Loves Fucking Embarrassing

Caroline, leaning against the lockers with her arms folded, let out a slow breath through her nose. "Elena."

"What? I'm just saying it."

"I told you not to push," Caroline said, quiet, not quite meeting Bonnie's eyes. "This morning. I specifically said don't push."

"I'm not pushing, I'm asking a question." Elena turned back to Bonnie, and her voice softened, but it didn't soften enough. "I feel like I don't even know what's going on with you anymore. You skip everything, you don't answer texts for hours, and when I do get you it's like, one word answers. I'm worried, Bonnie. That's not me pushing, that's me caring."

Bonnie felt something in her chest go tight and hot at the same time, the particular kind of anger that came from being cornered by someone who genuinely believed they were being kind. "I lost my grandmother six months ago," she said, low. "I don't think wanting some quiet is the same as disappearing."

"I know that, I'm not saying it isn't hard, I just." Elena stopped, visibly searching for the right words and not quite finding them. "I don't want you to shut everyone out. That's not healthy."

"You don't get to tell me what's healthy for me." It came out sharper than Bonnie meant it to, sharp enough that a couple of kids glanced over on their way past. She dropped her voice. "You don't know what this feels like."

"I lost my parents, Bonnie."

"And you had all of us. You had Stefan and Damon and Jenna and half the town lining up to make sure you never had to be alone with it for five minutes. I'm not saying that to be cruel, I'm saying I don't have that. I have Grams' empty house and a grimoire I don't fully understand and everyone acting like I'm supposed to be fine because it's been long enough."

Elena's face did something complicated, hurt layering over guilt. "That's not fair."

"Maybe not." Bonnie felt her eyes sting and hated it, hated that this was happening in a hallway with people walking past pretending not to listen. "But it's true."

Caroline shifted like she wanted to step between them, opened her mouth like she had something to add, but Bonnie was already gathering her bag onto her shoulder.

"I have to get to class," Bonnie said, which wasn't true, there were still ten minutes on the clock, but nobody stopped her.

She didn't look back to see Caroline's face, the particular mix of I told her not to push and but I don't love how you're coping with this either that Bonnie could feel even without seeing it. That was somehow worse. Elena's pushing she could be angry at cleanly. Caroline's quiet, careful worry left no clean edges to be angry at all.

She skipped the rest of the day. Nobody stopped her for that either.

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The Grill was near empty in the after-school lull, just a couple of regulars at the bar and the low hum of a game on the TV nobody was watching. Bonnie took a booth in the back, ordered fries she didn't really want, and let herself replay the hallway conversation on a loop until her fries went cold and the anger curdled into something more tired.

She almost didn't notice the woman until she was already sliding into the booth across from her, uninvited, easy as anything.

"You looked like you needed the company," the woman said. She was maybe late twenties, warm brown skin, dark curls pulled back loose, and there was something in the shape of her face, something in the set of her mouth, that snagged at a memory Bonnie couldn't place. "Or maybe you didn't. Hard to tell with Bennett women. We're not great at asking for things."

Bonnie went still. "How do you know my last name?"

The woman smiled, unhurried, like she had absolutely nowhere else to be and nothing to prove by rushing. "Same reason I know you're probably wondering why a stranger just sat down at your table like she owns the place." She extended a hand. "Lucy. Lucy Bennett."

The name landed somewhere familiar. Bonnie had heard it before, in passing, in one of Grams' stories about far-flung cousins scattered across bloodlines nobody kept close track of anymore. A Bennett witch out in New Orleans, Grams had said once, vague and unbothered, like it was a fact that didn't need more detail than that. Bonnie had never met her. Had never really thought about her, if she was honest.

"I've heard the name," Bonnie said carefully, not taking the offered hand yet. "Never met you, though."

"No," Lucy agreed, unbothered, letting her hand drop without any wounded pride about it. "Family's spread out. That's sort of the tragedy of us, isn't it? All this power in the blood and we still barely know each other." She glanced at Bonnie's untouched fries, at the general slump of her shoulders. "You look like you've had a day."

"You have no idea."

"I might have some idea." Lucy's voice was easy, threaded with something that felt almost like recognition. "I heard about your grandmother. I'm sorry. I only met her once, a long time ago, but she left an impression."

Something in Bonnie's chest, already raw from the hallway, cracked open a little further at that, at someone saying Grams' name like it meant something without immediately pivoting into a lecture about coping mechanisms.

She was still turning that over when the bell above the Grill's door chimed, and a man Bonnie had never seen before ambled in behind Lucy's booth like he'd been trailing a few steps back the whole time and simply hadn't bothered to hurry.

He was good-looking in a way that seemed engineered rather than incidental, dressed like he'd wandered out of a decade that wasn't this one, and he surveyed the Grill with the mild, faintly bored disdain of someone assessing a room and finding it beneath him.

"You didn't wait for me," he said to Lucy, sliding into the booth beside her without asking, the picture of someone entirely too comfortable in a space that wasn't his.

"You were taking forever."

"I was admiring the local architecture. Very charming. Very small town America." His eyes cut to Bonnie then, cataloguing her the way someone might glance at a painting they weren't sure was worth the price tag. "This the witch, then?"

"Kol," Lucy said, a warning wrapped in his name.

"What? I'm making conversation." He extended a hand toward Bonnie, lazy and unbothered, a smile that looked practiced rather than felt. "Kol. Don't worry about the last name, it comes with a lot of baggage and I'd rather not ruin your afternoon."

Bonnie didn't take his hand either. "I wasn't planning to worry about it at all."

Something flickered across his face, brief, almost like surprise, gone again just as fast, replaced by the same bored, easy charm. "Good," he said. "Wise girl." He turned his attention to the menu like the conversation had already lost his interest entirely, propping his chin on his hand, visibly counting down the minutes until he could be anywhere else.

Bonnie looked between the two of them, Lucy watching her with warm, patient eyes, Kol already half checked out of the conversation he'd inserted himself into, and felt the strange, dizzying sense of standing at the edge of something she didn't yet have the shape of.

"So," Lucy said, turning her attention fully back to Bonnie, unhurried, like she had all the time in the world and intended to use every bit of it. "Tell me about yourself, Bonnie Bennett. I want to know everything."

And despite the hallway, despite Elena's hurt face and Caroline's careful silence still sitting heavy in her chest, despite every instinct that might have told her to be cautious of a stranger who knew her name before she'd said it, Bonnie found herself wanting to answer.

Her phone buzzed against the floorboards beside her. Elena.

hey are you coming tonight? we're doing the bonfire thing, everyone's asking about you

Bonnie stared at it for a long moment, then set the phone face-down without answering. It wasn't that she didn't want to see them. It was that she didn't have it in her to perform being fine for three hours by a fire while Caroline watched her with that soft, worried look and Elena tried to loop her back into whatever crisis was currently eating Mystic Falls alive. There was always a crisis. There was rarely room in it for Bonnie to just be sad.

A knock at the door pulled her out of it, not urgent, just two soft raps, and she knew before she opened it who it'd be.

"You didn't answer your phone," Jeremy said, holding up a paper bag that was already translucent with grease at the bottom. "So I brought bribery."

"It's not bribery if I already like you."

"Sure it is. Bribery just means I brought food. The liking you was optional." He stepped past her without waiting for an invitation, which she found she didn't mind from him the way she minded it from almost anyone else. He dropped onto the old couch in the study like he'd done it a hundred times, because he had. "Onion rings. Extra ones because I know you steal mine."

"I do not steal your onion rings."

"You have literally never once let me finish a serving of onion rings in your presence."

Bonnie huffed something that was almost a laugh, rusty, like she hadn't used the muscle in a while, and folded herself back down onto the floor next to him instead of the couch, close enough to reach the bag.

For a while neither of them said anything. That was the thing about Jeremy that she'd come to rely on more than she probably should admit out loud. He didn't fill silence just to fill it. He ate his fries and looked at the bookshelf, at the rows of dusty spines with Grams' careful labels on some of them, and didn't ask her if she was okay in that voice everyone else used now, the one that made okay sound like a foregone conclusion she was supposed to confirm.

"She used to yell at me for putting my feet on that couch," Bonnie said finally, nodding at it. "Every single time."

"Did you stop?"

"No."

Jeremy smiled, small and real. "Good."

It was easier with him. She'd tried to name why, exactly. Maybe it was that he'd buried people too, had sat in the exact particular quiet that comes after a funeral when everyone else has gone back to their lives and you're the only one still holding the weight of it. Elena grieved out loud, needed to talk it through, needed everyone in the room to feel the same size of sad she did. Caroline grieved by fixing things, by showing up with plans and playlists and well-meaning schedules designed to keep Bonnie too busy to spiral. Jeremy just sat with it. Let it be shapeless and heavy and didn't ask her to organize it into something presentable.

Her phone buzzed again. Then again. She didn't check it.

"That's gonna be Elena," Jeremy said, not quite a question.

"Probably."

"You gonna go?"

"Probably not."

He didn't push, which was, again, the entire point of him. "She means well," he said instead, like he could hear the guilt creeping in around the edges of Bonnie's silence. "She's just... Elena. Everything's a five-alarm fire with her, even the stuff that isn't."

"I know." Bonnie pulled the grimoire back into her lap, thumb tracing the edge of a page without opening it further. "I just don't have five-alarm energy left over right now. For anyone's fire but my own."

"Yeah." Jeremy stretched his legs out, bumping his sock foot against her knee, easy and familiar. "That's allowed, you know. Not having it."

She looked at him sideways. "Since when'd you get so wise."

"Since I buried more people than anyone our age should have to and had a lot of time to think about it." He said it lightly, no self-pity in it, just fact, the kind of thing you could only say flat like that once you'd actually made peace with it. "Turns out you learn things. Not fun things. But things."

Bonnie leaned her head against his shoulder, just for a second, and he let her, didn't make it weird, didn't ask what it meant. The grimoire sat closed in her lap. Outside, the sun was starting to go down, orange light catching the dust in the air, and for the first time in longer than she wanted to admit, the quiet in the house didn't feel quite so much like an accusation.

Her phone buzzed a third time. This one she checked, mostly out of guilt.

Elena: ok well if you change your mind. love you. miss you

She typed back a short love you too, not feeling it tonight and left it at that, ignoring the small twist of guilt in her chest, the sense that she was going to have to actually deal with Elena eventually, that avoidance had a shelf life.

But not tonight.

Tonight there were onion rings, and Jeremy's shoulder, and a house that still smelled like Grams, and that, for now, was enough.

She didn't know yet that three states away, a woman with her own name and her own blood in her veins had just crossed the Mystic Falls town line, an Original vampire trailing after her with his hands in his pockets and absolutely no idea, yet, what he was about to walk into.