Chapter Text
Harri learns, quickly, that peace is not the absence of violence.
It’s the presence of routine — the small, almost stupidly mundane things you do to convince your body it’s allowed to stand down. A chipped mug warming her palms. Rebekah’s perfume lingering in the corridor like she owns every threshold she passes. The Mystic Grill’s terrible music bleeding through the walls while people pretend Mystic Falls is just a town and not a trap with streetlights.
So Harri does the normal things on purpose.
She sits across from Niklaus at a booth that doesn’t suit him, watching him swirl an untouched drink like it’s a thought he hasn’t decided whether to keep. She listens to Rebekah complain about the town with theatrical disgust, and nods at the right places, and laughs when she’s supposed to. She eats fries she doesn’t taste. She smiles at strangers like she isn’t carrying a war’s worth of reflexes under her skin.
And every so often, when the conversation dips , when Nik turns his head and his gaze lands on her like he’s remembering what tenderness looks like , she almost believes it’s working.
Almost.
Because the truth is still there, lodged behind her ribs like a splinter: Bonnie is gone.
Not dead. Not missing. Worse than both , withdrawn. Not orbiting anymore. Not reaching out with those late-night texts that were half-joke, half-plea. Not showing up on Harri’s porch like she needed a safe place to breathe. Bonnie has stopped moving toward her, and Harri can’t even blame her.
She sees Bonnie’s face every time she closes her eyes; the control, the hurt behind it, the fury that didn’t need shouting to feel like it was scorching the room.
I don’t know if I can trust you.
Harri hates that sentence for how cleanly it cut. Not because it was cruel, it wasn’t, but because it was honest, and honesty always hurts most when it lands exactly where it should.
She’s disappointed in herself in a way that feels… physical. The kind of disappointment that makes you want to crawl out of your own skin and leave it behind like a coat that doesn’t fit. She promised Bonnie she wouldn’t be used. She promised it with all the conviction of someone who once swore she’d never let another person be placed on an altar and called it necessary.
And then she did it anyway.
Not with her hands. Not with a spell. With silence. With omission. With friendship built on careful gaps.
Harri tries to fix it. Of course she does.
She writes a message and deletes it. Writes another and deletes that, too. The third is the simplest and therefore the hardest to send: I’m sorry. I should’ve told you. I want to talk. Please.
Bonnie reads it — the little “seen” that appears like a cold stamp — and does not reply.
The absence doesn’t scream. It just… sits there. A boundary held steady.
Harri stares at her phone like it might give her another chance if she watches long enough, then forces herself to put it down before she breaks something. She thinks, unexpectedly, of the words she’d glimpsed on Bonnie’s wrist that night, raised ink, fresh and undeniable.
Bonnie has a soulmate.
Somewhere in Mystic Falls or near it, someone exists who is tied to her in a way that can’t be negotiated away. Harri’s mind keeps circling the question like it’s a wound: Who? When? How?
She wonders, in a quieter, uglier place — whether Bonnie would have told her if everything else hadn’t happened. If there hadn’t been moonstones and rituals and ancient men who treat people like pieces.
If Bonnie had walked into Harri’s kitchen with shy excitement instead of fury and betrayal, would they have giggled like idiots? Would Bonnie have rolled her eyes and tried to act unimpressed while her smile gave her away? Would Harri have made tea and pretended she wasn’t delighted just to see Bonnie delighted?
The thought is soft and painful, like pressing a bruise just to prove it’s still there.
Instead, they are estranged.
Instead, Harri’s world is full of near-misses and conversations that don’t reach what they mean.
And Nik—
Nik has been pulling back.
Not completely. Not consistently. That would be easier; cruelty you can measure has edges you can brace against. With him it’s a swing: cold, then warm. Tender, then distant. A touch at her waist like she is precious, then an hour of silence where his body is present and his mind is somewhere else entirely. He smiles at her, and she feels chosen; he turns away, and she feels punished for wanting to be.
Rebekah notices. Rebekah always notices.
She doesn’t comment at first, just… shifts. A little farther from Nik at dinner. A little sharper with her sarcasm, like she’s trying to cut around something she can’t name without making it real. Even her laughter sounds careful, as if she’s measuring how much joy the house can tolerate before it snaps back into violence.
Elijah is worse. Elijah simply becomes absent.
Not dramatically. Not with doors slammed or threats issued. He just… spends less time in the rooms they occupy, and when he is there, his gaze doesn’t linger the way it used to. Like he’s placed his attention somewhere else and is determined not to bring it home.
Harri tries not to catalogue it all, but she can’t help it. The war trained her to notice when patterns change. When footsteps alter. When people start moving like they’ve already decided something and are only waiting for the right moment to do it.
She thinks of England, because thinking of anywhere else is a kind of relief.
Teddy safe with Andromeda, the image of it almost unbearably tender. Hermione’s steady presence. Ron’s stubborn loyalty. George’s grief shaped into noise because silence would swallow him whole. Neville, sweet, stubborn Neville — somehow finding himself fond of Rebekah, and Rebekah, of all people, looking vaguely softened by it, like she doesn’t know what to do with gentleness offered without a hook.
She thinks of New Orleans, too. Ginny with Kol, the most ridiculous pairing in the world until you picture it and realise it makes a kind of sense. Marcel with his own soulmate, that thought landing in Harri’s chest like warmth and envy tangled together. People finding their person and keeping them. People getting to be happy without paying for it in blood.
And then she is back here again, in a house that breathes like it is waiting for a knife.
Nik sits on the sofa one evening with the moonstone in his hand, turning it over like it’s a worry stone and a verdict at the same time. He doesn’t look at her when she comes in. He doesn’t need to , she feels him in her bones, the restless tension that hums off him like heat.
“What’s wrong?” she asks, because she still believes, stupidly, that asking might matter.
He smiles without humour.
“Nothing,” he says, and the word is useless.
Harri doesn’t press, because pressing is how you end up learning truths you can’t unhear. She sits beside him anyway. She lets her shoulder brush his. She tries to anchor them with something small and human: proximity. Touch. Shared air.
For a moment, he allows it. His hand drifts to her knee, warm and possessive in the way he can’t help being. She closes her eyes, just for a breath, and lets herself pretend this is what she came here for: to build something new. To start again.
Then he pulls away like her warmth has burned him.
Harri opens her eyes. The room feels colder.
Outside, the moon is climbing.
It is only when she catches the shape of it through the window, full and bright and too watchful that something in her stomach turns over, slow and sick.
Full moon.
Her first instinct is denial. Her second is the sharp memory of Bonnie’s voice, iron-flat with control: I had a vision.
The house feels suddenly crowded with silence.
Harri gets up, moving toward the hallway, toward anything that might distract her from the way her pulse has started to sprint. She checks her phone. Nothing from Bonnie. Nothing from anyone that matters.
She is halfway up the stairs when the front door opens.
Rebekah steps inside. She looks… wrong.
Not injured. Not afraid. Just glassy-eyed in the way people get when they’re trying not to fall apart. Her lipstick is perfect; her hands are not. One is clenched so tightly her knuckles have gone pale.
Harri’s mouth goes dry.
“What happened?” she asks.
Rebekah’s gaze finds her, and in it is apology so raw Harri almost flinches.
“It’s happening,” Rebekah says.
That’s all. No explanation. No details. None are needed.
Harri moves before her mind has caught up, body taking over with the clean efficiency of someone who has sprinted into disasters since she was a child. She snatches her wand from where she keeps it hidden, the motion almost angry, like her magic should have been enough to prevent this and is only useful now as an accessory to panic.
“Nik—” she starts, turning back toward the living room.
He’s gone.
Not just absent, gone. The air where he was feels empty in a way that makes her skin prickle, like a door has been closed in her face without being slammed.
Her bond—
Harri reaches for it, instinctive, a quiet internal tug. Nothing answers. Not silence. Not distance.
A shut door. He’s closed it. Her breath catches, sharp and hot.
Rebekah says something, Harri doesn’t hear it. She can only hear the blood in her ears, the thud of her own heartbeat turning animal-fast.
She apparates. Not cleanly. Not calmly.
She twists through Mystic Falls in snapping bursts, landing in dark streets and empty lots and behind trees that whip at her face. She spins, searches, tries again. Each time she reaches for him, the bond gives her nothing. Each time she appears somewhere new, dread sinks deeper, heavier, more certain.
She is not chasing him by instinct anymore.
She is chasing the shape of what he would do when he decided promises were optional.
A clearing in the forest.
She doesn’t remember choosing it; her feet simply hit ground that feels… prepared. The air tastes like chalk and old blood and something that makes her teeth ache.
Moonlight floods the space. And there they are.
Bonnie first, because Bonnie is always where the cost is.
She is standing inside a chalk circle, swaying slightly, pale under the moon, blood tracking down from her nose in a slow, stubborn line. Her eyes are open, but unfocused, not unconscious, not fully present. Like she is holding herself upright out of spite.
Elena is in Niklaus’s grasp, limp enough to look dead at first glance, skin greyed-out, lips tinged wrong. Her chest rises shallowly, like even breathing is effort.
Tyler is at the edge of the circle, half on the ground, half trying to stand, body contorting in ugly, unfinished jerks not a cinematic transformation, but something raw and breaking.
And— Aunt Jenna. Still. Unmoving. A body placed like a consequence.
Harri’s stomach drops so hard she thinks she might be sick.
Niklaus stands over it all like he is conducting, not committing. The moonstone is on him, she sees it, the dull oval in his hand , and his expression is calm enough to be obscene. Not cartoonish. Not frothing. Just… certain. Like he’s decided the world can scream all it wants; he has already done what he came to do.
Harri’s voice arrives late, torn and furious.
“Nik.”
His head turns slowly. His eyes meet hers.
Whatever lives between them, whatever softness he allowed her to believe in, is not there. Harri feels something in her chest fracture.
“Stop,” she says, and it comes out like a command, like she still has the right to speak to him that way. “Stop this.”
Nik’s mouth curves slightly, an almost-smile without warmth.
“You’re late,” he says, as if they missed a dinner reservation.
Harri shakes, anger and grief and betrayal trying to occupy the same space.
“Let her go,” Harri demands, and she means Elena, she means Bonnie, she means all of them. “You promised me.”
His gaze flickers, briefly, like that word is an irritation.
“I promised you what you needed to hear,” he says quietly.
Harri raises her wand.
The motion is automatic, protective, furious. Her magic surges, bright and vicious in her veins , the spells she knows, the ones that work, the ones that saved her life a hundred times back home.
“Finite—” she starts, aiming for the circle, for the lines, for whatever anchor holds this in place. “Protego—”
The spell hits the air and… skids. Not rebounds. Not shatters.
It simply refuses to take.
It slides off the working like water off oil, leaving the circle untouched, still humming, still hungry, still waiting for Bonnie’s voice and Bonnie’s blood to feed it.
Harri freezes.
She tries again, harsher, more desperate, forcing power through her wand until her arm aches.
Nothing.
It’s like trying to rewrite a language she doesn’t speak.
Father Kieran’s words rise up with cruel clarity, his calm voice, his stern hands guiding hers: These magics do not lace together neatly. What their craft begins, yours cannot simply unmake. Do not assume power is universal just because it is powerful.
Harri’s throat tightens.
No. Not now.
Not now.
“What—” she chokes, staring at the circle like it has personally betrayed her. “What use is my magic—”
Nik’s eyes glitter faintly, entertained by her shock.
“You really thought,” he says softly, almost kind, “that your little wand would undo Bennett magic?”
Harri’s breath shudders.
Bonnie sways again, and Harri sees it, sees the stubbornness, the fury, the way Bonnie is still choosing Elena even while everything inside her is breaking. Fragile, furious, bleeding, still refusing to let someone else pay alone.
Harri tries to step forward. The circle hums louder, warning her off.
Nik’s voice drops, sharp enough to cut.
“Dont.”
Harri’s hands shake around her wand.
This is the moment her body understands before her mind does: she cannot stop this the way she knows how to stop things. She cannot outspell it. She cannot force it open. She cannot bully the magic into obedience.
She has power and it is useless in the way that matters.
Harri looks at Bonnie — really looks — and the disappointment she has been living in turns into something worse.
Self-disgust.
Because she brought Bonnie into a world where this could happen.
Because she trusted a monster to behave like a man.
Because she promised safety with her whole chest and forgot that promises don’t stop knives.
Her voice breaks, small and raw.
“Bonnie…”
Bonnie’s eyes flick toward her, hazy and pained, and there is something in them that Harri cannot name without flinching: I told you. I told you I couldn’t trust you.
Harri swallows hard.
She lifts her wand again anyway, because even if she can’t undo the circle, she can still do something. She can still try to reach. She can still fight in the only way she knows: refusing to stand still while people bleed.
Her gaze locks on Nik.
And for the first time since she met him, she doesn’t see her soulmate.
She sees the man who is doing this in her name.
The man who closed their bond so she couldn’t find him.
The man who took her promise and killed it like it was an inconvenience.
Harri takes a step forward into the moonlight, wand steady despite the tremor in her hand.
She doesn’t shout. Shouting is for people who still believe volume can change outcome. Harri has watched too many outcomes hold steady under screams.
“Nik,” she says, and it is not his name in her mouth so much as a warning.
His gaze lingers on her wand with mild, indulgent interest, as if he’s humoring a child with a toy. He doesn’t look back at Bonnie for long, he doesn’t need to. The circle already has her. Bennett magic doesn’t ask twice once it’s been fed.
Bonnie’s knees dip. Her shoulders jerk like her body is trying to fold in on itself and can’t find permission. Blood glitters on her upper lip, dark in the moonlight. The circle hums, low and hungry, and Harri feels it in the wrong places; teeth, ribs, the back of her throat, like her body is trying to translate a language it was never taught.
Tyler’s scream turns into something animal and breaking.
Elena’s head lolls against Nik’s arm, breath shallow enough to make Harri’s stomach pitch. Blood keeps slipping out of her, steady and indifferent, soaking into earth that doesn’t care who it drinks from.
And Aunt Jenna—
Harri does not let herself look for too long. The shape of a body on the ground is a memory she doesn’t need revived.
“Stop,” Harri says again, quieter now, like quiet will make it truer.
Niks mouth curves, almost fond. “You’re still thinking like a person who believes in stopping things.”
He shifts his grip on Elena; not cruel, not gentle. Practical. And Harri understands, with a cold clarity that makes her hands go numb, that he is not performing for her. He is not hesitating for her. He is simply finishing what he began.
Bonnie’s voice lifts, ragged. Not a spell shouted triumphantly, not a witch in control but a girl dragged to the edge of herself and made to speak anyway.
Harri doesn’t catch every word. It’s not her craft. It doesn’t sit in her bones the way it sits in Bonnie’s. But she feels the moment the circle tightens, the way a noose tightens: one smooth pull, no drama, just conclusion with hands.
The air shudders.
Nik inhales like something inside him has finally reached the end of its tether.
For a heartbeat he looks almost… peaceful, staring at nothing but sensation, like he’s tasting freedom with a body. Then his eyes sharpen, and whatever is chained inside him snaps.
Tyler’s howl tears through the clearing.
Nik’s head tips back. The sound he makes is not a scream. It’s a laugh with teeth. A low, shaking exhale that turns into a roar, pleasure and agony braided together so tightly Harri can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
The ground trembles beneath Harri’s feet.
Bonnie staggers.
It is subtle at first, a sway, a slip, like her body tries to pretend it can hold her upright a second longer. Then her shoulders buckle and Harri lunges instinctively, wand held tight, hands reaching for the only thing that matters.
“Bonnie”
Bonnie’s eyes find hers, hazy and burning, and for a moment Harri sees the whole distance between them: the kitchen table, the truth, the rupture, the silence that followed. All of it folded into this one look.
Bonnie’s mouth moves. The words come out thin, urgent, the last of her control spent on choosing someone else.
“Elena,” Bonnie whispers. “Save her. Please.”
The plea lands like a blade and a mercy at once.
It is the first thing Bonnie has asked of her since that day. Not forgiveness. Not explanation. A task. A trust, small and trembling, offered anyway.
Harri’s throat tightens so hard it hurts.
“I will,” she says, and it comes out broken. “I will—”
Bonnie’s eyes slip. Her body goes slack.
Harri steps forward—and Elijah is suddenly there.
Not arriving. Not approaching. Simply present, like the space beside Bonnie has always belonged to him and the world is only now catching up.
His hands catch Bonnie mid-collapse with impossible precision, impossibly careful. He does not look at Harri. He does not look at Nik. His attention is entirely on the girl in his arms, as if everything else in the clearing can burn and it would not change where he stands.
Harri’s breath catches.
Elijah’s jaw flexes once, the only sign of anything resembling emotion.
Then he’s gone. One blink, and the space is empty.
Bonnie is gone.
The circle is still etched into the earth, smoking faintly at the edges like a wound that refuses to close.
Nik stands in the centre of his ruin, chest heaving, eyes bright, the wolf finally awake inside him. He looks… satisfied. He looks like himself in the worst way: a man who has always believed wanting something justifies the taking.
Harri’s wand lifts again, not because it will undo what’s been done, but because she needs something in her hand that isn’t her own shaking.
The anger rises, hot enough to make her vision pulse white at the edges. Her whole body wants to throw itself at him. Wants to tear him open and see if anything human spills out.
She takes a step.
Nik’s gaze slides to her, amused, as if he can already see the shape of the fight she wants.
Harri stops herself on sheer force.
Because Bonnie’s voice is still in her head.
Elena. Save her.
Harri swallows, hard. Her wand stays trained on Nik anyway, the point steady now, her voice low enough to be dangerous.
“I will deal with you later,” she says, every syllable laced tight. “Do not move. Do not follow. Do not—”
Nik smiles, slow and sharp, like he’s pleased she thinks “later” exists in a world he’s just rewritten.
Harri doesn’t give him anything else. Not another word. Not another look.
She turns.
Elena is swaying, barely upright, blood still oozing out of her like her body hasn’t realised it’s allowed to stop. Tyler is on the ground, shaking violently, eyes wild, half-man and half-something else, caught in the aftermath.
Harri runs to them.
She catches Elena first, because Elena is light in a way that makes Harri sick; too light, like her bones have been emptied out. Harri drags her closer, hands already moving, wand flicking without thought.
“Hold on,” Harri breathes, to Elena, to herself. “Just—hold on.”
She levitates Tyler with a sharp jerk of her wrist, because she refuses to waste time hauling him when seconds matter. He makes a broken sound, more pain than language. Harri doesn’t have the luxury of soothing him.
Her eyes flick once, against her will, to Aunt Jenna.
A body on the ground. A consequence with a face.
Harri’s stomach turns, grief rising sharp and unwanted, but she clamps down on it like she learned to do at sixteen when there were too many bodies and not enough time to mourn.
“Later,” she whispers, not to Klaus this time. “I’m coming back.”
Then she apparates.
Not elegant. Not clean. Desperation has jagged edges.
The Salvatore house snaps into view around her , old wood, dark windows, a place that feels like it’s already hosted too many disasters and learned to brace for the next. Harri stumbles as she lands, Elena’s weight dragging at her arms, Tyler’s levitated body jerking midair like a marionette with cut strings.
She has never been here before.
She doesn’t know the rules.
She doesn’t know the people.
But Bonnie asked. And that’s all that matters.
So Harri goes anyway, bursting into a stranger’s home with blood on her hands and panic in her throat, because there is nowhere else left that might have a chance of keeping Elena breathing.
“Hello?” Harri calls, voice sharp with urgency. “I— I need help. Now.”
The bang is loud enough that Damon thinks, briefly and with deep personal offence, that Stefan has finally managed to knock something over without apologising for it.
That assumption lasts exactly half a second.
The front door flies open hard enough to rattle the frame, wood slamming against the wall with a crack that sends a ripple of alarm through the house, and Damon is already on his feet before his brain catches up, instincts snapping to attention with the sharp efficiency of someone who has survived a century and a half by never assuming noises are benign.
What comes through the door is not a threat in the traditional sense.
It is worse.
A girl Damon recognise in passing at the mystic grill stumbles inside carrying Elena like she weighs nothing at all, Elena’s body slack and wrong in her arms, her head lolling back against the stranger’s shoulder, skin greyed out to a colour Damon has only ever seen on corpses and very nearly on mirrors.
There is blood on Elena’s shirt, too much of it, dark and tacky and unmistakably human, and Damon’s mind latches onto that detail with unpleasant clarity because blood is supposed to be his thing, not something he finds smeared across her like evidence.
Behind them, floating. Actually floating.
Tyler Lockwood is suspended a foot off the ground, his body contorted at angles that make Damon’s spine ache in sympathetic protest, muscles jerking violently beneath skin that looks stretched too tight, his mouth open wide in what is very obviously a scream that is producing absolutely no sound at all.
Damon’s brain, which prides itself on categorisation under pressure, starts sorting anyway.
The somewhat unknown girl. Witch, clearly, because gravity has apparently been optionalised. Elena unconscious but breathing. Tyler mid-werewolf nightmare, currently muted by something clever and deeply irritating. No immediate attackers visible.
Then the girl crosses the threshold fully, and whatever barrier she has wrapped around Tyler snaps like a soap bubble.
The scream hits the house all at once.
It is raw, animal, and wet with pain, the sound of bones finishing arguments they started under moonlight, and Damon flinches despite himself as Tyler collapses to the floor in a tangle of limbs, body snapping and reforming in sickening increments as the transformation reverses itself with all the grace of a car wreck in slow motion.
“Good God,” Damon mutters.
Stefan appears at the top of the stairs and freezes, eyes locking immediately on Elena, colour draining from his face so fast it’s almost impressive.
“Elena,” Stefan breathes, already moving, already reaching.
Damon is there first.
He doesn’t remember deciding to cross the room, but suddenly his hands are on Elena’s shoulders, steadying her, fingers brushing her throat automatically to check for a pulse he knows he’ll find and would lose his mind if he didn’t.
It’s there — faint, too slow, wrong — and something ugly and sharp coils in his chest, something that feels a lot like panic and therefore has to be strangled immediately.
This is not happening.
They saw her this afternoon. Alive. Arguing. Human and annoying and fine.
You do not get to almost die in a handful of hours without leaving some kind of trail.
“Hey,” Damon says, softer than he means to, his sarcasm failing to show up for work. “Stay with us, sweetheart.”
He bites his wrist without ceremony and presses it to her mouth, because this is not the time for debate or permission, and because the idea of waiting for Stefan to give the okay feels unbearable in a way Damon does not intend to examine.
Elena coughs weakly, lips parting, swallowing on reflex, and Damon watches the blood vanish into her like it belongs there, watches colour begin to crawl back into her cheeks with agonising slowness. Relief hits him sharp and unwelcome, lodged somewhere under his ribs, and he ruthlessly categorises it as practical satisfaction because anything else would be dangerous.
Stefan drops to his knees beside them, hands shaking as he cups Elena’s face, whispering her name like an apology.
Only then does Damon look back at the girl who brought them.
She’s standing just inside the doorway now, a stick still in her hand — her chest rising and falling too fast, eyes wild and furious and threaded through with something that looks uncomfortably like grief.
Tyler is a crumpled, twitching mess on the floor behind her, breath coming in ragged gasps, skin slick with sweat and blood.
Damon straightens slowly, irritation clawing its way back into place where it belongs.
“Okay,” he says, voice sharpening as he looks her over, cataloguing again because that’s what he does when emotions threaten to get ideas. “You’re going to start talking. Preferably in sentences that explain why my brother’s girlfriend looks like she lost a fight with a meat grinder and why Lockwood just redecorated my foyer with his internal organs.”
The girl meets his stare without flinching.
“Klaus Mikaelson,” she says bluntly. “The moonstone. A hybrid curse. A full-moon ritual. Sound familiar?”
The words land with weight.
Damon feels something cold slide into place in his gut, because Katherine had said those words, or versions of them, weeks ago, had babbled and pleaded and spun half-truths like she always does, and Damon had dismissed it all as another dramatic performance in a long career of lies.
Stefan stiffens beside him.
“She told us,” Stefan says quietly, horror dawning in his voice. “About the ritual. About the moonstone being part of something bigger.”
Damon exhales through his nose, sharp and humourless.
“Of course she did,” he mutters. “Because God forbid Katherine Pierce ever be wrong, just inconveniently unbelievable.”
He looks back at the witch, anger starting to burn hot now that Elena is breathing again.
“And you are… what? A bystander with benefits?” Damon demands. “Because you seem to know an awful lot about a very personal apocalypse, and I’m not seeing you bleeding on my floor.”
Her jaw tightens.
“I tried to stop it.”
Damon laughs once, sharp and ugly.
“Wow. Gold star,” he says. “Because from where I’m standing, it looks like you showed up late, waved a stick around, and then dropped my almost-dead friend on my rug like a very traumatic housewarming gift.”
Something flashes in her eyes then; not fear, not shame, but pure, incandescent fury.
“You think I don’t know that?” she snaps. “You think I’m not aware of exactly how close she came to dying?”
“Then why didn’t you stop it?” Damon presses, stepping forward, because anger is easier than the alternative, and because if he doesn’t stay loud he might have to stay honest.
She stares at him like she’s deciding whether he’s worth the effort.
“Because not all magic plays by the same rules,” she says coldly. “And because I’m not from your little ecosystem of chalk circles and bloodletting. What they started, I can’t unmake.”
Damon’s eyes flick to the stick again, irritation flaring.
“Well you should’ve tried harder witchy.”
Something flashes in her eyes again - pure, incandescent fury.
“So let me get this straight,” Damon continues. “You’re clearly a witch. You knew the ritual. You knew the players. And your plan was… what. Yell really loudly and wave that stick like we’re in a children’s fairytale?”
She moves faster than he expects.
One second she’s standing there, the next Damon is airborne, slammed bodily into the wall hard enough to rattle picture frames, the impact knocking the air from his lungs in a sharp, humiliating burst. He slides down a few inches, stunned more by the audacity than the pain.
The witch’s voice is shaking now, but not with weakness.
“With all due respect,” she says, stalking toward him, stick leveled, “fuck off.”
Damon blinks up at her.
“I brought her here alive,” she continues, voice cracking under the strain of holding herself together. “I held him back long enough that she’s still breathing. And if I hadn’t, you’d be planning a funeral instead of asking questions.”
She turns away from him then, already done, already moving toward the door.
“I have a witch to find,” she says, raw and urgent. “A body to bury. And a monster to deal with.”
She pauses, glancing back just long enough to drive the knife in clean.
“You’re welcome.”
As she reaches the threshold, Stefan looks up from Elena, eyes red and frantic and grateful all at once.
“Bonnie,” he says. “Is she—”
The witch stops.
“That’s what I’m going to find out,” she replies quietly, and then she’s gone, the air snapping in her wake.
The house falls into a terrible, ringing quiet, broken only by Elena’s shallow breathing and Tyler’s broken whimpers.
Damon stays where he is for a moment longer than necessary, staring at the space she occupied, his mind replaying the image of Elena’s grey skin over and over again like a bad loop he can’t shut off.
He hadn’t noticed she was gone.
Not because he didn’t care.
Because he didn’t know he was watching.
And that realisation settles into him slowly, heavily, like something that is going to hurt later when he finally lets it.
Harri goes back alone.
Not because she’s brave, or noble, or because she has any appetite left for clean endings. She goes back because there is a body in the woods and Harri has never been able to leave bodies behind once she’s seen them. That kind of neglect is a luxury for people who didn’t spend their adolescence counting the dead by name.
The night has thinned by the time she reaches the tree line again, the moon still bright enough to make everything look deliberate. It lights the clearing like a stage, and Harri hates it for that. She hates the chalk still scored into the earth, hates the faint burn where magic has chewed through the ground, hates the way the air still tastes of iron and old words.
She hates him most of all.
The walk back is long only because she forces it to be. She could Apparate straight to the centre of the clearing, but she doesn’t trust herself to land cleanly when her hands are still shaking and her thoughts keep slipping sideways into images she can’t unsee: Elena’s mouth parted around breath that barely mattered, Tyler’s bones cracking like snapped branches, Bonnie swaying under moonlight with blood on her face and betrayal in her eyes. Nik’s calm. Nik’s certainty. Nik closing the bond like a door in her face.
Harri keeps replaying it anyway, as if repetition will change the outcome.
It doesn’t.
It only gives her more time to decide, with a slow, sick clarity, that she is going to hurt him. Not in a lover’s argument. Not in a way that can be soothed over with apologies and hands at her waist. In ways he has never been hurt, the kind of hurt that sits in your body and teaches you fear.
The thought should scare her. It doesn’t. It steadies her. It gives her something to hold onto that isn’t grief.
By the time she steps into the clearing, Jenna is still there.
The sight knocks the wind out of her, sudden and brutal, because the world will keep moving no matter how wrong it is. The body is arranged exactly as she left it—too still, too quiet, a human shape laid out under moonlight like a warning.
Harri swallows hard and forces herself to move.
She kneels beside Jenna, not gently, because gentleness is a thing Harri no longer trusts. She doesn’t know this woman. She knows what she represents: a normal life that never stood a chance once monsters decided they needed ingredients.
“I’m sorry,” Harri hears herself say, and the words are useless. They don’t give Jenna her breath back. They don’t rewind the night. They don’t undo the fact that Harri stood in that circle and watched her magic fail her when it mattered most.
She draws her wand, because even if her craft couldn’t tear apart Bennett work, it can still do this. It can still make the earth open. It can still make death less exposed.
With a flick and a whispered spell, the ground softens. Loam loosens. Roots pull back like they’re being asked, politely but firmly, to make room.
Harri lowers Jenna into the hollow with careful hands and freezes when her fingers brush cold skin.
The cold is familiar.
Not because she has ever touched Jenna before, but because she has touched too many bodies. Because the war taught her what skin feels like when the person inside it is already gone. Because she spent years doing this, closing eyes, lifting weight that shouldn’t have been weight, pretending that burying someone is the same thing as giving them peace.
She told herself she was done with it.
She told herself she’d earned the right to stop digging graves.
She thought Mystic Falls was a detour. A small violence, a contained one. She thought New Orleans and Niklaus and the promise of starting again meant she was allowed to lay the war down at last.
And here she is, kneeling in dirt with blood still crusted under her nails, trying to be the last hands a stranger ever feels.
Her throat tightens without warning.
Hotness gathers behind her eyes, and Harri hates it on instinct. She hates the weakness of it, the betrayal of her own body deciding to soften now, after the worst has already happened.
A tear slips down her cheek and she goes perfectly still, furious at herself for it.
What right does she have to cry?
Jenna is the one who died. Bonnie is the one who was forced. Elena is the one who nearly bled out. Tyler is the one who screamed himself raw. Harri is the one who arrived too late and watched her promises collapse like paper in rain.
Another tear falls anyway.
It isn’t for Jenna alone.
It’s for everything that is breaking at once, the way her life keeps circling back to this, no matter how hard she runs. It’s for Bonnie’s eyes turning away from her. It’s for the fact that Bonnie is in Elijah’s hands now, and Harri doesn’t know whether that means safe or simply out of reach. It’s for Elena’s grey skin against her arms. It’s for the brief, awful thought that if she’d been seconds later, Elena would have been a body too.
It’s for the realisation that she let herself believe her soulmate would not be the one to drag her back into this.
She lets the grief crest once, sharp and humiliating, then she crushes it down the way she learned to at sixteen.
Not because it’s healthy. Because it’s necessary.
Harri covers Jenna with earth, slow and methodical, filling the hollow until the body is gone from sight. She presses her palm to the mound when it’s done, grounding herself in the simple fact of dirt under skin, and breathes until the tremor in her hands eases.
When she stands, her cheeks are streaked and her jaw aches from how hard she’s clenched it.
The fury is still there, hotter now for having been forced to share space with grief. She clings to it because anger at least has direction.
Nik deserves it.
But Bonnie—
Bonnie is the one who matters first. Who matters now.
Harri wipes her face with the heel of her hand like she can erase the evidence of softness, then looks up at the trees, at the empty moonlit space where Elijah vanished with her.
“I need to find her,” Harri whispers, and the words are not a hope. They are a decision.
She tightens her grip around her wand, draws one steadying breath through her nose, and Apparates—leaving the fresh earth behind, leaving her tears where they fell, carrying only the one thought she can survive on now:
Bonnie, please be alive.
//
Blessedly, she finds Bonnie in her own home ,in the familiar quiet of her bedroom, the curtains drawn against the night, her duvets pulled close and cocooning her like the room itself has decided to keep her safe. Bonnie looks small beneath the weight of exhaustion, colour leeched from her skin, lashes resting too heavily against her cheeks. But she is breathing. Steadily. Unequivocally alive.
Elijah sits at her side.
Not hovering. Not pacing. Simply present, his palm resting against Bonnie’s cheek with a care so deliberate it borders on obsession. He looks up when Harri enters, and whatever he sees on her face makes something in his own expression tighten; guilt, first and foremost, sharp and unguarded.
“I didn’t know,” he says quietly, before she can speak. “I swear to you, Harri — I did not know he meant to do it tonight.”
The words aren’t defensive. They aren’t polished. They land heavy, like something he has been carrying since the moment he took Bonnie from the clearing.
Harri believes him.
The certainty comes immediately, bypassing suspicion and rage alike. If Elijah had known, Bonnie would never have stood in that circle breathing. Whatever else Elijah Mikaelson is capable of, this kind of betrayal would have required foreknowledge, and he does not have the face of a man who arrived too late on purpose.
Harri exhales, long and shaking, and only then realises how tightly she has been holding herself together.
“Is she safe?” she asks, voice low, careful, like speaking too loudly might disturb something fragile. “With you?”
Elijah’s hand does not leave Bonnie’s face.
“Yes,” he answers, without hesitation. “She is safe.”
Not will be. Not I intend to keep her so.
Is.
“She is safer with me,” he continues, meeting Harri’s gaze fully now, “than she would be anywhere else.”
Harri swallows.
It isn’t accusation that makes her ask next. It’s need. The kind that demands certainty, not reassurance dressed up as conviction.
“Why?” she asks. “What assurance do I have — what proof — that I can trust that?”
Elijah does not bristle. He does not argue.
He simply nods, once, like he has been waiting for the question.
Slowly, deliberately, he rolls up his sleeve.
The skin of his wrist is unmarked by violence, untouched by ritual , but the words there are unmistakable, dark and indelible against his pale skin. A soulmark. Not fresh, but alive with a quiet gravity that makes Harri’s breath hitch.
Then, gently, carefully, Elijah lifts Bonnie’s hand from the duvet and turns her wrist so the light falls just right.
The matching words stare back at her.
For a moment, Harri cannot make sense of what she is seeing, her mind stalling out as something vast and unbearable rearranges itself all at once. Then understanding hits, not like revelation, but like collapse.
“Oh,” she breathes.
Her knees give. Not dramatically. Not all at once. Just enough that she has to reach for the bed to steady herself, the world tilting violently as relief and grief crash together inside her chest. Her vision blurs, and she hates herself for the tears even as they come, hot and unstoppable.
Thank God. Thank God Elijah hadn’t known. Thank God he had been there. Thank God Bonnie had someone who had reached for her not as a resource, not as a necessity, but as a person.
A soulmate.
Someone bound to her in a way that isn’t transactional.
And then—
Something else breaks. The relief curdles, sharp at the edges.
Harri straightens abruptly, breath hitching, the tears drying almost as fast as they came. Her hand drops from the bed, fingers curling like she needs something solid to hold onto.
“No,” she says quietly.
Elijah looks up at her again, startled this time.
“No,” Harri repeats, firmer. “That doesn’t— that doesn’t mean anything to me.”
The words scrape out of her, raw and unkind and absolutely honest.
“Don’t show me that like it’s a guarantee,” she says, her voice tightening. “Don’t expect it to reassure me.”
Elijah’s brow furrows. “Harri….?”
“My soulmate,” she cuts in, eyes burning now, “stood in a clearing tonight and used a girl I care about like fuel. He promised me restraint and gave me blood instead. He closed our bond, lied to my face, and broke a curse over bodies he didn’t bother to mourn.”
Her laugh is sharp and joyless. “So forgive me if matching words on skin don’t mean safety to me anymore.”
Silence stretches between them, heavy but not hostile.
Elijah absorbs it. All of it. When he speaks again, his voice is lower, not defensive, not offended.
Measured.
“You are right,” he says. “A bond does not make a person good. It does not prevent cruelty. It does not absolve choice.”
Harri watches him closely.
“Then why,” she asks, “should I trust you?”
Elijah doesn’t look at his wrist again. He looks at Bonnie.
“At her,” he says quietly. “Because whatever I am, whatever I have been , I will not be the thing that harms her. Not knowingly. Not unknowingly. Not for my brother. Not for a cause. Not for a cure.”
He turns back to Harri, gaze steady, unflinching.
“I give you my word,” Elijah says. “She is safe with me.”
Not because of the bond.
In spite of it.
Harri stares at him for a long moment, the war-honed part of her cataloguing tone, posture, omission. Looking for cracks. For evasion.
She finds none.
Something in her finally loosens; not trust, not fully, but the absence of immediate fear.
“Good,” she says hoarsely. “Because if she isn’t—”
Elijah inclines his head once. “I understand.”
Harri exhales, shaky and exhausted, and looks down at Bonnie again, at the steady rise and fall of her chest, the familiar line of her mouth slack with sleep.
“When she wakes,” Harri says softly, “tell her I’m sorry, truly. Tell her Elena is alive. Tyler too.”
Elijah nods. “I will.”
Harri lingers for a final heartbeat, imprinting the room into memory , the quiet, the safety she cannot yet trust, the way Bonnie looks when the world has stopped hurting her for a moment.
She turns toward the door knowing the worst part is already done not the violence, but surviving it. The bodies are buried. The blood is dry. What remains now are consequences, and the man who made them inevitable.
//
Harri finds him back at the house.
Not lurking. Not hiding. Exactly where he has always been when he believes himself untouchable , seated, composed, the aftermath of violence already arranged into something he can live with. Rebekah is there at first, hovering too close, her mouth tight with words she knows better than to speak.
Harri doesn’t look at her.
She walks straight in, dirt still under her nails, grief still wet on her skin, fury humming so loud in her chest it feels like static.
Rebekah reads the air instantly. She leaves without being told, heels sharp against the floor, the door closing with a quiet finality that feels deliberate.
Now there are only two of them.
Nik doesn’t stand when Harri stops in front of him.
He looks up instead, eyes bright in a way that is not relief, not regret , something fevered and sharp, like he has already decided how this ends.
“You’re here,” he says. “Good.”
Harri stares at him.
The man she loved is not gone. That is the worst part. He is exactly the same man who kissed her forehead in quiet rooms, who held her through nightmares, who listened when she spoke about the war and did not flinch.
That man did this.
“I buried her,” Harri says.
Her voice is steady. Too steady. “I buried Jenna.”
Nik’s jaw tightens, just barely. A flicker. Gone almost immediately.
“That was never—”
“Don’t,” Harri cuts in, and there it is , the crack. “Do not finish that sentence.”
Silence stretches.
Nik rises slowly, as if humouring her, as if standing is a courtesy he is granting rather than a necessity.
“You came back,” he says instead. “I wondered if you would.”
“I came back because I needed to hear you say it,” Harri replies. “Say it to my face. Tell me why you broke your word.”
His mouth twists.
“I told you,” he says. “Your love shackles me.”
The words hit hard, not because they surprise her, but because they don’t.
“You expect me to hesitate,” Nik continues, his voice sharpening. “You expect restraint. You expect mercy. You expect me to become something else because loving you makes you uncomfortable with what I am.”
Harri laughs once. It’s ugly. Short.
“I expected you not to use a girl I love as leverage,” she says. “I expected you not to kill someone who had nothing to do with your curse. I expected you not to look me in the eye and lie.”
“You expect softness where I am cruel,” Nik snaps. “You expect compromise from a man who learned a thousand years ago that hesitation gets you killed.”
“And I expected,” Harri fires back, “that my soulmate wouldn’t drag me back into a clearing full of bodies like the war never ended.”
That lands.
Nik’s eyes darken, something feral flashing through them.
“You don’t get to hold that over me,” he says. “You don’t get to pretend your hands are clean.”
“Oh, I know they aren’t,” Harri says, stepping closer now, tears burning hot but unchecked. “That’s why this disgusts me. I left that life. I bled for it. I buried enough people to last a lifetime. And you….”
Her voice breaks.
“You promised me.”
“I promised you what I could afford,” Nik says coldly. “And then Elijah found his soulmate.”
That stops her.
“What?”
“You heard me,” he says, bitterness seeping in now, defensive and sharp. “Elijah finding his soulmate to a Bennett witch changed everything. Every question he asked, every hesitation, every attempt to delay, it was obvious. If I waited, he would have stood in my way.”
“So you rushed,” Harri says, incredulous. “You panicked.”
“I acted,” Nik snarls. “Because the timing mattered. Because if Elijah hadn’t found her now, I wouldn’t have broken my promise to you.”
Harri stares at him like she doesn’t recognise the logic he’s trying to sell her.
“So because your brother found his soulmate,” she says slowly, “you decided it was acceptable to destroy mine.”
Nik scoffs. “You make it sound so dramatic.”
A sound tears out of her, half laugh, half sob.
“There is a dead woman in the ground because of you,” Harri shouts. “There is blood on Tyler’s hands because of you. Elena nearly died because of you. And you’re standing here telling me it was bad timing?”
Nik steps closer. Too close.
“You don’t understand,” he says. “You never will. Because you still believe the world bends for morality. It doesn’t. It bends for power.”
“And what about me?” Harri demands. “Where do I fit in your grand fucking philosophy?”
“You are the problem,” Nik says flatly. “You make me hesitate. You make me doubt. You make me compromise.”
“And you resent me for it,” Harri whispers.
“Yes,” he says, unflinching. “And I love you anyway.”
Something inside her snaps.
Something cold settles behind Harri’s eyes.
She thinks of Bonnie’s bloodied mouth.
Of Elena’s weight in her arms, too light, terrifyingly light.
Of dirt under her nails and the sound of earth hitting a coffin that didn’t need to exist.
She thinks of how easily he closed their bond. How deliberately.
Her wand is already in her hand. She doesn’t remember lifting it.
Nik notices the shift before the spell is spoken. He always notices. His shoulders tense, weight shifting slightly, prepared for violence the way a body remembers how to breathe.
“Harri,” he warns, low.
The way he says her name still does something to her.
That almost stops her.
Almost.
“You don’t get to say it like that anymore,” she says, her voice strangely calm. “You don’t get to say my name like it belongs to you.”
His eyes flicker. Annoyance. Something sharper underneath.
Harri does not decide to hurt him.
That is the part she will think about later, the absence of deliberation. The way the choice does not arrive dressed as a choice at all. It simply happens, rising up out of everything she has swallowed since the clearing, since the body in the ground, since the moment she realised promises mean nothing when spoken by men like him.
Her magic is already awake.
Nik steps closer, still talking, still defending himself, still insisting that love is a liability and that she should have known better than to expect anything else.
And something inside her goes very, very still.
It is the same stillness she felt during the war, right before she did something she would never speak about afterward. The calm that arrives when emotion burns itself out and leaves only intent behind.
“Crucio.”
She does not shout it. She does not spit it. She says it like a fact.
The spell lands.
Nik does not have time to sneer, or brace, or twist it into something theatrical. His body reacts before his pride can catch up. His back slams into the wall hard enough to crack wood, the sound sharp and ugly, and then—
Then he breaks.
The sound that tears out of him is wrong. Too raw. Too stripped of performance. His spine arches violently, fingers clawing at the air like he’s trying to grab something solid enough to anchor himself to. The scream rips free without permission, dragged out of places he keeps locked down even from himself.
Harri watches.
She does not flinch.
She feels it, the spell coursing through him, the way it lights up every nerve, the way his body becomes a map of pain she is actively tracing. She feels how easy it would be to push harder, to deepen it, to sharpen it until there is nothing left of him but agony and instinct.
A part of her likes that she can.
That realisation hits her harder than the spell ever could.
Because there is satisfaction there. Not joy. Not relief. Something darker. Something frighteningly clean.
For a heartbeat, just one, she understands why Voldemort loved it.
The control. The certainty. The way pain feels like proof that you matter enough to shape the world.
Her stomach twists.
Nik’s scream cracks, breaks into something hoarse and ruined, and she can feel the moment his pride fractures under it. Can feel the way his mind scrambles, the way his thoughts lose cohesion, reduced to nothing but sensation.
She holds it anyway. Longer than she should.
Long enough that his body starts to shake, muscles spasming uncontrollably, breath tearing in and out of him like it doesn’t know how to belong in his chest anymore. His head drops forward, teeth bared, a sound leaking out of him that is no longer a scream so much as a broken, animal noise.
And still she doesn’t stop.
Because this is what he did to others.
Because this is what he dismissed as necessary.
Because for once, the power imbalance is not theoretical.
Then something inside her recoils. Not because of him. Because of herself.
She feels it suddenly, sharply, the echo. The way this feels familiar. The way it fits too easily into her hands. The way her magic does not resist this at all.
“I—” Her breath stutters.
This is not who she survived to become.
“No,” she whispers, and the word is for herself as much as him. “No.”
The spell collapses..Released. Nik crumples.
He doesn’t fall so much as slide down the wall, body folding in on itself, breath coming in ragged, violent pulls. His hands shake as he tries to ground himself, fingers scraping uselessly against the floor like he doesn’t quite trust gravity anymore.
For a moment, there is silence.
Then he laughs. It starts low. Broken. A sound scraped raw out of his chest. It builds unevenly, half-hysterical, half-feral, until it fills the room in a way that makes Harri’s skin crawl.
“That’s it?” he pants, dragging himself upright inch by inch, pain still clinging to him like a second skin. “That’s where you stop?”
He looks at her, eyes bright with something unhinged, lips curling even as his body betrays him.
“You couldn’t finish it,” he says. “Even after everything I did.”
Harri is shaking now. Not from fear. From restraint.
She feels hollowed out, like the spell burned something through her on its way out. Her grip tightens on her wand, knuckles white, because letting go of it feels dangerous in a way she cannot articulate.
“I stopped,” she says hoarsely, “because I recognised myself.”
Nik tilts his head, a mocking echo of intimacy. “And you didn’t like what you saw.”
“No,” she says. “I didn’t.”
She steps back, tears spilling freely now, anger and grief bleeding into each other until she can’t tell where one ends and the other begins.
“Be thankful I stopped,” she tells him, voice breaking but fierce. “Because I am not above hurting you. I just refuse to let my cruelty rot me the way yours has.”
He laughs again, but there’s something cracked in it now. Defensive. Desperate.
“Still pretending you’re better,” he sneers. “Still clinging to morals when they don’t protect you.”
Harri wipes at her face, rough and furious.
“I don’t care what you think protects me,” she says. “I care what I can live with.”
She meets his gaze fully, and this time there is no love softening it. No hope. No reaching.
“Whatever we were,” she says, “whatever this fragile, beautiful thing was, it’s gone.”
His smile falters.
“You don’t mean that.”
“I do,” Harri says. “Find yourself another soulmate. One who won’t flinch when you decide bodies are acceptable. One who won’t expect you to keep your word.”
Her voice rises, cracking under the weight of it.
“I have already been betrayed. I have already been used. I did not survive a war to be broken by the one person who was supposed to choose me.”
Nik’s laughter turns sharp, almost hysterical.
“You’ll come back,” he says. “You always do.”
Harri looks at him, really looks, at the man who taught her tenderness and then weaponised it, who promised restraint and delivered blood, who called her love a shackle and still expected her to wear it.
“No,” she says quietly. “This time, I won’t.”
She turns away while he is still laughing, still shaking, still bleeding in places that will heal.
And she walks out knowing the worst part is not what she did to him.
It’s what she almost let herself become.