Chapter Text
Elijah chooses the hill because it does not demand anything of him.
No strategy. No history. No Niklaus.
Just a tree that sheds its blossoms early, and a bench that looks westward as though it remembers when horizons mattered.
The moonstone sits where it belongs tonight, quiet in its drawer, centuries of pursuit reduced to a smooth grey oval wrapped in an invisibility cloak. A neat solution to a long, inelegant problem.
That should feel satisfying.
Instead, Elijah feels… reflective. The kind of reflection that comes when one can sense the end of a chapter approaching, the soft turning of a page before the words even shift.
Their business in Mystic Falls narrows with every hour: Moonstone, secured. Doppelgänger, identified and very much alive.
Hybrid, inconveniently sentimental and therefore more dangerous than usual.
Bennett witch, grieving and therefore unpredictable.
Every variable has begun to settle into place. It means they will not stay.
The thought does not disturb him. He has left more towns than this one has years on its signpost. But the rhythm of departure is familiar enough that he recognises the early notes when he hears them.
He walks up the slope with his hands in his coat pockets, shoes soundless on the grass, eyes drawn to the pale lanterns of blossom overhead. The tree stands a little apart from the others, as if it too has been holding itself at a distance for years.
It is only when he steps into the circle of falling petals that he realises he is not alone.
Someone is already sitting on the bench.
A girl — young woman, he corrects automatically — tucked into one end of the worn slats, knees drawn up, jacket zipped halfway against a chill the town hasn’t quite committed to yet.
Her hair is lifted by the breeze, curls haloing and falling, and her gaze is fixed somewhere beyond the town, as if she is watching a future only she can see.
Elijah pauses, only out of courtesy.
He does not make a sound; he has not made accidental noise in nearly a thousand years. But she feels him anyway.
Her head turns, eyes catching his presence the way a match catches oxygen — quick, bright, instinctive.
Not fear.
Not the skittish flinch of someone who feels the wrongness of him.
Just awareness.
The kind that comes from surviving grief and magic in equal measure.
Elijah inclines his head, a small apology for disturbing her solitude.
“May I?” he asks, motioning with one hand to the other end of the bench.
A brief hesitation. A calculation he can almost see run behind her eyes: stranger, night, hill, exit paths, phone in pocket, spell on tongue.
Then a small nod.
He joins her, sitting with the old-world composure that seems to cling to him like a tailored shadow. They maintain the polite gulf of space strangers pretend is for comfort and is, in fact, for discretion.
The wind lifts the blossoms overhead, a soft snowfall of pale pink drifting across their shared line of sight.
For a while, neither of them speaks.
Elijah lets the quiet rest. Silence is not awkward for him; it was his first tutor, long before he learned swords, or law, or the art of asking a question three times in three different ways until the truth slid out on its own.
Eventually, his gaze slides up to the branches.
“They fall early this year,” he murmurs, more to the tree than to her.
She glances up as well, following his line of sight.
“It’s been windy lately,” she says, voice low but clear. “Makes them drop faster.”
Elijah hums — a low, considering sound.
“In some places,” he says, “they used to believe blossoms fell early when a place was nearing a shift. A change of season, yes, but also… of fortune.”
She looks at him then, properly, as though trying to decide if he’s being poetic or ominous.
Perhaps both.
“Do you believe that?” she asks.
“Sometimes,” he answers honestly. “I’ve found the world has its own ways of warning us before it turns.”
A petal lands on the bench between them, trembling faintly with the breeze.
She brushes it off with her thumb. He watches the motion; simple, delicate, oddly careful, as if she’s used to touching things that might react.
Her fingers are ink-smudged in a way that doesn’t belong to schoolwork alone. Spellwork, then. Or too much time with old books. The air around her tastes faintly of metal and thyme.
“You sound like someone who’s seen a lot,” she says softly.
He smiles a fraction, that small, private quirk of mouth that means he has chosen to tell the truth without giving anything away.
“I have lived long enough,” he says, “to recognise when the wind changes.”
She lets out a breath that sounds like it’s been waiting all day to escape. Not fear. Not yet. Just exhaustion in a younger throat than should have to hold it.
“Well,” she says, “it’s definitely changing here.”
“Is it?” he asks mildly.
She huffs something that isn’t quite a laugh. “You must be new.”
“Passing through,” Elijah replies, which is, in its broad outline, true.
She looks at him sidelong, eyes narrowing a little, assessing his suit, his posture, his lack of obvious small-town edges.
“Nobody just passes through Mystic Falls,” she says. “They either grew up here and can’t leave, or they got dragged here by something, and now they can’t leave.”
“An unflattering picture,” he says, amused.
“An accurate one,” she counters.
He allows the point with a small tilt of his head. She returns her gaze to the town below, where streetlights are blinking on in clusters, like cautious fireflies.
“How long have you been unable to leave?” he asks.
It is more blunt than he usually allows himself with somewhat strangers. Something about her—about the way she sits, spine straight but shoulders tight, as though braced for a blow the world hasn’t yet announced—invites a cleaner sort of question.
She considers that for a beat.
“Forever,” she says, then catches herself, mouth twisting wryly. “Or, you know. Since… last year.”
The correction does nothing to soften the truth in the first answer.
“School,” he guesses.
“School,” she confirms. “Family. Obligations. You know. The usual.”
He does know. Too well. Whole centuries chained to other people’s vows.
“It’s odd,” she goes on, voice thoughtful. “You can stand up here and look down at everything and it all looks… small. Like you could just walk away, and the town would fold itself back up once you turned your back on it.” A beat. “Then you walk back down the hill, and it’s all on your shoulders again.”
“Perhaps the hill is lying to you,” Elijah suggests.
She smiles, small and startled, like she hadn’t expected to like the sound of his voice.
“Or maybe it’s being honest for once,” she says. “Maybe this is the only place in town where things look the right size.”
He can respect that.
He lets his gaze linger on the distant streets. Somewhere down there, Niklaus is pretending not to be besotted. Harri is pretending not to be afraid of how much she’s already given him. Rebekah is pretending not to have picked out houses on every street they pass.
And somewhere else — not so far — the Salvatores are trying to decide how much of Katerina’s story to believe.
There is not much time left before everything tips.
Beside him, she shifts, arms wrapping more firmly around her knees. The motion exposes the edge of a bracelet at her wrist; thin, worn leather, inscribed with sigils he recognises from old Bennett work, though these are newer, crisper.
Grief, he thinks, seeing the way her fingers brush it. Fresh.
It is his first time meeting the latest Bennett witch, but he knows the line. Every smart vampire does. They are the hinge on which too many stories have turned.
He had expected his first meeting with this one to take place around a ritual circle, or a negotiation table, or in the fall-out of some disaster his brother had accelerated.
Not beneath a cherry tree, with her hair catching stray petals and the air full of the faint, stubborn magic of a girl who is trying not to crack.
“You came here to think?” she asks, breaking the quiet before it gets too deep.
“To observe,” Elijah replies. “Mystic Falls has an odd way of revealing things when one is still enough to notice.”
She makes a soft sound in her throat. “Yeah. It likes an audience.”
“You don’t approve?” he asks.
Her jaw flexes. “I’m tired,” she says simply.
Of what, she doesn’t specify. She doesn’t need to. The list is written all over her: the cemetery earth still too fresh under her shoes, the friends who carry too much supernatural gravity around her, the weight of being the one in the room who pays the bill every time someone else makes a bargain.
“Of this place?” Elijah asks, careful.
“Of… people thinking it’s entitled to all of me,” she says quietly. “My time. My power. My… forgiveness.”
Interesting.
“Forgiveness is a generous thing to assume as a given,” he says. “Most men I have met have considered it a right.”
“You say that like you’re not one of them,” she returns, sharp but not unkind.
He smiles slightly. “I try not to be.”
“Does it work?”
“On my better days.”
A petal catches in her hair. He watches it rest there, absurdly pretty atop so much carefully-held strain.
“One person,” she says, almost to herself. “Just one person doing the right thing at the wrong time and suddenly your life is… rearranged. And somehow you’re the one meant to patch it.”
He does not ask who. It is written in the shape of her mouth when she says it—hurt, but not utterly broken; faith cracked, not shattered.
“It is a terrible habit of the world,” Elijah says. “Looking for the nearest capable hands and dumping responsibility into them without permission.”
She huffs softly. “You say that like you’ve seen it a lot.”
“A few times,” he allows. “Once or twice I was the one whose hands everyone looked at. I did not enjoy it.”
“What did you do?” she asks.
He considers.
“Once?” he says. “I accepted. Too quickly. I took more than I should have, and others paid for it.”
“And the other times?”
“I took longer to answer,” he says. “I asked questions first. I learned the cost before I agreed to pay it.”
She lets that sit.
The wind turns, bringing the faint sounds of town up the hill, a siren, distant laughter, a dog offended by its own echo.
“You sound very sure of yourself,” she says finally.
He almost laughs. “I am not sure of myself at all, Miss…”
He pretends, as though he does not know who she is.
He turns a little more towards her, offers a hand — not too close, not presumptuous. Just there.
“Elijah,” he says.
She looks at his hand for a moment, as if gauging the cost of taking it.
Then she does.
Up close, the magic in her skin is unmistakable, a low, electric hum, different from the old, brittle power of covens past. Grief-thinned, but not diminished.
“Bonnie,” she replies.
Their hands part.
The name settles between them with quiet inevitability.
“So,” he says lightly, “Bonnie who is tired of patching other people’s messes. Is that a temporary condition or a permanent declaration?”
Something like a smile ghosts across her face. “Ask me in a year,” she says. “Tonight I’m just… taking a break.”
“From forgiveness?” he asks.
“From being useful,” she corrects.
Elijah inclines his head, conceding the distinction. “A radical act.”
“You say that like you approve.”
“I do,” he says. “Most people mistake value for use. They are not the same.”
She studies him, as if weighing how much she believes a stranger on a hill.
“People still come to you though, don’t they?” she says. “Even when you say you’re resting. You look like someone who gets… volunteered a lot.”
He cannot help it; he laughs, quiet and genuine.
“You have no idea,” he says.
He thinks of Niklaus, trailing ruin and affection in equal measure. Of Harri, fierce and exhausted and still willing to argue him toward a better choice. Of Rebekah, demanding a childhood eight centuries too late. Of the way he stands in every threshold their family approaches, shoulder to the door, pretending it’s choice and not compulsion.
“You sound fond of them,” Bonnie says.
He blinks.
“I did not mention anyone,” he says.
“You didn’t have to,” she says. “It’s in your face.”
He schools his expression automatically. She catches the motion, and for the first time a real laugh escapes her.
“Too late,” she says. “Now I know you have a soft spot.”
“Tragic,” Elijah murmurs. “My reputation will never recover.”
“Maybe it needs the hit,” she says under her breath.
He lets that go unchallenged. The wind jostles the branches; more petals drift down. One lands on the back of his hand, pale against the darker skin.
“So,” she says, voice quieter, “if you’re here to observe and not to fix… what do you see?”
He looks at her. Really looks.
At the tension in her shoulders that hasn’t relaxed even once. At the way her fingers keep returning to that bracelet. At the faint shadows under her eyes that speak of too many nights spent fighting things no one else can see.
“A young woman,” he says slowly, “sitting on a hill she visits when she wants the truth to look different for a minute. Someone who has given up more than she should have for people who have not yet learned how to deserve it.”
She blinks, expression flickering between offence and startled recognition.
“That’s a lot to get from one conversation,” she says.
“I’m very old,” he answers. “I’ve been practising.”
She snorts. “You’re also very full of yourself.”
He inclines his head in acknowledgment. “Also that.”
Her gaze slides back to the town.
“What do you see?” he asks, returning the question.
She hesitates; then she answers, because he has given her truth and some part of her, apparently, insists on reciprocating.
“A man in an expensive coat,” she says, “who came up here to think about leaving.”
That catches him off guard.
“Leaving?” he repeats.
“You’ve got that look,” she says. “The one people get when they’re halfway out the door in their head, even if their feet haven’t moved yet.”
“What makes you think I’m not from here?” he asks, amused.
She looks him up and down, unhurried.
“The suit,” she says. “The shoes. The way you talk. The fact that you called this ‘fortune’ instead of ‘luck.’ The fact that you picked this hill and not, like, the Grill or the falls.” A tiny shrug. “You’re not… stuck the way the rest of us are. You’re standing on the edge of something, and you’re not sure how guilty you’re supposed to feel for stepping off.”
He is quiet for a moment.
Then: “You are… disconcertingly perceptive.”
“Occupational hazard,” she says lightly.
“Of being…?”
She hesitates.
He sees the decision. The flicker of should I, the breath of maybe, the tiny shrug that means if he’s dangerous, he already knows.
“A witch,” she says.
He nods, as if this is new information and not something he read in the pulse of magic around her the moment he sat down.
“A heavy occupation,” he says.
“You have no idea,” she returns, echoing his earlier words.
He does, of course. He knows a great deal about what it costs a Bennett to stand up when the world comes calling. He has watched covens burn in the crossfire of other people’s ambitions. He is here, in part, because his brother’s curse is stitched to their name.
He does not tell her any of that.
Instead, he asks, “And tonight, Miss Witch, what would you like to be instead?”
She thinks about it. Really thinks, head tilting, eyes squinting against some internal light.
“Just Bonnie,” she says finally. “No magic, no duties, no… carrying anyone else’s mistakes. Just… a girl on a bench under a tree that’s doing its best.”
He follows her gaze to the tree.
“It is doing quite well,” he says. “It has provided us with at least three metaphors in twenty minutes.”
She laughs, unexpected and bright, the sound of it ringing under the branches like a small spell.
“See?” she says. “Useful tree.”
“Very,” he agrees.
The air cools further. Down below, a streetlight buzzes into life. Somewhere a car door slams. Life moves on, oblivious.
“Would you ever leave?” he asks after a while. “This town, I mean.”
“Physically or mentally?” she says.
“Both.”
She is ready with a quip. He can see it on her tongue, armour polished and waiting. Instead, she stops. Looks out over the town again, jaw working.
“If I could,” she says slowly, “I’d want to know someone was watching this place while I was gone. Someone who knew what they were doing. Then maybe I’d… breathe.”
He wonders, unexpectedly, what Harri would say to that. Harri, who left one war only to be dragged halfway across the world by a promise she made to a man she had never touched.
He thinks of Nik, who has never been able to leave anything alone if it bore his mark.
“If you ever do leave,” Elijah hears himself say, “do it because you want to. Not because someone else has pushed you there.”
She glances at him. “Is that what you did?”
He smiles, faint and complicated. “Once,” he says. “Another time, I stayed when I should have run. Both were… instructive.”
She studies him for a long moment, expression turned inward, as though she is filing his answer away for later. For a witch like her, later might not be very far away.
A breeze ruffles the hem of his coat. The blossoms sway.
“Do you believe in… inevitability?” she asks suddenly.
He arches a brow. “In what sense?”
“In the sense that some things are going to happen no matter how much you fight them,” she says. “Some… rituals. Some choices. Some… monsters.” Her jaw tightens on that word.
He chooses his response carefully.
“I believe,” Elijah says, “that there are currents in the world. Strong ones. Old ones. They push. But I also believe people have more say than they think in how they let themselves be carried.”
She scoffs quietly. “Easy to say when you’re not the one being tied to the rock and thrown in.”
Oh, but you are, he thinks.
Out loud, he says, “Sometimes the one tied to the rock is the only one who can decide whether the rope is cut or repurposed.”
She gives him a look that suggests she might call that nonsense if she weren’t so tired.
“And what if both choices hurt?” she asks.
“Then,” Elijah says softly, thinking of his brother, his mother, his own hands stained with both mercy and blood, “you choose the one you can live with afterwards.”
Her eyes flicker.
“That’s the problem,” she says. “I’m not sure anyone in this town remembers what ‘afterwards’ is.”
He cannot argue.
The night thickens at the edges. The cherry tree sighs.
“I should go,” she says at last, straightening, dropping her feet back to the ground. “If I stay too long, they’ll start texting.”
“They?” he asks.
She smiles wryly. “The people who keep expecting me to say yes, even when they don’t say it out loud.”
“Ah,” Elijah says. “Persistent creatures.”
“You have no idea,” she repeats, standing fully now, tucking her hands into her jacket pockets. Up close, she’s even smaller than she looked sitting, but there is nothing fragile in the line of her spine.
He stands as well, out of habit. She blinks at that, like she’s not used to men twice her age — let alone far more — remembering their manners when she leaves.
“It was nice to just be Bonnie for a while,” she says.
“It was… a privilege to make her acquaintance,” Elijah answers, and means it.
She hesitates, then adds, “And for what it’s worth… I hope you don’t feel too guilty about stepping off whatever edge you’re standing on.”
He inclines his head. “I shall take that as permission.”
“More like… a reminder,” she says. “If you’re already halfway gone, pretending you’re not doesn’t help anyone.”
Wise girl.
“And you,” he says, “remember that you are permitted to rest. Even if the town disagrees.”
A corner of her mouth lifts. “We’ll see.”
She turns to go, then pauses and looks over her shoulder, eyes cutting back to him.
“Elijah?” she says, his name soft but sure in her mouth.
“Yes?”
“If you’re still in town the next time the wind decides to turn… try not to be on the wrong side of it.”
The warning is gentle. It lands heavier than it has any right to.
“I shall endeavour not to be,” he says.
She seems satisfied with that.
“Goodnight,” Bonnie says.
“Goodnight,” Elijah replies.
He watches her walk down the hill, a small figure in a too-large world, shoulders squared against whatever waits for her at the bottom.
Only when she disappears into the dark of the trees does he sit again.
For a long time he stays there, under the slow rain of petals, looking out over Mystic Falls.
Moonstone, he thinks.
Doppelgänger.
Hybrid.
Bennett. Bonnie.
He had wanted to speak to the witch when it suited his schedule, when the strategy was neat and the emotional variables were someone else’s concern.
Instead, the world introduced her to him under a tree that is doing its best, on a night when she wanted, desperately, to be nothing but herself.
Harri has been a persistent wind against his worst instincts of late. A reminder that honesty, however inconvenient, has its uses.
He tips his head back, eyes closing briefly.
“Leverage,” he had told Niklaus earlier, when they spoke of this girl.
Tonight, under the cherry blossoms, she did not look like leverage.
She looked like a fulcrum the world had set and then forgotten was still bearing the weight.
When he rises at last and makes his way back down the hill, the petals cling to his coat. One rests in his palm, caught without his noticing.
He looks at it, thin and trembling, alive for a fraction of time between tree and ground.
“Miss Bennett,” he says quietly to the night, tasting the name now that he has heard it from her own mouth, “I do hope the next time we speak, the world will have the decency to be kinder to you than it intends.”
The wind answers by shifting, cool and insistent against his face.
The town below waits. Their time here is ending.
But tonight, at least, the hill has told the truth.
/
When Elijah returns to the manor, he expects nothing of note; the house hums with the same muted vigilance it always carries at night, Rebekah’s door shut, Nik’s light a thin stripe beneath his, Harri’s magic curled around him.
He unwinds with habitual precision—coat folded, tie loosened, cuffs unbuttoned—yet his thoughts drift not to the moonstone nor to strategy, but to a bench beneath a cherry tree, to a girl who spoke to him without flinching, to the way her voice carried exhaustion and humour in the same breath.
Bonnie.
The name settles in him with unsettling ease.
He reaches for his cufflinks, sleeve sliding back—then stops.
His wrist bears new text, dark and raised, still faintly warm: You say that like you’re not one of them. Her voice etched into his skin.
And on his other wrist, his own words—Forgiveness is a generous thing to assume as a given. Most men I have met have considered it a right.
He sits, not dramatically, but like a man struck clean through by an inevitability he had never allowed himself to imagine.
A soulmate, after nearly a millennium.
Bonnie Bennett.
He brushes a thumb over her words, feels them tingle like something awake, alive, irrefutable. He exhales—slow, steady, changed.
And so, the next time they speak, it is as soulmates.