Too Much Ch 15

Bonnie's POV:

I was already half dressed by the time the call to Damon's cell dropped with a series of ominous beeps. I tried calling back a few times as I searched around in the dark for my purple Chucks, but had zero success. I could only fervently hope that service had died, and not my dear friend. Just the thought of Elena being underneath a mountain of crumbling dirt as she had been in my oddly prophetic dream was enough to have me sweating and stumbling with fear. Caroline! I need to call Caro-

*BUZZ* I'm beautiful in my way 'cause God makes no mistakes, I'm on the right track baby, I was born this way! *BUZZ*

Care's voice was frantic when I answered her call. "BON! I have a really bad feeling –"

"Me too. Where are you?"

"Running. Damon sorta' mentally called me and I'm running toward his, um, voice. Something is wrong!"

Huh. Guess he could still compel Care a bit… a thought for another time. "Yeah, I had a dream and call-called Damon. Can you swing by here? I know where they are. They need us asap and I can't drive as fast as you can run."

"Of course!" I heard a swirl of gravel as Caroline spun around at the other end of the line, obviously changing direction. The air swishing around the receiver was almost deafening, and I knew I made the right decision of having her take me there rather than drive. The call disconnected as the scarping sound of feet skidding to a stop echoed in the still night below my window. I finished lacing up my shoes and threw the window open. Care was holding her hands out two stories below.

"Jump! I'll catch you." It was weird, being as my little blond friend was about the same size as me, but I knew that she could… so I grabbed Gran's grimoire, my purse, and my cell and hopped confidently off of my window sill into thin air. My back and knees hit cold flesh sooner than anticipated – Caroline had jumped up into the air to grab me in her haste.

Vampire-Caroline was much stronger than even I had anticipated. She smoothly flipped me around so that I was riding piggy back before her feet even touched the ground, and then took off like a shot into the trees.

"Where am I going?" She asked over her shoulder, dodging tree trunks and ferns, hopping over creeks. "I know the general direction, but I'm not sure where… ?"

I closed my eyes to distract myself from the scary journey. "Fell Salt Mine. They're buried. There should be, like, a backhoe or something parked nearby."

"Kay." I opened my eyes at an inopportune moment – just as we came to a small opening in the forest between a huge fallen tree and an overhanging branch. A small yell escaped my throat as my friend held my legs tightly to her waist and did a sort of sideways cork-screw flip through to the other side, our bodies missing impact by mere inches. Her laughter echoed in the quiet night.

"This is so freaking fun! You're ok, right?" Caroline didn't slow even a bit after that bout of acrobatics, but she did seem a little concerned at my shriek. "Yeah", I tried to calm my breathing and pounding heart. "Yeah, I'm ok Care. Let's just get there."

Fast or not, I mentally vowed that next time I would drive to a catastrophe… the scariest part of that thought was that I was positive that there would be a next time.

Damon's POV:

Elena's frightened breaths were growing shallow as the minutes ticked by, as though her lungs weren't working well enough… or as though there wasn't enough oxygen left in the tiny space to sustain a living being for much longer. Arms shaking, Stefan and I had another silent conversation, our sudden shared understanding, regret, and resolve passing between our shining eyes in the pitch blackness. We stopped breathing, saving the air for Elena, and bit our wrists. She was going to balk at the idea of possibly becoming a vampire, but the truth was that with two sources she would get at least some blood in her no matter how hard she fought. If things took an even bigger turn for the worse she would still be somewhat saved…

I held my dripping wrist over Elena's gasping mouth, and as anticipated, she fought. "What the hell are you doing?" Her brown eyes rolled with fear and disgust, sightless in the dark, and her head rolled away only to be met with another dripping faucet of blood.

"HEY!" She spit out most of Stefan's blood and turned back my way again, and I held my open vein to her sputtering lips. "WHAT THE FUCK! What are you two doing- *gurgle*" Her head thrashed away again, only to have her lips pressed to Stefan's wound. Finally, with another glance, we both held our wrists to her mouth, effectively stopping her movements… but even though her head was immobilized, my furious little kitten could still kick.

*GRUNT* "OW!"

*CRUNCH* "FUCKING HELL!"

Stefan and I collapsed, instinctually grabbing our nuts that had been kneed by a human who seemed bound and determined to die down here. Or maybe she just hated being looked after. It was irrelevant anyway, because, though she had effectively showed off her girl power, knocking us both down caused our protective barrier to break.

A deep rumble signaled the shifting of the earth above us, and the vibrations seemed to bring back her senses. Unfortunately, it was too late to do anything about it. Elena screamed bloody murder and tucked herself under my chest at the last second. I cradled her as securely as I could before the weight of world literally rained down upon us. I looked to my right and locked eyes with my brother as curtain of dirt fell in a black sheet through the cracks of the broken concrete above.

"STEFAN!" I reached out my arm to grab him and pull him over to our more stable location when a block of jagged concrete hit the floor of our little tomb. I had snatched my hand back in time, but Stefan was trapped behind that wall of debis, cut off completely. The rocky partition served as a bulkhead, with all the loose, heavy dirt channeling on top of Stefan rather than our relatively sheltered side of the broken concrete box, but I had to – HAD TO – get Stefan out of there. If things were bad for us on this side, they were a hundred times worse on that side.

Holding my body ridged for Elena, I managed to punch the concrete into rubble. Dirt poured into our body-sized spot like a flood, but I still searched around in the space beyond for my brother.

"Come on Stefan! Help me the fuck out here and grab my hand!"

I dug through the expanse of dirt some more, and finally felt Stefan's fingers curl around my wrist. I sighed in relative relief and pulled.

"Let's get you out of there, bro." I continued pulling… and he yelled out in protest. "Wait! Wait Damon. Don't. If you drag me over there, this thing will fill up and Elena will suffocate!" Stefan was right, so I released his hand and waited for rescue… but I could smell the blood gushing out of my crushed brother as I shielded Elena.

Without warning, a large chuck of rock fell and roughly knocked Elena on a tiny portion of her that my body wasn't covering… her forehead.

Plunk! She was out like a light.

Caroline's POV:

With Bonnie clutching onto my ribcage hard enough to warrant the Jaws of Life to pry her loose, I skidded smoothly to a stop at the boundary of the old Fell Salt Mine. My back-barnacle was about to speak, but I held up a finger to silence her as I listened for the slightest noises below the vast expanse of gravel.

'Caroline. Caroline.' The voice was mental rather than physical, but I knew the right direction despite that fact. Bonnie gasped again as I sprinted unexpectedly at full speed towards a big piece of equipment.

"This is the place", she and I said simultaneously, and I dropped Bonnie on her feet before rushing over to the giant machine. "The engine is still hot." I turned to see my friend on her knees flipping frantically through an old, thick book. Despite the heavy track marks that had pressed the ground back into a semi-natural state, the patch was obviously recently disturbed. Straining my ears again, I jumped when I detected a few masculine grunts of strain and a muffled shriek of fear.

"HERE! How deep are they?" I already had my hands in the ground, easily dislodging handfuls of loosened soil and rock.

"Damon said 60 feet", Bonnie said still frantically flipping through tattered pages. I looked at the smallish pile of dirt I had dug away and freaked the fuck out.

"60? How'd they get down that far? Elena probably doesn't have much air left! How am I supposed to-" Bonnie cut me off as her fingers finally settled on a page in what I now assumed to be a spell book.

"I got this", she said forcefully. "Get in the backhoe and figure out how to use it, Care. I'm going to need the help." Without a word, I flashed up into the strange cockpit of the yellow machine and tried to learn the controls to the best of my ability while Bonnie started muttering strange words quieter than the most desperate of whispers…

Effrenus effodio! Beatus matris , tribuo mihi ops levo orbis terrarum , lego mons montis in meus telum quod traho lemma absentis. Effrenus effodio!

I twisted a small silver key that had been conveniently left in the machine's ignition, and the huge yellow monster roared to life. It took a surprisingly small moment to push and pull the levers in the correct fashion, and the great arm was swinging into to position, its great clawed bucket reaching out and tearing into the soft ground with a whine of metal. I quickly found a rhythm. Right lever: push *dig* and pull *scoop*. Left lever: push *swing right and dump* and pull *swing back left*. With the aid of my vampire reflexes and heavy equipment, the hole in the ground was twenty five feet deep within a couple of minutes.

… But a couple of minutes were not quick enough. I worked even faster with Bonnie's chanting as a cadence, worrying like a crazy person. Er, a crazier person. With my focus so totally commanded, it took several screams from my witchy BFF before I noticed that she was trying to flag me, frantically.

"CARE! JUMP!" The ground was rumbling like there was an earthquake brewing, a big one. Bonnie was kneeling low in the dirt, her thin arms were stretched out before her, palms up, and her eyes were glazed with concentration. The tremors of the power she had evidently conjured shook the entire backhoe, and I vaulted out of the dirty yellow open frame that served as a door without another thought. I landed on the rusted tin roof of the old refining factory just in case the entire surface of the earth was about to crack open.

An eerie wind swirled around Bonnie as her expressionless eyes settled upon me. Somehow I knew she had been waiting for me to be a safe distance away. The small, skinny human nodded towards me, closed her eyes, and stood up.

Dust and gravel burst from the hole the backhoe had dug and formed into… were those giant arms? Fifty feet above us, clouds of rock and soil twirled and solidified into enormous replicas of Bonnie's hands and forearms, and they moved exactly how she did. With more whispered chants, she spread her arms wide and plunged them towards the ground where she stood. While Bonnie's fingers sank into mere air, the rock phantom fingers she had conjured drove into the gravel surrounding the dig site. It was a truly imposing sight.

When her human arms rose again, the phantoms were holding at least one thousand square feet of earth which she tossed to the side with a casual flick of her wrists. The second scoop into the ground was more forceful, and the conjured arms knocked the giant backhoe away with such force that it rolled over and over again across the gravel, smashing it into an ugly mass of twisted metal. Bonnie was more careful with this larger load, and turned to deposit it gently at a safe distance by the edge of the forest… and then she collapsed.

I zoomed over to save my friend from falling into the wide, deep, ragged hole, and dragged her exhausted body to a safe distance. "Bon! Bon! Are you ok?" The phantom dirt-arms exploded into clouds of fluttering dust when I laid her on the nearest patch of grass available.

"Yeah-" she gasped.

"That was so AWESOME!" I couldn't contain my excitement, now that I knew she was ok. Bonnie almost smiled, but then she shook her head forcefully and opened her eyes.

"Go GET THEM!"

"OH! Right-" I ran back to the hole and slipped and slid down to the bottom. Yells and screams were coming from not too far below, and it took only a second or two before I got to something concrete. It almost looked like… the corner of a box? I punched through it, and the space beyond it was empty and black. "Elena? Damon? Stefan? ELENA?"

A series of shuffles and grunts echoed below, and the sound of something dragging. The ground gave way a bit again on the far side of the hole, and I could tell that the concrete wasn't solid everywhere – I had just picked the spot where it had been intact. Out of the dark hole I had punched came the top of Elena's head. I screamed with relief and grabbed her shoulders to help pull my friend out.

"Elena!" I smiled and sobbed as I felt another pair of hands push her into my arms. Elena didn't say anything, and she wasn't moving…

"You got her?" Damon. "Yeah I have her."

Damon's face was caked with dirt and shiny with… fresh blood? "Good. Get her the fuck out of here." I noticed that Elena was unconscious or something, so I quickly picked her up to run her up the crumbling slope to the surface. Damon disappeared again into the darkness. "Wait! What about you?"

"Stefan is stuck. I have to get him free. Just get her out and come back, okay Britney?" I heard more clawing and digging and grunting. Without another word, I flew out of the mayhem and carefully set Elena's inert body down beside Bonnie's.

Yo: Bonnie's witchy incantation was recited in Latin. It means something like "By the power of Greyskull, I order you to move, you filthy dirt, you!" (Steph's comedic genius strikes again!)

Ok, it doesn't really say that but you get the idea. :D

Yo-yo: Looks like Glinda could actually pull off something like this after Thursday's episode! Despite the lack of Delena, I still loved it. The conversation between my mom and I while watching "Know Thy Enemy" went something like this:

**Mild TVD Spoiler Anecdote Alert**

Me (as John tumbles down the stairs): "YES! Oh please let that douchenozzle be finally dead!"

Mom (casually eating a fat free dessert): "No way. He has that ring thing, doesn't he?"

Me (giggling as John is declared dead): "Woohoo! No, see? He's dead! Thank god. I hated that dickweed!"

Mom (shaking her head): "Nope. He's going to wake up. Damon just looked at his hand."

Me (shaking my head): "No, he was checking his pulse!"

Mom (watching Damon tell Sheriff Forbes that John is going to come back to life): "Told you."

Me (kicking coffee table, swearing, and rubbing my toe): "Ugh! Why did I get you into this show again?"

Mom (smiling while daintily setting her plate on a side table): "I don't know sweetie, but it's too late to undo it now."

Me: *grumbles*

Mom (rewinds the last few seconds and glares at me): "Shhh! I can't hear what's going on when you complain!"

Me (five minutes later as Damon washes his hands and pulls off his shirt): "Oooo he's going to find out that the moonstone isn't in the soap dish!"

Mom (staring at me like I've lost my mind): "Why on earth are you looking at the soap dish?"

*rubs temples* I've created a monster…

Huggles to min bedårande mamma och härlig syster-beffers and, as always, my lovely readers. ;)

Until next time :K