortable they were. Bonnie and Elena would tell her to shut up, and turn off the lights to an indignant huff. And it would be normal; just another slumber party, the kind they’d been having since they were twelve.
Except it wasn’t normal. This fact never seemed to escape her; it sat low and heavy in her mind. And even though she hadn’t yet figured out how to make sense of it, she said with an easy smile, “I know.”
3b. Bonnie had never been good at dealing with things, sudden shifts, loss. This is something else she’s not stupid about. She knows herself. (She knows, okay.)
When Grams died, she cloistered in an upstairs room of her Aunt Evelyn’s house, and spent hours and hours poring over the grimoire. The first thing she decided to learn was how to hurt a vampire, to kill if necessary with a few whispered words and her arms outstretched, fingers twisting into fists. The spell was relatively easy now-she could do it without even blinking. Back then, she’d tried it just once and passed out cold for hours. Then she’d tried it again, and again, and again-until she could hold it with only minimal tremors and the sluggish gleam of blood at her nose.
When Caroline turned, she nearly killed Damon. She remembered it well; the haze of it, the energy rippling through her muscles. One word, and the water tap gushed, another one, and a flame lit and then he was screaming and falling on the ground and begging.
She’d been drunk on it, the power, to hurt, to funnel every drop of hate (everything) into something sharp, serrated at the edges, deadly.
4. So she thinks now that maybe this thing between them is more of the same (but different).
When Jeremy shows up on her front porch, skin waxy and yellow in the dim light, mouth hard-bitten and tense-he doesn’t say much of anything. Her dad isn’t home which isn’t new and she lets him in with a mumbled, “Hey.”
They aren’t together or anything. There aren’t any cute impromptu study dates that turn into tentative kisses by candlelight. None of that. But there is control, and blood pulsing, swirling and eddying in shapes she makes with her fingers. And she likes that. She likes that a lot.
5. He can feel her hands, palms down on his chest, and the ends of her hair tickling his cheek, her breath warm and heavy across his mouth. She curls her fingers into claws, and he feels the prick of it down in the tips of his toes. She's straddling him and waiting. And when she leans down to whisper, "Open your eyes-I want you to watch me, watch this," his stomach burns.
He holds her gaze, green flecked with gold. He can admit, inwardly, that he’s a little afraid seeing her like this, cool, predatory, hungry. This is the side she keeps hidden, locked tightly away. Her hands press firmly into his chest, right where his heart pulses, blood thick and hot. And she mutters the words. His breath hitches, and slows. He looks at her, the shape of her mouth as she repeats the spell, the shadow of a smile there. And then her eyes, darker than before, pupils dilated until they’re completely black. There's something cruel in them and it makes him arch, rub against her.
She brings her head down, her lips bare inches from his as she mimes breathing into his mouth. And then her hands tighten on his chest, and it's like a shock to the heart and a slow bleeding out. His lungs tighten, he struggles to drag in air, and he can hear the slow, slowing thud against his ribcage.
She's rocking above him, above his twitching legs and he can feel her warm, wet cunt against his dick. She's excited. Just as the edges of his world mottle and grow darker, he catches sight of her face, and the writhing black at the corners of her lids, down her cheeks, the line of her jaw mid-gasp-beautiful and terrifying all at once. A low moan like a wounded animal sits in the back of his throat. Dark spots appear at his eyes, and he can feel it: death, life, the hovering moment in between. The rush of adrenaline and the stultifying (welcome) sense of everything coming to a close, he could reach out and shake Death by the hand, if there was life left in his muscles to move.
And then she pulls away, and it all comes rushing back, harsh and glaring as lightning.
And she's slipping him inside her, squeezing her inner muscles around him until he thinks he might break, and he comes-quick and hard. She lifts his stiff, clammy fingers up to her breasts, and murmurs breathlessly, "Good, so good."