Yellow Ledbetter

Hope is a bitch

The night he finds out she's back he's wide awake as usual.

Every night he stares up at the ceiling for hours until eventually he drifts into a crappy rest. Some nights he has nightmares, memories warped to show even more emotions he never registered, other nights he dreams of green eyes. This particular night, he's trying to decide which one he'd prefer before realising that alcohol is a thing and nothing is an option. But that could lead him down a dark path and he remembers what Damon was like when he drank. Luckily his turmoil is interrupted.

A single buzz from his phone sitting on the nightstand, to indicate the first text message he's ever received from a number he's begrudgingly saved. Evene frenemies need to be able to contact each other:

Bonnie's back.

Leave her alone.

He barely managed to look at her when he and Jeremy were saving her. Damon didn't need to text it. The thought of actually having her in front of him, see her, touch her, smell her, hear her- what would she say? The thought of it makes him nausauos.

For a second, he swears he feels the faintest itch- and he wants to be sick.

No, he actually is sick.

Not just the once.

And again.

In fact he pukes for nearly a whole day straight and by the next one he's desperately stumbling out of the motel with one destination in mind, all thoughts of seeing Bonnie are thrown from his head. Or maybe she'd like seeing him suffer like this.

He needs Josette's magic to fix this sickness. He wouldn't be at her door, begging like this it wasn't his only option. But she doesn't want to see him and he doubts she even read his letter. He can feel it all slipping away and maybe it's what he deserves.

But no, no it's not. He doesn't deserve to go out this way. Kai doesn't want to die.

'I want to live!' He yells at Jo, and he knows he shouldn't yell because it scares her but he's in so much agony that it's the only way for the words to come out. 'Because quite frankly I didn't get to do a whole lot of that before everyone decided that I wasn't worth it.'

It actually... It actually gets through to her. Josette agrees to give him her magic but he also gets something better. Begrudging sympathy. Not for the part of him that's Luke, but for him. Kai. If she can feel even a little bad for him then it means that things weren't entirely his fault and maybe, just maybe he wasn't destined to be a crappy person. He can change.

His gift to her is to leave her alone for the rest of her life. Her and the baby, she was unaware of, growing inside her. It seems like an uncle-move to tell his sister she's pregnant. It means the coven is going to get bigger. It's hope.

Having Jo's magic makes him feel so much better. His appetite actually starts to come back and this time when he returns to the waffle house he orders and extra helping of bacon with the pancakes. His phone buzzes in his pocket and his heartbeat is incomparable to it's buzz. Is it Bonnie?

Ugh.

He regrets giving Damon his number. The vampire's already blowing up his phone in need of a favour.

Apparently his brother Steven turned off his humanity and they need to find out if his mother Lacy is alive in another possible reality or something. Honestly he's not entirely listening, because he's too enraptured by the video playing in the tiny screen of the camcorder. Yeah sure there's Damon's mom or whatever in the background but oh look there's Bonnie. Snowflakes falling on her cold cheeks as she stands in the first Gemini Prison World. Guess that makes her the official world record holder for 'most Prison World's visited'. It's a lonely title.