Fate Is a Twisted Bastard 🕯️🧛♀️🖤
It was their misguided attempt to restore “normalcy,” Caroline corrals Stefan, Damon, and Bonnie into a Mystic Grill double date.
Her plan? Distract Damon and Bonnie from their increasingly steamy magical bond. Good luck sis. 🍀
What starts as Founders Day trivia spirals into chaos when a misfired love spell body-swaps them mid-argument.
🧙🏽♀️Now Damon’s stuck in Bonnie’s body—magic flaring, heels wobbling, and ego bruised.
🧛♂️Bonnie’s trapped in Damon’s—leather-clad, bloodthirsty, and overwhelmed by vampire instincts.
🩸As they fumble through each other’s habits (and wardrobes), they uncover shared memories from a past life—one that hints their bond has always been fiery… and possibly fated.
The fluorescent lights of the Mystic Grill flickered, casting a sickly yellow glow over the scene of a magical disaster. The air still crackled with the faint scent of ozone and something akin to a burnt sugar factory. Caroline Forbes, ever the pragmatist in a crisis, had abandoned her trivia cards in favor of a frantic, one-sided conversation with her phone.
"No, Mom, it wasn't a party! It was a team-building exercise! Yes, with a purpose! Ugh, fine, a body-swapping catastrophe! Can you just get a witch on the phone who's not on the dark side of the moon?" she hissed, her voice a low, frantic whisper.
Stefan, meanwhile, had his head in his hands, brooding a gesture of weary resignation he'd perfected over a century and a half.
Across from them, a new, surreal drama was unfolding.
Damon Salvatore, cocky-confident, swaggering vampire, was trapped. And not in a fun, dungeon-with-a-lady kind of way. He was trapped in the confines of a human body, a body that felt impossibly small and frail. His own long, muscular legs were gone, replaced by Bonnie's slender, toned ones. He stood up, and the world seemed to drop three inches. Shit...He wobbled, unused to the different center of gravity, and a sudden, intense wave of motion sickness hit him. He grabbed the back of the booth.
He looked down at his feet, now encased in sensible, low-heeled black ankle boots. He felt a wave of visceral disgust. "What are these?" he growled, the soft, lilting timbre of Bonnie's voice a bizarre echo of his own fury. "They're practical," Bonnie's voice came from his own mouth, now belonging to her. "They're a personal affront to the concept of style," Damon shot back, tugging at the hem of her cardigan. The fabric was soft, annoyingly so. He felt a phantom craving for leather, for something solid and dangerous.
Suddenly, a waitress with a plate of sizzling fries bumped past him. Damon-in-Bonnie's vampire senses, now muted and replaced with a human's, failed to warn him. He stumbled, catching himself with a wild, flailing motion that sent his hand slamming onto the table. The flimsy wooden tabletop groaned under his touch, and he felt a strange, tingling sensation in his fingertips. It wasn't the bone-crushing strength he was used to, but a different kind of power, a humming, electric energy. He pulled his hand back as if burned.
"What was that?" he muttered to himself, but before he could process it, another patron, a burly man with a baseball cap, clapped him on the shoulder. "Hey, sweetheart, you okay?"
Damon's blood ran cold. He froze, a flicker of pure, unadulterated rage bubbling up inside him. No one, and he meant no one, called him sweetheart. He was about to turn and rip the man's throat out—a thought that felt disturbingly foreign and impossible—when he realized he was still in Bonnie's body. The instinct was there, a deep, primal anger, but the physical means were gone. He tried to force the man to leave with a glare and a subtle command, the way he would with a vampire compulsion. The man just laughed. "Don't worry, hon. Happens to the best of us."
Humiliation, hot and sharp, coursed through him. He couldn't compel him. He couldn't hurt him. He couldn't even intimidate him. He was powerless. He was... a human.
In a fit of frustration, he slammed his hand down on the table again, a simple, futile gesture. But the humming energy flared, and in a brilliant flash of purple light, the glass of water in front of him exploded into a thousand glittering shards. The plates on the table, a stack of them waiting to be cleared, lifted into the air and crashed to the floor, a cacophony of shattered ceramic. The bar went silent.
Damon-in-Bonnie stared at his hands, his knuckles now bruised and bleeding. He had done that. He had wielded Bonnie's magic, a raw, uncontrolled burst of it, with no intent but pure, unfiltered rage. The power was terrifying in its unpredictability, a volatile force that felt less like a weapon and more like a live grenade.
Across the table, Bonnie Bennett was having an entirely different, but equally disorienting, experience. She was in Damon's body, a vessel of unimaginable strength and speed. His leather jacket felt heavy and confining, and his clothes, a size too big for her now, felt like an ill-fitting costume. The scent of bourbon and pine, of something old and dark, was overwhelming. She could feel the low thrum of the jukebox in her bones, hear the whispered gossip of a couple in the far corner, and smell the metallic tang of blood from a cut on a bartender's hand. Every sensory input was a scream.
The world was a cacophony, a jumbled mess of sounds and smells that had her head spinning. She pressed her hands to her temples, a futile gesture against the sheer volume of it all. It was too much. The world was too loud, too bright, too vibrant. The instincts of Damon's body were a constant, low-level hum in the background—a desire for blood, a need to move faster, a readiness for violence.
Then, a new, more horrifying sensation. A waitress came by to clear the broken plates, and the scent of the fresh cut on her finger hit Bonnie with the force of a tidal wave. It wasn't just a smell. It was a craving. A deep, primal, and utterly repulsive hunger. She had to fight it, to shove it down with every ounce of her will. She felt a phantom hunger gnawing at the pit of her stomach, a desperate thirst that was not her own.
To distract herself, she reached for a napkin and, without thinking, crumpled it into a ball. Only, her hand didn't just crumple it. It tore it into a dozen tiny shreds. She looked at her hands, Damon's hands, with a mix of horror and morbid fascination. The sheer, effortless power was intoxicating and terrifying. She reached for the heavy wooden table, a thick, sturdy piece of furniture that would have taken two men to lift. She wanted to steady herself. Her fingers brushed the edge, and the entire table, with all the drinks and plates, lifted a full six inches off the ground.
Her eyes widened in horror. She put it down quickly, the thud of the wood on the floor a testament to her newfound strength. The power was there, a well of it just under the surface, but she had no idea how to control it. The thought of what she could do, what Damon could do, with this body, made her skin crawl.
"Look at this," she muttered to Damon-in-Bonnie, holding up a mangled napkin. "I just... I ripped it. Without even trying. And I can hear everyone's thoughts."
"Their thoughts?" Damon-in-Bonnie asked, his frustration temporarily forgotten.
"Their conversations," she corrected, her voice still an unfamiliar growl. "I can hear every single one. That guy over there thinks his wife is having an affair, and that woman is furious about the price of the meatloaf." She shuddered. "It's a nightmare."
Before the two of them could fully process their new bodies, a new wave of chaos swept through the Grill. The doors burst open with a crash, and a figure stood silhouetted against the night sky. It was a man in a long, dark coat, his face obscured by a low-brimmed hat. He was no ordinary man, though. The air around him shimmered with a dark, twisted energy, and a low, guttural growl echoed in the space.
Stefan, ever the protective one, was on his feet in an instant. "Who are you?"
"The one who's here to collect," the figure snarled, his voice a gravelly echo. "The spell you two cast... it woke something up. Something that wants its due."
He lunged forward, not at Stefan, but at Damon and Bonnie. Stefan was fast, but the newcomer was faster. He sent a bolt of dark energy towards them, a swirling vortex of black magic that would have, in any other situation, obliterated a human and only inconvenienced a vampire.
But this was no ordinary situation.
Damon-in-Bonnie saw the magic coming. His first instinct was to run, to use the speed and strength of his own body to get to safety. But his body was gone. In a moment of sheer desperation, he reached out with his hands, a desperate, wild, and uncontrolled burst of power. The air around him shimmered, and a brilliant, protective shield of green magic flared to life, a testament to Bonnie's raw power. The dark energy slammed into it, and the two forces met with a shriek of clashing power.
Simultaneously, Bonnie-in-Damon, seeing Stefan go down under the stranger's attack, felt a new, unfamiliar surge of anger. The protective instincts of a vampire, the desire to protect her 'pack,' took over. She moved with a speed and grace she didn't know she possessed, a blur of motion that had her in front of Stefan in a heartbeat. Her hand lashed out, not with a spell, but with a punch. The force was staggering. The man in the coat flew backward, crashing into a table with a splintering crack.
They were forced to cooperate. The humor of the situation, the annoyance of their new bodies, was gone, replaced with a stark, terrifying reality. They had to use each other's powers, the very things they couldn't control, to survive.
As the fight intensified, the man in the dark coat lunged again, a dagger now in his hand. Damon-in-Bonnie and Bonnie-in-Damon stood side-by-side, a bizarre pair. Damon, wielding magic with the grace of a clumsy child, and Bonnie, fighting with the savage intensity of a vampire.
But as the man's dagger came for Bonnie-in-Damon, the world went fuzzy. A new memory, a vivid, overwhelming flash, hit them both at the same time.
He was in a speakeasy. Not the Mystic Grill, but a place dripping with velvet and smoke. He was at a piano, his long fingers flying over the keys. He felt a different kind of anger, a younger, more reckless rage. A woman, a beautiful witch with a mischievous glint in her eyes, was standing over him, a martini in her hand. "Still sulking, Damon?" she'd teased. "The world is on fire, and all you care about is your own misery." He had lunged for her, a blur of fury, but she'd flung the martini in his face, her laughter echoing through the smoky room. The sting of the gin had been nothing compared to the sting of her words. And then... she'd kissed him. A fierce, desperate, soul-shattering kiss that had felt both like a promise and a goodbye.
She was there too, in the speakeasy. But she wasn't a witch. She was... her. But a different version of her, with a different name, a different life. She remembered the fierce argument, the way his fingers had flown over the piano keys. She remembered her own recklessness, the way she'd taunted him. She remembered the feeling of being trapped, of being in a world that wasn't hers. She remembered the desperate kiss, a plea and a confession, a moment of pure, unadulterated connection that had burned itself into her very soul. She had hated him. And she had loved him. Both with a fierce, burning intensity.
The memory ended as abruptly as it had begun. The man's dagger was a hair's breadth from Bonnie's throat. But the memory had lingered, a low, buzzing hum of recognition. They weren't just two people who had a single shared moment. They were two people with a shared history, a past that stretched back a century. They had been rivals, lovers, and everything in between.
The dagger stopped, held in mid-air by an unseen force. The man in the coat looked up, his eyes widening. "You... you're connected to the source," he muttered, his voice a mix of awe and terror. "The ancient witches... they spoke of this."
Damon-in-Bonnie, still holding the shield, felt a new surge of power. It wasn't just magic. It was memory. It was their combined strength, their shared history. He willed the man back with a silent command, and a powerful wave of green magic sent him crashing through the front window of the Grill, the sound of shattered glass echoing in the stunned silence.
The spell, the one the young witches had said would wear off in an hour, had been a lie. The connection, the force that had swapped their bodies, was far more powerful, far more ancient, than they could have imagined. As the dust settled and the patrons began to stir, Damon-in-Bonnie and Bonnie-in-Damon looked at each other. The annoyance, the frustration, the pure chaos of it all was still there. But so was something new. A deep, unsettling, and undeniable sense of understanding.
Caroline, who had spent the entire time on the phone, finally hung up, her face pale. "The witches I called... they said they can't reverse it. Not yet. The spell is too strong."
"How long?" Stefan asked, his voice low and weary.
"They don't know," Caroline whispered, her eyes wide with fear. "It's tied to their past-life bond. It could be days. Weeks. They said it'll wear off when the bond is... resolved."
Bonnie-in-Damon folded her arms, a gesture of defiance that was eerily familiar on Damon's face. "What does that even mean?"
Damon-in-Bonnie just stared at her, a silent, knowing look in his eyes. He had no idea. But he knew, with a certainty that chilled him to the bone, that this was just the beginning. The past was not just a memory. It was a living, breathing thing, and it had just been unleashed.
