Memory
PG. 05/24/2002.

She's reached that age where she can freely admit she's old. Pale, brittle orange hair fades into deeply freckled skin that's seen too many worries. She bakes crisp brown sugar cookies for the young ones when they visit, but she stopped eating them herself ten years ago, when the diabetes set in. She worries about her husband: sometimes he stares into space and forgets the whole world. She worries she does the same without knowing it.

Bonnie tells the grandchildren stories she would have never revealed in her younger days, and her twin daughter and son shake their heads in humoring disbelief.

It's amazing how little they'll really ever know about her.

She tells the children about when she was little more than a child, long before the war, when times were worse and better all at once. She tells them what she can, about ghosts and a brave beautiful blonde girl who kept on living despite countless and unimaginable hardship. She's allowed to be vague in some parts, because she's a very old woman and can't remember those days too clearly. It's all too easy to keep her old friends' secrets.

Time wears on her like a scratchy sweater. She just wishes she could rest, let go and let everything slip away.

Bonnie's eyes have seen too much.

The boys, as she calls them now, visit from time to time. It's strange, and sad, but they somehow make her feel like a girl again. When she looks into the vampires' eyes, she feels impossibly, infinitely young. Childlike.

She tosses in sleep next to a man she really does love, and dreams about Damon. That mouth on hers, just for a moment, unspoken promises in every breath. She wakes in the morning and looks in the mirror, turning in the new light, and wonders what it would be like to live in a perpetual Never-Neverland: to never grow up.

Bonnie could have been seventeen forever. But of course, in those days she thought she'd die before she hit thirty. It would have been beautiful, and tragic, and never forgotten. That was immortality, too, she supposed.

But love.... Love for her turned out not to be the drama she'd envisioned. That was for only the brightest light, and thinking back on it, Bonnie is pleased at that. She was never as strong as Elena. For Bonnie, love was simply living. Surviving. She and Matt were merely survivors. And that was more, more than enough.

She remembers the hunger in Damon's eyes, knows in her heart of hearts that all she would have ever had to do was ask for it.

No, he would never, never say no.

Bonnie could have been young and beautiful in her coffin. Skinny and nervous and underage until the end of time, too, if she'd wished. But time has a funny way of changing things.

She offers homemade wine to the brothers when they're visiting, and wonders if they see the parallel, or if they've seen so many that they fade into the background. Wonders if there's deja vu everywhere they turn, or if it's a quality uniquely human.

She will never ask them her questions. Her own negligence, her own fear, stifles her. Bonnie does not want to be reminded of what she gave up for this.

She loves, she loves so much. All of this. Time wears thin, and she tries not to ask, "What if...?"

She is an old woman, outdated, possibly mad, who draws more and more on memory to sustain her. It holds her, binds her to a time when she wasn't this weary.

But memory lasts only so long.

******

They died within days of one another. After all this time, Matt had nothing--was nothing--without her.

Damon takes his turn filing by the open coffin. He places his hand on hers, just for a moment, and marvels.

Such strength. No one else had denied him for ever, not in all the centuries, all the torrid romances and petty affairs. And no one else had refused to push him away. The paradox of her was what pulled him, what made him kiss her forehead and silently step away.

She was more than he could ever quite grasp. She was everything he had expected of her, and everything he hadn't.

And she was never, never his.

END.

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