Chapter Text
Bonus Day #1: Fluff, Hurt/Comfort
Day 1: Cousins
One of the cool things about being a siphon is making magic uniquely optional.
Right off the bat, it's not an option for mundanes (as in humans, or doppelgangers which are basically just humans, etc), because they usually won't believe even after witnessing it in action. And even if they somehow accept that it's real, it's still not something they could use, not even with unlimited access to all the spellbooks in the world (which they also wouldn't get).
Okay, technically, there are artificers capable of imbuing items with magic so that mundanes can use them. That's how you get hunters as a type of magical creature. Not just the hobbyists like Jeremy Gilbert and Alaric Saltzman, but even the real ones created by the Witch of the Five, Bonnie's however-many-greats-great-ancestor.
But that's obviously an exception, a huge stretch. It's like saying "bugs can manifest storms" just because of the butterfly effect. Magic isn't an option for mundanes.
And things are only slightly better for regular witches trying to live a normal life, because even if you manage to ignore all the prophetic visions, unintended levitations, et cetera disrupting your humdrum existence, if you want to elude some annoying coven or other, you have to resort to using the very thing that makes you so easy to trace.
Siphons, therefore, are uniquely able to walk between the two worlds. You want to live in the world of witches as a siphon? Don't expect a warm welcome, but they'll have a hard time kicking you out. You want to live in the normal world as a siphon? Get used to certain inconveniences (if you don't want your bike stolen, you can't just cloak it, you have to actually lock it up somewhere, and spring for a lock that can't just get removed with some pliers), but otherwise, go crazy. Even if a witch manages to track you down against your will, just sap their magic and run while they're incapacitated. Hell, use their magic to run. You're not stuck in one world or the other.
As a witch, there's always the classic "hide your magic in a tree and trick your brother into thinking you still have it so he can be dragged to hell while you fly off to medical school" method of walking away. But that had been an agreement, with no need to throw anyone off the trail. Though maybe there's always a need, if the family you're running from works like theirs. It only took one report of Kai's return to have Joshua casting a murder spell on his only remaining daughter (not counting Liv because she was just food for Luke).
So if you're really running away from a magic bloodline, you gotta give up more than your ability to do magic. Especially if that bloodline is particularly strong.
[gremlin draft]
kai decides to look up any surviving bennetts (including confidants, witnesses, in-laws, etc) for bonnie, once he senses some bitterness at his getting to be the head of his family after killing so many off. he finds her cousin (from the katherine moonstone mansion episode, or w/e) and tries to scope out her deal. detects no recognition at parker/portland, in fact detects no magic whatsoever. how. looks into
Arguably, Kai had learned patience from the prison world. Easy to be patient when all you have is time. The pressure to conserve that precious resource eases up, and the sense of urgency quiets, eventually.
He wasn't a stranger to slogging through paperwork. Learning to fly hadn't been pure trial-and-error - those things have manuals galore. But focusing on something boring (at least old-timey spellbooks were interesting once you finally understood what the hell they were saying) when the whole world was spinning around you (and reading isn't a blessed distraction from global silence), with a magical question-answering machine sitting right there in your pocket? That was a whole different story. He might not have managed it without an endless, portable music library keeping him company (thank you, magical question-answering machine).
UNSURE WHETHER OTHERWISE-NAMED BENNETTS LESS POWERFUL BY REPUTATION OR COINCIDENCE
[RETROACTIVELY BORROWED FROM DAY FIVE LONG LOST RELATIVE]
A few months after Kai was banned from using Gemini connections to seek out (and, more likely than not, piss off or scare into hiding) remaining Bennetts for Bonnie's sake, her curiosity about returning the favor won out. Finding siphons outside of Lily's gang might be good for Kai, and it wouldn't hurt to get independent confirmation on some questions. Did drawing magic from someone always hurt? Did it have to? Even if Kai were able and willing to answer honestly for himself, that didn't make him an expert, just a lone example. They could use more.
The nature of magic was also as subject to censorship and revisionism as any other topic in human history. And that's when you have any writing to begin with. Witches have been understandably reluctant to leave incriminating spellbooks lying around, so without the benefit of an oral tradition, it's nearly impossible to get even basic answers by reading. Add a taboo on top of that and you have one of the world's least-documented subjects of all time: siphons.
Bonnie had been hard-pressed to find any references to their existence, certainly nothing beyond simply describing and condemning them. Some real, live siphons wouldn't go amiss.
Caroline offered to help Bonnie by compelling any people of interest in her search, but she declined politely. Who knew whether siphons without magic could even be compelled? Add it to the list of mysteries yet unsolved. It was gratifying to seek answers that she knew no one else had. It felt like every other witch in the world had grown up with the benefit of a magic tutor (though, to be fair, some of those tutors were preparing them to fight to the death on the brink of adulthood). For a change, Bonnie was going to get answers to questions that no one else had apparently bothered to ask.
[they wanted siphons to go away, so they didn't mention them, so people didn't know about them, so people didn't know how to deal with them, etc etc]
[where did the stigma come from? the auto-win of merges?]