For Kit.
Regardless of what happened and no matter what roads he traveled or how far he roamed, Florence had always felt like home. For centuries, smaller cities and towns had been born, risen, and floundered around the old metropolis, however, Florence always remained herself, a stone and plaster city built on hills of terra-cotta, despite the passage of time and the changes it wrought. The cobblestone streets paved in strained herringbone patterns, albeit well-worn, still existed in most areas of the city. The forni, owned by flour-coated matrons still opened in the pre-dawn darkness, ovens exhausting the smell of semolina and almond through the air, and merchants, with wheeled wooden carts as they had used for centuries before, could still be heard rolling their wares towards the open market piazzas as the first streaks of rose flushed the morning sky.
Damon gazed at the coffering of the ceiling above him. The decorative patterns of roundels and knotted motifs would have seemed to blur together in the darkness to any mortal's eyes, though Damon, with his preternatural vision saw every detail clearly despite his languor; every swipe of the artisan's tool, every surface imperfection, flecks of gilding mismatched to cover, or missing altogether. None of it mattered; really, the organic would all eventually crumble at the feet of time. Even the city he loved would eventually fade, or become distorted by the flux of the modern world. Memories could haunt you and chill to the bone, and the potential that dreams held was tenuous and fleeting, a bubble on a pond.
It was only the present that could be trusted, the conscious moments of existence and his own tight-rope walking between dissociation from and immersion into the real world. While the sounds of the waking city slowly built to a quiet cacophony, Damon turned onto his side, preferring to hear only the soft cyclical breathing of the womanling lying next to him, alternating to focus his attentions to the low rhythmic beating of her heart beneath her fragile ribcage and her creamy, freckled breasts. Her red curls spilled across the soft linens, shining dimly in the darkened room.
They had seemed the least likely of the group to pair off. Elena's radiating light illuminated the shadows of Stefan's dim existence, and Alaric's inquisitive nature proved a viable counterpoint to Meredith's cynical nature; clearly, these pairs were natural and thus readily accepted by the small coven of friends they had built within Fell's Church. What seemed to surpass everyone's vision for so long, though, was the powerful and innate magnetic pull that existed between the pair with the most disparate features among them. It was this contrast of obsidian and opal; Damon's volcanic core and sharp resolve to Bonnie's fragile and mercurial nature. Bonnie was drawn to Damon's charm, naturally, but also to the curious way in which he was utterly and brutally honest beyond any ego; she was most drawn, though to the guarded man that he had revealed to her early that summer. Damon was drawn to Bonnie's fragility and girlishness, but could not deny the allure of one who could be so similarly at ease whether communing with the dead, or writing in the square flowered vault of her journal. Damon, too, would not forget how in a dark, wooded clearing on a night drenched in blood, how selflessly Bonnie had offered her veins to his brother as he lay at the threshold of death, or how in those black lightning minutes the red haired girl brought resurrection and salvation to the few he truly loved.
And so it was in the weeks that followed that night that the two began to gravitate towards one another. Bonnie would dream of raven's-wing hair and midnight eyes, and half a world away, Damon would see a flash of light or smell the silk scent of her hair. Damon would lie in his bed in Florence, sifting through his memories of the girl, and Bonnie would wake in a cold sweat, smelling leather and musk. The patterns had been set; bodies in motion would stay in motion unless otherwise countered by an opposing force. It was towards the end of August that year that Bonnie would walk to the oak tree in front of her house, peer through its leafy branches, and whisper for him to come down, that the dance could not continue unless they both knew their stance and where their footwork would take them.
It wasn't two weeks later that Bonnie had withdrawn her admission from the community college, and bought a one-way plane ticket to Florence. While Bonnie knew that Elena touted Fell's Church as being her one and true home forever, Bonnie knew that the same would never be true for her. Virginia would always hold fond memories of childhood for Bonnie, and Fell's Church had honed and shaped her through adolescence into the woman that she had become, but a place now so recently saturated with times of such confusion, terror, and fear could no longer be one that she called home. Florence might not provide the hearth she was looking for either, but it was the home to her curious counterpart, and offered a road to her own future.
Bonnie's eyelids fluttered open, the inky pupils receding into the brown prisms of her irises. Damon's own met hers, as he slid his hand across the cool sheets to brush his beloved's cheek. Neither felt quite at home, anymore, but they seemed to get closer every day.
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