Dear Readers: I'm sad to announce that this will be the final chapter of the Heresy series. So I just want to take a minute to say Thank You to ALL of you, everyone who left reviews on those first few chapters of The Invitation Barrier because the support kept me going, everyone who ever left reviews along the way, the multitude of "Guest"s out there who say nice things, and those of you who are my loyal reviewers, you know who you are, thank you! Even those of you who read but never felt like commenting, I love it that you're out there.

I will not be writing any more fan fiction with this kind of dedication. It has been an amazing year, (I started my FF account in January I think? Maybe Dec 2015), and I'll still be around. I may end up writing one shots now and then, probably all Bonkai or Bonora, and that said...if anyone has any questions about Heresy that you feel were not answered in the narrative, OR if you have a one shot request for something you might want to see within or outside of Heresy fanon, OR anything, anything at all, hit me up in messaging, comments or even better, Tumblr. I love getting Asks. Please, fill my Askhole. respectable-alcoholic dot tumblr dot com.

And again. THANK YOU GUYS I LOVE YOU I WILL NEVER FORGET YOU. Now please, get yourself a plate of cheese and crackers, or pumpkin pie, or salty delicious seaweed strips if that's your thing, and enjoy Chapter 21. XOXOXOXOXOXOXO!

songs

Nine Inch Nails - Heresy

Son Lux - Easy (Switch Screens Remix ft. Lorde) (the Bad Bonnie song, reprise)

Arcade Fire - My Body is a Cage

Lia Ices - Thousand Eyes

21

Right on time, the kick jolts her.

Every morning at ten, when she can at last sit herself up in bed, she pauses and turns her head. She looks out the window of her second floor bedroom. She gazes at the land and how the season is changing it.

September is taking the color out of everything but the pines.

She gathers her robe from side to side and it's always then, when it's the rest of her body that knows she's on her way to the bathroom, when she takes that first step onto the cold wood floor and it creaks because it's old…the fetal infant gives the inner wall of her mother's belly a swift beating with the heel of her foot.

There is nothing she can do except press her palm calmly on her belly and pray to the spirits that all this drama between her and her unborn daughter dissipates when her water breaks.

If it ever breaks.

She's a week overdue and bulbous. Her ankles have finally given in and started swelling. She pees constantly from the pressure on her bladder. She needs—needs—to give birth.

At the same time, she's grown attached to pregnancy. She's discovered, now that she's past the nausea, she actually likes carrying the baby inside her. She feels cute. She feels important.

The tension of impending birth has led her to feel like an end is coming, and she cannot picture life afterward.

It terrifies her.

So much emotion ran through Bonnie like blades to her chest.

She could do nothing but weep against the door frame while she stared at Nora's dead body. Any moment now she'd get the news, whether someone made it out alive and came back to share, or no one did.

The mourning seemed to change the structure of her, spiritually. Not enough time had passed and yet her magic cooed underneath her skin, collecting in her hands, binding around her heart as it broke.

It was returning to her like nothing and no one ever would.

Nora gasped.

Bonnie yelped and clutched her chest.

The Heretic's eyes, though they had already been open in death, rolled around to look at Bonnie, then blinked as she arched her neck and pressed herself up with her hands. Loose and mussed hair fell around her thin, bare shoulders as she sat up.

Her dress was wrinkled. Dry blood decorated her pouting lips and with her low-lidded, baggy eyes Nora looked as though she was merely recovering from a hangover, and not necessarily death.

Of course, Bonnie thought. Even if Nora's life was bound to Kai's by their coven link, she was still half vampire. She had died that contractual death. Now she was fine.

"What happened?" Nora slurred.

"You died," Bonnie reminded her, sniffing back a sob.

Nora squinted at the little pool of blood on the floor beside her.

"I did, didn't I?" she recalled, pressing the pad of her forefinger to her lips and wiping over the crusted red. Her expression grew less hazy and more concerned as she looked Bonnie over.

"Does it mean…?" Bonnie began, unable to finish the question aloud. The words were unutterable. The concept unacceptable. She hoped with all her might that Nora's answer wouldn't be what she knew it was.

Nora put a hand over her mouth and looked to Bonnie, her eyes beginning to drip. She shook her head and breathed, "I don't know."

"Quit looking at me like that."

Kai tried to reorganize his facial features but ran into some difficulty, as his nervous system was on the fritz due to head loss. He could only frown into Damon's earnest eyes as he watched the vampire kneel over his beheaded body and set his head on the ground. He didn't know how, but he could sense the radial magic from his body, like home, calling, pounding in his brain.

"I dunno if this is gonna work," Damon grunted. He grimaced and held the sides of Kai's face. Kai could feel the ground sliding along the back of his skull as Damon adjusted him, and he could hear wet spooning-through-leftover-macaroni type noises coming from just below his ears.

Damon let go and his crystal eyes widened. There was this strange feeling of tightening in his skin, and it kind of hurt but it mostly felt nauseating. He could sense his stomach, unexpectedly, and it wanted to hawk up some of the hearts he'd stuffed down it. He started to get all choked up, not emotionally, not in a puke-y way, but like his veins and arteries were slipping around, busy bloody worms inside his neck.

Suddenly he could breathe again.

He was hungry again.

He was aware, nervously, of his body again.

Kai inhaled, rolled his shoulders back against the ground, sighed.

In Damon's eyes, he caught sight of his black-eyed reflection and the many fangs bearing back at him.

"What the hell happened to you?" Damon muttered incredulously.

Over Damon's shoulder, Kai watched a tall young man step up to join the sentimental moment. It was a second of time, maybe, that he could drink in the sharp-nosed, white-lab-coated, glasses-wearing, basic fucking man that had stalked his family for months, had finally taken them away, and had seconds earlier killed him.

Maybe his movements were perceivable because Kai was some kind of monster himself. Before even Damon could register the circumstance, Ollie leaned over. There was a cracking and a gushing.

The scientist's hand emerged into view, clutching a heart. Damon seemed to choke, and his pretty eyes slivered in confusion, and pain. Grey traveled up from the collar of his leather jacket and spread to his face, veiny and finalizing. He careened to one side and slumped over onto the ground at Kai's side.

Kai had imagined Damon dying a thousand times before. That he didn't get to kill the bastard himself was irritating. But what really ruined it for him was that he had done something helpful for once. Of all saviors, of all solutions, Damon reattached Kai's head to his body…and it fucking worked. And he still didn't understand how it was possible and he still didn't understand why Damon would've intuited such a bizarre fix-it method. True monstrosity was a wondrous thing.

Now, Kai couldn't help but feel a little miffed that Damon was dead.

He heard little shuffles of feet, off somewhere in the lab. He could feel Caroline's energy ebbing to life. Ric's fear. One of the babies started crying.

The fight was not yet finished.

Kai flicked his dark eyes onto the emerald irises behind those wide glasses. Ollie, or, Dr. Oliver T as the badge attached to his lab coat read in tiny print that Kai could actually see if he zoomed in on it, was studying him.

"Very fascinating," he said, and his voice was deeper, rougher, than Kai was expecting. The scientist crossed his arms, drawing one up to scratch at his smooth chin while he looked down at Kai, who was waiting for the right moment to rise. "Very, very fascinating."

"Stefan!" Kai heard Caroline's whisper. He could hear the panic in her voice nearly overcoming the need to keep hushed. Kai honed in and could hear the wrinkling of a blood bag being squeezed dry like a Capri-Sun in frustration.

"Oh my," Ollie chuckled a little, looking up from Kai to somewhere across the room, "It seems you've chosen a rather defective rescue squad. Your vampire friend is, um, eating my patient."

Kai's heart broiled.

"No matter though. I still have two doses to work with, once I rip them away from their father over there. And by the way, when I kill you with one of my medical devices, do find Damon in the Oblivion and thank him for me. If not for his blabbering, I never would have known the immortality cure can be reproduced via literal human reproduction. Fancy that."

Kai heard stirs from other vampires on the floor, recovering from the bout of black magic he had cast. "Stefan, no," Caroline whimpered again.

"Do tell," Ollie went on, "What has been done to you? I just beheaded you, by all standards, you should be dead. It's…against nature. It's cause for study, really. A scientist is nothing if not curious and I am very curious about you."

Kai steadied himself while he listened, very aware of how his family needed him to get up.

"Remy!" Ollie called out across the lab. "Remy is my little witch assistant," he informed Kai. "Remy! Are you alive over there? I'm sorry I missed all the drama, I was upstairs in my study when I heard the commotion. Can we get this beast a bed and a clipboard?"

He wanted to be as creepy as possible. The second Ollie turned his head, Kai sprung up from the floor like fucking Nosferatu. And he waited for the scientist to notice. He had a moment in monster time. He was faster. He was hungrier. He was more dangerous. When Ollie did turn back to find Kai standing before him and no longer on the floor, his falter was slight. The surprise was well-masked but Kai could see it in his emerald eyes: he was scared for a second there.

"Well. Look at you," Ollie said, smiling as he adjusted his glasses. Kai watched the man's pupils expand and observe him, making a mental specimen of him already. He didn't dare wonder what kind of experiments were crossing his mind.

"Invisique," Kai whispered. The baby's cry rebounding off of every cold, hard lab surface clipped silent. He knew without needing to look that Ric, Josie and Lydia were no longer visible, nor was Jo, cutting Stefan's feed short. Hopefully. Death's scent was already too thick in the air to tell.

Ollie noticed his patients vanish. "What…have you done? Where are they..? Remy!" he yelled and snapped his fingers. "Find them!"

Kai spread his lips into a beaming, victorious grin. He made sure to show off all the tips of his fangs and not to withhold the craving drool, viscous with the blood of vampires' hearts, bubble from the left corner of his mouth. He felt like some kind of fucking dragon and he was ready to destroy.

He could see it easier now.

Catch some steps as they were taken.

Ollie, apparently a coward, vamp-sped out of the lab.

He ran away and Kai had to make a decision. To chase, and he knew he would catch up quickly. Or remain, let it go for now, and ensure that his family got out safe.

He itched to amble after the scientist and claw his heart to tasty little bits. It was the monster in him to want his revenge first. To have his hearts and eat them too. For all he'd consumed, he still felt starved.

He whipped around and made his way to the shattered room in which his sister slept.

Caroline was crawling on hands and knees towards Stefan, who had collapsed to the floor and was lying back, holding gnarled hands in knots over his chest. Jo's blood dripped from the corner of his mouth as he held it open, vacuuming breaths with some difficulty, his eyes zoning out on the ceiling as though he was watching his very long life flash before his eyes.

Kai wiped his hand through the air, uncloaking Jo to find that her neck had been ravaged, and she slept a possibly deeper sleep.

The former ripper let his head fall back on the ground, flattening one hand over his chest and catching his breath. Kai could hear his speedy heart slowing down, normalizing. The thump weakened in his hearing, did little to rouse his hunger. As he looked over the tired vampire, trying to will himself against feasting on his heart for punishment, he realized he was no longer looking at a vampire at all.

It has begun to feel less like a compound and more like home.

Though she knows the town is only five miles down the winding mountain road, she hardly leaves the property, and it's easy to feel like the rest of the world has either ended or gone on without her.

The letters she gets occasionally from Elena and Caroline help to remind her that it's all still out there, somewhere. Life is still happening to other people as it happens to her; Elena is two months pregnant; Caroline started singing in a local rock band of all things. Mystic Falls is, at the moment, calm.

Her best friends don't know where she lives; the letters are sent to a PO Box and Nora picks them up on her way home from class. But she has to be fine with the seclusion. It's safer for everyone this way. And despite the change of scenery, she is still herself.

Bonnie watched through teary eyes as Nora siphoned up the barrier spell between them. When the Heretic passed through on hands and knees to sink against the doorframe with her arms around Bonnie, it was a comfort.

She needed that hug. She needed that closeness. She needed to cling to what she had left.

She needed to leave this town that had taken everything from her.

A home was not supposed to hurt you so.

Jo was beyond anyone's help in a mansion full of dead or stirring vampires. Now with five humans to shepherd safely out and a magically injured Caroline who was very little help, he had no choice but to call for human back-up. 911.

Only after counting heads and snarling a rather passionate, "Incendia," at the busted front door.

Even while Caroline got the paramedics on the phone, and Stefan held so guiltily onto Kai's dying sister, and Alaric waited anxiously in the back of the Firebird with two crying babies, Kai was in burn mode. Long gone was any sense of sympathy he might've had for the wayward witch still inside. He stalked the front of the house, repeating, "Incendia," at any vaguely flammable surface. He wanted the entire place in flames without hope.

Incendia.

Incendia.

Incendia.

Her things finally arrived at the start of her seventh month and while she doesn't consider herself a materialistic person, having familiar objects comforts her. Her blankets, her grandmother's furniture, her clothes, her dishes and silverware, her tea canisters, her movies, CD's, books and grimoires and jewelry and photo albums… All now furnish what was for months a cold, stark victorian cabin with more ghosts than boards in the floor. All now create busy patterns throughout the short-ceilinged home that make it feel as such. "It's still froufrou," he says in disgust. Quilts on the couches, rugs on the floors, wind chimes on the porch, a tea kettle is always screaming for attention, books fill the shelves and lay open on the tables, Shakespeare the cat is a loaf on a windowsill… These qualities give a sense of peace to the air she breathes. And now that Josie and Lydia are waddling around like she is, there is laughter on the wind that comes up from the western hill, where behind a sparse curtain of towering pines, a mother-in-law cabin and a miniature playhouse are built.

She stumbled, her heart in knots, down the aisle.

She felt Nora watching from the back door as she clopped up the wood steps to the platform that had been built that morning for her to be wed upon. She drooped to her knees, gripping onto handfuls of tulle in her dress and sobbing upward at the white moon beaming down through the lavender that hung from the altar.

She wasn't sure if she could handle this again. Losing him, and with so much more to mourn.

Hands shaking, she released her handfuls of dress and clutched her belly, wishing she knew how to stop crying. She worried her distress would upset her jellybean, and she couldn't lose it too. It, or she…Lenore…was all she had left of Kai.

Why, she asked the spirits. Why did she have to lose everyone she loved?

Caroline made the necessary compulsions.

Ignore the house burning down to all Hell.

Ignore the black-eyed humanoid in the bloodstained tuxedo.

Forget these strange circumstances.

This was an animal attack.

Ric climbed into the back of the ambulance with Josie and Lydia, and in a symphony of sirens disappeared down the empty country road.

Kai was not certain he would ever see his sister again. He was not certain that he would kill Stefan for what he might have done. Like him, he'd been a monster, doing what monsters do.

In the car as they drove away from the flaming plantation, Caroline grunted in pain behind the wheel, and Stefan hung his head over the brother he had lost, and Kai watched out the window imagining himself bounding alongside the car, howling for the blood and sex of the woman he had left for this.

Most afternoons, between a brunch of waffles and a snack of pizza rolls, she craves him. He comes inside sweating and panting and needing water and to sit down for a break from the small cabin he's been building with Alaric.

Her hormones and her zigzag emotions and the sense that the end is as near as Lenore's birth all have her wanting to rush things. He knows better than to take that seat he needs. Any chance she gets, she's batting her eyes and rolling her hips when she walks and he's charmed, following her up the stairs before he realizes it.

Her belly has grown so full he has to take her from behind. She doesn't mind it because he holds her. He kisses the back of her neck, her hair, her shoulder. He lays his palm over her firm belly with affection, and hope, and lust.

The rhythm he pumps into her is reminiscent of the car ride they took in their wedding clothes. They got blood on the seats of the Firebird. There was only one CD. For two thousand miles she was exhilarated.

She grinds around his cock until she comes and she wonders if growing up in Mystic Falls has conditioned her to feel so doomed.

"Left at the altar," a voice tsked.

Bonnie didn't recognize it. In her grief, she hardly cared to wipe her eyes and find out whose it was.

But there was something about the way the air moved around her. It was spring turning into summer but she felt like it had begun to snow. And she had forgotten that being so emotionally close with another witch seemed to bind their skins together, because she could feel Nora from yards away, bristling. Something was wrong.

Bonnie bruised her cheekbone with the heel of her hand wiping tears away, and looked up.

He must have come to the Lockwood yard through the trees. A strategic direction from which to arrive.

A man in a white lab coat, flecked daintily with blood, sauntered into the aisle from between the third and fourth rows. Glasses magnified his emerald eyes, where grey veins were squirming just underneath the skin. Bonnie received the immediate sense that this man had come from wherever Kai had gone to. If he was here and the others weren't…

She didn't know what to think. So she waited.

"The name's Ollie," the man said so politely, showing her a kind yet fanged smile. "And you are…Bonnie. Right?"

Bonnie did not respond or nod in acknowledgement. She watched through persistent tears, positive she would not need to upturn her scowl.

"I've been watching you and your kin for months now. I know a lot about you all. For instance, I know that today you were to be married. To the man-turned-beast who I finally met face to face. And I know how very deeply he loves you…"

Bonnie glanced to Nora, who had begun to take stiff steps from the inside of the house towards the back row of chairs. Feeling her magic pulsing in full return at her fingertips, Bonnie felt confident, but knowing that Nora was on the move in her defense made safety even more certain.

"I feel you back there, Nora Hildegard," Ollie said, his eyes fixing on Bonnie's. "I wouldn't come closer."

Bonnie watched Ollie play absentmindedly with a lavender ribbon streaming from the back of a chair, feeling quite uncomfortable beneath his unrelenting stare.

"Your groom saved the day, it seems," he said lightly. "I've no longer got the cure-carrying humans. And I really was going to treat them well, I'll have you know. I had comfortable rooms, wi-fi, a freaking Keurig. That is until someone decided to lead a resistance in my laboratory."

He lost the humans. Bonnie gathered it meant that Kai had succeeded in at least part of his mission. So where were they? Where was Ric? Caroline? Stefan? And what in the hell happened to Kai?

"…He ripped the hearts out of hundreds tonight. I didn't have the time to count the bodies…or the hearts," Ollie chuckled, "But that's a lot of damage. Let's tally. My friends," he named on his forefinger, "My hope," he said, erecting his middle finger, and "My property," on his ring finger. "Now I've come to equalize. I've got to kill you if I've any hope of waking with a little dignity tomorrow. It's just a formality. You understand."

It was clearer to Bonnie than the fresh spring night that this man was the probably the one who had killed Kai. The way he behaved, the way he spoke, the way he leered at her.

She needed no more convincing.

Not another word from your mouth, she thought, as she firmed her heel on the wooden stair, and stood. She didn't dare remove her eyes from her opponent—ha, he wishes he was more than just a victim—but she could see Nora peripherally, bony shoulders squaring with anticipation. Hold on, Bonnie thought, let me.

"I understand," Bonnie said pleasantly, subtly flexing the fingers of her left hand. When all of it—grief, rage, heartache, all that had rotted in the pit of her heart since the day vampires changed her life forever—came forth.

In a look.

In a scream.

In a lightning whip of magic from her throbbing heart to her gnarled fingers.

Ollie, caught off guard perhaps by the sound of her howl alone, watched her in awe for a second.

Only a second.

After, he appeared to have been paralyzed, though he remained stiff on his feet in the aisle. His arms shook at his sides and as the howl ripped through Bonnie's chest, sanding her voice, Ollie's face turned a shade pinker. Then it was magenta. Those grey hunger veins faded and natural red veins appeared.

Do you feel your insides liquefying? she wanted to ask through her howl.

It was his eyes, first, that hinted at what was to become of him. The capillaries burst into the whites and he sported bright red polka dots in his agonized stare. Bonnie could hear his breath shallowing, a groan trapped in his throat.

So this was the enemy. So big. So bad.

He was nothing.

Nothing but a pressure cooker.

When his eyeballs popped like cups of cream, Bonnie held her ground. She held her arm still. She held her will. For all the strength this level of vengeful magic would remove from her, she would not stop until the pain did.

The wind swirled around her, nature patting her on the back.

Ollie's streaming red eye-holes stared hollowly back at her as his body began to quiver under the intensity of her wrath. All skin she could glare at had become a frightful puce color.

Then he was a firecracker.

Ribbons of blood streaming through the air, out across the aisle and over the chairs.

Crimson confetti.

His liquid remains spattered much of Bonnie's wedding dress and the skin on her legs, but she didn't care. It was warm with righteousness.

He was right on time for the show.

He ignored the scent and sound of Nora's heart pumping excitedly as he brushed past her. Ollie was standing there in the Lockwood yard and it appeared he had come to enact some kind of justice. He could hear Bonnie screaming the darkest and throatiest of screams, and if it could have had a sobering effect on his monstrous condition he believed it'd be the one thing to bring him back.

Ollie was fucking toast and Kai stretched his heart-wrenching fingers out to make sure of it, but the second he stepped forward to take Ollie's heart through his back, the vampire changed form.

His body erupted.

Between the creamy red slivers, Kai stole a glance of his bride with her twisted fingers out, tendrils of her up-done hair falling loose, front teeth gritted in pain and hatred, and he saw Hell in her eyes.

The slops of Formerly Ollie landed with slaps all over their beautiful wedding.

There was no more heart to eat.

But that was fine with Kai.

The woman standing at the altar had just exploded someone into blood and maybe it was his condition but it was possibly the hottest thing he had ever seen.

And then she saw him.

When she has finished satisfying herself on him, she slides lazily out of bed and lets him return to his busy afternoon. She has her own project she's been working on, little by little, day by day.

A bedroom on the first floor has a window seat and she has been making library of it. It's here that she keeps the grimoires both Bennett and Parker, and all of her occult books. She builds shelves and trolls the internet for more long, lost books to fatten up her collection. It's one way to nest.

She is sad to have left the position she worked so hard to achieve. But knowledge and expertise on her subject matter is only growing. She imagines she might one day teach everything she knows to all of the young witches that will surround her here. It will be noble enough to fulfill her. If life allows her to get so far.

Stalking toward her up the aisle, his tux layered in sheets of blood, he was her rising sun. His black eyes glared with fixation, on her, and she herself was covered in not so much less blood than he, and it occurred to her to feel fear that it was only those red spots he was after, only satisfaction of some frightening kind because he came, head cocked, closer, closer, closer.

But she had just killed a man with no more grief than pleasure.

She remained where she stood beneath the altar, even if she trembled in the lavender heels.

Behind her approaching groom, she caught sight of Caroline limping out through the doors looking tired as hell but ready to bitch slap anyone who got in her way, and the blonde stared around the wedding at all of the blood that had just fallen from the sky. Bonnie wanted to hug her so tightly. Out came Stefan then, a joyfully weepy Elena attached to his arm as he kissed her on the top of the head and there was something very inspiring about their love, and something very different about the way Stefan moved. He seemed slower. Less permanent of a force.

Tyler Lockwood joined, and Matt Donovan. Bonnie's own mother, who must've stayed behind and gotten held up in whatever safe-room Matt and Tyler kept Elena, also appeared.

The new entrants stopped beside Nora and looked up at Bonnie, to the monster advancing on her from the aisle.

Her monster. He was alive.

She knew she shouldn't be surprised. Kai Parker wouldn't be killed. He was immortal in his own way. Still, tears returned to her eyes from the overwhelming relief flaring in her chest.

She tried to hide them before he stepped up to the altar but it was hopeless. His nice shoes thunked on the wood, one last step and he was there, standing before her, those deep and endless black eyes having their consuming effect on her and her face was wet and her teeth were chattering and all she wanted was to go limp in his dangerous arms.

At the same time she braced her hands before her in self-defense, he reached out. His cold fingers touched her neck and wrapped around. He cupped the base of her skull and his face loomed over hers in pause, giving her a chance to let the fangs strike a last beat of panic through her veins before the darkness in his eyes hypnotized. Bonnie could feel in daggers of energy the collective concern of everyone who watched from the back row of chairs. Nobody moved.

She wondered what he was thinking and couldn't guess. Nothing about him, like this, could give him away. Not until he go of a deep exhale and a gust of rancid breath carrying the scents of blood and digesting hearts wafted over her lips, and he unhinged his bottom jaw to crack it, and he wavered in some silent fight for self-control, before he latched his bloodstained lips over the whole of her mouth.

The many fangs jutting from his gums rubbed and poked against her lips, knocking into her two front teeth when his tongue slithered out and he started sucking in her skin. Bonnie tasted the sour blood that lingered in his saliva, pooling into the small resistant opening between her lips. She didn't want to share what he'd had in his mouth earlier, but it seemed that the beast wanted to kiss her and she had no choice but to accept the foul flavor. An accidental whimper hummed between their mouths and a short, satisfied laugh puffed from his nostrils.

After all of it, still Kai.

Bonnie took a loose hold of his blood-crusted lapels and gaped into his kiss, taking everything. The taste, sharp pricks of his teeth, smell of his breath and above all, their first kiss underneath the altar.

Anyone qualified to pronounce them was no longer present, but it wasn't needed. The matrimony was unspoken. They had witnesses to attest to the heretical union between monster and woman. Even if control was lost and the kiss went awry and one had to kill the other in the moments that followed, Bonnie and Kai were married.

He did not know what was driving him. But it wasn't hunger anymore.

Like the siphon he was, he could feel the magic of the monster curse pulsing heavily inside him and he wanted that power for himself, his true self, not the add-on entity that Hunger had become in his mind. He wanted that power, and he wanted to hold Bonnie without bars around his affection, without her knees buckling in fear against his or the trickling-in sounds of Caroline's and Nora's hearts dividing his attention, the very high probability that he would hurt Bonnie if he stayed this way. Though he could kiss her for a moment, it was a barrier between them. There was no future for him like this. No future but inevitable damnation to the Oblivion.

These things he knew between the cracks of his mutated mind.

He spread his lips around the fine collection of teeth he was definitely going to miss, and Bonnie jerked away from the kiss. He felt her grip on his suit disappear as her hands dropped to ready little fists half-full of weakened magic, waiting.

Kai took his hand back from her hair and closed his eyes as he hugged himself tightly. He rounded his palms over his shoulders, digging his fingers beneath the white collar of his undershirt, feeling his own skin. He concentrated on dragging the magic out of himself, a complicated process he was not quite used to. The monster curse, thick and biting, crept backward.

Come on, Kai coaxed.

A pair of delicate hands with familiar energy laid then against his shoulder blades. They sucked to absorb like his at the stubborn curse fighting back from its nest in his soul. It hissed at them.

Come on.

It burned.

Come on.

It fucking seethed and his eyeballs felt like they were bath bombs fizzing away in acid soup slopping around the bowl of his skull, and it felt like an exorcism, and it felt like Death's scythe was splitting his soul, and then it felt like Heaven and Kai couldn't breathe anymore.

Come on.

It's lucky when, on the porch at dusk with a mug of tea and the least of expectations, warm water gushes from between her thighs and Jo is already there.

She has a revelation as she locks surprised gazes with the older woman.

This is not the end, and it was silly of her to think so.

This is the beginning. Even as hours tick by, contractions start and worsen, Kai says, "Wait until we have twins, then you'll be hurting," and Nora has to remove him from the room because of the uncontrollable bouts of magic Bonnie is bound to injure him with, and it feels now more than ever like things cannot possibly go on after this much pain…it isn't the end.

A baby girl is born. Bonnie Bennett feels like a new woman. Kai Parker has lost his appetite.

"It's magic," Bonnie whispers wondrously as she cradles the newborn addition to the Bennett bloodline and the Gemini Coven, and her heart is fat with love, and life astounds her. "It's magic."