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thecooler · 7 months

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Interstellar Molecular Cloud

It ends with Bonnie and Marceline clinging to each other as they fall towards their deaths. It begins with two lost girls, alone in the wasteland, finding hope in each other. An exploration of Bonnie and Marcy's early relationship in the Alternate Universe presented in "The Star".

Relationship: Princess Bubblegum / Marceline

Tags: Vampworld!Au, Vampire Hunter PB, Angst, Friends to Enemies, Post-Apocalypse

Word Count: 5,930

A03 Mirror

Bonnibel Bubblegum is thirteen years old when she meets her for the first time. She is thirteen years old, and she has blood on her hands. This isn’t something that bothers her, really. Vampire blood isn’t like regular person blood. It’s a mark of honor, if anything, a badge she wears with great pride. She’s snuffed out more vamps than anyone she knows.

Not that she knows many people.

She’s picking her way through what used to be a convenience store. For the most part, it’s long since been picked clean, but Bonnie is resourceful— has to be, to make it out here. She sets a sensor at the main entrance, then two more near the broken windows, and then she gets to work. She breaks tables apart and whittles their legs into stakes. She takes apart broken down cash registers and pockets parts that have even the slight possibility of being useful.

One of her sensors goes off, and her blaster is out of her pocket before she even turns around, gripped confidently as her other hand falls to one of the stakes lining her belt. She falters when she registers what’s in front of her.

She’s a girl. Around Bonnie’s age, by the look of it. She has short cropped black hair, pointed ears, and slate-gray skin. She’s wearing a deep, dark purple dress with black lacy bits around the skirts, and if Bonnie were to allow herself to stop and really look for a second, she might note that it’s pretty on her. But what really stands out about her is the long, exposed length of her neck. Bonnie lets her blaster fall to her side and uses her free hand to tug her scarf up over her nose.

“Uh. Hey,” the other girl says, taking a step closer when Bonnie begins to rifle through her bag. She pulls out a spare scarf— a tattered old thing with more than a couple mysterious stains marring the ruddy surface. She shoves it towards the stranger.

“You should really cover up,” she says curtly.

The girl looks down at the offering, and for a moment, the only sound is the distant, familiar sound of oozers groaning a few blocks away. And then the girl’s lips quirk up into a smile, and to Bonnie’s outrage and horror, she laughs. Not just a little chuckle, either. This girl is full-on guffawing. She’s loud about it too, like she doesn’t know how dangerous it is to be heard. Bonnie moves faster than she can think, smacking her hand over the other girl’s mouth.

And she licks it.

“Uhg!” Bonnie pulls back, nose wrinkling in disgust, and the girl laughs even louder.

Bonnie’s hand clamps down on the handle of her blaster until it hurts. She takes a step back, glaring daggers in the girl’s direction. Once she manages to stop laughing for two seconds, pausing to wipe tears from her eyes, she has the gall to extend a hand towards Bonnie. Her smile is crooked and it’s not even a little bit charming. “Name’s Marceline,” she says, like Bonnie cares.

“Well, Marceline,” Bonnie forces as much contempt as she can muster into the name. She hates how it feels on her tongue, “a vamp’s gonna use you like a ding—danged juicebox if you don’t cover up your neck.”

“Uh, yeah,” Marceline rolls her eyes, which makes the fire in Bonnie’s chest burn and lap up her throat, “I wouldn’t worry about that, princess. Vamps won’t even think about touching me.” She says it with this maddening unearned confidence, and Bonnie thinks she’s never been so angry in her entire life. She shoves her blaster roughly back into its holster. She should just leave, let Marceline get what’s coming to her. She’s never paused for anyone else before.

But she’s watching Bonnie with these big brown eyes, and that stupid crooked grin hasn’t left her face. Her posture is relaxed, hands dug into pockets that look hastily patched onto her skirts. “Sooooo—” she says, tilting back on the balls of her feet, “where are y’off to now?”

None of your business, Bonnie thinks. “My tank,” she says out loud. She’s disarming her sensors and popping them back in her pockets. The sound of the oozers is closer now. She might need to move the tank for the night.

“Woah, back up— your tank?” Marceline echoes, suddenly right over Bonnie’s shoulder. “Nuh-uh. You can’t just say something like that and then not show me. C’mon, princess—”

“Don’t call me that.”

“Then tell me your name.”

She pauses, looking over Marceline. How has she survived like this? She seems so carefree, like she’s not even a little bit scared. She finds she can’t stay mad about it. There’s something entrancing there— something that Bonnie finds she can’t define. And she isn’t used to not knowing things. It makes her want to talk to Marceline more, to find out how she ticks. “Bonnie. Follow me, and keep up.”

Her tank— which is a bit of a misnomer, if she’s being honest— is parked nearby. It’s really more of a pick-up truck rigged with traps and reinforced windows. As she approaches she reaches into her left pocket and taps a code into a remote, deactivating her security system so that she and Marceline can clamber inside. Bonnie climbs into the passenger seat and watches through narrowed eyes as the other girl ooos and ahhs over her equipment.

“What’s this do?” she asks, picking up one of her more recent projects, which will hopefully sense vampiric presence within a three kilometer radius once finished.

“It’s a bomb,” Bonnie says flatly, then snorts when Marceline drops it in a hurry.

“Kidding. It’s a sensor I’ve been working on.”

Marceline blinks at her, then her face breaks into a smile again, and this time it makes Bonnie’s heart skip. Bizarre. “I didn’t know you joked.”

“You don’t know me at all.” No one does. She tries to keep it that way.

“Okay,” Marceline leans closer, propping herself up against the armrest, “then let’s get to know each other.”

Bonnie knows she should say no. Instead, she says, “Alright.”

☆

In one of the seats of her truck, under a section of peeled leather, Bonnie keeps a thin stack of papers and a collection of pencils. The paper is gray, thin, and worn from countless times being drawn on, then erased. When she’s alone in her truck at night— when Marceline goes home, or she finishes scavenging on her own, she’ll take out the paper and use moonlight to sketch little candy people. She imagines what they’d be like, what their hopes and aspirations would be.

She’s never breathed a word of it to anyone, much less shown them. To be fair, she hasn’t really had anyone to tell. But one day, when Marceline stays a little later than usual, Bonnie pulls out one of her drawings, and she tells her friend about a sentient Root Beer who’s an aspiring crime novelist, and Marceline listens.

☆

Bonnibel Bubblegum is fifteen years old when she figures out what a crush is. She’s fifteen years old, and she’s running for her stinkin’ life through a crumbling alleyway with Marceline’s hand clutched in hers. They’d been sitting in the back of her truck, like they did all the time, and clearly, Bonnie had let herself grow complicit, unobservant, because one minute she was listening to Marceline read out one of the kissy bits in an old romance novel they’d scavenged, and the next she was looking around and realizing there were about twenty vampires lurking around the corner.

She should’ve just gotten in the truck. If she’d given herself a moment to think, they’d both be safe in the vehicle and bookin’ it down the road, knocking vampire heads along the way.

But instead she’d panicked.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

And now Marceline’s in danger, too, and she’s giggling as Bonnie drags her along, like it’s some sort of game. Like there isn’t a gaggle of parasites looking to leech their fluids. Bonnie skids around a corner and throws both of them against a wall, arm slamming against Marceline’s chest. Her breaths come out heavy and ragged, and her free hand begins to pick at her belt.

Four stakes, a garlic bomb— she doesn’t even have her blaster.

“Bonnie?” Marceline looks worried— which is the response she should have been having from the start. For her part, Bonnie jerks her arm away from her chest and adjusts her scarf in hopes of covering the blush she knows is creeping up her neck. Marceline always teases her for how obvious it is when she gets flustered.

“They’re probably still on our tails. Dang nabit! I shoulda been paying more attention. You distracted me!” she points an accusing finger at Marceline, nearly poking her in the nose. But the other girl, unperturbed, bats her finger away.

“Look! We’re fine. I’m telling you, Bonbon, vamps never mess with me.”

She says that a lot. Whenever Bonnie brings up the subject of vampires, she hedges, changes the subject. She’s never pushed it, because she figures that she’s just putting on her little tough girl act or whatever, but right now Bonnie’s pumped on adrenaline and her body wants to feel a million intense emotions at once, so she settles on anger.

“Why?” she asks, crowding Marceline up against the crumbling brick. “Why don’t they mess with you, Marceline?”

Marceline blinks, her cheeks flushing dark, something that Bonnie doesn’t think she’s ever seen. “Uh— do you need to be so close for this conversation?”

“Answer me.” She is so done with this. She’s watched vampires drain hundreds of people. They don’t even hesitate, so what makes Marceline so damn special?

Marceline laughs nervously, eyes darting away, her blush deepening. She waves her hands in vague gestures and makes a couple aborted attempts to start a sentence— well, uh, you know— before eventually pushing out. “I mean, I haven’t died so far, right?”

She looks tense, and her voice wavers as she speaks. She seems almost scared. And that, at least, makes sense to Bonnie. That, at least, is familiar. She breathes out a long, heavy sigh and takes a step back, then another. Her back hits the opposite wall and she slides down until she hits the ground and her baggy cargo pants immediately soak through with what she’s going to assume, for her own sanity, is water. “I worry about you, you know.” She can’t meet Marceline’s eyes when she says it. Doesn’t need to. She can vividly imagine the wrinkle of her brow, the way her lips tug into a tiny frown and her deep brown eyes take on that almost pleading look. Bonnie crowds her knees to her chest and focuses on a random brick in the wall instead.

“Bon,” Marceline’s voice is soft, barely audible over the persistent noise of the dead city— the wind rattling dilapidated architecture, the skittering of mutated rats. Her hand falls on Bonnie’s shoulder, causing her to tense, “you don’t need to worry about me.”

Hot, fiery indignation rises in Bonnie— it burns through her chest and prickles uncomfortably up her spine. “Of course I worry about you, you- you nimrod!” she lets out a frustrated growl when Marceline has the nerve to snort at the insult, “you’re the only person I have in this place— you’re my only friend. If you die because you couldn’t be bothered to take care of yourself, then—” then she’d be back to the way she was before. The way she’d been for as long as she could remember. Alone. Surviving.

She doesn’t understand how she can be just fine on her own for thirteen years, and now, after knowing Marceline for two, she can’t even conceive of going back to that. She stands, and Marceline, for once, is stunned silent, mouth hanging slightly open. “If you’re not gonna take care of yourself, at least let me protect you.” She knows immediately that it’s a silly thing to say. Marceline is all she has, but she knows that she isn’t all Marceline has. She has a dad, somewhere. She’s never met him, because Marceline insists she wouldn’t get along with him. She doesn’t need protection from her, specifically.

It’s also silly because she knows good and well that Marceline can brawl with the best of them. She’s seen her smash a mutant rat skull under her steel-toed boots more than a few times.

The weight of just how much she doesn’t need Bonnibel sits like a rock in her stomach. Her shoulders sag, and the fire snuffs out in her. All at once, she feels exhausted.

And then Marceline’s arms are around her, and she’s being drawn into a hug, and an altogether different sort of flame lights up her chest. It makes it hard to breathe. Her hands hover awkwardly over Marceline’s back for a moment, before settling gently against the soft fabric of her tank top.

“You know, for a total braniac, you can be a real numbskull.”

Bonnie pulls back, intending to glare, but when she’s met with a signature Marceline grin, her heart skips a beat, and she knows the look she ends up shooting her is nowhere near intimidating. Marceline tilts her head and hums quietly. “Look, if it’ll make you feel better, I’ll let you play knight for me, alright?”

“That’s not—”

“And I’ll be more careful. If it pleases the lady.”

Bonnie's shoulders box up around her ears, and her fingernails dig into her palms, “It does.”

“Alright then,” Marceline reaches over and attempts to tousle her short-cropped hair, only to pull back. “I, uh, sometimes forget you’re like, actually made of candy.”

And then they both snort, and the tension evaporates. There’s a moment of silence, before Marceline pats her on the back and gestures with a wave of her hand. “C’mon, all that running around made me hungry. I think there’s an old soda machine nearby. Bet we could smash it up and get you some parts while we’re there, huh?”

She punctuates the sentence with another lopsided smile, and doesn’t wait for Bonnie to respond before sauntering off. Bonnie watches her go for a moment, her heart still thumping loud enough that she’s surprised Marceline doesn’t hear it. Or she would be, if she was less aware of how her own cardiovascular system worked.

She thinks back to the romance novel they’d been reading together. She has a stack of them in the glove compartment of her truck. A lot of them are missing parts, or are partially rotted. But she cherishes them anyway— she cherishes the flowery prose, and the silly, saccharine protagonists. But she doesn’t think she’s ever fully understood them until now.

The revelation takes all of ten seconds. And then, Bonnie straightens her back, adjusts her scarf, and follows behind Marceline.

☆

Marceline never brings her back to her house. She says that her dad likes to keep it a secret, that he’s real paranoid. Bonnie asks where she gets her attitude from, and Marceline tells her she’s a wild child. And the next day, she brings a red bass guitar in the shape of a labrys.

She tells Bonnie that she can’t bring her home, but she can bring Bonnie something of hers.

And then she sings, and it’s awkward, and fumbling. She keeps stopping to laugh and apologize, adjusting her instrument or clearing her throat before continuing on, or starting a new song altogether.

She sings about making it on your own, and busting up oozers, and day-old fries. She sings about sweet candy, and she looks into Bonnie’s eyes while she does it.

☆

Bonnibel Bubblegum is seventeen years old when everything changes. She’s seventeen years old, and she’s pretty sure she’s gonna die for real this time.

She’s in an old storm drain, up to her ankles in stagnant, tepid water. Marceline’s breathing heavily next to her, and for once in her life she actually looks properly scared. She doesn’t have time to be vindicated now, though, because at their back is a wall of rubble, and in front of them is an army of huge, mutated, six-legged squirrels. Their teeth are long and gnarled, their eyes bulging and blind. They can barely keep themselves upright as they lumber towards them, and if there weren’t so dang many of them, maybe there’d be a chance of fighting them off.

Bonnie feels cold, but she feels calm, too. She’s read, before, about people getting all calm before they die. Like— there’s nothing more you can do, so you might as well close your eyes and accept it. Like your brain is giving you one last moment of peace before you bite the big one.

She looks over at Marceline, awash in pale gray light filtering through tiny holes in the ceiling, and she doesn’t completely think through her words before she says, “Marceline,” she reaches up and presses her palm to Marceline’s cheek. Deep brown eyes, wild with fear, soften minutely when they meet hers. “Before we get all mashed up into squirrel chow—” uh “— can I kiss you?”

Marceline stares at her, slack-jawed, and it lasts for maybe five seconds, which is more than enough time for Bonnie’s mind to start panicking. She flips through apologies, she contemplates going out in a blaze of glory smashing squirrel skulls just to have something to distract her in her final seconds. Her hand jolts away from Marceline’s cheek, but the other girl grabs her wrist and holds it in place.

And then she says, “My dad’s the Vampire King.”

The squirrels are going to be on them in less than thirty seconds. There’s a huge pile of rocks behind them. Bonnie has never been more fucking angry in her entire life. A loud, guttural, “WHAT?” rips from her throat, and it doesn’t even sound like her. In that moment, Bonnie realizes that she has to get out of here alive, because there’s no way she’s going willingly to any dead world with this as her last memory. She whips her blaster out of its holster, tugs Marceline roughly behind her by the arm, and begins to blast the top of the rubble pile.

Bits of stone shoot like bullets, scraping against their skin, “Ow! Bonnie—” Marceline starts, but she’s interrupted by Bonnie hooking an arm under her legs and hoisting her up and through the narrow hole her blasts have managed to create. “Climb, you dink!” And, to her benefit, Marceline climbs, Bonnie hot on her heels.

The two of them fall in a heap on the other side, and Bonnie is ready to tear Marceline a new one right then and there, but one of those freaky squirrels is shoving its grubby mitts through the hole, dislodging more rocks. “Book it, Marceline— this conversation isn’t over,” Bonnie says, shoving Marceline along, which evokes a hiss from the other girl, but she doesn’t argue.

Water soaks into Bonnie’s cargo pants— it seeps into her boots and drenches her socks as they slosh through the tunnel, fighting towards the light at the end. Sunlight breaks upon them, and they don’t stop running. The grass is slippery under their feet, but they climb their way to the top of a hill, so they’re at a vantage point, in the shade of a solitary oak tree, alive against all odds. Kind of like them.

Bonnie’s hands are gripping her knees as she catches her breath, and her jaw is tensed so hard it’s starting to hurt. When she glares up at Marceline, the vampire hugger at least has the self-awareness to look ashamed, for a moment, before she looks away.

“Don’t—” Bonnie huffs, “—don’t look away from me. You have a whole world of explaining to do, like, yesterday.”

“Orrrrr we could go back to that bit about kissing?” Marceline hedges, but Bonnie is having absolutely none of that. The part of her who’d asked for that, minutes ago, is as good as staked through the heart. The look she’s giving Marceline must convey at least some of that, because she swallows, presses her back against the gnarled oak tree, and slides down. Once she hits the ground, she starts bonking her head gently against the tree. “Well, what do you want me to tell you?”

“Uh, how about you start by telling me how long you’ve been rubbin’ shoulders with bloodsuckers?” Bonnie snaps, sitting cross-legged and straight-backed across from Marceline. All business. Marceline looks at her with her biggest puppy-dog eyes, and Bonnie does a valiant job at pretending to be unaffected. “Talk.” She says through gritted teeth.

“I mean—” Marceline clenches her fists, looks at the ground, “I knew you were gonna be weird about this.”

“Uh, no doi? I’ve been staking those suckers since I was old enough to walk— they’re crashing the mammalian population of this continent into nothing, Marceline. It’s not sustainable, and it’s not right.”

Marceline’s shoulders tense, “Oh yeah, because it’s always Bonnibel Bubblegum who gets to decide what’s right.”

“Oh, can it, Marceline! It doesn’t take a masters’ in ethics to figure out that slurpin’ people’s juices up nasty style isn’t a cool thing to do.”

“And so what are we supposed to do—”

“Oh, so it’s we now?” Bonnie is aware that her voice is higher than she’d usually allow it to go. At this volume, they’re bound to draw attention, but she’s past caring about that.

“Yeah— we— because my dad is the Vampire King,” Marceline is standing now, forcing herself into Bonnie’s space. She responds by standing straight and tilting her chin up. She forces herself to look into Marceline’s eyes as she tears their relationship up from the inside. “We don’t have any other choice. We have to feed somehow.”

“Have you tried anything else?” Bonnie’s voice is ice cold. She knows the answer to the question, but she feels no vindication when Marceline averts her gaze. “Of course not.”

Silence hangs between them for a moment, and Bonnie hugs her arms around herself, busies herself by checking the perimeter. The squirrels must’ve found something else to focus on, or they couldn’t manage to get through the opening she made.

“What do you want me to do, Bonnie?” Marceline’s voice is defeated, and sadder than she’s ever heard it.

Bonnie’s grip tightens around herself. She bites down on her tongue and does not let her frustration bubble up into tears. She won’t give Marceline the satisfaction. “I want you to be better than them,” she says, “vampires can’t keep feeding like they have, or you’ll run out of food before the end of the decade, and then,” she shrugs. And then, it didn’t matter. The vampires would turn on themselves, or they’d starve. Either way, it ends in desolation, unless something changes.

She manages to look at Marceline again, and she knows immediately that it’s a mistake. She’s never been able to keep up her walls when those big brown eyes get watery. “You’re not a vampire yet,” she says, reaching out tentatively. Her hand hovers over Marceline’s shoulder, hesitant but inviting— practically begging for her to move into her space. To give her something, anything. Bonnibel Bubblegum has never been one to beg, but the words crowd now at the back of her throat. Please, she wants to say, I don’t have anyone else. Don’t turn your back on me.

Marceline stares at her hovering hand, then meets her gaze. She steps back, and Bonnie’s hand falls back to her side. “Not yet. He isn’t gonna turn me until my eighteenth birthday.”

She says it like an inevitability, like she’s already made her choice. In six months, unless something changes, Marceline is going to build a wall between them that can never be surmounted. Bonnie feels her airways tighten. She should have seen this coming, really, so maybe it’s her fault. It all seems so obvious in retrospect— the secrecy about her dad, the nonchalance about vampires. How did she never see it?

“I think being around you makes me stupid.”

Marceline flinches back, “What’s that supposed to mean?”

Bonnie doesn’t respond. She turns away from the girl she thought she knew, and begins her walk home.

“Goodnight, Marceline,” she whispers, and she doesn’t look back.

☆

Bonnie spends the next six months dedicated to her work. Marceline comes by a few times, tries to start up a conversation, like nothing’s changed. She doesn’t bring up her dad, or anything they talked about. Bonnie ignores her until she leaves, and ignores the way doing so makes her chest ache and burn. She finishes building her tank, and she shows it off to no one.

☆

Bonnibel Bubblegum is eighteen years old the first time she tries to kill Marceline.

She’s been avoiding her. They’ve talked very briefly a couple of times since that day on the hill, but Bonnie isn’t willing to let her guard down again. She keeps thinking about all the sides of herself she’s shown Marceline over the years— about all her silly little passion projects she’s shown off. She let her read her corny romance novels— she wanted to kiss her. She doesn’t understand how she’d miscalculated so severely, but she knows she can’t let it happen again.

Marceline’s birthday grows closer. Usually, on the night of, after Marceline was done spending the day with her family (she thinks, now, about how she was never invited and why, and she bites down so hard on the inside of her cheek that she tastes thick, syrupy blood), the two of them would sit up on a rooftop and watch the sun dip behind the hazy horizon. Bonnie didn’t know when her birthday was when they met, had never thought it mattered. So back on the first birthday they spent together, Marceline declared they could share one.

They would sit, year after year, and exchange gifts, and talk until their eyelids were droopy and they were one good yawn away from passing out in the open.

It was all so miserably soft.

Tonight, she doesn’t bring a gift. She has eight stakes in her belts, and some flash bombs and a pocket knife in the deep pockets of her best cargo pants. In her back pocket— the one that zips up— is the keys to her tank. She’d come here to answer one question, and she’s prepared for whichever answer Marceline has to give her. At least, her mind is ready. Her heart will just have to tough it out.

She doesn’t even make it to the roof before she bumps into Marceline, in the dingy bottom floor of the abandoned house. Half the floorboards are missing, and the ceiling is partially collapsed onto what used to be a couch. Marceline is in a form-fitting knee-length red dress with long sleeves. She looks good. “You came,” she says, sounding breathless. She holds out a tiny box wrapped in newspaper. Bonnie doesn’t take it.

“You said that your dad would turn you when you were eighteen,” she glances at Marceline’s neck, exposed as always, and finds no marks.

Marceline swallows, and Bonnie has to look away again, “I asked him to wait,” she says, “I wanted to talk to you first.”

She knows that she shouldn’t let hope take root in her, but she can’t quite hide her yearning flinch at the words. They hang above her, ripe with possibility. But she won’t be reckless, like she had been before. “Talk to me about what, exactly?” and she makes herself meet Marceline’s eyes as she says it, even if doing so makes it feel like she’s being torn apart and left out in the sun for the vultures.

“Bonnie,” Marceline says carefully, like she thinks Bonnie might break. She steps forward, and Bonnie steps back. Marceline’s eyes are big and brown and beautiful, and so, so sad. “I want to be your friend. I miss you.”

I miss you too, she doesn’t say, because what she really misses is ignorance. But damn if her heart doesn’t twist and burn with desire. Damn if she doesn’t want to push herself into Marceline’s arms and take whatever she’ll give her. But it isn’t just about the two of them. It never has been.

“Marceline, I have one question,” she doesn’t move to grab a weapon yet, but she does adjust her feet for better motion, “do you still plan on becoming a vampire?”

Marceline’s breath hitches, and her eyes dart to the side. Her brows furrow, and again, that pesky little seed of hope threatens to take root. But then, she speaks, and she says, “Yes, Bonnie. I do.”

Bonnie stares at the person she once called friend, and it looks like she’s pleading, though for what, she can’t be sure. Their friendship, maybe. Or maybe just mercy. In either case, Bonnie can’t offer her what she wants.

“Okay, then,” Bonnie says, and she rips a stake out of her belt and bursts into motion.

Her body collides with Marceline’s, and surprise offers her an advantage. Marceline lets out a sharp yelp and crashes against the rotten wood underfoot. She bites out the first part of Bonnie’s name, but is cut short when Bonnie’s palm collides with her forehead and slams her head back.

Tears blur Bonnie’s vision. She wants to get this over with quickly. She’s spent days thinking about how it’ll play out, and days weeping pathetically in her tank when she considered the thought of Marceline’s blood under her fingernails. A necessary evil, she told herself over and over, hoping that in doing so she would solidify it as a truth.

I’m hurting you because I love you, bounces loudly in her skull, but all that erupts from her throat is a formless, pained caterwaul as she slips her pocket knife out and flips it open. She sounds like a trapped animal in its death throes.

“Fuck you, Bonnie!” Marceline cries, and then she jerks up and bites hard where Bonnie’s thumb joint meets her palm. Bonnie’s body reacts before her mind can catch up, and she stumbles backwards, giving Marceline the opportunity to clamber on top of her, legs bracketing her hips. She has a stake in a white-knuckle grip, and Bonnie isn’t sure how she got it, but she’s holding it over her head and shaking, and tears are running down her cheeks and falling onto Bonnie’s scarf.

Something she learned early on, before Marceline was a name in her head, is that hesitation is what gets you killed. Vampires can move lightning quick, and if you pause for even a second, that’s ample time for them to get their fangs in you. Marceline won’t ever be a vampire if she can help it, and right now she’s trembling and clenching her teeth, and her cheeks are flushed with frustration. Bonnie refuses to look in her eyes. She slams a fist against the other girl’s temple and doesn’t waste time watching her roll.

Her legs shake despite her best efforts as she hauls herself up. “I’m doing you a favor, you know,” she says, and she hates that she can hear a waver in her voice. She hates that tears are stinging at the backs of her eyes and her throat is tightening painfully.

“You tried to stab me.”

She isn’t going to get it, and there’s really no point in explaining herself. Marceline has proven she’s too far gone. Years under the Vampire King’s influence has poisoned her mind, and the only antidote is a swift and merciful death. Bonnie clenches tighter around the handle of her knife. “Vampires don’t make it past the first dead world,” is all she can manage to say, and then she has to move again.

Hesitation is what gets you killed. If she pauses, she might change her mind, and she can’t afford that.

She lunges again, but surprise isn’t on her side this time, and Marceline may not be a Vampire, but she was raised in the wasteland, same as her, and for all the worries of her youth, she’s always been a good fighter. She won’t go down without a fight. Good— Bonnie wouldn’t have it any other way.

She’s fast, always has been, and even if she’s rattled from being tossed around, she doesn’t show it. Bright blood trickles down a cut on her forearm as she walks a slow circle around Bonnie, eyes still wide and pleading. “Just let me go, Bon. I don’t wanna hurt you.”

Does she think that Bonnie wanted this? “I’ve been killing vampires my whole life,” she grits out. Marceline knows this. It’s never been a secret. How must it have felt, sneaking around with a vampire hunter, then going back to her den at night. Did she tell the others about her? Did they laugh together at her naivete? Has everything about them always been one big joke?

She’s been killing vampires her whole life, and it’s never hurt like this.

A familiar burn rages through her chest, laps up her throat, and emerges as a deafening roar as she charges, slamming her forearm against Marceline’s chest. Her teeth clack together painfully as the two of them crash into the wall, which creaks under their combined weight.

She presses the blade of her knife to Marceline’s throat, watches as bright red droplets run down steel. She’s stalling. She knows she’s stalling. She could slit her throat in one fluid motion and have it be done with.

The next part happens too quickly, and it’s over in an instant. The hand with the stake— she’d forgotten the stupid stake— flicks up, and then the sharpened end is piercing her eye with an awful pop, and Bonnie is collapsing on the floor, ears ringing and vision swimming. Her hands scramble desperately at her face, and distantly, she hears footsteps against the floor, the clattering of wood on wood. Her breath is coming quick and painful. It burns in her throat.

All at once, half her world is gone.

She looks down at her own trembling hands and finds them coated in her blood— a deep, dark purple. She gasps and flips onto her rear, wildly swinging her head to and fro to find where Marceline might be now.

But she’s nowhere.

She’s gone— fled into the night. Lost to Bonnie forever.

And so Bonnie sits in that old house for a long time, breathing, trying not to cry, trying even harder not to throw up. A parcel wrapped in newspaper lay on the floor, and despite her better judgment, Bonnie unwraps it. Inside is a mostly-intact photo frame, and enshrined within that is a photo of the two of them that Marceline took with an old camera nearly a year ago. In it, Marceline’s arm is slung over Bonnie’s shoulder, and they’re both laughing.

She’s never hated anything more.

She has to patch up her face, to get a good look at it and clean it out before infection sets in. But it’s hard to think logically when she feels like her entire life has been torn to shreds from the inside. She breathes, and she breathes, until the pattern of it is slow and regular and she’s only trembling slightly. And then she stands, wipes blood on her cargo pants, and begins her walk back home. She leaves the gift behind.

She’s eighteen years old, and she has to learn to be alone again.

#adventure time #atimers #fionna and cake #bubbline #marceline abadeer #marceline the vampire queen #princess bubblegum #writing tag #hiiiiiiiiiiiii

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