Chapter Text
It’s not every day that you travel to a pocket dimension with your supposed ex-lover who you can’t remember doing anything good, ever. It’s a testament to Elena's life that this isn’t the weirdest thing she’s ever done—it doesn’t even make the top ten.
But here they are. The boarding house different than she knows it; this is the place where Bonnie and Damon spent four months without killing each other somehow. It makes her admire Bonnie’s self-restraint, but at the same time, it makes her wonder. Ever since Damon came back, he’s been…different, than she remembers. He expresses his emotions more easily. Elena remembers walls and snappy comments, pretending not to feel at all, but now it’s like at least some of the ice has thawed. It has her curious.
He’s always been a strange juxtaposition, of keeping people at arms’ length yet at the same time wearing his heart of his sleeve. Putting on a performance, yet having every emotion written on his face.
Easier to read, now.
It’s different enough that she’s willing to get to know the new him—the one everyone says she was hopelessly in love with. So after he pages Kai and they’re stuck waiting by the phone, she says,
“Tell me something.”
“You’re gonna have to be a little more specific.” The eye thing, at least, is familiar. Somehow, it’s comforting that he’s not an entirely different person than she remembers, but that’s ridiculous, given the person she remembers being an irredeemable monster.
“Well, apparently, I compelled away everything good that you ever did,” Elena says impatiently. “So tell me something good. Tell me why I would ever…”
“What? Love me?” Damon says sardonically, but hurt flashes in his eyes. She softens.
“I can tell that I don’t have all the facts,” she says. “It’s clear to me. But if you don’t give them to me, how am I ever supposed to fill in the blanks?”
“Maybe I don’t want you to,” he snaps.
Her brow furrows. It makes no sense. Even with her fractured memories, monster or not, the one constant has always been that he is in love with her. To the point of killing her brother when she didn’t reciprocate.
They’re interrupted by a call. He makes threats to Kai, but suddenly his entire demeanor changes. A quiet sort of happiness that looks alien on his face, with his eyes soft and human like he doesn't use them to hunt.
“Bonnie,” he says, and Elena snatches the phone away to talk to Bonnie herself.
Bonnie has always been a strong, steady presence in Elena's life, going back as far as the sunny spring her parents died. It had felt so cruel, the sunshine, because spring was supposed to be rainy and her parents were supposed to be alive. Bonnie would drive her to school, chattering away as Elena zoned out, remembering the feeling of water filling up her lungs as Kelly Clarkson played on the radio.
Bonnie will know the best way to go about these missing memories. She’s going to head their way.
“We’ve got some time to kill before she gets here,” Elena says, giving Damon a smile. Making an effort. “Why don’t you give me the 1994 tour?”
“Are you kidding? We’re going out to meet Bonnie halfway.”
The exasperated, brisk tone catches her off guard. Her smile falters.
“Come on. You heard her; if she hurries, she’ll make it in time.”
“And if something goes wrong, she can kiss her freedom goodbye,” Damon says. “We’re meeting her halfway.”
The words are firm, inviting no arguments. The my-way-or-the-highway routine makes Elena bristle. This is Bonnie they’re talking about. Spilt nail polish and sweaty cheer routines and text speak before technology evolved. Elena’s best friend. What has he ever done for Bonnie, anyway?
As Damon drives down the empty stretch of road, something occurs to her. They’ve spent the drive so far in silence, far from what she’d been expecting. This person who’s supposedly done good things alongside the bad. Who everyone told her was head over heels in love with her, who she remembers being obsessed with her, but who certainly doesn’t act like it.
“Why would Jo give you the ascendant? It was the only thing keeping Kai trapped…”
“No, it wasn’t,” Damon says, taking a turn. His eyes are fixed on the road. “The ascendant doesn’t travel between worlds. Kai had the ’94 version and a Bennett, so really, the fact that he got out had nothing to do with me.”
Anticipation runs through her.
“You? What did you do?” she asks.
“I compelled Ric to steal it from Jo,” he says shamelessly.
It’s ridiculous to be feeling disappointment alongside the vindication. She swallows it down, scoffing. It shouldn’t have surprised her. This is the Damon she knows.
“Of course you did,” Elena says. “Why would I expect anything different? You’re just the same selfish dick you’ve always been.”
“Um, hello? Reality check? It’s the only thing that can free Bonnie. Ric was the selfish one for refusing to give it up. He wouldn’t even have met Jo if it wasn’t for Bonnie bringing him back to life.”
“Yeah, so of course you compel your best friend to give it to you. Don’t even pretend that this is about Bonnie! She’s my best friend; of course I want her back! But to you she’s something else. To you, she’s just a chance for me to realize what a great guy you are.”
“You’re wrong,” Damon says evenly, each word simmering with quiet rage. “And if any of you really wanted her back you all had a funny way of showing it.”
“How dare you lecture me about Bonnie when you tore into her throat and got her Grams killed,” Elena says, voice shaking. “Not to mention her mother.”
He widens his eyes incredulously. “The only reason her mother ever became a vampire is you, Elena.”
Her heart is racing.
“Let’s just stop talking.”
“Fine,” he snaps.
Unable to stand the sight of his face any longer, she look out the window and watches the world go by. It strikes her—the emptiness. Day in and day out with no people… Except Damon. Poor Bonnie.
It’s a relief when her sensitive hearing picks up on another car in the distance. It doesn’t take long for it to come into view. As Bonnie’s car stops, Damon presses the brakes. They get out of the car. The sight of Bonnie is a comforting one; she’s wearing an outfit typical of the 90s, with a big grin and shining eyes.
Elena smiles at Bonnie with disbelief. They’re really here. After all these months apart… She steps forward as she watches Bonnie run.
She watches Bonnie launch herself at Damon, throwing her arms around his neck.
It takes a moment to process the sight; that’s how absurd it is to her. They’re hugging. Damon has wrapped his arms around Bonnie and has buried his face in her shoulder.
Overcome, Elena has to look away. She knows there are gaps in her memory. But this?
Damon is smiling in a way that she has never seen before. Elena wonders if this is how he smiled when he was human. Without a hint of sarcasm. Because that’s how it looks—human and real in a way that he has never seemed to her.
They’re laughing. The breathless kind of laughter that comes with beating the odds.
It’s a long moment before they let go of each other. They still look dazed. His face is full of wonder.
Bonnie’s the first to snap out of it, turning to hug Elena next.
“It’s so good to see you,” Bonnie says into Elena’s brown hair.
“You too,” Elena says, smiling, but something inside her feels like it’s unraveling.
Considering the anti-magic border, they go to Whitmore. They for some reason including Damon. Because for some reason Bonnie hasn’t stopped smiling at him once, even through her eyerolls.
“What happened?” he demands when they’re in the dorm room, waiting for everyone else to arrive so they can go out for a celebratory dinner. Elena already popped open a bottle of champagne, but Bonnie seemed…off. Maybe this is why.
Bonnie removes her hand from the large bandage on her torso and pulls her shirt down again. “Kai stabbed me. He used my blood to get out.”
Damon bites into his wrist, and Elena would expect Bonnie to refuse, but she doesn’t know what to expect when it comes to Bonnie anymore. Bonnie used to be safe, comforting, and consistent, but now something is different. Sure enough, Bonnie drinks from his wrist without hesitation, even shooting him a grateful look once she’s done.
Elena feels a little like she’s the one who stepped into an alternate reality.
“So,” she speaks up hesitantly, and their gazes snap to her like they’d forgotten she was there. “Kai already had everything he needed to get out of the prison world?”
Bonnie gives a sympathetic grimace. “Yeah. So there’s no reason to beat yourselves up over his escape.”
“You hear that? He would’ve gotten out regardless,” Damon says sardonically, every word sharp and pointed. “So while Ric was refusing to give up the ascendant for nothing, Bonnie here was getting stabbed in the gut.”
Okay, she’ll admit the present day ascendant got Bonnie back, but couldn’t Damon have gone about it another way than to compel his best friend?
(Says the girl who asked me to compel her brother, a voice in her head pipes up that sounds like him. It makes no sense. She’d never ask him to compel her brother. He wouldn’t agree, and she wouldn’t trust him with something so important. Right? …She wishes, not for the first time, that she could fill the gaps in her memory.)
Bonnie puts a comforting hand on his shoulder. His tense stance relaxes under her fingertips.
“Hey. I’m okay now,” Bonnie says softly, before she laughs disbelievingly. “I’m more than okay, I’m out.”
“Hell yeah you are,” Damon says. “I’d tell you I’m glad for it, but then I’d have to kill you.”
The smile Bonnie directs his way is brilliant. How long has it been since Bonnie has smiled that brightly? Elena can’t remember.
“Alright, tough guy. No one can know there’s not a billion people we’d rather be with under threat of death?”
“Bonnie,” he says with a fake scandalized voice. “What happens in ’94 stays in ’94.”
Bonnie laughs, and it’s disconcerting and yet so right, but then her eyes slide to Elena and she abrubtly stops.
Being in the dorm suddenly feels very wrong. The room is too small and Damon and Bonnie are too big.
He doesn’t even seem to notice. “We should just go back to barely tolerating each other’s company in front of everyone. You know. For the reputation, and all.”
Attention caught by him again, Bonnie's nodding. “Fake hating,” she says solemnly, and now he’s the one doubling over in laughter.
It’s even worse than Bonnie’s, because at least that had been familiar, in a distant, achingly nostalgic kind of way. This is something completely new. And it shouldn’t be. Should it? If they had such an epic love as everyone keeps saying they did, shouldn’t this at least niggle at her memories despite the compulsion?
It doesn’t. This kind of unabashed laughter, from him, is alien to her.
She does her best to laugh, too. “Well, this is something I never thought I’d see.”
She beats herself up over the words as soon as they’re out of her mouth. She’d meant Bonnie and Damon, and their sudden camaraderie, not…
Damon looks at her. She remembers him saying that he didn’t want her to fill in the blanks of her memory.
Elena's eyes slide to Bonnie, who’s smiling at her, but it doesn’t look the same as earlier. It makes her feel itchy.
The anti-magic border around the town has mysteriously vanished; Damon thinks Kai must have siphoned the traveler’s spell. The concept of a magic siphon is still foreign to Elena, but not to him, and not to Bonnie.
Elena walks the streets of Mystic Falls, eyes roaming the cemetary as she passes it. When she was human, she’d come there to write in her sea foam green colored diary, leaning against the statue across from her parents’ grave. She’d sit in the grass, autumn leaves all around her, thinking that if she was lucky she’d wake up the day of the bonfire and it would all have been a terrible dream. Everything always felt like it took so much effort, in those days, even ripping out blades of grass with her free hand.
It’s where she first properly met Stefan. The fog, and the Hitchcock vibe, and the cut on her knee. His disappearing act right after. She thinks back to her words with irony now: we have history together. She’d meant their classes at school, but now they really do. They have history. It’s all history.
Being back in town after not being able to enter it for months is making her nostalgic. She leaves the cemetary behind and walks all the way to the boarding house. If she was human, she’d be tired from the trek. She hasn’t been human in a long time.
She walks through the front door, taken as always by the vintage interior. She remembers, or she thinks she remembers Damon calling it too kitschy for his tastes, but she’s always loved the cozy feeling of the place. She can’t exactly trust her memories of him, though, not anymore. Besides. Damon lies.
Hearing voices in the distance, Elena follows them to the kitchen, only to stop short.
She was hoping to talk to Damon. To demand answers. They’re not just his memories, they’re hers, too, and she can’t get them back anymore. It’s like there’s a piece of her missing, and he holds the key to getting it back. It’s disgusting, because it’s him, but she’s going to have to suck it up if she wants to know what she’s missing.
Except he’s not alone.
“Elena! Hey,” Bonnie says, offering her a small smile.
“Hey,” Elena says, feeling wrong-footed, rooted to the spot.
Bonnie’s eyes slide to Damon, holding a spatula as batter sizzles in the pan, before coming back to find Elena. “I should go. Let you guys talk.”
“Nonsense,” Damon says, twirling the spatula to point it at her. “I’m making you breakfast. Don’t be rude.”
“You’re making me pancakes,” Bonnie says, unimpressed. But she makes no further move to get up from her seat. “Now that we’re back in our world you could at least try making something new.”
“If it ain’t broke…” Damon's lips curl into an expecting smirk. Bonnie rolls her eyes.
There’s change. I can sense it. Feel it.
Elena’s old diary entry comes to her unbidden, and she shakes her head. That was…about something completely different. Something about Stefan, and not feeling so sad anymore. It’s just some lingering nostalgia from earlier, but the words echo in her head. Like a taunt.
Bonnie’s looking at her. How long has she been doing that? “He thinks he can make pancakes,” Bonnie says with an eyeroll, nodding to him. “He can’t.”
“Says the girl who ate them every day for four months,” Damon says.
“I just didn’t feel like making my own breakfast,” Bonnie says sweetly.
“And you’re welcome,” Damon tells her, widening his eyes smugly.
Picking up the scent of coffee brewing, Elena heads over to the pot so she has something to do. The sound of coffee pouring has always been a pleasant one, and it’s there three times over. Elena sets down the mugs, Bonnie shooting her a grateful smile, while Damon is seemingly focused on flipping pancakes. He hasn’t even spoken to her once.
Elena takes a sip from her coffee and burns her tongue. It heals quickly, like all things do.
“Were you guys always friends or is it just another thing that I forgot?”
Silence falls after her question, and a part of her takes satisfaction in the discomfort that seems to have settled over both of them.
“Who cares about the past?” Damon says, finally adressing her, but without looking her in the eye. It’s such an insanely hypocritical thing for him to say. “We’re friends now. Eat up.”
The pancakes are served with whipped cream and blueberries, depicting cute vampire faces.
They eat. Bonnie keeps meeting Elena's eye, apparently by accident, and then looking straight back down at her food. Damon stares at her, but doesn’t say a thing. Elena wants so badly to make excuses and leave, but it will feel like admitting defeat, somehow. That the two of them together is too much for her to handle, which is ridiculous.
It's been a long time since she had pancakes. She doesn’t think she likes them anymore.
“I can’t tell if this is a good thing or a bad thing,” Elena says, squinting at Jeremy on the couch, with a pencil in his hand and an empty sketchpad in his lap. “I mean, great that you’ve got your sketchpad out again, but shouldn’t you…you know…draw something?”
Jeremy glances at her, annoyed by her tone as she intended. “I’m going to, just give me a sec to figure out what.”
“How about Bonnie?” Elena says, shooting him a sly smile.
Jeremy rolls his eyes. “How about no, considering she just broke up with me.”
The world stutters for a moment, as this information makes it way to Elena's brain. They broke up. Bonnie broke up with him.
“But why?” she breathes, horrified.
It makes sense, now, the stilted air between them at Bonnie’s celebratory welcome back dinner. The steak was perfectly cooked, seasoned, and well-presented, and Bonnie wouldn’t look Jeremy in the eye as she ate it.
“I don’t know, she said she didn’t feel it anymore, and I can’t exactly blame her. It’s not like I looked for her. Instead…” He sighs.
Sure, Jeremy fooled around with a lot of girls in the wake of Bonnie’s death, but they’d been in love. That has to mean something, doesn’t it?
“I’m sure you can still fix it,” Elena says. “No, you are going to fix it.”
“Hey, I’m pretty sure my love life’s my own business,” Jeremy says.
“It’s my business too when it’s my best friend in your love life.”
“Well, she’s not in it anymore, so just drop it, okay?”
The combative tone reminds her of his drug haze when their parents died. He’d don a black hoodie and walk around with his spiked hair, smoking joints and dealing pills. She had been the dutiful sister, pursuing him to ruin his buzz every time she saw him. I know who you are, she’d pleaded once, and it’s not this person. So don’t be this person.
That version of Elena was different. Human. She would have said the same thing to the Elena of the present, and she would have been wrong.
When Elena was human, she was fragile. Everyone always had to bend over backwards to save her life, to borrow Rebekah’s phrasing. Elena can barely imagine anymore what that felt like.
Her eyes narrow at Jeremy's empty sketchpad. “Right, and you’re so unbothered about it. I’m sure that’s why you have art block.”
It’s not the most profound of analyzations, but then, Jenna was the psychology major in the family. Elena’s not aiming to be that kind of doctor.
“Art block?” She bristles at Jeremy's nonchalant tone.
“Like writer’s block, but for art. I don’t know. That’s not the point!”
“Well, what is the point?” Jeremy says, exasperated. “Why are you so bothered by this? And don’t give me that ‘best friend’ crap, she’s the one who broke up with me.”
“I…” She falters.
It’s ridiculous. She doesn’t even remember loving Damon.
But she remembers Damon loving her. Chasing her. Obsessing over her. And she remembers Bonnie, willing to do whatever she had to to keep Elena alive. To the point of channeling a hundred dead witches and coming close to death herself.
“I’m not bothered,” Elena lies.
“Uh-huh.”
“Oh, go back to staring at your empty paper,” she teases, but she’s not sure the playful tone comes out right by the strange look Jeremy shoots her.
She finds herself driving to Whitmore.
“I’m just going to ask her,” she mutters to herself. The words seem loud in the empty car. “It’s not weird. I’m her best friend. I can ask about her break-up. …I should stop talking to myself.”
She smiles wryly and shakes her head at herself.
When she’s walking up to her dorm room, she comes to an abrubt stop in front of the closed door. Bonnie isn’t alone.
“You can go back to the boarding house if you want,” Bonnie's saying. “You don’t have to stay.”
“Now why would I go back to my master bed that I spent months missing, when I can sleep here in this tragically tiny dorm bed?”
“Caroline—“ Bonnie tries.
“Nice try, but Caroline is with her mom, and Elena is with the guy whose heart you just ripped in half,” Damon says wryly.
Elena startles at hearing her name, her heart pounding as Bonnie tells him off for being an ass.
It just doesn’t makes any sense. Sure, Bonnie is steady and dependable, and maybe Damon finally realized that, but that doesn’t explain what he brings to the table. What does he do to make Bonnie look at him the way that she does?
“So you don’t have to worry about being a horror story roommate,” he continues breezily. “Besides, how am I supposed to sleep when I’m thinking of you not sleeping?”
Bonnie has been having trouble sleeping?
“We’re idiots,” Bonnie says. The words are spoken in a soft and fond tone. Elena pictures an eyeroll accompanying them.
She tries to reconcile this with the Bonnie who wanted to let him die in a fire, and can’t.
“Idiots who have shared a bed before,” he points out.
Elena's stomach joins her heart in rioting, making her oddly nauseous.
“What happens in ’94 stays in ’94,” Bonnie teases gently.
Elena can hear shuffling, and she realizes they’re getting into bed. Literal sleeping together. She almost laughs, but clamps a hand over her mouth in time; Damon would pick it up with his vamp hearing and know she was stalking them.
Her torso fills up with ice. She backs away slowly, silently, until she’s nowhere near the dorms.
She breathes, and isn’t quite sure what to do next, when something collides with her head.
Everything goes dark.
Awareness comes back slowly. Elena's ears are ringing in a way they only do when there’s magic involved, or vervain, or both; her mouth feels sandpaper dry. There’s a voice, becoming clearer with every second.
“…cause I siphoned up all that magic from your little town, my control isn’t as precise as I’d like it to be. Which is a problem, considering I don’t exactly want to vaporize my twin before we…”
There’s chains around Elena's wrists, secured above her, holding her in place. Her eyes flutter open to see a boy. Dark hair, blue eyes, but not as blue and beautiful as Damon's.
Even before everyone’s strange insistence that she fell in love with him, she always thought he had the prettiest eyes out of anyone she ever met, from the moment he started playing mind games with her to screw with his brother. And even Stefan's eyes hadn't been as striking to her, but she never would have admitted that when they were still dating. They’d been something else, anyway. Forest green, gentle, peaceful. Pulling her in and making her feel like smiling. Exactly what she needed, at the time.
Elena recognizes her surroundings with a start. She’s chained from the ceiling of the high school. This corridor is where she met Stefan. She can see the men’s room in the distance.
As the boy keeps talking (and talking, and talking) it becomes clear that this is the third resident from the pocket dimension that brought Bonnie and Damon so much closer together. The third piece of the puzzle. The one who stabbed Bonnie—that thought comes later than any other. Kai.
“…and that’s why you get to be my lucky guinea pig! Yay!” Kai mimes Elena cheering for him, high and drawn out. Her eyes narrow, nonplussed. Is he for real?
Kai reaches out a hand. Instinctively, Elena yanks at the chains to try and escape, but she’s too weak to manage it. Kai tells her he’s trying to boil her blood, but nothing happens.
Rows of lockers start to sizzle. The paint melts right off. Cold dread settles in the pit of her stomach as she watches it happen with an open mouth.
“God, you see what I mean? No precision whatsoever!”
Kai paces, clearly agitated. Elena's eyes track him warily as he comes to a stop in front of the trophy case. He comments on an old picture.
Elena and Caroline and Bonnie, in their cheerleading days. Wearing the uniforms in a shade of red that now only reminds her of blood, and the blue ribbon she stole clashing with it. But this picture was before any of that. In there, she is human. In there, she is not an orphan. Her smile is sharp, her old mean girl smile, promising wicked things. Caroline used to say Elena was a lot more fun those days, and she was right. The mischievous partier had turned into gloomy graveyard girl.
Good riddance to both, she thinks privately.
“You look so innocent and happy, like nothing could go wrong in the world,” Kai says. “Look at Bonnie’s smile. You don’t see that too often anymore. Honestly, she’s so serious all the time. Except when she’s with Damon, of course. I get why she wouldn’t be all that jazzed about laughing with you, though.”
Bonnie’s smile, in the picture, is innocent and happy. Elena remembers the twin braids Bonnie used to sport at cheer practise, while Elena herself preferred a perky ponytail. They’d stretch on the grass, a CD of their routine’s music playing on the radio, water bottles nearby for when they inevitably got thirsty shaking those red pompoms.
Elena used to keep a framed picture of herself in her cheerleading uniform. Always staring at her from her dresser. She can’t remember when she took it down, only knows that she did.
“Stop talking,” she grunts.
She hates this feeling. Like she needs somebody to come rescue her.
Kai ignores her demand and does not stop talking.
“Since I totally stalked those two for months and got the whole sad story. Bunch of travelers, lots of death, yadda yadda. Bonnie trying to bring back all of her friends…getting closer to death herself with every soul that passed through… And then her selfish bitch of a best friend deciding to kill herself unnecessarily to add to the strain. All because you couldn’t let your boyfriend blow up alone. I mean, yeesh. Even I think that’s harsh.”
“That’s not true,” Elena insists, despite knowing it’s futile to argue with the sociopath. “I wouldn’t hurt Bonnie like that for Damon. I wouldn’t.”
Kai laughs. “It’s not just Bonnie, though, is the kicker. If she hadn’t had to bring you back too for nooo reason, your spot probably could’ve gone to Lexi. Poor Steven.”
“Stefan,” she snaps. “And I didn’t do any of that.”
“Gosh, torturing you with all the crappy things you did is no fun when you can’t remember them,” Kai sighs, but then he perks up. “Hey, compulsion is magic, right? I could totally try siphoning it away. Now that’s what I call a control exercise. Maybe I can even pull it off without permanent damage to your brain!”
He moves towards Elena after the cheerful statement. She recoils, but she has nowhere to go in her restraints.
“No, stop. You don’t have to do this,” Elena pleads, but Kai ignores her, cupping her cheeks. A red glow begins to eminate beneath his hands.
And it all comes flooding back.