Note: This is it kids, say your goodbyes as you read the final (unedited) instalment of this fic. Huzzah and stuff. Every review to the last chapter stirred up fuzzies and I thank you all for that. And a warm hug to everyone who followed this story from the beginning to now. What treasures you all are XO

Shall we?

How do you know when you've finally lost it? Do you look as different as you feel, so suddenly? Does anyone else notice? Do you leave? Are you taken? Did you even want to stay? Do you remember your life as it was or as you wished it would be? What does it feel like to no longer be yourself? Were you ever who you thought you were? How close did you get to who you wanted to be? So many questions, so many things that will haunt you when you're left with nothing but yourself. This shadow, this daily reminder of how there's nothing left. Because although your still there, writhing inside of yourself, there's nothing else around you, nothing registering in your mind, only pain in your heart – and you can scream as loudly as you like because there's no one to hear you…

But you don't – because there's no one to hear you.

If there's no one else to remind you, to show you, to be with you even if they ignore you – do you exist at all? The sun burns, the trees sigh in the wind and the pain ebbs and flows, but nothing changes. Nothing comes, nothing goes. Inside all you know is a growing darkness, coaxing you in with the promise of its warm oblivion. But your brain tries to remind you, perpetuating the pain in the same breath – but it forges on anyway. It reminds you of colours, of smiles, things, memories, words, sounds…so sharp and clear in your mind, only dulled in its effects by its consequence. And the consequence never changes. You mourn. You mourn and cry. You sniffle, fall, begging to die. Because true nothingness is the only antidote you can think of in this hell. You want to stop existing, like you did to everyone else. You want it to finally end, this state of 'almost' you've been sucked into. All you know is the feeling of nothing, not even you, ever being enough. All you know is that it hurts and you want it to stop. All you know is that you're alone and that this is the end of the line for you – but as fate would have it, as a last punishment, the Universe wants you to push yourself off of the plank. It wants you to finally do something for yourself, or at least this is what you've convinced yourself. So you take a tentative step towards it and the pain flares and you almost fumble in your resolve. You remind yourself of another thing: this death, here, it's freeing. Heaven may still have you…Then you truly waver…

You don't want heaven and you've had your fill of hell.

You want to obliterate it all like you wished you could the memory of it all. You don't want your soul to survive this – you want every shred of yourself to meet death. You don't want any more halves. Half of this, half of that. An almost love, an almost family, an almost friendship…A consistent miscalculation in the hands of the gods. You want to die in every sense of the word, and despite yourself, or perhaps because of yourself you've never wanted to die more in your 'life'. So you take another step. And it hurts more than it did a few seconds ago, but like every other time on the brink of death you push further because of how much you want to pull away. You know that this is it, and you can't think outside of this moment long enough to consider what you might have wanted as an alternative. You've always been out of time. You've never been enough. You don't want to be this either, this nothing is too all consuming –

You take another step.

Hello, Death –

When Damon found Bonnie in Purgatory she was trying to kill herself. Luckily he was through hesitating with everything he did and he stopped her. He pulled the knife out of her stomach and poured liberal amounts of his blood into her mouth that was hanging open – and Damon just hoped that he'd come in time. Looking down at her, she was so small, so pale, so utterly frail and insignificant facing the odds stacked up against her. The slashes on her wrists cleared, the hole in her stomach closed and her head lolled around loosely from her neck and it unnerved him, how floppy she was. There wasn't a hint of Bonnie inside the body Damon clung to and for the longest moment he thought that she'd died. That she'd finally gone and done it and then he also thought…what if by some miracle the timing had been just right and she was transitioning? But her heartbeat pitter pattered softly in her chest reminding him that she was only healing and that he should be grateful for that. So he decided that he was. He was glad that she'd live and that he'd finally made good on his word to be a friend to her, to save her, to show her that he'd push through the realms of heaven, hell and everywhere else to bring her home with him.

When Bonnie's eyes opened she just stared up at him while he stared down at her. Then, without saying a word she raised a bony arm and wiped an errant tear that hung precariously from his left eye. Her hand fell away then, like she found it too heavy to hold up for a moment longer. "Bonnie?" He whispered and she blinked at him…shaking her head in the negative after a few moments.

"She's dead." Bonnie said, her voice gruff and hoarse, unused and tired.

"No you're not." Damon said, trepidation building.

"Yes she is." Bonnie replied. "She's dead and we're both imaginary, none of this is real."

"Bonnie, I'm right here." She pressed her mouth into a tight line as tears pooled in her eyes. Why hadn't she died like she wanted? "I'm here and we're going home." She pushed away from him and scrambled away desperately, shaking her head at him; no, no, no, no. "Come with me?" She shook her head again, "Bonnie, please, come back with me."

"He's not real, he's not real, he's not real, he's not real." She began rocking herself as she sat bunched up an arm's length from him, hands clawing at her every available surface, "Wake up, wake up, wake up. He's not real. He didn't come back. You're alone. That's all, just breathe through it then wake up and then you can die. Just wake up."

"I can't let you die Bonnie, you need to come home with me." She stilled and looked up at him for a long time, and he could have sworn he was watching the colour bleed right out of her in front of him.

"I suppose it doesn't matter," Bonnie finally said, "Either way I'm dead. Here or there, up or down, I'm dead and there's nothing anyone will do to change that." Damon blinked and raised his palms as he inched over to her, moving on his knees over the kitchen floor in her grandmother's house, until he reached her. When he did, he pulled her closer to him and crushed something in his hand while she stared unseeingly somewhere past him, mouth shut, soul slipping away as they slipped through the folds of space and time, bringing Bonnie Bennett back home. When they landed back in the cemetery she blinked a few times, stepped away from him and hugged her body and sighed, turning to walk away and he almost let her but he needed to know –

"Why did you send me back?" He called after her and she paused, turning slowly to find him right in front of her when she did. She held his gaze and he felt nothing from it as he stood there, wishing he'd done more, fought harder, come up with solutions sooner, did anything but disappoint her and again, lend a hand in her downfall. She frowned a little and a spark of something came and went, a flicker of what she doubted she could ever dredge up again. "I didn't deserve it."

"You had something to come back to." Was all she said and then she did walk away and even though every bone in his body begged to follow her, hold her, care for her, he pulled out his phone and called Caroline. Then, he turned and looked around himself a little, looking for what he didn't know…he didn't feel right, he expected more when he eventually found Bonnie again and this hollowness she met and left him with sunk into his chest, drowning his dead organs, pulling him under.

But we all know Damon Salvatore, he'd smile at his own funeral.

Have I Gone Mad?

"Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

You have a choice to make.

Every outcome is death, but choose wisely nonetheless.

Jeremy is going to die. Will you save him?

Damon wants you to be a vampire. Will you transition if he forces your hand?

Or –

Shall we revisit Purgatory and simply obliterate you entirely?

You'll cease to exist, swallowed by peace and an all-inclusive nothingness.

You'll leave them all behind – you'll leave him behind, is that what you want?

Bonnie woke up to Damon looking down at her, exactly as she had been since he saved her, since he moved in with her, since he grew to love her. Except today he looked especially alarmed, especially scared, especially helpless and the guilt slammed into her. What had she uttered in her sleep, why was he –

"Damon what is it –" but the answer to her own question was what cut her off – it all flooded back. "Oh my god…Jeremy…Where is he?" She knew she was too late, but there was always that part of yourself that hoped, no matter how obvious the truth made itself to you.

Later

When Bonnie died later that day, like she almost had if she hadn't opened her eyes to the sound of Damon's voice she knew something they all didn't. That she was going to live – she got to see who they were without her, who they were with the knowledge of only her memory; it made for quite the show. She knew it would hurt Damon, her dying again. She knew, even though she hadn't openly admitted it to herself, how much he'd come to depend on her in her dependence on him. She just didn't think she'd be able to have a perfect view of it all.

"He loves you," Death said affectionately, her onyx eyes shining as she watched Damon's blue ones slip between red/black and blue and back again, "It's breath-taking." Bonnie frowned, she felt so disconnected to it all, curiosity turned her head to Death.

"You said something about a letter?" Bonnie pressed as Death's eyes shone with affection between the scene before her, only flattening out unhappily when they passed over Elena. Death hummed in response.

"You're already dead," she said, her long black hair falling in waves that she curled a forefinger through as she spoke, "But I have another option for you to consider." Her black eyes met Bonnie's then, "But you need to hurry, especially if you want to be a vampire."

"…What is it?"

"Become like me." The girl said, her fair skin flushed with sudden animation. "Live forever – as exactly who you were always meant to be." Bonnie considered her words as she looked back down to where Damon was rocking her body, embers of gold floating off of her corpse as he clung to her, his chest heaving as he yelled and snarled and tried to mourn her when he was yet to let her go. Death giggled and before Bonnie could turn to say something she opened her eyes to Damon's face. She woke up with an influx of knowledge slamming against the sides of her skull, blue eyes begging for it all to be real and a heartbeat that was no more. And just like when he'd come back to rescue her from Purgatory, she wiped away at his tears. He looked so beautiful in that moment to her, so perfect and so sad. He looked at her the way we all want to be looked at – like we matter, like the world might come undone if we weren't in it…He looked at her like she had saved his life in that moment. Perhaps she had. He'd most certainly saved hers.

A few days after

Elena made it very clear that Bonnie was not invited to Jeremy's funeral. Neither was Damon. Every time Caroline or Stefan brought it up Elena threatened to turn her switch off and Bonnie shrugged and smiled, saying that nothing would stop her from mourning Jeremy in any case. Caroline was at a loss for words, trying to make sense of Bonnie's words, Stefan's, Elena's…the way Damon reacted to Bonnie's death. That was love. Is love. That was what had been missing between him and Elena, Caroline felt; Damon had shaped his love for Elena by force, whereas his love of Bonnie shaped him by choice, by truths that he didn't even expect to uncover. And what made the perfection even more perfect? It was a connection of souls, tangible between their gazes and affections, it transcended the wants and needs of their bodies. Caroline doubted they had even formed the idea of romance between them, what they had was more profound, sturdier – they had what she wished she could fathom between herself and Stefan. Something she'd been torturing herself with; in an amongst the mess of their lives.

To top it all off, she missed Bonnie. More so when Stefan pulled her aside one day as she was helping to finalise arrangements for the funeral – telling her that Bonnie and Damon were going to leave Mystic Falls. That Bonnie had already said goodbye to Matt, one of the few people left she even cared about. Caroline's heart broke even as she begged it not to, in her eyes she'd lost the right to ask anything of Bonnie. She hadn't done much outside of her mourning – Damon had half killed himself, a few times, to get Bonnie back home. And Bonnie had finally had enough, and who were they to blame her? Stefan gave her his trademark 'I know your pain' eyes and that broke her and she cried. She cried as he held her, as Elena called to them for something or other, as the sun dipped under signalling the end of the day before Jeremy's burial. Stefan held her and although her mind told her she was falling apart, her heart felt some glimmer of hope, as if she were being put back together.

Epilogue:

Oh, but now we have forever, isn't that something?

Bonnie and Damon stood beside each other, looking down with reserved eyes at the grave stone of one Jeremy Gilbert.

"I can't believe the kid's dead." Damon mused, and Bonnie hummed softly in the back of her throat, too pensive to pick at his tone. "Actually, everything that's left is pretty unbelievable."

"Nothing made sense here if we really think about it," Bonnie replied, her voice distant and thoughtful, "For the longest time this place was a precarious mess, violent and cruel and we all tried to accustom ourselves to that, to 'survive' or whatever that word meant to us…We all lost parts of ourselves throughout it all though, some more than others. Some lost their entirety."

"Is this the part where you put a hex on me because it's all my fault?" He wondered and she rolled her eyes.

"To blame you and you alone for everything that's happened wouldn't make sense; we all made our own choices, we all killed someone, we all saved someone, we thought we were doing what's right – defending what was ours, even when we didn't want it." Bonnie replied, stepping closer to him and leaning into his side as he took her hand in his, "It's us, all of us, who messed up. Even Stefan, bless him." Damon snickered. "But this madness also had to end, how much longer could we have lived like this until we all died? Or until the town was bled dry of all its people?"

"That's the scariest part though," Damon interjected, "I think it could have gone on forever if it wasn't for you."

"Me?" Bonnie scoffed. "I'm pretty sure it was your change of heart that saved us all." Damon frowned and pulled a face.

"I didn't have a change of heart, angel," he grinned as he dipped his head to whisper the last word in her ear, "I just remembered myself, and either way your argument is null and void, because you were the one that brought me back to myself. So it's you. Once again, Bonnie Bennett saves the day."

"Alright Salvatore, that's enough out of you, we have a few more things to do before we can leave."

"Ah yes," Damon said, steering her from the grave back to his Camaro, "Our travelling extravaganza." He splayed his palms out for emphasis, while Bonnie shook her head with a smile on her face.

"You still haven't decided where we're starting." The Angel pointed out and he shrugged.

"That's because you're deciding," he said, "I've been pretty much everywhere and this is about you and getting out of this tumbleweed town, it's all up to you."

"No pressure." She teased, bugging her eyes a little. When they got to the boarding house, Caroline and Stefan were outside waiting. "Care!" Bonnie called out, flashing out of the car and into the blonde's arms, who gasped and giggled at the strangeness of the girl in her arms. "I'm going to miss you," Bonnie muttered into her shoulder, "So much, so, so much."

"I'll miss you every day," Caroline, "And I'll love you forever."

"Forever." Bonnie promised as they broke away. The girls turned in time to see the brothers pull away as well. Stefan was still smiling an odd, watery smile when he turned to Bonnie.

"Oh Bonnie," he said as he pulled her to him, "I don't even know what to say."

"Say you'll look after her, that you'll protect her…even if it's from Elena." She felt Stefan's chin move on top of her head as he nodded.

"Especially if it's from Elena." The younger Salvatore vowed. "Thank you, Bonnie. For everything. I can't even put into words how invaluable you are to me, to us, come visit?"

"As soon as we can." Damon said with a warm smile as Bonnie stepped under his arm as it rested comfortably on her shoulder.

"So this is it?" Caroline asked and the vampire and angel nodded.

"Is it?" Another voice interrupted and all four of their eyes closed in momentary annoyance, "Were either of you going to say goodbye to me?" Damon and Bonnie turned to face Elena.

"Like you let us say goodbye to Jer –"

"What good would have come from it?" Bonnie asked, cutting Damon off, "Every time we do the right thing it's not good enough because it wasn't your idea or it wasn't in your favour…Elena, I know that look in your eyes, and I know what you're thinking and you're wrong…"

"So you're not in love with Damon?" The brunette vampire bit out.

"How would that have anything to do with you?" Damon snapped. Elena's head snapped back, affronted.

"It has everything to do with me." Stefan pulled a face and made a thin sound in the back of his throat in disagreement while Caroline barked a short, humourless laugh.

"It's because he needs me isn't it?" Bonnie asked, narrowing her eyes, "It's because he needs me and you're scrambling for reasons why he no longer needs you."

"And is that so awful?" Elena cried out, arms flailing about.

"No, not really, but you are." Bonnie said evenly and the density of the atmosphere quadrupled.

"You two deserve each other." Elena spat.

"…Probably." Damon said with pursed lips and a quick nod.

"They'll never love you like they loved me, and you both know that." Elena went on, her eyes flitting between Caroline and Bonnie. Bonnie smiled softly.

"You're right, and that's perfectly alright with me." Bonnie said, winking at Caroline. "I'd hate to lose myself because I'm loved…" Bonnie frowned a little, "Who would they be loving then? No one." Elena snarled and took a step forward which Damon mirrored, stepping in front of Bonnie.

"Another step and I break something of yours Gilbert." Damon snapped. Stefan shook his head and tried to intervene only to be pulled away by Caroline. "I still owe you one for when you pushed her the other day."

"You'd hurt me?" Elena stammered, wide brown eyes blinking owlishly at Damon while tears lined them. He tilted his head a little and pouted at her, laughter bubbling in his chest.

"Hurts doesn't it?" Damon said, "Looking into the eyes of someone who used to care about you but no longer does."

"Damon –"

"Time's up Elena, Bonnie and I have to leave." Bonnie smiled a little when he stood upright and stood next to her. "We'll call when we land, wherever and whenever that is." Bonnie nodded, locking eyes with Caroline.

"And I'll call as much as I can before I, before we," Bonnie corrected herself, "Start 'working' or whatever you want to call it." Caroline nodded. Elena sped off while the four of them hugged again. When Damon and Bonnie got into the car again and he cranked up the engine he turned to look at her while the car thrummed and growled underneath them.

"I don't know what it means, but, everything I need is here with me right now, in this car." Bonnie smiled, and it was like watching the sun break through the clouds after months of endless rain.

"I don't even need the car," Bonnie replied, "Just you." Damon beamed in response and pulled out of the driveway.

"You know," he said keeping his eyes on the road even as he broke into another face-stretching grin, "If you got me a dragon I wouldn't need the car either."

"Oh shut up." Bonnie laughed.

The End

Notes: A sequel? Bonnie and Damon falling in love while fighting demons and dealing with the aftermath of Mystic Falls? You'll be the first to know ;)