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Stefan sat on the cement bench in the corner of the family crypt gripping a bottle of bourbon tight in his hand. The wind blew in from the open door onto his face, but the liquor shielded him from the cold.
Damon.
After months of desperate attempts to bury his brother deep in his memories, he resigned himself to his failure. Damon was difficult, annoying, and crass. He was also the other half of himself. He was the only other person who had experienced the uniquely traumatizing events of his existence: Guissepi Salvatore, losing their mother, Katherine Pierce, becoming a monster, taking innocent lives. He could confide in and love Elena and Caroline, but they wouldn’t know him like Damon did. No one ever would.
To accept that he couldn’t merely start over from losing Damon was to accept the painful, numbing isolation of a life without him.
Alone.
How he lived.
How he may never die.
Immortality created an unfair cushion in the un-lives of vampires. He thought about the many years that went by without Damon in his life, sometimes justified, sometimes the result of misunderstandings that could have been clarified by even one conversation.
When there is endless time, you never consider that you might be wasting it.
Now, on the verge of only a handful of years of a happy, loving relationship with his brother, Stefan whispered into the void, pleading with the man he knew couldn’t hear him.
“I’m not doing so great without you. I keep trying to start over, but I can’t get anywhere... Because I’m lost, brother. I’m lost.”
He got to his feet and raised the bottle to chuck it across--
“Bonnie!? No, no, no, no. Bonnie! Damn it!”
Stefan froze suddenly. He felt hope light up his chest. He knew that voice. He dropped the bottle at his side, letting it crash onto the ground in a wave of tiny shards.
“Damon!?” he yelled, sprinting out of the crypt at full speed.
In a small clearing in the woods, he found the source of the scream. Damon, or something that looked like him, had fallen onto his hands and knees, digging into the dirt beneath him with his bare hands.
“Damon?” Stefan whispered. It had to be a trick. Somebody like Silas had rolled into town: somebody who could convince him there was hope to see his brother again. Maybe it was a spell or--.
“Why would you do that?” Damon shouted into the ground. “Why would you do that? I’ve had forever. You—you’ve barely started. You’re so stupid! You’re so fucking--,” he screamed, grabbing piles of soil in his palms and throwing them so hard they slammed into the trees behind him. Tiny pebbles nestled painfully under his nails.
“Hey!” Stefan fell to his knees beside him and grabbed his shoulders firmly. He was solid. Corporeal, not a ghost, not a visitor from the other side that was no longer.
Damon froze.
“Is it you?” Stefan whispered. He met his brother’s wide, shocked eyes.
“She sent me back.”
Damon balled his hands into fists, pinned down by his insomnia. He stared up at the shadows on his bedroom ceiling.
What did Bonnie do today? Was she asleep? Was she still home, or had she moved into her childhood house by now?
Did she still keep track of the days?
He squirmed in place on his bed, trapped in his own senses: the way the fabric of his sheets rubbed against his skin, the sound of the analogue clock softly ticking on his bedside table. Elena shifted in her sleep beside him, letting out a light groan from what seemed to be a nightmare. He wanted to wake her, to reach over and comfort her. He wanted to be the man she expected to meet from her diaries, whose charm captured her attention and whose bravery kept it. But waking her would mean talking. He couldn’t take more talking.
“He’s off; how do you not see it?”
His vampire hearing instinctively tuned into the conversation down the hall. Of course. Ric had made it his mission to point out how fucked up he had been since his return. He listened as his drinking buddy spat at his brother in frantic stage whispers.
“He’s fine,” Stefan replied firmly. Damon knew he didn’t believe his own words, but at least he honored the promise he made that first night to not tell anyone about Bonnie. They hadn’t talked about it again since.
“He’s not! He’s usually King Compartmentalizer, and now he’s skulking around like someone died. Hell, you spent a summer drowning in a safe and you acted more normal than this. Caroline, back me up,” Ric implored.
“Let’s see... rude? Check. Annoying? Check. Smelly? Double check. Seems like Damon to me,” she replied.
“I’m not saying he’s not Damon. I’m just saying-- I know he’s not exactly a loner, but I didn’t think four months plowing through the Mystic Grill liquor supply by himself would make him so...”
“He’s fine, Alaric,” Stefan snapped.
Damon felt physical relief as the talking stopped for a moment until his brother’s familiar guilt-ridden sigh broke the silence.
“I’m sorry. Look, we can’t know what happened. Elena told me he won’t talk about it, not even with her.”
Damon’s irritation pushed him from the bed. He dressed and closed the door silently behind him before stalking down the hall.
“Damon?” Alaric yelled after him. He stormed down the stairs and out the front door without answering. He absently spotted his brother’s silhouette in the rearview mirror as he peeled out of the driveway.
He didn’t know where he was going, but he sped down the empty, foggy roads in the black night anyway. He gripped the steering wheel tight, his fingers turning paler under the pressure.
He was so tired of the questions. He was tired of Elena’s soft, imploring stares and Alaric’s wary ones.
What are you thinking? What do you want? How are you feeling?
No matter how delicately they tried to frame their prodding, he saw through it. There was one, uniform undercurrent.
Why are you broken?
He slammed the bottom of his palm into the steering wheel, hard and abrupt. The horn let out a fleeting screech.
Didn’t they have anything better to worry about than him?
They wanted him to get over it. Surely, four months is a blip for someone his age. He spent five years being tortured in Augustine, and he never even mentioned it. He left it behind. He stored in a locked box deep in the back of his memory, unlocked it once in a great while, then put it back. King Compartmentalizer.
Only, he couldn’t leave 1994 behind.
Bonnie was there.
Damon pulled up to a long tunnel and stopped the car abruptly. He sat in the driver’s seat and stared at the empty tunnel for a long moment. It was lined with dirty, white tile decorated in bouts of graffiti.
He looked at the passenger seat beside him and remembered a time it wasn’t empty.
Bonnie. Bonnie in the seat leaned halfway back, her bare feet on the dashboard, the sun warming her face. Bonnie with her eyes closed, a book in her lap, chewing gratingly on a stick of mint gum. Bonnie wearing pink nail polish, smelling of her pumpkin body butter, laughing about something not funny. Bonnie glowing.
He opened the car door, stepping out onto the damp gravel. He walked to the entrance of the tunnel. The dim, yellow ceiling lights reflected off his leather jacket.
He could feel her beside him as he walked inside.
“Ooh! You have to hold your breath,” she demanded as they spotted a tunnel in the distance.
“I don’t need breath.”
“Come on. If I have to listen to Whitesnake, you can humor my nostalgic car games.”
“Watch yourself. Whitesnake is a classic.”
She mimed zipping her lips, locking them at the corner of her mouth with the turn of a key.
“Besides, I already whooped your ass at ‘I Spy’,” he said, a self-satisfied glimmer in his eye.
“You did not whoop anything. And holding your breath through the tunnel is a road-trip staple! Dad and I did it every time.”
They drew closer to the opening, and he looked at her from the corner of his eye. She had one eyebrow arched expectantly.
“It’s non-negotiable?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied without hesitation.
He rolled his eyes, but the quirk at the corner of his mouth betrayed him.
“Alright.”
As they crossed the threshold, they each took in a lungful of air and held it.
“Creepy, isn’t it?” a voice echoed lightly off the walls, pulling Damon out of the memory as he walked deeper inside. He whipped his head over to spot the source: a woman in her young twenties armed with a large camera.
He looked at his surroundings. The light above him flickered weakly, but he didn’t find it creepy. He found it comforting.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to interrupt some deep thought,” she added, pulling her camera to her face as she adjusted the lens.
“Don’t worry about it,” he muttered.
She crouched down on the ground, aiming her camera down the long tunnel. She caked the knees of her jeans in dirt, but she didn’t care. She clicked furiously, occasionally looking down to assess the photos.
“Not the prettiest subject. You run out of avocado toast?” Damon asked.
She looked up and smirked. It jarred him for a moment; it was so much like him.
“I’m doing a project on the in-between,” she said, taking more photos as she spoke. “Spaces that connect one place to the next. Spaces you’re in temporarily between phases of life. Tunnels, motel rooms, abandoned bus stations...”
“Sounds cozy.”
“Just promise me you’re not a serial killer,” she said.
Damon smiled slightly despite himself. He couldn’t remember the last time he smiled.
“You’re safe,” he promised.
He walked back against the tile wall and slid down to the ground, looking around at the tunnel.
“So why the in-between, photography girl?” he asked. There was something nice about talking to someone who wasn’t preoccupied with assessing him. It helped that she rather inexplicably felt comforting. Maybe because she reminded him of Bonnie: brave, focused, emitting quiet strength.
She laid back on the ground to get a low angle shot.
“There’s something cool that takes us over when we’re in a space like this. Think about it. We’re halfway through the tunnel right now,” she said. He looked on either side of him as if that would explain the calm that rested in his chest, but he didn’t follow. She went on.
“We can turn back to where we came from or keep going ahead; it’s the same distance. But, till then, we’re right here in limbo. As long as we’re here, there’s not a yesterday or tomorrow... just an eternal present until we make the choice. It’s weird. A never-ending today,” she said.
Damon felt a wave crash over him, and he got up suddenly, walking fast back to his car. She quirked her head but shrugged it off.
“Nice meeting you, too...” Sarah muttered.
“Elena?” Caroline called out as she kicked the front door closed behind her.
“In the kitchen!”
Her boots squeaked beneath her as she fumbled with the tall stack of boardgames in her arms.
“You can’t put your quiche next to my pancakes; it will just make them look sadder,” Elena complained, and Stefan grinned at her. Caroline walked through the doorway, dumping the games onto the table.
“You’re soaked!” Elena said.
“It’s pouring. Could barely see through the windshield,” Caroline replied. She kicked off her wet shoes and groaned at her damp jeans.
“Extra pajama pants?” she asked Stefan.
“Yeah, I’ll grab them,” he promised, looking over at the games. “Jenga, Operation, Candy Land?”
“Rainy night in by the fire means board games!” she said. “Operation Cheer Damon Up wouldn’t be complete without the Operation part,” she said.
Another month had passed, but Damon wasn’t back to normal. They missed his quippy remarks, irritating antagonism, and brutal honesty. His behavior had gotten stranger. Last week, Caroline found him sitting on the hood of his car in a gas station in the middle of the night, doing nothing but sipping from a bottle of bourbon. When Elena or Stefan pestered him enough, he let them accompany him on long walks down empty back roads, but he never talked about why they were there.
“Well, we’ve got a whole breakfast for dinner set-up,” Elena said, flipping the hash browns.
“My favorite,” Caroline smiled.
Damon walked in the kitchen suddenly, and Elena lit up. He rummaged around the room, moving the games as he searched.
“Hey! We thought we could--,” Elena began until she spotted him grab his keys next to the card decks. “You’re going out?”
“Yep,” he replied, tucking them into his pocket.
“Damon, it’s pouring,” she said. He walked over to her side and spotted the kettle on the stove.
“Hot chocolate?” he asked.
“Yeah...”
Damon opened a cabinet and grabbed a thermos, pouring the drink inside.
“Are you sure? I brought Catan!” Caroline said cheerily. Damon looked up to find Stefan’s concerned eyes.
“Well, now I’m more sure,” he said before planting a quick kiss on Elena’s forehead. “I’ll be back later.”
He was out the door before they could protest.
He drove down quiet back roads into a nearby town, far smaller than Mystic Falls. He passed the corn fields and azalea bushes on either side of the two-lane road until he reached the town’s lone stoplight. He pulled into the center of the intersection and turned the car off, watching the rain cover the windshield in tiny droplets reflecting the bright, yellow stoplight.
An eternal present. A never-ending today.
The photographer’s words echoed in his ears. When he was in the prison world, all he could think about was getting home. Get back to Elena, get back to Stefan, get back to real life. It was their mantra. They repeated and held onto it like prayer. Now, he lived for these tiny moments in these spaces that brought him back to 1994: a prison and a refuge.
If he could place himself in the in-between, he would be closer to what Bonnie was experiencing in her looping eclipse.
She wouldn’t know it, but she would be less alone.
He would feel less alone.
Damon’s eyes focused on a raindrop hovering in the corner of the windshield. He stared at it for minutes, sipping the hot chocolate, until it fell down the glass.
“This may have been a mistake,” Bonnie conceded, watching the water pour down the passenger car door window. They parked at an intersection in rain far too heavy to drive in.
“You think? This is weather straight from LOST,” he complained.
“We’re in the 90s, Damon.”
“Gilligan?” he offered.
“That’s better.”
After months living the same day on repeat, they longed for change. They wanted variety to mark the passage of time: proof that seasons and time existed, even in their hell world. Bonnie had proudly stomped into his bedroom one night and flopped down beside him with an encyclopedia book in her hand, pointing to a list of the rainiest U.S. cities. They filled the car with road trip snacks and headed out that morning to chase change.
“We don’t have anywhere to be anyway,” he said, turning the car off. He reached over into the bag of popcorn in Bonnie’s lap and took a few pieces as she sipped on the hot chocolate in her thermos.
“Let me try,” he said, reaching his hand out for the cup.
Bonnie handed it to him, brushing his fingers with hers. The light turned and lit her skin with a green hue.
“Alright, pick your winner,” she said, pointing to the windshield. He looked at her, confused.
“Are you having a stroke?” he asked, handing her back the thermos.
“We each pick a raindrop on the glass. Whoever’s stays on longer without dripping down the windshield wins,” she explained. Damon shook his head, amused and more charmed than he wanted to be.
“I have never met anyone so good at entertaining themselves,” he remarked, leaning his seat back.
“Well, when one of your parents abandons you and the other works all the time, you make your own fun,” she said. She always talked about her traumas casually and factually, just like he did. It helped keep her expectations from getting too high.
“Playing the old ‘My mom abandoned me’ card, huh? I see what you’re doing,” he said.
“Transparent? Yes. Effective? Also yes.”
She pushed her seat back to match his, a makeshift bed with a safe divider between them.
Damon leaned toward her, grazing her forearm with his as he pointed to a raindrop on her side of the glass.
“That one,” he said, his arm lingering on hers longer than he had to.
“It’s too big. Rookie mistake,” she said, keeping her voice even.
“He’s the heavyweight champ!” he defended, pulling his hand back to the armrest between them.
She smiled and pointed to a smaller raindrop closer to him, gently placing her hand next to his.
Damon’s drop fell first, and Bonnie let out a victorious shout.
They played again and again, shouting and talking trash. They didn’t look at each other, though. They stared straight ahead, never glancing in the other’s direction.
If they did, they would have to acknowledge the way his pinkie had made its way on top of hers.
They’d have to acknowledge the way she let it.
The light turned red. He hoped they would all be asleep by the time he got back.
Damon sat at a bench at the laundromat, leaning against the wall behind him as he drank from a bottle of whiskey. He loosened his tie around his neck and pulled it up over his head, watching the few people in the building. A student typing away at an assignment, a mom watching her kids chase each other as she folded, a worker restocking the vending machine.
A young employee walked over to him.
“Hey, you can’t be here if you don’t have any laundry. You’re loitering, man.”
Damon looked up at him and straightened his nametag on his shirt.
“Cameron,” he said before looking up into his eyes. “Well, Cameron, I’ve had a really bad day. Liz Forbes, the Sherriff over in Mystic Falls, you know her?”
The man shook his head.
“Well, she did this little thing where she died for no reason. So here I am fresh out of giving a subpar eulogy in a deeply stupid attempt to feel closer to someone that’s gone forever, and I’m gonna need you to let me do that. In fact, how about this? There’s a plumbing problem. You’re sorry, but everyone needs to evacuate the building now. You’ll find the keys in that bush outside tomorrow, and you’ll forget all about this.”
“I’ll forget all about this,” Cameron nodded, handing Damon the keys. One by one, he corralled the disgruntled customers outside.
“In fact, why don’t you hit the light on your way out?” he called after him.
Cameron obliged, and Damon sat in silence, thinking about Liz Forbes, Bonnie Bennett, his own mother, and everything he wished he had ever said to each of them.
He heard the door open again as he stared down at his dress shoes.
“Forget something, Cam?” he asked into the darkness.
“You know we have a perfectly functioning washer and dryer at home, right?”
It was a voice he never thought he’d hear again, barring five lame words on a voicemail. He whipped his head up so quickly it faintly hurt.
“Bonnie?” he whispered.
The moonlight pouring in through the windows illuminated her silhouette: her short bob, her favorite flannel.
“The one and only,” she smiled.
Damon nearly tripped over himself getting out from behind the table. In an instant, she was in his arms, firmly gripping his waist with her legs. He brought one hand to her back and the other to her thigh, holding her in place so hard he had to be sure he wouldn’t hurt her. They swayed slightly on their feet, breathing each other in.
Holding Bonnie was relief he had never known before. He had been bound by thick, barbed wire without knowing it only for it to all fall away in the split second it took for her body to collide with his.
“You made it,” he said.
They stood that way for a moment too long, and then another for good measure, before he set her down. His hands stayed on her waist and hers on his arms.
“What are you doing here?” he asked.
“Well, I was waiting for you at home with pancakes, but you were taking too long so I got impatient. Imagine my surprise when the locator spell said you were at a laundromat an hour away,” she said, looking around.
“Well, I like to see how the other half lives sometimes,” he said, breezing past it.
“Pretty fancy getup for this half.”
Damon’s face fell and he dropped his hands from her sides.
“I have to tell you something.”
Bonnie sipped whiskey from one of the styrofoam cups they found in the back. She sat next to Damon on a table, staring through the dark at the laundry spinning behind the glass door in front of them.
“Poor Caroline,” she said. “Time didn’t stand still here, too, huh? Cancer, memory loss...” she trailed off and took another drink.
“I really tried to come for you,” he whispered, staring straight ahead. Bonnie shook her head and placed her hand on his shoulder.
“I know you did,” she promised.
“Are you okay?”
“It was touch and go there for a minute, but... I’m happy to be home.”
Damon’s body tightened reflexively, and he regretted it the second it happened. She was too aware of him now.
“Shouldn’t I be?” she asked.
He shook his head, trying to cover quickly.
“Well, duh. Goodbye, 1994. Hello, Lady Gaga, iPhones, and Takis Fuego!”
“Damon,” she said, grabbing his chin in her hand. She turned his face toward her and searched his eyes only to find pain.
“Has it been bad?” she whispered.
Damon closed his eyes for a second before he took her hand and brought it down to her knee.
“Don’t worry about it, Bon Bon. It was a me thing,” he said.
Bonnie looked down at their loosely connected hands and weaved her fingers through his, holding tight. She looked up at him expectantly. The room was silent but for the spinning laundry and the sound of Bonnie’s quick heartbeat.
“I couldn’t leave... not really. Not knowing you were there,” he whispered.
Damon ran his thumb along her knuckles, staring down at their hands.
The laundry buzzer went off. Bonnie leapt, letting out a high yelp. Damon let go of her hand quickly and crossed the space in front of them to turn the machine off. He kept his back to her as he spoke.
“But you won’t have that problem, so I’m sure you’ll just slide right back into place,” he promised, his voice transparently casual. He wanted desperately to believe the words that came out of his mouth.
His phone buzzed in his pocket, and he pulled it out to find his brother’s name.
“Hey, Stef,” he said, clearing his throat slightly. “What’s up?”
“We have a problem.”
Damon poured himself a drink as he stood alone in the boarding house. Stefan was chasing Caroline down somewhere, and Elena took Bonnie back to their dorm at Whitmore. His phone lit up beside the decanter with a text from Elena.
Checking in. Joined the Caroline hunt. Want to come help?
What happened to “It’s a girls day!”?
That was before Care went to a rave full of young potential victims.
Wait, where’s Bonnie?
She’s here.
Damon picked up the phone and called her immediately.
“Hel--,” she began.
“You brought her to a club!?” he asked.
“She said she wanted to come,” she said, startled by his reaction. The noise around nearly drowned out her voice.
“Taking a page from the Caroline Welcome Home Guidebook? Did you try shoving her in a safe with Katherine first?” he snapped.
“Was I supposed to leave her alone? Don’t you think she’s been alone long enough?”
“I’m on my way,” he said shortly. Before Elena could reply, the line went dead.
Damon pushed through dense crowds of sweaty college students under flickering warm lights. Out of the corner of his eye, he spotted Stefan pleading with Caroline beneath the booming music, but he ignored them. He had to get to Bonnie. She hadn’t even been home a day. Unlike him, she had been terrorized by a psychopath. Maybe worse, she had experienced true isolation, the kind he’d never known.
He shoved through a couple and spotted her in front of him in a halo of red light. Her eyes were wide and her shoulders tense. He felt an inexplicable warmth spread through his chest when she visibly relaxed at the sight of him that made him feel both proud and guilty. He approached her so casually she never would have known he had sprinted to get to her.
“Are you okay?” he asked.
“Well, if scorching some douchebag with my magic is okay, then yeah. Peachy,” she said, her hoarse voice reflecting the sensory overload.
“I’m sure you’re a bucket of useful looking for a Caroline-shaped needle in this haystack, but--,” he gestured behind him. She nodded and let him lead her out, keeping a hand on his shoulder through the crowd.
They drove in silence apart from the quiet sounds of Mazzy Star’s album So Tonight That I May See from 1993. It was the first time Bonnie had ever put it on that Damon didn’t complain. On a whim one day in the prison world, they had driven to the house she found her mom living with Jamie and rifled through her music. Bonnie kept it and played it nightly to Damon’s annoyance. Well, his strongly exaggerated annoyance. More than anything, he was glad something, anything, had made her feel better.
Bonnie rested her head on her arm against the car door and closed her eyes, letting the music calm her.
Would she feel this way forever? Would she ever be normal again?
When Damon turned the car off, they weren’t home. She looked around, confused for a moment, before a smile spread across her face.
They were at the grocery store. Their store. Sure, it had undergone some renovations in the last twenty years, but it was the same building: sturdy and full of eggs, pancake mix, and liquor.
“I’m pretty sure it’s closed,” she said as he got out of the car.
“I’m pretty sure I’m a vampire,” he replied, walking to the store without turning back.
She caught up to him swiftly as he led her to the back entrance. He grabbed a stowed away key and broke inside.
“Oh, crime. We’re doing crime now?” she asked.
“Don’t you worry, Bon Bon. If we get caught, I’ll be the fall guy,” he said.
The alarm went off, but he deactivated it swiftly with a code he seemed to have memorized. Bonnie’s eyebrows rose.
“Come here often?” she asked. Damon didn’t turn around to face her.
“Yep,” he replied without further explanation.
Damon turned on half the lights, and the building opened up in front of her. She looked over at him and grinned before running to a nearby cart. She put one foot up on the bottom of the cart and pushed herself off the ground, gaining momentum until she could stand and ride it down the aisles. She stopped only to grab two pairs of sunglasses.
Damon and Bonnie laid on opposite sides of a display hammock under a pile of fleece throw blankets, one of his feet on the ground rocking them gently side to side. He held his hand on her shin on top of the soft fabric.
“Ready?” he asked.
“Just do it,” she replied.
Damon precisely aimed a Froot Loop and tossed it at her in an arc. Bonnie caught it seamlessly in her mouth.
“What’d I tell you!?” she bragged.
“Fluke,” he shook his head. Bonnie grabbed the microphone next to her.
“We have a hater in aisle four- a hater in aisle four,” she announced.
“Fine, fine. You have improved,” he said, handing her the box. She grabbed a handful of the sugary cereal.
“Oh, say it again but slower,” she teased.
They laid back until their grins faded and listened to the silent air. Every joke she made infused him with warmth as she reunited him with himself.
“I never thought I’d want a little quiet again,” she said.
Damon hesitated for only a moment before he sat forward and reached his hand out to her knee.
“It’ll get better,” he promised. She didn’t hesitate to reach out to him and take his hand in hers. They had been apart long enough.
“When did it start to get better for you?” she asked.
Damon swallowed hard and forced himself not to look away from her.
“About twenty-four hours ago.”
Bonnie nodded so slightly he barely registered it.
“Scoot over,” she said. He quirked his head at her but moved to the side.
Bonnie crawled awkwardly across the shaky hammock until she laid beside him. She rested her head on his chest and hiked her leg up around his waist. Damon laid his hand on her hip, tucking his thumb in the belt loop of her jeans. They closed their eyes, and Bonnie nuzzled her cheek against his cotton t-shirt.
They laid together in their makeshift haven. Tomorrow, this space would be bustling with loud customers. Tomorrow, they would have to face the real world and all its implications: Caroline without her humanity, Stefan scrambling to save her, and everything that came with Elena. Tomorrow, they would figure all of that out.
Tonight, they would hold each other in their eternal present.
They would lie in their own never-ending today.