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The thing is, Bonnibel knew how Maja’s magic worked. As much as she looked down on magic on general principle and really, really tried to make her space a magic-free zone, you couldn’t avoid it. Magic was baked into the fabric of Oo like science was baked into her gum. Magic was everywhere you went, and keeping it out of her space was like running against the wind. Every bit of progress you made just got battered down in a couple of days. And asides from that, Bonnibel and Maja had tangled before. She knew how Maja’s magic worked, and she knew how those potions of hers worked.
(—shouldn’t get so attached to my stuff; it could get smashed any time. But that thought was a relic of a bygone age, when Bonnibel was a different kind of person, and she put the thought away.)
Okay, the invoices were a bit of a surprise, because really? Maja was not the kind of person Bonnibel would have expected to keep invoices. Not hardly. But when one has limited resources, one uses the resources they have, and—
(I’m a princess I shouldn’t get so attached to a shirt I have bigger stuff to worry about I shouldn’t—
There were a lot of ‘I shouldn’ts’ in Bonnibel’s vocabulary, she was noticing. She couldn’t really… She really couldn’t… It was just a tidal wave of I shouldn’ts crashing towards her, and she couldn’t find the energy to run away from it. All she could hear was the roaring of the wave screaming at her in her own voice:
Ishouldn’tIshouldn’tIshouldn’t
She was tired.)
Marceline had looked so happy when Bonnibel tossed her that old, ragged, honestly kinda smelly doll. (Then again, if Bonnibel had gone millennium without a bath, she hoped she’d smell as good as that—sweet things could turn pretty thoroughly rank.) She’d looked happy at the moment of reunion, and kept looking happy even as they were fleeing Maja’s house. Bonnibel wasn’t going to pretend they were doing anything else; just because the trade was good, didn’t mean Maja wasn’t going to chop them up for potion parts.
Admittedly, Bonnibel couldn’t always be certain that a smile and watery eyes really signaled happiness. Half of her subjects had smiles permanently affixed to their faces (she’d made them that way, once upon a time, in a time when she couldn’t conceive of why she’d want otherwise), had the shared habit of smiling even when they weren’t especially happy. Hell, that was Bonnibel’s habit; it had just bred true in her candy children.
She was getting off track. It was hard to focus when she kept thinking about all the work she had to do, but she’d try.
The smile, by itself, didn’t immediately clue Bonnibel in to just how happy Marceline was to have that old doll back. The hug Marceline had enveloped Bonnibel in once they’d gotten clear of Maja’s house and the cursed forest in which it dwelled helped solidify it in her mind.
Marceline… Bonnibel couldn’t ever remember her being very ‘huggy.’ Sometimes, she wondered if the fact that she wasn’t always very huggy didn’t have something to do with that. There was only so much PDA Bonnibel could handle in a twenty-four hour stretch, only so much of it she could take even when you removed ‘p’ from the equation, and for the life of her, she couldn’t remember how Marceline had been with the more physical aspect of their relationship. It had been ages (Nearly literally). There were some things Bonnibel just couldn’t remember anymore.
The hug was—
They’d parted ways about a mile out from the hedge. After Bonnibel made contact with the Candy Kingdom to let them know she was on her way back, she thought she’d just walk back. Walking back would see her getting home sometime around noon tomorrow, and true, a delay like that meant that she had to fight to keep her mind from straying to thinking of literally everything that could go wrong while she was gone, but it was… Nice. It was quiet.
(It would be fine. It was gonna be fine. Finn and Jake and Peppermint Butler were there to hold down the fort until she got back. It would be fine. Fine. Just fine. It would be fine.)
Bonnibel wondered if time didn’t work a bit differently in Maja’s little domain, because when they’d left, it had been several hours later than Bonnibel would have thought. Still daylight, still enough light that Marceline had to wear a cloak and a mask and gloves, but Bonnibel would have thought they’d gotten out of there around two, and instead it was closer to five in the afternoon. There was a moment when Bonnibel honestly wished she was on better terms with Maja; even if the effect was magical in nature and not scientific, it would have been fascinating to study.
Anyways.
Bonnibel didn’t get out this way too often. It was nice. Not a lot of people lived out here, so it was mostly just light forest and meadows full of pink and yellow flowers. When she was little, she’d liked making flower crowns. It was coming back to her now. When she was little, when she and Neddy were somewhere reasonably safe, she’d picked flowers with long stems and weave them into crowns. They were nice—the petals were soft and smelled so sweetly (Until they got past wilting to the point where they started smelling rank). Neddy didn’t like them. Well, he liked looking at them, as much as he ever liked looking at anything, but the one time Bonnibel had tried putting a flower crown on his head, he’d just screamed and screamed until she took it off of him.
And it was quiet. All Bonnibel could hear was the breeze, the wind blowing through the leaves and the grass. That was nice. It was nice, up until the point where her mind started to tune it out, and it got harder than ever to ignore her own thoughts.
The hug was—
It had been a long time since Bonnibel had roughed it by herself. And not even in any official capacity, either. She found herself staring into the glow of the fire she had lit, and her mind kept darting back and forth, from one thing to another to another to another.
Bonnibel was beginning to remember why she hated taking days off from work.
Finally, her mind settled on one topic and wouldn’t leave: the shirt.
She felt like she was missing a part of her own body with it gone. She’d had that shirt for she couldn’t even remember how many years now, had done so many things to it to keep it from fraying or tearing or fading, so many things to keep the print from flaking away. She’d worn it to bed nearly every night for—
It hadn’t been much of a substitute, but it had been quite a lot, in its own way.
And now it was gone.
Bonnibel knew how Maja’s magic worked. She knew she couldn’t have given Maja anything that wouldn’t have been hell to part with. She didn’t regret it, not really; at least, Bonnibel knew she shouldn’t regret it. All this over a beat-up old toy, but knew she shouldn’t regret it. She’d gone to that house to help Marceline, and she really shouldn’t get so attached to her stuff, anyways. And thinking of Marceline’s joy to get her old toy back was… nice. It saw a smile stealing over Bonnibel’s lips, the soft, wobbly smile of tired satisfaction.
Bonnibel stoked the fire with a stick, and wished, briefly, that she’d asked Marceline to stick with her as far as the edge of the Candy Kingdom. Maybe when she got home, she could call her up. Maybe they could find time to actually hang out. She thought she’d like that.
(She just hoped Marceline wouldn’t ever find out about the shirt.)