songs

FKA Twigs - Mothercreep

Halsey - I Walk The Line

Mirel Wagner - What Love Looks Like

Is This What Love Looks Like

Her ears are ringing.

Her lavender Jansport is overflowing. Her eyes are trying to.

But she can't let them, she can't have that water cloud her vision, she can't afford to stop moving for even the build-up of seconds it would take to wipe her eyes.

Can't stop grabbing the things she will need. Shirt. Toothbrush. Back to the dresser for panties. Back to the bathroom for damned toothpaste. Hands are shaking. She keeps dropping things. Heart is racing. She keeps losing focus.

She drops to her knees, slides her fingers between the mattress and boxspring, fishes out a folded wad of hundred dollar bills.

Back to the dresser for socks. Flip flops are on the floor by the laundry basket.

He left twenty minutes ago and she should have two hours at least but it doesn't feel like enough. He has the car. They're going on foot. He has no idea. She's going off a guess.

"Mom, do we have to go?" Lenore groans from her bedroom. She's been told to put her shoes and socks on, pick one toy and one book, put them in her blue sleepover bag. Bonnie sighs and picks her breath back up quickly.

"Are your shoes on?" she calls out as affectionately as she can without her desperation creeping through.

Five year old Raven, four year old Emily and two year old Maple come, still barefoot, to stand in the doorway holding hands. Raven holds in her free hand something that Bonnie hasn't seen since…technically…1994.

Her own children begin to recite the spell that will send her away.

Bonnie snapped awake with a gasp.

Sunlight was peeking, cautious and loving, through the long sheer curtains drawn over them, green because he liked the color. It made their bedroom gangrene at dawn.

Holding that one sharp breath inside for a moment to remember herself, she rolled her open jaw until it popped, and then she let herself breathe.

It was only a dream.

She propped herself up on the elbows and looked down at her belly, bulbous and squirming with infants as hungry as she was.

Eartha and Hestia were due in June. Just two months away, and she was already the size of a hot air balloon.

Their first set of twins. Ever since he put them in her, she'd been having nightmares.

Most of her bad dreams were about the Merge, but sometimes it was one or any number of her six daughters, even the unborn two, putting her to some form of destruction.

And it was silly. Because her life wasn't the one in danger.

True, he had promised her many years ago that they would find a way around it. Still the Merge, while not a threat for another twenty two years, loomed over her and she looked to that promise for comfort. But a bitter discontent, always, crept in.

As hard as she tried to ignore it, or deny it…Kai had been acting strange. Staying up late and rising early. Spending time away.

She sighed, heaved her uncomfortable weight out of bed, slipped into her white glassy robe and matching slippers and yawned her way down the staircase that cried beneath every heavy footfall. She was so big with his fucking seed.

Nora, bless her, had already beaten Bonnie to tending her first four children's needs. The thin Heretic was clopping around in platform shoes, already blushing and dry with beautiful preparedness for the day, placing plates of toast and scrambled eggs and bacon on the long table in front of the young girls. The woman was smiling, her long hair shimmering in the morning sunshine that beamed through the kitchen windows, hips bopping subtly from side to side to a song that was stuck in her head. Bonnie stood in the kitchen doorway for a moment envying her for her immortal energy, loving that half her morning's work had already been taken care of for her. When Nora at last chose to acknowledge Bonnie with a bright half smile, she chuckled and grinned back. For despite each night's terrible dreams, the days were full of love and laughter.

Kai was off on another coven-related mission he wouldn't tell her the details of. He'd been gone for weeks. During that time, she took refuge from solitude in books. She baked, even though she hated it. (Her daughters weren't hating it.) She dried good herbs for pregnancy teas and drank them, ate well, fattened herself up considerably, walked the grounds barefoot with Maple and Emily while the other girls were at school. She gave herself wholly to mothering.

The other adults on the Gemini acreage had been helping her out more than she deserved.

Nora (when she wasn't miles away in class working towards yet another college degree) cooked and cleaned and made her laugh, and made her girls laugh. Many nights, though Nora had her own cottage now, were slumber party nights when Kai was gone.

Jo provided a motherly comfort Bonnie desperately needed, even if she wouldn't admit it. The invitation for any meal of the day, home cooked by Alaric usually, was always open.

And Alaric had been unwittingly satisfying her intellectual thirst with a newfound fascination in talking about her lineage. Some afternoons he stopped by for tea (spiked in his cup) and conversation, just the two of them. It wasn't weird after so many years of being family, though she got to feeling like he sensed her unease in being pregnant with the Gemini Coven leader's twins. Ric was the only non-magic human within miles but Bonnie sometimes wondered if living around so much magic had begun to rub off on him in small ways. He was a perceptive man already, but had lately been psychic to her troubles. Saying, "Don't worry, Bonnie, he'll be home soon," or, "Jo and I can watch all the girls tonight if you and Nora want to take a night out," and "I was thinking of starting a little school for the girls here on the property," which was a relevant and relieving notion after Josie, Lydia and Lenore had started getting in trouble at the public elementary school in town. Among other minor things, they'd been making their classmates' pencils disappear.

Six daughters in six years, Bonnie thought incredulously, walking from bedroom to bedroom in the upstairs hallway after a day too short, flicking light switches down for darkness, looking in on each of her daughters' sleeping faces until she reached the twins' unfinished nursery, and smiled.

She had a family.

Their names were tattooed on her heart.

Lenore Sheila Bennett-Parker.

Raven Abigail Bennett-Parker.

Emily Ann Bennett-Parker.

Maple Lee Bennett-Parker.

Eartha May Bennett-Parker.

Hestia Rose Bennett-Parker.

She did not feel the Parker name besmirched her family with their father's history. It was in fact she herself who had fought to include something from Kai's lineage in the naming of his daughters. Most names were plucked like apples from her own family tree. Tacking Parker onto the end of them all was a practical bone thrown his way. And even though he had told her to stay a Bennett when they were married, she accepted the weight of the Parker name on the back of hers as well.

She liked the sound of it anyway.

Bennett-Parker.

Bennett-Parker.

Bennett-Parker.

Though every time she thought it or said it aloud it struck a chord of fear inside her.

It wasn't voluntary.

She wondered sometimes, and never asked him, if their daughters would ever know who he used to be. It was a dark subject that when given too much thought often led Bonnie to a state of emotional peril. Drowning in those what-have-I-done thoughts.

She knew well what she had done. She'd gone and married a man waving more red flags than fingers on his hands.

But he loved her.

She told herself.

Sometimes he told it too.

"I love you," was his favorite thing to moan in her ear when he was close to coming. "I love you," was the first thing he said to her when he held his first daughter, fresh and wet from her womb, awestruck. "I love you," was always hanging unspoken in the air when he looked at her.

Kai Parker. The man she married.

Kai Parker. A father of daughters.

Kai Parker. Bad boy. Murderer. Sociopath. Mr. I-Get-My-Feelings-Mixed-Up. Loved her.

At last alone in the dark, quiet house.

Bonnie longed in the span of one breath for the days when she could pour herself a brimming glass of wine and stumble outside for a reckless stare at the moon.

She forwent the drink.

She tightened her robe around her belly, feeling its soft billowy end slithering around her ankles as she walked, past the wall where hung an epic collage of family pictures in homemade frames, and it was growing. Past the little reading nook where shelves upon shelves of books upon books, heavy and ancient and new and borrowed and inherited and tattered, were stacked, a thick and multi-dimensional to-do list. Past the rocking chair where she had nursed her first four daughters. She walked. Blinking in the moonbeams, mouth stunned open in a delightful kind of ache, drawn and transfixed on her nearest exit. She unlocked the glass door at the back of the house, swung it silently open and let herself out.

It was a cool March night.

She kept on walking.

Into the shadowing pines that surrounded the house. In a direction where she would not pass Nora's or the Saltzmans' homes. She felt half naked in her lilac maternity gown and ivory robe; needed time alone to wallow and worship at the trunks of trees and the stars; did not want to see another soul; did not want to be seen by another.

The girls at home asleep and alone would be fine for half an hour in their secluded Gemini corner of the world. She just needed this brisk mountain air, unweighted by the dust and love and devotion inside the house. She just needed to breathe.

There was a small lake some short walk away from the triangle of houses, and she stopped there to feel the mud of the shore between her toes.

She wasn't worried about wildlife. Claws, hunger and bristling fur had nothing on her pregnancy-ramped magic.

Though it was different this time.

She had a few guesses as to why, but this pregnancy had been particularly draining in comparison to the others.

Just to entertain herself she sent a white spark dancing across the water and she smiled as it died on the opposite shore.

Then her smile flickered just the same.

"How long have you been standing there?" she asked, her gaze hesitating to leave the dark water for the shadows behind her. She didn't turn around. She didn't need to turn to be certain of the presence back there, watching her, making her skin creep with risen hair. It appalled her that this still happened to her body when he was near.

After so many years.

"Not that long," his voice said, fettered around the gnashing of his teeth after a very loud bite into something succulent. He always talked with his mouth full.

Bonnie turned around to find him leaning against the wide trunk of an evergreen with a half-eaten apple in his hand.

"You followed me."

"Nah," he said, having chewed most of his mouthful, tossing the unfinished apple carelessly to the dry pine needles at her bare feet. "I just know where to find you."

Bonnie narrowed her eyes at her husband, unsure of what to say. She felt like she was in trouble for something, but did not know what. It was the way he made her feel when it was he who had something to be in trouble for.

"The girls asleep?" he asked, shifting his weight off of the tree.

"Of course," she said, stepping backward without quite realizing the retreat until it was taken. She was not alone in how it bothered her.

"Miss me?" he asked, taking a step, hands in the pockets of his jeans. He cocked his head in wait for her answer, one cheek sucked in between his jaws and his eyes sharpened meanly, studiously.

"Of course," she repeated, and was comfortable enough in its truth. For how each inch of her skin was aquiver now, the rock in her heart was missing and all she wanted was to melt away like mercury between his fingers. And she was hurt he had to ask.

"I missed you," he offered, taking another step towards her and she was mindful not to retreat again. She even took an inward step, ignoring how in her unease she misstepped and the pine needles punished the sole of her foot. She felt foolish. But he was looking at her, to her, for her, inside her. I love you.

Husband and Wife met halfway. His hands gravitated first to her belly. She was long past wincing before his touch; he had not siphoned her in anger for years. Pain with permission was a regular kink of theirs but he would not harm her for anything whenever she was pregnant. This, her fifth pregnancy, would be no different, she was sure.

She slid her arms around the back of his neck. His fingers spread wide to palm as great of a surface area he could cover, feeling the hard, responsive bump that was Eartha and Hestia. And he seemed satisfied.

Corny pregnancy jokes like, "I feel like there's something between us," had been long exhausted and he said nothing when he moved his hands around to her back and pulled her into him. He breathed deeply into her hair, and his body was warm and familiar and home. He was at absolute ease with her touch, and she could tell that he really had missed her. A little more than she had missed him. Being hung up on her was his curse, and hers. Still Bonnie burned with the intimation that he was hiding something from her, keeping it tucked away neatly in the part of his brain that had no regard for anyone else, and that he was very comfortable with his secret.

"You have something to tell me," Bonnie said lowly.

A normal keeper of secrets might have tensed in her arms then. That is to say, a normal person keeping a secret, and not an abnormal person who normally kept them. Like Kai. Who in no change of bodily tension merely un-hugged her to cock his head and, pleased at her intuition, say, "Yeah, actually, I do. Passed through Mystic Falls while I was gone, brought you back some gifts from your friends. They're in the car."

Bonnie frowned at this information. She studied his facial features, his nitty little smile, so pleased with himself for evading her.

"That's not it," she said, determined not to let him lead her astray from the subject. Even if she was painfully curious what business he had in Mystic Falls, how her friends were doing, what gifts they gave, how the town was and how Elena's and Stefan's kids were doing and if Matt had any yet and if Klaus and Caroline were ever… "We'll come back to why you were in Mystic Falls, but that's not it. There's something else."

"What do you mean?" he asked, still light hearted, letting his smile fade just a little to act the appropriate amounts of confused and concerned just right. Oh he was so good at playing normal. Even if he wasn't the bad guy anymore, he never could bring himself to authenticate the good guy. He was hardwired for tricks and deviousness, self-service and petty amusements.

"I'm your wife, not an idiot," she reminded him, though the two sometimes felt synonymous. "Hello? Bonnie? Your wife? I know you, so don't make me feel like I'm being crazy. What are you not telling me?"

Maybe it was her name when she said it out loud. She saw something change in his eyes. They fell to darkness and his entire composure shifted.

"I keep having these dreams…" he said emptily, and she knew that she had finally dipped the scooping fingers of her mind into his. She recalled the terror in her heart like muscle memory from her own dreams of late.

"You too?" she croaked, suddenly feeling guilty and sorry and aligned with him. Were they having the same nightmares? Was it only psychic tension passing back and forth in their bed each night? Was it all going to be fine?

He gave her a look, and she realized she should explain herself.

"I've been having bad dreams since we found out it's twins," she said.

He smirked and bit his lip, and said, "I've been having bad dreams since I met you."

Behind her a midnight fish leapt in the lake and the splash made her jump. Her hands joined around the back of his neck began to feel sweaty and she didn't know what to say to him again.

But the games were all up with him.

Outright, and glaring into her avoidant eyes, well aware of the weight in his words despite the callous and detached half of his brain, he said:

"I don't think we can avoid the Merge ceremony."

Her first instinct was to defy.

"Yes we can."

Her arms had fallen from his frame. He stood straight with his head bowed slightly to his right, watching her from beneath cruelly lowered eyelids.

"How long have you kept this from me?"

All he did was tilt his head the other direction. He was reptilian and unaffected, it seemed. Or maybe the answer to her question was A Very Long Time, and he had grown adaptive to its terribleness.

"You wanted this," she accused. "You kept getting me pregnant. You weren't going to stop until we had twins."

"Who says we're done?" he asked, inspired suddenly. A tremble ran through her cunt.

"I do. Me. I say I'm done having your babies now."

He shrugged. "Cool. Once you pop those twins out, we have all we need."

"Kai," she breathed through the ripping in her heart, its sears breaking her voice, "…Why?"

"Don't ask me to explain it, ok? I can't. It's in my genes, ok, it's in my fucking bones and there's this voice in my head that's been telling me to have twins since the first time I fucked you and I can't even tell you about the dreams I have because you'll cry, so just… All I know is that I'm not gonna live forever and I have to fulfill destiny. I have to."

Bonnie's heart paced trying to stomach all of these things at once, and what kind of dreams were so awful that even coming out of someone else's mind they would make her cry? Was he really hearing a voice in his head or was it his way of explaining an urge? Was he going crazy on her, truly?

She inhaled and counted.

One.

Two.

Three.

"Our daughters killing each other for control over this coven is not destiny, Kai, it's corruption."

"It's tradition."

"It's fucked up is what it is."

Kai made a sound that started as a groan and became a roar.

"You think I want it? You really think I want this for them, knowing the kind of pressure they're going to grow up with, the depression, the kind of mental complexes they're going to give themselves stressing out over it— fucking knowing what it's like? You think I want to watch our daughters duel to the death for my power? Or is it so easy for you to just assume that I'd be okay with that, maybe because of my past? What do you think it is I'm doing when I leave town for weeks at a time, fucking diddling around looking for Gemini relics, really? I've been hounding other covens for help. And guess what I've learned. There isn't any help for us. The closer those girls get to twenty two the more they're going to fight, the more anxiety and mania they're going to feel that they won't be able to understand or explain, and none of it will go away until they merge. Even if they love each other as much Lucas and Olivia loved each other, or Jos— Fuck!" He cut himself short in the middle of his sister's name to clench his fists, igniting in his growing anger a bolt of lightning across the sky that brought a bone-shattering crack of thunder upon the trees. Bonnie held herself, watching the sky become a murky and deranged shade of purple. How soon would the rain come from his mood? Her moon and stars were gone behind the violet of the blossoming storm. She looked to Kai, who was just recovering from the restraint of a fit as his eyes settled on her.

"…The Merge is inescapable, so we might as well make the most of our time," he concluded.

She could smell the rain. She could feel his hopelessness like a matrimonial drain installed on the bottom of her heart.

Bonnie knew it could be dangerous to push him when he was so emotional.

But she was nothing if not daring.

"Don't say that. You promised me, Kai, you promised we'd find a way around it."

He was exhausted. He was tried.

"I know, and I'm—"

"If I can't depend on you to keep your promises then I don't know what you're good for."

"Bon—"

"Shut up. If you can't find a way around it, I will. I'm Bonnie god damned Bennett."

Kai pursed his lips and held up a finger, drawing it out in the charged air as he reminded her… "Hyphen Parker."

It was a cool slap in the face.

Bonnie shook her head. She tried biting it back but the growl carried it out from her mouth anyway.

"I hate you."

Kai sighed and gave her a stern scowl. She felt a raindrop on her shoulder.

"You don't mean that."

She moved to walk away, leave him in the woods, leave him behind to make some kind of point. In passing, she found her upper arm caught in his grip.

Disbelief and heartbreak had begun to flood her already. This, physical disrespect atop the years of lies and broken promises, was too much.

She wanted to scorch his flesh. No. That wasn't physical enough on her end to match him. She wanted to rip her arm free and send it rebounding across his knotted jaw. She wanted to grab him by the shoulders and shake him until he understood the motherfucking grief she was feeling. But couldn't.

Kai's eyes cut deeply at her and she could see that he was suffering, too. She believed him when he said that he didn't want the Merge to remain a part of his bloodline, even if that very blood inside him was calling him to uphold tradition. She believed that he had tried his best not to listen. She believed that he had searched his hardest for a solution. And she knew that there were still many years of time to find it.

She breathed and blinked back unwanted tears, and turned her body just enough. Kai read the language as if her body was his own. He tightened his hand around her arm and reeled her into an even tighter embrace.

Even with a belly bigger than a basketball, she felt small in his arms. It was more the towering effect of his energy than physical size. He had a habit of devouring her.

She folded into him and buried her face in his warm chest. He smelled like the car, and Funyuns. She was glad he was home.

He kissed the top of her head, with another raindrop. And another. And another. And in a moment the forest around them was symphonic with patters. Despite it and the threat of an awful pregnancy cold, they held each other still and agonizingly tight on the shore of the rippling lake.

"You love our daughters, don't you, Bon?"

Shivering with the strength it was taking her not to cry, she nodded and trembled her "Uh huh." She felt his chin dig into her hair, his hand petting its length that she had recently cut back to a bob, "like when we first met."

He cut a path of hot breaths from her scalp down to her ear.

"And you love me…don't you, Bon?"

She sniffled and lifted her head, grabbing onto the collar of his flannel shirt. She tilted her chin up to share a mourning gaze with him, biting the inside of her cheek and wondering in anguish if she ever could have guessed she would find herself in love with this person.

"Yes," her mouth said for her.

"Say it," he pleaded.

She winced as if from a blow. Her chest felt empty, and thick. Draining.

"I love you," she said breathlessly.

He frowned down at her, pouting, punishing with his fingernails into the skin on her arm, smiting her with his eyes that could corner her in the widest open of spaces.

"Say it again."

Her lungs felt about to collapse in his embrace. The infants in her belly squirmed. Her teeth chattered and the rain fell cold and harder and her feet were sinking into the earth. The lake ebbed with rise.

"I love you," she said, issuing the final drops of hope from the bottom of her heart out through her mouth. And then she was hollow.

But he said, "Good," and then he pressed his lips onto hers, and the vise of his love around her ribs relaxed, and she was full again.

She had missed him so much.

His hands found their way to her hips, what he could feel of them beneath the tough swell of his seed.

"You know I love you too, right?" he whispered into her mouth.

"Yeah," she said, licking his saliva from her lips.

Bonnie swallowed, dropped her hands to his sleeved forearms and looked down at her belly in time to watch someone's tiny fist protrude. She could see the swipe through the thin fabric of her gown, the infant's strength impressive. Then she felt a manageable but breathtaking little sting inside her. These stings had been happening more and more in the last few weeks, and she feared they would only become advanced as she neared her ninth month.

"I guess there's something I should tell you, too," Bonnie muttered, and hissed as a second sting came on.

Kai, watching the almost demonic reaches from within her womb with relish, put his hand underneath her gown to feel them skin to skin. "Spill."

Bonnie steadied herself for a third sting, but nothing came. And she let out a breath of peace. "…They're siphons."

Kai's eyes turned up to hers and in them she found a blend of pain of amazement. What was he thinking? She meant to ask him whether he was happy about it or sorry, but he spoke before she could.

"Have I ever told you how hot you look when you're pregnant with our spawn?" he said with the evilest of smirks.

"Stop saying 'spawn,'" she laughed, before she remembered what kind of conversation they had been having, and shamed herself for even smiling.

But her cheeks warmed, remembering a particularly good fuck he had given her when she was big with their 'spawn' for the first time. She felt worshipped. When she wasn't pregnant, their sex was wilder, more violent, more enjoyable for her because she was able to move and whip her body in certain ways that gave her pleasure. But when she was fat and delicate like this, the sex was gentle. He took his time. He took care. She never worried that he preferred her one way or the other, and she liked that he liked the look of his impregnation on her. She liked that he made her feel like a goddess for her life-giving ability. In her mind it was right.

They would find a way around the Merge. Somehow. Some way. Some day, and together, they would find a way. Because they were powerful people, and because they loved each other. They were the rulers of their destiny.

She hoped.

The nearest tree became a source of gravity. Bonnie leaned back against the scratching bark, one arm above her head clinging to its flaky scales with her fingers and so much love. The other arm hung like a stiff right angle at her hip, fingers knotted into Kai's hair, nightgown bunched up underneath her armpit and she was half bare for him.

He kneeled at her feet, attached to her by the mouth at her left breast and sucking the raw flesh of her nipple in between his teeth, suckling, sucking, suckling, sucking.

After nursing all of his babies, her breasts didn't even feel like sexual parts of her body anymore. They weren't, really. They never were, and they were not meant to be. They were nourishment. And as he lapped at them with his tongue she felt that familiar and unmistakable rush of hormone in her brain, all throughout the muscles of all the limbs on her body, the calming and relaxing overflow of love and harmony.

The letdown.

She watched the muscles in his neck contracting with swallows.

This was new, and she bared her teeth at him in disgust, but couldn't bring herself to push him off. She felt his dull incisors scraping along the ridges of her hardened nipple and hissed. It was less the sensation that gave her pleasure than it was the satisfaction he derived from doing this to her.

When he'd drunk his fill, he widened his mouth to a smacking O, letting her wet breast free. He lowered himself to hands and knees and kissed the bones on the tops of her dirty feet. And when he had shown his respect there, he lifted his head up between her knees, his hair tickling the sensitive skin between her thighs. Long fingers sliding up underneath the waistband of her panties.

He pulled them down to her knees and replaced them with his mouth.

Bonnie could barely see the lump underneath her gown that was his head working on her. Her belly was in the way. But she felt him, and she had him by the ear, by the hair, by the neck and broad shoulder when she lost her grip in pleasure.

His tongue was long and practiced by so much of this.

He said he liked to taste her when she was in a family way.

He said she was sweeter like the junk food he craved.

He spoke the truth in thick slippery patterns from the top of her slit to the aching cavern of her core.

He often had her wishing she could fit all of him in that hole. Just to hold him. Envelope him. Be as close to him as she was to her own spine. Devour him like he did her.

Her clothing tore and her back slid down the tree as she sank her pelvis unto his face, letting him spread her, tongue in cunt, nose in clit.

After a few more moments of being eaten alive, he was on his feet and she was turned to face the tree while a hand steadied her back like a fat mare. He plunged into her from behind. She bit bark. Butter colored milk dribbled down her belly until the lowest point where it dropped off and fled to waste on the mossy tree roots at her toes. The nectar of life met the dry needle leavings of death and while Kai pumped between gently and furiously into her, she imagined her milk nourishing the tree they staggered on in their animalistic swoon. Maybe those roots would grow milk colored moss and bleed milk colored sap and grow, a testament, to her worldly motherhood. A shrine to her, a goddess fucked against a tree.

When Kai groaned in her ear, thick milk of his own too glissaded from between her flexure and his still rigid cock stuck up inside her. His cum dropped. Essences joined. The shrine in her imagination grew. And she moaned in sorrow when he removed himself because she never felt more whole than when he halved her.

They walked home bent and breathing like two runaway dogs who missed shelter. Wet from the rain. Dripping between their legs.

Bonnie knew there were years of trials ahead. But through blood and fire, and prison worlds and freedom spells, and motherhood and monsterhood, theirs was a love that had endured. When they got inside, he made a pot of tea, two bowls of Lucky Charms, fire in the hearth, love to her a second time, and the promise not to give up hope.