Disclaimer: I do not own the Vampire Diaries nor am I making any profit from this. Characters, etc. belong to all respective owners.

A/N: So here I am venturing into the Kennett ship once again! This one is definitely way more angsty than my last. I wasn't entirely sure what to rate this since there's a part which on the precipice where it's sort of a heavy T and sort of a very light M.

Enjoy!

Rain pelted down hard as lightning split the sky, booming thunder following not too far behind.

At any other time Bonnie Bennett would have found the cliché of it all just ridiculous, but now she is rendered speechless and thoughtless, laying on the forest floor in the mud, broken and bleeding from her mouth, noise, and ears while surrounded by the bodies of her dead friends.

She thinks that maybe she feels someone lifting her, cradling her torso in their arms as a bloody wrist is placed in front of her.

"Drink," she hears an accented voice say. Looking up, she is just able to recognize him as one of the Originals through the blur of her vision caused by the blood loss and rain.

Kol, she remembers. She only really knows him by name and face, never having spoken to him before.

"Drink," he tells her again. "You'll die if you don't."

She can't help but find it so ironic that he would try to save her. She helped destroy his entire family and he has just helped kill all her friends.

He has to tear into his wrist again because it had already healed up.

"It'd be such a waste of a life."

She almost finds that amusing. What made her more worthy of living than any of her friends? Matt hadn't deserved to die. He was just a poor, normal human that managed to get sucked in their problems and shouldn't have even been there in the first. She didn't have the greatest relationship with her mother, Abby, but she didn't deserve to die. Neither did Caroline or Tyler or Alaric. Hell, she wasn't even sure if Damon or Stefan deserved it either.

"Your friends wouldn't want you die," he says.

She supposes that's what ends up getting her to drink. Maybe he was right. Maybe she did owe it to them.

As she drinks, she can feel the blood stop leaking out of her, signaling the internal bleeding caused by magic overuse has stopped, and the darkening blur of her vision became clearer.

He doesn't say anything, simply holding his wrist to her mouth as her upper body is cradled in his lap. When the slash on his wrist closes up and he pulls it away, she still feels exhausted as if she had gone twenty rounds with a pro wrestler, which she kind of did just do the equivalent of.

"Sleep," he tells her.

She shakes her head, fighting to keep her drooping eyes closing. She doesn't want to fall asleep in his presence after all that has happened, but she can't stop herself.

She wakes up in a bed that is not her own, still wearing yesterday's clothes that are caked with mud and blood and she sees that they stained the pristine white bedding she was wrapped up in.

There are clothes laying on top of the nightstand and she assumes that they had belonged to Rebekah because of the designer labels and the fact that the jeans were nearly half a foot too long for her. She's glad that he didn't take it upon himself to change her himself even if it was slightly gross that she spent the night in dirty, bloody clothes.

When she creeps out of the bedroom, she eventually finds her way to the living room where Kol is standing at the window, staring at the rising sun with muscled arms crossed in front of his chest.

"I plan on leaving today," he tells her, not bothering to turn around. "You can join me if you like."

She should ask him why. His entire family was dead because of her and he friends and all her friends were dead because of him and his family.

She already knows why. It's because she really has nowhere else to go and he has nobody because Klaus kept him locked in a coffin for a century.

She could go home to where her father was almost never around and live out the rest of her life in Mystic Falls with constant reminders of what her life used to be. But she doesn't know what she was supposed to tell Jeremy or Elena or anyone for that matter. Jeremy was still in Denver and now Bonnie hoped that he would never come back to discover what had happened and everyone had deliberately kept Elena out of the loop.

She's not sure if she honestly even has the ability to tell anyone what happened.

It would be so easy to slip out of Mystic Falls with him and let everyone assume that she was dead and that her body simply couldn't be found. At this point, it almost seemed, as sick and twisted as it sounded, appealing.

Neither of them says anything as she leaves the mostly empty mansion.

It doesn't take her long to grab a few simple things from her house that nobody would notice being gone like a backpack to hold a few changes of clothes and her grimoire. She figures she could always buy some things later.

She rips Rebekah's clothes off her body and sets them on fire with her magic.

Her hands hover over a picture of her, Elena, and Caroline on the day they made the cheerleading squad. Her hands close around the frame before she pulls them away as if it burned her. The memories were already too painful.

She then crouches down pulls out the bottom drawer of her dresser and brushes aside her clothes to reveal a few White Oak stakes. Weeks ago, she had discovered through a vision that Mikael had kept a whole store of them hidden in some crypt out in Florida of all places. When she found out she wondered if he had planned on killing his entire family or if he simply had them for backup to kill Klaus.

She had insisted that they should bring all of them when they went to that fatal meeting with the Originals, but both Damon and Stefan agreed that they should save some just in case. Bonnie's house became the designated storage because with was totally and utterly vampire-proof since she never had and never would invite one in.

She grabs them and puts them in her backpack.

She hasn't decided whether she would use it on Kol or not.

She walks through the front door of what was once the Originals family's home less than an hour later, not bothering to knock or ring the doorbell and sees Kol sitting at the dining room table, as if he was waiting for her even though she never told him whether she would leave with him or not.

He looks at her backpack with a blank expression on his face and for a second she almost seizes up because she has this crazed idea that he somehow knows about the stakes as if he could see clear through her backpack. Then, she comes back to her senses because, really, how would he know?

She silently follows him outside to her car. She's not sure whether she should be more surprised that he had car and could drive since he just stepped out of the last century about a month ago (did they even have cars in 1912?) or that his car was simple and normal when most of his family was all about extravagance.

She climbs into the passenger side and the drive is completely silent and she doesn't plan on making the first step towards conversation. She doesn't even bother to ask where they're going.

Anywhere but Mystic Falls, even Virginia for that matter, was fine with her.

They wind up in New York City in the mid-afternoon. Kol checks them into a hotel, getting just a basic room with two queen sized beds. She was beginning to notice a running theme with him and simplicity. She actually kind of likes it.

Not knowing what else to do, she picks a bed, curls up in it and sleeps. She hasn't been expecting to sleep through the rest of the afternoon and all of the night, but when she wakes, it's morning once again.

Kol is sitting at the little round table in front of the window, reading a book. She wonders how he manages to remain so calm and collected given what has happened, but she figures he's had at least a thousand years to practice his poker face.

It makes her wonder how she looks at the moment. She must look like a disaster and she felt dead inside, but she hasn't even cried once. She supposes that it makes sense, though. The dead weren't supposed to cry.

She slowly climbs out of the bed, ignoring that her clothes were all wrinkled from sleeping in them.

When she sits at the table across from him, she notices a cup of coffee and a brown paper bag sitting on the table. He pushes the items towards her, while watching her intently.

Opening the bag, she sees a plain bagel along with a small container of plain cream cheese and a plastic knife. The coffee was black with no cream or sugar.

"I don't know what you like," he tells her.

"It's fine," she murmurs with a shrug and says an almost inaudible thanks as she begins to slather the bagel in cream cheese.

She looks at him and wonders which of her friends he has killed.

She saw Klaus behead Stefan and saw Elijah rip out Damon's heart and she saw Rebekah stake Caroline she also saw her rip out Abby's heart. She wonders if Kol was maybe the one who broke Matt's neck or staked Alaric with his own stake despite the history teacher's lack of vampirism or maybe he was the one who beheaded Tyler.

She feels the question on her lips, almost fighting to come out, but she stops herself.

She's not sure if she wants to know.

Their third night in New York, she wakes up in the middle of the night, quietly creeps out of her bed and retrieves one of the stakes from her backpack.

She stands at his bedside, stake clutched in her fist so tightly she wonders if maybe it'll break and make dozens of tiny splinters embed themselves in her hand.

He's shirtless and the bedding is bunched around his waist and she wonders how he has not woken up yet. It would be easy. Just so damn easy.

When his eyes finally snap open, she has the stake pressed against where his heart was.

What seemed like a thousand different scenarios suddenly flash through her head.

Would he behead her like Stefan and Tyler were? Would he rip her heart out like Damon's and Abby's were? Would he stake her like Caroline or Ric were? Would he break her neck like Matt's had been broken?

He does none of those things. Instead, he simply watches her with dark eyes that seem all-knowing.

Then, she feels herself shatter into a million different pieces.

The stake drops from her and falls onto the carpeted floor with a dull thud as both her hands cover her face and her body shakes with silent, uncontrollable sobs. Her legs give out and she collapses onto the mattress and he folds her into a tight embrace and doesn't let go as she cries herself to sleep.

She dreams about open chest cavities with missing hearts and broken necks and headless bodies and hearts with stakes running through them.

When she wakes up, he's no longer in bed, but she can hear the shower running and she assumes that's where he is.

When she looks in her backpack she sees that all the stakes are in there, including the one she had attempted to use last night.

She recognizes as a sign of trust and it almost makes her burst into tears again.

Every night after that, she sleeps in his bed.

Some nights, she just lies next to him and they talk about everything and anything except how they got in the situation they're in until she falls asleep. Other nights, she silently burrows herself against his side. Sometimes she asks him to hold her and he does without question.

He never makes any moves to touch her without her explicit permission.

One night her tells her that he didn't kill any of her friends. He tells her that the only time he stepped in the fight was to defend a family member, but he never actually delivered any of the killing blows.

At first she's not sure if she should believe him or not. She can see the earnestness in his eyes and knows very well that it could easily be an act. But then she wonders why he would even bother.

He knows that she's suspected he was behind some of her friends deaths all along and she hadn't killed him. He had even left her with the only things on earth that could possibly kill him for good.

So, in the end she decides that she does believe him.

After about a month in New York, he moves them to Chicago.

She doesn't know why or what his plan is or if he even has one and she doesn't bother to ask.

Hell, she doesn't even ask how he's been getting his blood.

In her short eighteen years of existence, she's already learned that there are some things in life that one just doesn't want to know and most of the time ignorance really was bliss.

They'd been living in Chicago for about a week when one night out of sheer impulse and probable insanity, she grabs the front of his shirt and kisses him.

He doesn't respond, but he doesn't make a move to stop her either.

She pulls away and moves to tug her shirt off and that's when he stops her.

"Do you even know what you are doing?" he asks her, grasping her forearms which had tugged her shirt halfway up, exposing her midriff.

With a broken look, she silently nods.

"Please," she whispers. "I need to feel something. Anything."

He lets her go and allows her to finish pulling her shirt off her body.

This time when she kisses, he responds by pulling her closer and running his large hands over her small body and they spend the night in throes of passion and for the first time she manages to forget her problems even if it was temporary.

That night her sleep is dreamless.

She's not sure what to call what they do.

It's not quite fucking, but not exactly making love either, so she ends up settling on the basic biological term. Sex. They have sex.

She hadn't been a virgin the first time they had sex, but she hadn't exactly been experienced either and it amazed all the different reactions he managed to elicit from her.

Her body would shudder whenever his lips touched the little junction of her neck and jawline just underneath her ear. She would break out in goose bumps when his hand softly trailed up her thigh. A breathy sigh would escape her when his lips brushed the underside of her breast.

Eventually she began to allow him to bite her. He had been hesitant when she first asked him during one of her many bouts of impulse and temporary insanity. She refused to let it go for reason she didn't even know, so he eventually gave in.

There was moment of slight, sharp pain when his fangs pierced her neck which was quickly replaced with an odd sucking sensation. He often did it when she was in the middle of an orgasm, causing her to claw at the muscles of his back with blunt nails.

They have a weird symbiotic relationship that neither one of them can describe, but she knows that at the end of the world they're all that they have.

A/N: I know I've stated this in my other fics before, but my stories have a habit of running away from me even when I have a clear plan set up in my head for where it's supposed to go…

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