Bonnie & Damon Mix | Until We Bleed
Note: A Bonnie and Damon fanmix, my first one for this ship that I'm not even sure I ship as more than a pragmatic mainly platonic otp of people who get things done and are awesome etc. and hate each other in their spare time (but they give me feelings sometimes, and they were one of my first ships in this fandom, so). Anyway, there are eight fic interludes in this mix, you'll see them in the midst there because my fingers told me to do it. I don't know that I know how to write these two as a ship anymore so it was odd, but it was fun and forgive me, mistakes are mine. Word count: 1466.
Enjoy! Feecback is cool!
Until We Bleed | A Bonnie & Damon Mix
Track List (click on track titles to download)
I
1. Caesar, I Blame Coco (Diplo remix)
I want to annoy / And I'm going to enjoy it / And merely 'cause we're bored / Merely because we're bored. // 'Cause all you do is hope / You're all fucking hopers / And it's the Lord of the Flies all over again / It's the Lord of the Flies all over again.*
2. First We Kiss, Anna Calvi
My heart beats against the wardrobe / I hear the closing door / Beats against the window / Tell me how long, tell me how long // Feel it come from nowhere / Taking over me / Feel it come from nowhere / Tell me why, tell me why.
Interlude 1
It should surprise no one that Bonnie’s response to their first kiss (a wet, sloppy, drunken thing that smushed their noses together and left them staggering) was to give Damon an aneurysm so violent that he could barely see straight.
End Interlude
3. Hang With Me, Robyn
Just don't fall / Recklessly, headlessly in love with me / Cause it's gonna be / All heartbreak / Blissfully painful and insanity / If we agree / Oh, you can hang with me.
Interlude 2
She swirls the beer in her mouth and swallows. It’s flat, bitter and not her usual drink of choice-but she’s on a budget and on Fridays, the Grill sells single malts for three bucks.
A leather-bound arm slithers onto the bar beside her, followed by the lop-sided smirk of Damon Salvatore. He’s waggling his brows for no apparent reason-it’s weird-so she frowns, and says, “Seriously, there are no other women to prey on, you had to pick me?”
“Wow, Bonnie, hello to you too,” he nods at the barman who knows his order by heart, “Besides, don’t flatter yourself, I’m waiting for Ric.” She grunts and gulps down more of her beer, determined to ignore him and get good and drunk. By the faint buzz in the back of her ears, she knows she’s well on her way.
An hour and forty minutes later, Alaric still hasn’t shown up. Damon has been drinking like a man dying of thirst-a thought that is funny for reasons she doesn’t care to untangle right then. If he was human, she thinks, he’d probably be drunk as a skunk or blind drunk or drunk as a doornail?-now she’s knows she's drunk.
“I guess your date didn’t show up.” Her words are slurring and she’s shaking her finger in his face as if to prove a point (what that point is escapes her).
Damon sighs and guzzles what must be his fortieth shot of whiskey. “Present company will have to do.” He sounds like he’d rather be staked a million times. She shrugs-she knows the feeling.
In a sudden attack of camaraderie, she clinks his glass (she clinks so forcefully that her beer splatters on his shirt and she can see him grimacing). “Here’s to this hot mess of a situation: a drunk, broke, witch-no, super-witch,” she points to her chest confidently, “Hanging out with a loser vampire on a Friday night because she clearly has no life.” She bursts into a fit of uncontrollable laughter at her own joke, slamming her mug down on the counter. Damon makes a strangled sound, rolls his eyes and takes another shot.
End Interlude
4. Lick the Palm of the Burning Handshake, Zola Jesus
I’m the only one that makes you stop / And I know the plane is going down / When you say you don’t see the pain in my eyes / Do you really want to bring the fire outside / I don’t want you to go / Close my eyes, I’ll never show.
5. Crooked Lust, Bowerbirds
I was born a ghost / An apparition / Filled with holes / And contradiction // And I fear I'm the only one / So I wake early / Watch the leaves quake / And the first light braze the trees / I hide myself in a secret place / Here I know my heart / I know it's careless / But, darling, you seem like you're fearless / Maybe you're my perfect fix.
Interlude 3
Damon thinks that sometimes they’re the ghosts, vampires that is. They hang like cobwebs, hidden in unlit corners in the homes of the living, like silvered wraiths lingering long passed their time, walking anachronisms-trying to be, to live, and with each draught of lifeblood, reminded they are dead.
He even loves like a ghost, clinging always to her-or the image of her. Desperate for something-validation, perhaps, or meaning. The hope that he might find himself in those dark, all-knowing eyes (whichever version of them), that he might find the boy he once was, his less-broken, less-tainted former self.
Bonnie-Bonnie is different. And perhaps that’s the key. The small, innocuous key that opens the door and opens him wide until he gapes and is naked as a newborn.
End Interlude
6. Cockiness (Love it), Rihanna
Suck my cockiness / Lick my persuasion / Eat my words and then / Swallow your pride down, down // Place my wants and needs / Over your resistance / And then you come around / You come around / You come around // I can be your dominatrix / Just submit to my every order / Enter my diamond matrix / If you want my golden flower // Make me your priority / There's nothing above my pleasure / She may be the queen of hearts / But Imma be the queen of your body parts.
Interlude 4
Bonnie channels him sometimes. The parts of him that are living-not the dead. The sensation stings, like the feel of sharp fingernails on his skin and the rippling burn of flames beneath, down where his veins pulse with blood and his heart shakes. Fuck. It makes him hiss through his teeth, bite down on his tongue until it hurts. He feels stretched as if on a wrack, and hard, harder than anyone should be.
“You like that.” Her breath is hot near his ear, the words like melting wax on the shell. He smiles.
End Interlude
II
1. Addicted to Love, Florence & the Machine
A one-track mind, you can't be saved / Oblivion is all you crave / If there's some left for you // You don't mind if you do // Whoa, you like to think that you're immune to the stuff, oh Yeah / It's closer to the truth to say you can't get enough, / You know you're gonna have to face it, you're addicted to love.
Interlude 5
Damon read a book once, a collection of fairytales from some country he’s now forgotten, in which there was a man who loved. A man who loved a beautiful statue that shone as pure and white and perfect as a pearl.
He dedicated his life to it as a monk surrenders his soul to a god; shaved his head, and woke at dawn each day to worship it. Running reverent, spidery fingers across its smooth, alabaster surface; weeping tears of salt and hopeless adoration into its nooks; praying mindlessly like a madman for a sign that she heard, that she listened, that she saw him and saw his eager proselyte’s devotions and that-most of all-she loved him as he did her.
The goddess-stone, his very reason and rhyme for being, did not smile or speak. But sometimes when the sun hung low in the west or the moon was half-full and the shadows veiled her face, and he was drunk on his endless prayers and supplications, he swore he saw her cool, marbelite lips curve or the wink of a stone-lashed eyelid.
This man (this idiot) loved so much that, one day, he decided he must bleed for the goddess-statue. He took a curved knife and struck himself lemming-like in the belly. It was purposeful-a sure suicide as only such surety can be found in willing death. His blood poured out of him in an endless river and spread like oil at her feet, working its way into the smoothed crevices at her toes.
And when he finally dropped onto his back to stare into the blinding sun, the silhouetted curve of her chin seemed to smile at him in his tunneled, graying vision. Or perhaps laugh at him. He smiled back-or thought he did, he had lost the feeling in his lips-and exclaimed, “What a life well-spent, to live and to die for love.”
Something in the story had appealed to Damon and he had found himself reading it from time to time-or versions of it. He had hated it too. It was too close, as a mirror is close, a not-quite-there image of you in reverse.
He thinks of that story often.
End Interlude
2. Two Planets, Bat for Lashes
I am full / Shattered by this sailing time / For all your suffering by night / Oh warm, but under bright // And life is so much dark and light / When day cannot exist without a night / And you are not separate from me / I am a heart that's full of life.
3. Until we Bleed, Kleerup
Now we're bound to linger on / We drink the fatal drop / Then love until we bleed / Then fall apart in parts.
4. Piece of My Heart, Janis Joplin
I want you to come on, come on, come on, come on and take it, / Take it! / Take another little piece of my heart now, baby! / Oh, oh, break it! / Break another little bit of my heart now, darling, yeah, yeah, yeah. / Oh, oh, have a! / Have another little piece of my heart now, baby, / You know you got it if it makes you feel good, / Oh, yes indeed.
Interlude 6
Damon can hurt her. That’s when she realizes that without knowing, without her granting permission-he has her, a piece of her at least. (She hates it)
He has crept inside her in the cover of darkness. He has found a secret part of her, and set up roost as if he belongs; as if his presence does not leave the landscape of her irrevocably changed, marred (more than it is already); knobby and uneven where she was once smooth as an undisturbed, dusk-lit lake.
Now where safe, almost placid waters reigned, sudden and unknowable storms rage. (It scares her)
End Interlude
5. My Boy Builds Coffins, Florence & the Machine
My boy builds coffins for better or worse / Some say it’s a blessing, some say it’s a curse / He fits them together in sunshine or rain / Each one is unique, no two are the same.
Interlude 7
Damon’s face is smeared in scarlet, an obscene, clownish grin of blood splitting his cheeks in half. It drips from his teeth, from his fingers, his arms gloved in slippery bits of hybrid innards. In his eyes, the dark stain of what he is shrouds him in darkness and shadows. His chest heaves with slowly-dissipating agitation-excitement, relish. There’s a tension in his shoulders, wariness, as if he could spring at any moment, teeth-bared, kill-ready.
His most monstrous self-there for anyone to see.
Later she sits on his bed, giving him her back, unable to face him in that moment-almost afraid of what she’ll find on the other side of the mattress. “I’ve never seen you like that,” she says quietly.
“Well, we’ve never fought an army that big with odds that bad.”
“You-enjoyed it, didn’t you?” The question hangs conspicuously in the air the minute it crosses her lips, no matter how softly she tried to breathe it. An accusation? An acknowledgment of fact, and thus more damning for it. She waits. Afraid of the answer because she knows it, and there’s a part of her that understands it.
“Yeah, I did.” When he speaks, he doesn’t sound guilty and she’s thankful for that, for the ingenuousness of whatever it is they have here. “I’m a killer, Bonnie. It’s a part of who I am.” You can’t change me are the words left teetering on the precipice of that sentence, scrabbling for purchase and inevitably losing hold to fall into an abyss.
She sinks into the bed, flicks the lamplight off and stares unseeingly at the ceiling. His fingers (formerly slick with coagulated blood, now clean) reach for hers in the dark, like blind worms, and she clasps them back, presses hers into his palm as if she might hold onto this small, pure moment, just for now.
End Interlude
6. Black Hearted Love, PJ Harvey
I think I saw you in the shadows / I move in closer beneath your windows / Who would suspect me of this rapture? // And who but my black hearted love / And who but my black hearted love // When you call out my name in rapture / I volunteer my soul for murder / I wish this moment here forever.
7. Video Games, Lana Del Ray
I tell you all the time / Heaven is a place on earth with you / Tell me all the things you want to do / I heard that you like the bad girls / Honey, is that true? / It's better than I ever even knew / They say that the world was built for two / Only worth living if somebody is loving you / Baby now you do.
Interlude 8
Her forehead is squashed hard against the door and his hand covers her mouth, stifles the sounds she makes with each movement. She leans back on his chest and breathes out into the air between them. “Kiss me.” His mouth is warm and wet against her cheek and then her lips and she can taste him and her, them-intermingled. She grins at him and he feels it in her teeth clacking against his own.
End Interlude
8. Bonus: All I Need, Radiohead
I'm the next act waiting in the wings / I'm an animal trapped in your hot car // I am all the days that you choose to ignore // You are all I need / You’re all I need / I'm in the middle of your picture / Lying in the reeds // I'm a moth who just wants to share your light // I'm just an insect trying to get out of the night // I only stick with you / Because there are no others.
Back Cover:
*This version of this track was inspired by this Bonnie/Damon video