The morning after.

To Kai it felt more like the morning before losing this than than the morning after having it. He woke hours earlier than Bonnie but pretended to sleep, the longer to lie beside her and listen to her breathe. He listened, and he inhaled the scent of her hair, of her skin that smelled like sleep, and her weirdly still minty morning breath, all so endearing. Every now and then he had to open his eyes and take her in, and relish, and admire, and worship, and miss her already.

"Say 'Bye bye totes adorbs Christmas cottage that I'm glad we had sex in at least once,'" Kai told her as he loaded their luggage into the trunk of the car.

Bonnie turned to face Éternité, inhaled big, sighed comfortably and recited, "Bye bye totes adorbs Christmas cottage that I'm glad we had sex in at least once."

The next two hours were spent driving in a silence colder than called for. When they arrived at the airport, Kai went right to prepping the plane. Bonnie waited in the terminal and made herself a latte, the way Kai had taught her in one brief stop at Parisian cafe. She sat at a table in the hauntingly empty airport, sipping through the hot foam and obsessively smoothing out her navy blue going-home dress while she thought over the previous night and the heavy revelation she'd come to. Now that it was light outside and she was dressed and espresso ran down her throat at an awakening temperature, she could conclude that her revelation was neither here nor there. Maybe she loved Kai. But it didn't mean anything, wasn't going to matter when they returned home, wasn't going to change anything between them. The whole captor and captive dynamic wouldn't make for such a great story if anyone ever asked how their relationship came to be. So there would be no relationship.

Nor would there be any rumination.

When the plane was ready, Kai found Bonnie frowning at the airport cafe and made himself a large coffee. Not that he needed it. He only clung to those human habits for the now impossible nostalgia fighting every Heretic molecule in his body.

On the plane, she joined him in the cockpit and strapped herself into the co-pilot's seat. He was pleased but he wasn't about to admit it; she looked irritated. For the duration of the flight, he taught her the recitation that would open the bridge portal as he died. He made her repeat after him and he listened fiercely for accuracy while he noted her hands, whitening as they clutched the armrests of her seat.

He understood that she was anxious. He sympathized. While she was braving an amateur flight in anticipation of rejoining society, the minutes were counting down to his death. It was hard to tell whether it felt much different from the thousand other times he knew he was going to die. Though it would be permanent this time, it was for her, and he was experiencing a familiar difficulty in finding fear anywhere inside himself. In actuality, he was beginning to feel quite old. The prospect of total nothingness didn't exactly frighten him.

"Somebody's salty."

"You would be too if you'd been held captive for almost two years of your life," Bonnie snapped, and bit her tongue almost as fast. "I'm sorry."

Twenty miles from Mystic Falls, the trusty black Corvette began to sputter pleas for gas and they had to stop. Kai, standing on the other side of the cashier's counter, looked up from what he was doing just to offer her a forgiving scowl.

"It's ok," he said.

Bonnie shook her head and crossed her arms.

"I still don't think it's right."

"You'll thank me."

"But how will anyone explain the sudden emergence of duplicate bills floating around the economy?"

"They won't. They probably won't even notice. And anyway, who's gonna trace the anomaly back to a little Bonnie Bennett in Tinytown, Virginia? No one."

She watched, hopeful that he was right, as Kai located a rubber band on the counter and began stretching it around a large stack of bills from the cash register.

"Plus," he added, "This is only like three hundred dollars. It's not like we robbed a bank. Although that would be a good idea."

"No."

"Hmm, yeah. I vote we do. You might need it."

"I won't use it. So you might as well put that stack, and any other money you steal, into your bag. Then you can explain to the FBI how you got it all from a magical Groundhog Day in a parallel universe that you made with your powers."

Kai sighed and looked, for a moment, listless.

Mystic Falls was expectedly the same as they left it. Lonely and dark with night.

Kai made a quick stop at the Mystic Falls bank, against Bonnie's moral protests, and ran out with a few tight stacks of hundred dollar bills, yelling, "Drive, drive, drive!" Bonne ignored this and stewed in the passenger seat while he packed the money straight into the trunk.

"Do you need to stop at home for anything?" he asked as he buckled himself back into the driver's seat.

Home, she thought, and smiled, and panicked.

"Grimoires," she said. As much as the thought of getting right to it and ditching this hell blinded her with fearful joy, she wanted to be smart about it. If college was hopeless, then she needed a plan. Whether or not it involved all the grimoires she had added to Grams' collection throughout her journey in this place, they could always come in handy. Maybe she could be a librarian of sorts. A grimoire librarian. Or a keeper of relics. A keeper of knowledge. She wanted to plan for a life and a profession more mystical than not. It suited her. After all she'd been through, she knew it would be harder adjusting to a life where she had to hide. She didn't want to hide, didn't have the energy, didn't care to protect the ignorant wellbeing of the general public all of a sudden.

Kai drove to her grandmother's house waited patiently while she collected the spellbooks. When she came trudging into the foyer with another suitcase, he asked, "Hungry?" And her stomach groaned at the thought.

Escape was further stalled while they cooked and sat down to eat a decided last meal of spaghetti at the kitchen table.

"What are your plans?" Bonnie asked before taking a sophisticated bite.

"My plans…for?"

"When we get back."

"Dairy farmer," Kai shot out after half a second of thought.

"Be serious."

"I am. That or magician. The professional kind. I could perform in Vegas and blow people's minds, good looks aside. Like that Criss Angel Mindfreak guy."

"Kai."

"I hear boy bands are a thing again. I can sing."

"Kai."

"What? What are your plans?" he asked defensively, and muttered, "Judging my aspirations…"

"I was asking you. Doesn't mean I have my own answer yet," she grumbled, stabbing a forkful of noodles.

"Any ideas?"

"I don't know. I might see if I can get back into Whitmore. Chances are slim. And anyway, if Caroline's still there she'd be in the middle of her senior year and I'd be way behind."

"There's always community college."

"Yeah, maybe."

"What about a job? You know, once you blow that three hundred bucks on ice cream and dresses."

Bonnie scowled and shrugged. She didn't want to say her thoughts out loud, but it was possible that Alaric wasn't teaching at Whitmore anymore. It was possible that he wasn't in Virginia. She knew if it were her, she'd spend her life staying as far as possible from the grounds on which her pregnant wife was murdered. She wondered if he even survived the mourning.

Who could?

"I doubt I'm qualified for much more than flipping burgers. Without a degree, or an actual previous job to put on an application, or any idea what I'm doing… I'm already overwhelmed by how much I need to catch up."

"Hey. Flipping burgers is a highly undervalued profession. Burgers are delicious."

"Spongebob Squarepants was happy, I guess."

"Who?" Kai asked.

"Oh my god, you're kidding," she said, but when she looked up at him he seemed genuinely confused.

"Whatever. At least you already know how to use the internet," Kai offered, wiggling his eyebrows. Bonnie wanted to laugh but felt too sour to even smile.

"I do know of a strip club outside of town that's always looking for smart, hardworking dropouts," she brought up matter-of-factly.

Kai snorted in his soda and then winced in pain.

"Go ahead, laugh. But I'm only half joking."

Kai set down his soda and eyed her meaningfully for a moment. She had to look away and scrape her plate with her fork just to suppress the thoughts she didn't want to have. Kai spoke anyway.

"I predict that the seas will part for you to find the life you want."

Bonnie let her fork clatter out of her hand and chuckled mirthlessly.

"The real world isn't so easy for people who play by the rules."

"Isn't it?" he smirked.

"No, it isn't."

She scooted her chair back from the table and stood up with her plate.

"Of course you'll have an adjustment phase," he rushed out, touching her arm with his hand. A gesture that usually preceded a siphoning. She waited for the pain but all she felt was his thumb sliding back and forth, and his words.

"Given everything that's happened, you're allowed. But when New Year's Eve hits…it's gonna be a new year. And you know what I think?"

Bonnie pursed her lips and bucked the heel of her boot into the hardwood just to hear it knock.

"What," she snapped.

"It's gonna be your year."

All was quiet in the woods.

The only souls who could peep weren't speaking as they dragged their luggage through the trees. Kai had said that even though it was probably also midnight in the real Mystic Falls, you never know who might be skulking around. It was best to appear out of thin air where no one was likely to witness it. She trusted his expertise on the subject.

She had asked if he was taking her back to the cave, where she, Kai and Damon had all respectively used the concentrated power of the May 10th eclipse to escape the 1994 prison world. But apparently the only celestial power needed to activate the bridge portal was the basic blanket of sky they'd be standing under at any given time. All they needed was the spell, and one dying Kai Parker.

When they hiked deep enough into the trees, Kai stopped and dropped his bag to the ground and Bonnie hers. She stood still and waited for instruction, pinching the bottom hem of her dress as it blew in the breeze. He watched.

"So…" she stirred.

His mouth pressed into a frown and his hands found his hips. Bonnie suddenly got the sense that there were so many things to say and she didn't know the right words or how to catch them from her brain and put them in her mouth.

"Will you miss any part of this?" he asked. She heard the slightest waver in his voice.

Her immediate answer was No. Instead, wisely, she said, "I won't know until I do. Maybe then I'll let you know."

Kai looked out into the distant blackness of the forest.

"Right."

"Are you ready?"

"No," he admitted. "I have just one more question."

"Well fucking shoot, I wanna go home."

He took a subtle step towards her and in the dead silence around them Bonnie thought she could hear every granule of dirt, every sprout, and every stem of fallen plantlife crunch beneath his shoe. Her eyes darted from the sound to his querying features.

"One last dance?"

She laughed a sharp and callous laugh.

"Really?"

"I know there's no music, but," he smiled and reached into his pocket, "Oh, wait. There is." And he pulled out his iPod. He started unraveling the earbuds while he studied her reaction. "Please, Bon? It is our thing, isn't it?"

"You want to slow dance with me in the middle of a dark forest like idiots?"

He shrugged and nodded.

It would be a terrible idea if she was going to keep her little secret at bay. If he took one more step, if he touched her, if he breathed on her, if he kissed her…she would have a harder time convincing herself that none of it was real.

But the way he was smiling at her, practically beseeching her…she didn't want to say No. After what they'd done the night before, how his body made her body feel and how much it meant to her, she couldn't.

"Ugh," she groaned, "Fine. One song."

"Great," he muttered through his smile.

Bonnie closed the distance between them and took the earbud she was handed. They each inserted the little earphones into their ears and she watched Kai scroll through his music.

"Let's see if you know this," he said, and the song started while he stuck the iPod back into his pocket.

Bonnie closed her eyes and listened for familiarity in the guitar, and suddenly felt Kai's hands on her hips. She blinked and looked up at him to find his eyes blue and bold, not a trace of the smile that had been there seconds ago.

"I don't recognize it," she admitted, reaching up and clasping her wrists behind his neck.

"I guess you wouldn't, would you?"

Kai began to move in slow time to the song, taking her body with his.

"Because I've never heard this song before?"

"Because I had to finish that part of the crossword for you."

She opened her mouth in remembrance of the chill that danced from vertebrae to vertebrae the day she found that someone had completed her crossword puzzle for her in 1994.

"Yellow Ledbetter," she whispered, as the ever evasive answer dawned.

"Yellow Ledbetter," he confirmed.

"Huh."

"Yeah."

"It's nice."

"It is."

"Nicer than I expected."

"It would be."

Bonnie relaxed her lower body from the tension she'd been using to keep from getting too close to him. She couldn't hold herself so distant for an entire song; it didn't feel right.

"Listen," Kai said, and the earnest change in his tone caught her attention. "I don't need you to make me any promises. It's out of my reach, and I don't want you to do anything for me."

Bonnie bit her lip while she listened, sensing some kind of lecture coming up at the mention of promises. Having run out of small, stupid things to say about the song she'd never heard and might not want to hear ever again, she was prepared to sit back and feel the wrath of a Kai rant as it saved her from doing any more talking.

"I don't want you to stay out of trouble because I said so," he continued as his hands tightened, perhaps unintentionally, on her hips. "I'd want you to choose yourself first because you say so. As much as it kills me that none of your friends have the decency to strap you down when you get all martyry, and as much as it kills me that you won't at least stuff my ears with candy and promise you won't be a save-the-day-Sally anymore, you're right. You can't make any promises. All I want, all I need to know if I'm going to die with any sort of peace, is that you will go home and—"

"And give Damon an excruciating death?" Bonnie quoted.

"No. Well, maybe. But this isn't about him. It's about you, Bonnie. I just want you to start a life before you ever put yourself at risk again. You said you're the end of the Bennett line and that's a fucking travesty. I want you to revive the Bennett line. Have the family you've been missing. Start a coven. Take Mystic Falls back."

"You've obviously never lived in a town with a vampire infestation."

"Well I'm not going to be the one who tells you to give up and walk away. That's not my style, I'm sure you've noticed."

"Merging with Luke really put you through a makeover, didn't it?"

"Why do you say that?"

"Sometimes you're not just a better version of you. You're actually capable of being a good person. Sometimes," she emphasized. "Most of the time you're just an ass."

"Thank you?"

"It wasn't a compliment. Just an observation. And…I promise."

"Come again?"

Bonne rolled her eyes and inadvertently stomped her next step.

"I promise I won't get involved in vampire drama anymore," she mumbled.

Kai's eyes twinkled as he grinned.

"Is that a for real promise or a hey-i'm-alone-in-the-woods-with-a-creepy-sociopath-under-pressure type of promise?"

"Both."

"Good girl."

"Ass."

The song in their ears slowed to a close and it was quiet again.

Bonnie stopped moving with Kai's rhythm and pulled the earphone out of her ear, trying to ignore the drooping expression on his face. But he began wrapping the cord around his iPod anyway, moping not so subtly over to his backpack anyway, kneeling and trading the iPod for a wooden stake anyway. Was it just her anticipation or was time moving faster? And condensing to a blip in retrospect? That first night when she broke down and bled herself for the sake of company, called him out from the darkness with the red dripping down her arm, laid eyes on him after what she knew now was a whole year, right before she watched the big bad wolf break her door down, then compromised and fed him for the first time…didn't feel so far in the past.

When he held the sharpened stake up, Bonnie's insides blanched. Her chest felt stiff as she watched him zip his bag and sling it over his shoulder, holding the stake close and ready for use in his grip.

She followed suit and attended her luggage, making sure that every bag was touching and bound together by the same rope spell she had used to bind Kai's hands in New York. She smoothed her dress, a tic she had become used to throughout the day, and flattened shaky palms over her thighs. She couldn't believe this. What if she fell out of this moment and woke up? What if she was still at the cottage in France and the last forty eight hours were all a death dream?

I'm going home.

And this time was over. This period of misery, of having no company but Kai, of being unable to grow her hair out and god, she was sick of her haircut, but it was over. Almost.

"Ok?" Kai asked. She detected his nerves at last. He swallowed, breathed through his nose, wouldn't stop looking at her.

"Ok," she nodded. She gripped onto the handle of her suitcase and they stepped close together.

"Here…" Kai held out his left hand, "Don't let me go, ok?"

Bonnie's heart spasmed. She grabbed his hand and squeezed him tight, not sure how violent their trip through time and space would be, and she assured, "I won't."

He blew out a breath he had been holding and glanced to the stake in his hand, turning it in his fist anxiously.

"Here goes nothing," he said.

"Wait!"

His eyes, horribly narrow, turned up at her. Her chest came to life with the punching of her heart like the fists of giants, insistent, incessant, impassioned. The rest of her began to quake with excitement and fear and worry. After hiding from it all day, she wished she could and wondered if she should, just in case, tell him that she thought for a second in a post-orgasmic haze that she was in love with him.

"What if it doesn't work?" she voiced quickly to shut her thoughts up, as if their infinite time was ticking out, "What if we just die? What if you just die and the world falls apart and then I die and then we're just stuck in Oblivion and this was all for nothing?"

Kai's mouth moved into a sad quarter moon of a smile and he blinked.

"Even in Oblivion, I'd find you."

Bonnie stared, and she wanted to kiss him, and she wanted to kill him to get this over with, and she wanted to slip through a wormhole so that her physical placement might match the way her guts seemed to be falling inside her body.

Without any warning, Kai's hand jammed the stake through the plated bone of his chest. The sound of it, and the speed, and the lack of time Bonnie had to adjust to the motion of a lethal object making its way into Kai's heart, made her gasp. Her hand in his made a spastic five for the reflex to do something before she remembered she wasn't supposed to let go, and she hurriedly latched her hand back onto him while she watched his jaw drop in pain. He was only supposed to poke his heart with the wood, not drive right through it, but the growing white in his eyes and the sudden greying of his skin, spreading up from his neck with black veins, carriers of death, hinted at his overestimation. His cheeks swelled with the air of a breath he didn't seem able to exhale. Bonnie panicked and felt the need to do something drastic, to help him, to stop this pain, but just as she noticed his blue irises growing glassy with tears, a horrible wrenching sound shook the sky and seemed to vibrate through her soul.

The memory of finally ascending home from 1994 while the world was getting confused between itself and the 1903 prison world, snowing and then not, altering to Bonnie's utter horror, occurred to her. This was like then. There was a glitch, and it was Kai's dying, and the world around them appeared to be retaliating in a most violent fit. The ground beneath their feet rumbled and all the trees of the forest began to sway in a wayward wind that lacked any real current. As the earth began to shudder, Bonnie found it harder and harder to keep her knees from buckling beneath her and to keep her footing, until the soil itself split in diagonal cracks all around. Instincts were telling her to run, to jump, to play hopscotch over the growing, spreading cracks before they fell between them, and she tugged on Kai's hand, but he was no longer as responsive to instinct as she. His grip in her hers was slackening, his eyes rolling back into his he head as his body slumped.

"Kai!" she screamed. And she heard the beginning of her own scream, before the tail end of it was caught in something that ate sound as the splitting earth beneath her opened its mouth and she was eaten. Then no sound could enter her ears but a rapid whipping of wind, and her vision was ripped away by darkness, and she thought she had done something wrong, that she shouldn't have let the earth eat her up this way, that she had missed her chance and would die by live burial in this too tangible world as it crumbled.

She had just enough sense in her mind and sensation in her stringing nerves to tighten her grip on Kai's hand and make sure that it was still there, and for a second she thought it was. Then as the air tightened and the feeling of the earth's crust whistling past her skin warped into a cold weightlessness, she felt nothing more certain than Kai's hand slipping out of hers. Just as she screamed his name into the voice-devouring cacophony of their plight, her spine bunched up with gravity's collection. Her face and her hands planted into something like ice and all noise vanished.

She turned her head out of the icy substance for air and panted and tried screaming the terror out of her heart. Was this Oblivion? This ice cold hopeless heartache and whiplash? Shaking more than the earth had, Bonnie dug her fingers into the ice and pressed herself up. Gaping and squinting through hundreds of unexpected tears, she saw first her own breath pouring out like a fog from her mouth. And a billion dancing spots floating down from the top of the cinereous sky. Ash? Vision damage? Her eyes followed them to the ground, bright white with billions more of them. Snow.

She blinked through her tears and focused on her surroundings, finding that she was still in the forest, but all the trees were stark naked, black with wet cold and their spindly branches topped white with snow. Through the many bare trees, it wasn't difficult to hone in on the yellow circle of light in the distance, a beacon of homecoming. The clocktower in the town square.

A loud gong sounded once.

A loud gong sounded twice.

A loud gong sounded thrice.

It was three in the morning in Mystic Falls, and she was alone.

THE END

(of part 2)

A/N: THANK YOU TO EVERYONE who has stuck by me with this story. It's turning out to be a long one, and I appreciate every one of you for reading, and reviewing, and being awesome. The third and final part of this story has been cooking for a while in my brain, and I hope to get started on it very soon. If you're interested, part 3 already has already been created and it is called Heresy, you can go to my author page and follow it. You will be notified when chapter 2 is posted, which will mean that the first time any content for part 3 is published there will be two chapters to read! Anyway, for you music nerds out there, the official Oblivion playlist will be posted on my Tumblr (link in bio) sometime on 7/1, mountain time lolz. XOXOXOXOXOXO