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In the beginning, there was emptiness.
Bonnibel could recall the exact moment it happened, the second she broke apart from the hivemind of the Mother Gum and became an independent individual. She could recall it because of the overwhelming loneliness it brought - a hole carved on her chest, as painful as ripping off a limb, so violent and abrupt she didn’t even have time to scream.
From the very beginning, Bonnibel feared she would collapse into it, her insides crumbling around the edges, her entire soul sucked into that pit.
She didn’t know how to cry back then. That only came later.
Saying she tried to fill in that emptiness with the people she created wasn’t exactly right. Rather, if forced to think on it, Bonnibel would say the candy people were born of her abyss - fruits of creativity and ingenuity that only a deep existential despair could ever fuel. She created not of a need to silence her anguish, but as a way to voice it.
And voice it she did, in the best way she could. Rather than give them her pain, she gave them everything else, and made them what she wished she could be, and vowed to make them happy. There were mistakes, of course, mistakes on her part that she would think about at night while she tried to convince herself she was a good person.
She lived with those. Had to.
The candy people were simple people. They were simple for a variety of reasons. They were simple because that made them happier.They were simple because Bonnibel struggled with understanding people, and so she found it better that way. They were simple because when she tried to make someone complicated, she messed up.
They were simple like her brother Neddy was simple, and though that made them good subjects, it also made them bad company. And so Bonnibel was alone. She met other people, of course - people whose existences were as strange and illogical as her own.
But it was not an easy thing, interacting with those so different. She didn’t know what to do or what to say. She was used to sharing her every thought, her every feeling with the Hive. There were no misunderstandings then, and any sort of communication seemed to pale in comparison.
She’d learned, with her first creations, the risks of miscommunication. Bonnie was a quick learner, and she found some risks were just too high to take.
And then there was Marceline, the cool to her scorching inner fire, the magic to her science, the mountains to her bottomless pit. That's how it felt, being with her - like climbing the highest of peaks, like bridging the widest of gaps, like sliding from one end to the other of a rainbow in the search of a pot of gold.
That was how it had always felt, even when they first met. The Candy Kingdom had been small back then, and though it was never easy to run, she used to have more time to be herself - back when she wasn't trying to bury that person under piles of equations and glass flasks with mysterious liquids.
It was a cloudy evening. Bonnie remembered that, because she'd spotted Marceline on a hill, and she'd found it in herself to start over - to try the whole people thing again. And so she'd climbed up the hill, and she'd turned to that stranger and spoke.
“Looks like it's going to rain,” she'd said, because she'd read somewhere that talking about the weather was a good conversation starter.
“That's all right,” Marceline had replied, without looking at her. “I'm not made of sugar.”
Bonnie fixed the whole candy-people-and-rain issue, eventually. But on that day, all she ended up doing was letting out a strangled sound of surprise and realization, and then ran back to herd her subjects indoors.
Lake Butterscotch was a fairly remote place.
That was something Bonnie always thought, whenever she visited, whenever she needed an escape. On the way to her former uncle’s cabin, she’d sit down for a break and look at the lake, and think just how far away it was from everything. She could think of a billion reasons why it would be a terrible place to build a city.
The thought struck her with a twinge of anguish she pushed to the back of her mind.
There were fishes in the lake - little butterscotch-and-honey, candy wrapped creatures, sometimes sentient, sometimes not. Bonnie wasn’t entirely sure of how much she needed to eat - she couldn’t consistently identify the sensation of hunger - but she’d often stop by the place’s single shop and get herself a can of fish.
She’d tried fishing, several times. She found she didn’t quite have the patience or the flair for it. And so when, on her way, she met someone sitting on the edge with a fishing rod, she couldn’t help but stop and watch and wonder whether that was a thing she could learn.
Marceline, though she didn’t know her name back then, was floating.
“The rain is radioactive,” Bonnie said before any kind of greeting. It had been on her mind since the two met. The strange blue-skinned girl hadn’t been made out of candy, but the rain was radioactive and it hurt and it burned, even to people whose very building blocks didn’t melt under it. “It rains knives, sometimes. You should be more careful.”
Marceline turned to her, just her head, twisting it at an almost hundred-eighty degrees angle that should have been impossible. She smiled. Bonnie smiled back, or tried to. She was still learning. “That’s okay. I’m immortal.”
“That sounds like a lonely thing to be,” Bonnie replied without thinking.
Marceline tilted her head, a funny thing to look at considering the position it was in. “We should be friends, then. So we can be lonely together.”
Bonnie had never had a friend before - not one she hadn’t created, not one she could talk to for longer than five minutes. She hadn’t counted how long she and that girl had been talking to, but she had a feeling they could talk for longer than that.
“I’ve never been friends with anyone,” she admitted. She used to speak her heart, back then. Like the tears, the lying and twisting only came later. “I don’t know how.”
Marceline un-twisted her neck and turned, this time full body. “That’s all right. I’ll teach you.”
“Is it a thing you can learn?” Bonnie asked, because she was curious and inquisitive, but some things she’d run across seemed too daunting, too difficult to understand on her own. One of them was people. Another, she supposed, was fishing.
“What an odd question.” Marceline smiled. “You can learn anything, when there’s someone willing to teach you.”
That seemed like a good thing to believe on, so Bonnie decided it was a truth. She took a step closer, and then she sat down on the edge of the lake and stared at the weird colors it reflected under the setting sun. “Can you teach me how to fish, too?”
Marceline floated down, until her butt almost touched the floor, and extended her the rod. “Of course. Here, try it.”
Bonnie didn’t catch any fishes that day, but that was all right. She made a friend.
And she was still learning.
Bonnie and Marceline were sitting on a couch made of jelly-o. Or rather, Bonnie was sitting. Marceline, she’d learned, didn’t usually touch things, just hovered slightly above them, close enough to seem like she was sitting when she wasn’t. There was a pre-mushroom war movie playing, but Bonnie wasn’t paying attention, because she had a much more pressing question on her mind.
There was a bowl between them, filled with jelly beans. Just the red ones. Marceline ate colors, and red was her favorite color to eat. She didn’t actually eat the jelly beans, once she’d sucked the color out of them, just placed them back on a second bowl.
“What does red taste like?” Bonnie asked when she could no longer hold the question back. She wasn’t sure whether it was an insensitive thing to ask - she never knew - but at that point curiosity was eating her alive.
Marceline, who had been more or less sitting-floating, turned upside down in the air, making her hair fall down over Bonnie’s shoulder. “Spicier than pink, but not as liquid as purple.”
It answered everything and nothing at all. Bonnie let herself fall on the back of the couch and bounce right back. Marceline’s eyes were still following the movie, her hand extending automatically to grab the next piece of candy. “Here,” she said, when she was done with the next one. “Give it a try.”
Bonnie took the sweet from her, held it between her fingers. It was a strange thing, that candy without color - it wasn’t white, which she knew was supposed to be a mixture of all visible light colors - but it wasn’t black either, even though black was technically no color. It wasn’t exactly transparent or exactly reflective.
It was a nothing and an everything all at once - black and white and mirrory and see-through. Looking at it too much made her a bit dizzy, so she just popped it inside her mouth instead.
It still tasted of sugar. It still tasted of cherry. But it wasn’t quite the same, in a way Bonnie didn’t think she would ever be able to explain.
“Red tastes like what is missing,” Marceline said, watching Bonnie’s frown as she swallowed the sweet.
It still made no sense whatsoever, but now Bonnie understood it a little bit better.
She’d heard music before. She’d even made music before, clumsy synthetic sounds on electronic keyboards that were only more-or-less rhythmic.
But when Marceline made music, it felt like something else entirely.
“I don’t get it,” Bonnie said after a jam session. Jam session was what they called it, but in reality she’d just sit and watch as Marceline produced tunes that caused her a thousand feelings she couldn’t quite name.
“What? My lyrics?” Her fingers plucked absently at the strings, as if on their own accord, producing a tune she hadn’t yet heard. Marceline’s fingers, it seemed, were directly linked to her heart, translating its every pump into harmonic beats.
“No, I get the lyrics, the lyrics are your feelings,” She replied, trying to translate her thoughts into words. She wished, not for the first time, she had Marceline’s natural inclination to it. “I don’t get your feelings.”
“You don’t get my - huh.” Marceline let go of the guitar, placed it on the corner of the room, and floated down to where she sat on the bed. “Don’t candy-people have feelings?”
“I do have feelings,” Bonnie placed a hand over her own heart, felt it drum under her skin. “They’re just...hard. To name. To understand. I don’t know.”
“Well, it’s feelings, you’re not supposed to understand them,” Marceline punched her on the shoulder. “Just, you know. Feel them. What do they feel like?”
“They’re all tangled up and messy.” Bonnie stared at her, watched her tuck her hair behind her ear. The strands were soft and silky and she wanted to touch them, but that was rude. “There’s too many all at once. I don’t know. It’s too hard.”
“You’re overthinking it, Bonnie. You’re always overthinking things. Here.” She hovered back to her guitar, picked it up without wrapping the strap around her shoulders, and resumed whatever tune she had been playing. “What does this make you feel?”
There was something about it - a melancholy, maybe sadness, all translated into the low beats and how they dragged and overlapped. And then there was something else, much stronger, something about how looking at Marceline play made her heart squeeze a bit tighter.
She couldn’t pinpoint what that was about, either - could be the way she looked when her shoulders relaxed and her half-lidded eyes stared from across the room. Could be how she ever-so-lightly changed her floating pattern to the tune, wiggling left and right in beat with the slow music. Could be, could be.
It was magic, she decided. Magic were things which she had no explanation for, and she could never explain this.
“What are you feeling?” Marceline asked, when she caught her staring. “I can almost see the little gears turning in your head. Stop that. Don’t think, just feel.”
“My heart does a funny thing when you play,” she felt heat crawl to her cheeks, something which happened a lot when she had a fever or when Marceline was around. “It makes me want to… I don’t know. Touch you. And be around you.”
Marceline missed a key, throwing the whole song off beat. She cleared her throat and looked away and put the guitar back down. “Bonnie, you can’t just - just say things like that.”
“You asked what I was feeling,” she frowned, confused and mildly indignant.
“You just - you have no filter at all, do you?” Marceline still didn’t look at her. “God, it’s like - you have the brain of a genius but when it comes down to feelings, you’re like a little kid.”
“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?”
“It’s… a thing. A you thing.” She paused. “A good thing, I think. Or at least it feels good to me. No, not good.” She turned, and Bonnie had a chance to see the pink on her cheeks. “It’s wonderful.”
Now her whole face felt on fire, and the impulse to reach out and touch was stronger than ever, so Bonnie stood, and she walked to Marceline, and pulled her into a hug. Marceline was warm when it was cold and cold when it was warm, but right then Bonnie couldn’t tell which it was because her heart was beating too fast and being that close to Marceline made it hard to think.
“My stomach did a little twinge,” She said, and Marceline pulled away from the hug but didn’t make eye contact.
“Let’s get you something to eat.”
“I don’t think it was -”
“It was definitely hunger,” Marceline didn’t let her finish and grabbed her hand. “One hundred percent hunger. Trust me.”
“Okay,” she nodded, because she did trust Marceline and Marceline seemed more skilled with feelings than she was.
“So, are you in the mood for ice cream?”
“I’m always in the mood for ice cream,” she replied, “But you can’t eat the pink out of mine this time.”
“No promises, princess. Race you downstairs?”
“What? No.” She stood. “You always win because you can just fly -”
But Marceline was already laughing and already gone, so she took a deep breath and raced after, because Bonnie didn’t mind losing, but she’d never lose without a fight.
“I don’t get it,” Marceline said as they flew away from the Ice Kingdom, Bonnie latched to her like a backpack. The wind was cold against her face and the flying, though she would never admit it, made her a little bit anxious. “You have all these smarts and all these resources and yet this keeps happening. Why don’t you stop it?”
Bonnie looked back at the castle where the Ice King had been keeping her for the last couple days, then stared at the emptiness ahead and shrugged. “He’s your dad, isn’t he? Or, well. Sort of your dad.”
“Yeah, so?”
“I don’t know.” She struggled an answer. “It was scary the first time, but he never does anything bad, really. I just sit on the cage and listen to him ramble. I bring a book. He makes nice food. It’s not a big deal.” Something flew into her peripheral vision and she tapped the top of Marceline’s head. The two immediately dropped in altitude, making whatever projectile miss them altogether. “I guess it just feels right for me to… check on him. And besides, you always come to rescue me so I get to see you, too.”
“Oh.”
She could already see the Candy Kingdom in the distance, together with a flock of magma winged toasters flapping away from the Kingdom of Fire. She patted Marceline on the left shoulder and they changed directions, heading to the mountains instead so they could wait the toasters out.
“Nasty things,” Marceline said. Bonnie took a seat on a rock, but Marceline didn’t join her. “Did you really mean it? You let him kidnap you… for me?”
Bonnie frowned. “That’s a way of interpreting it, I suppose. I do think the elderly are the responsibility of all of society and since the Ice Kingdom doesn’t have any inhabitant sentient enough to uphold basic morality I feel compelled to -”
“What are you even talking about,” Marceline turned to her, snorting, and made her way to her.
“He’s important to you, so he’s important to me too, because you’re important to me,” she summarized.
Next to her, Marceline tensed. “Do you mean that? That I’m important?”
“Of course I do, I never say things I don’t mean, you know that -” She cut herself short when something else caught her attention. “You’re touching the floor. And sitting on the rock. You never touch the floor or sit on stuff.”
“Shh,” Marceline waved it off. “Hey. Can I show you something?”
“Is it the weird slit-pupil thing again? Are you going to jumpscare me?” She crossed her arms over her chest.
“God, Bonnibel, you are so blind,” Marceline replied, and closed the distance between them, and touched her on the cheek.
It was cold, so she was warm.
“I’m going to kiss you,” Marceline warned, and leaned in. Her heart did a little flip on her chest. Her stomach twinged even though she’d just had dinner with the Ice King.
“Okay - mmf.”
She felt lightheaded when they broke apart. Her hands were shaking and Marceline didn’t look her in the eye. Bonnie wasn’t good with feelings, but sometimes they were too strong to ignore. “That felt nice,” she said, and then concern got the better of her and she added, “Was it nice for you too?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s good. I really like you, Marcy. Like, like you.” She was blushing, but she was also feeling brave, and so she added, “And, um. We could do that again.”
Marceline didn’t answer, but she smiled, and that made Bonnie’s insides flutter again. “Look. The toasters are gone, we can get going.” She didn’t move.
“We can,” Bonnie replied, but didn't move either. She leaned on Marceline’s chest, and tangled her fingers on the soft and silken hair she’d been dying to touch for so long. “Or we could stay here a little bit longer.”
“Won’t your subjects miss you?”
“They have such short memories, they might not even remember I’m gone,” she shrugged. “They’ll live.”
Marceline chuckled, and she could hear the way her lungs expanded and feel the way her rib cage moved under her fingers, and she realized she wanted to kiss her again. It was a fortunate thing that Bonnie was such a quick learner.
She pressed her body against Marceline’s, pushing her against the mountain, and held her face and pressed their lips together.
The sound of surprise she got made it twice as satisfying.
She didn’t know when things between them got so complicated. Didn’t know why. There was no big event, no big fight, no single moment she could pinpoint as the moment they were broken apart. In a way, she wished there had been one - just so she understood what happened and could make up for it.
Just so she knew.
But Bonnie didn’t know, and she suspected as good with feelings as she was, Marceline didn’t know either. And so they were left with loneliness, and resentment, and an ache at her heart the likes of which Bonnie hadn’t felt since that very first day when she broke from the Hive and became who she was.
It was insidious, the way it happened. One night Marceline didn’t kiss her goodnight. One night, Marceline didn’t share her bed. One night, Marceline didn’t float through the window, her hair a mess from flying and a smirk on her lips. One night, she didn’t show up at all.
There were arguments, of course, and she tried so hard to understand where she went wrong. To fix it. That was what she did best, after all - she found problems and she fixed them, with her flasks and her pills and her science. But they couldn’t communicate .
Marceline couldn’t quite word what the problem was, and Bonnie couldn’t quite figure it out, and her attempts to blindly fix it did more harm than good. She asked herself, more than once, what was wrong with her and why couldn’t she just get it. And when she was not angry at herself, she’d be angry at Marceline, for not being able to explain it.
That was when she learned to cry. That was when she learned to lie.
In the end, the two were just too tired to keep going. But at night, Bonnie could never quite bring herself to lock the bedroom window.
Bonnie buried herself in her work deeper than she ever had. The Ice King stopped coming, and that, oddly enough, felt like a second blow - as if she’d lost not one but two parts of her family. Two parts of herself. The candy people smiled at her, and they needed her, and she clung to that to keep her afloat - to being needed and loved.
And when night came, she’d grab that shirt from the closet and put it on and promise herself that was the last time, and she’d get rid of it in the morning.
And when morning came, she’d put it back on the drawer and feel her insides crumble inside her old friend, the abyss.
It had been years since the Ice King had last kidnapped her, and when Bonnie found herself between ice bars again, her heart couldn’t help but hope. All the things she’d worked so hard - literally and metaphorically - to keep inside a vault threatened to break through the surface.
She didn’t know how she would react if she saw Marceline again. It scared her.
But the Ice King would never kidnap if he wasn’t sure she would be rescued, as she’d learned, and so she sat down with her book, and made small talk with him, and waited. It was both a relief and a crushing disappointment when the one who came to rescue her wasn’t the vampire queen, but a little boy and his talking dog.
“Hi, princess,” He said with an innocence and gentleness that only a child could ever muster. “My name is Finn, and that’s my friend Jake.”
And Bonnie wasn’t usually overcome by feeling, but right then, in that state of vulnerability and expectation and fear, she felt her walls shatter and her feelings go loose, and when she looked at him she realized,
I was his age when I tried to create a family for myself.
It was more overwhelming than anything she’d ever experienced - a lightning bolt of empathy and sadness and admiration and all things inbetween.
“Princess!” He wore a hat with little ears on top of his head, and he was still missing one of his milk teeth, the tip of the permanent one that would replace it just showing on his gums. “Are you hurt?”
“No, Finn,” she replied, wiping the tears with the back of her sleeve. “I’m just happy you were here to rescue me. You’re a hero!”
He beamed at her, and she felt something inside her crack.
Bonnie swallowed her tears until she was alone, and then she could hold them no more.
To her defense, she tried her best to be the parental figure she never had.
But she had no reference and no guidelines. Finn was energetic and eager, and he got into more trouble she could fathom. He was so sweet and so candid he might as well have been a candy person.
Bonnie wasn’t sure what she should be to him, and so she tried many things. She couldn’t do mother, so she tried big sister, but that wasn’t quite right either. She tried to fit herself in the same archetypes she’d used to build her family, but what failed once failed again, and so she tried to be a friend.
She messed up quite a few times. But Finn was a generous kid who forgave easy and loved openly. He had a little crush on her, for a while, which was a delicate situation for the both of them, because her heartbreak was fresh and unending and she would never want to inflict that on anyone else.
Bonnie didn’t know what to do about it, like she usually didn’t when it came down to dealing with people. But rather than teaching her how to act, Finn ended up teaching her a much more valuable lesson - that it was okay to not know.
There was something about his unconditional love that made her feel adequate despite her inadequacies, something heartwarming about knowing someone that noble could even exist. He challenged her in every way - challenged her to forgive and apologize and plead and thank and have fun while at it, because to him life was beautiful and meant to be one great adventure every day.
And maybe that was what did it, what finally got the gears in her heart to turn in synch with the gears in her brain again. She didn't know. Like with Marceline, there wasn’t one clear moment of shift, but rather a long process she only fully grasped when she saw its consequences.
Consequences she met when she looked out the window and saw Finn with Marceline herself, no less. And consequences she met later, when she found a pack of wolves in her bedroom, and she realized she wasn’t mad at it - that perhaps a mean prank was the lesser kind of punishment she deserved.
To her defense, she did her best to plan ahead to their confrontation.
To her defense, she didn’t account for a musical door and a shirt-stealing door lord and god damn, she still couldn’t predict Marceline at all.
This time, though, she realized perhaps that was the problem. Perhaps she shouldn’t be trying to predict or breakdown or fix. Perhaps she should have stopped thinking and just felt things, and it sure took her time to figure that out.
It made for one hell of an awkward ride home.
“So…” she began, when Marceline had dropped her off her room - through the window, as always. She seemed allergic to doors. For whatever reason that single shred of familiarity was what gave Bonnie the confidence to get the words out, even though she wasn’t sure what the words would be. “I don’t think you’re a problem. I’m sorry, Marcy, I messed up.”
“Bonnie -”
“No, listen, please, let me finish.” She hopped off the bed, stood and paced. “I know my approach to things can be… blunt and cold and cerebral and - and I know I can be obstinate and insensitive. And if I made you feel like a problem and not a person I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean it. I care about you, I just… don’t know how else to show it. This must be so frustrating -”
“Do you mean that?” Marceline floated down from the window and put her hands on Bonnie’s shoulders. “Do you really care?”
She clutched Marceline’s shirt close to her chest and tried to speak, but her voice broke and now the tears were blurring her vision and her heart ached so much she could have fainted. “Marcy, I always cared. I’m just shit at how I go about it. And I know it’s no excuse, but…”
Marceline broke eye contact. “It isn’t all on you. You got so caught up on work and I - I got scared. That you’d be like my dad and just… forget me. And I think that made me close down and made everything worse.”
“I just wanted to build -” She paused then, because she wasn’t sure what, exactly, she was trying to build, until it clicked inside her head in an epiphany and she understood. “Love. I wanted to build it so bad I didn’t - didn’t see you trying to give it to me. I’m not perfect, Marcy. I just like to pretend so. I don’t know.” She let her head fall, resting her forehead on Marceline’s shoulders. “I don’t know anymore. It’s just so lonely out here. Everything is so difficult. But you were a good thing and I spoiled that. I’m tired, and I miss you, and I don’t want you to go again.”
She felt a hand on her nape. It was warm, so Marceline was cold - popsicle fingers that she liked to sneak around and touch people with to get them to squirm. She felt Marceline rest her chin on her scalp, just like she did when Bonnie had nightmares. “You kept having all those new responsibilities that forced you to grow and I guess I just… didn’t want to. I was so attached to what we were that I lost sight of what we could be.”
“What can we be, Marcy?” she asked. She watched her own teardrops fall on her toes. She was made of sugar, but she’d long fixed the melting-down-by-crying issue. “It’s been so long. We’re so different.” Even as she said it she reached out to Marceline’s free hand, interlaced their fingers.
“We are. It’s a good thing, don’t you think? You’re not as insensitive. I’m not as irresponsible. We can give this another try. Make it work.” The hand that was on her nape moved to her jaw and tilted her head up. “Besides, not everything has changed, has it?”
She felt the squeeze in her heart and the twinge of not-quite-hunger in her stomach. “No. Not everything. I -” the words were stuck in her throat, even though she meant them. “I…”
“It’s okay,” Marceline replied, and pressed their foreheads together. “I know. Me too. Now let’s not rush it anymore. Take your time.”
She wanted to cry again, but then Marceline was wiping her tears with her sleeve and hugging her tight and she felt like everything was right in the world again. “There’s this emptiness that I’ve felt since… since always, I think. And I don’t know what to do with it, and it makes me afraid that I can’t be the person you deserve. I think it’s loneliness. I’m an odd thing, a freaky thing of which there’s only one, and in the Hive I was never misunderstood and never alone.”
“I’m one of a kind too, Bonnie,” she bumped their noses together. Her touch left Bonnie’s skin feeling funny, as if the sugar that made it was spontaneously turning to caramel even though Marceline was cold. “That’s us. Two strange creatures bound together by an even stranger fate. You don’t have to be perfect for me. And your emptiness…”
She broke contact, floated away to the bed and sat on the mattress - really sat on it, making the blankets sink with her weight. Bonnibel plopped down next to her, making their shoulders touch. “I have a magic device right here, Princess,” Marceline flipped the axe from her back to her front, fingers dancing over the strings. “It turns emptiness into melody.”
“Play me a song, then,” Bonnie let herself fall down on the mattress and stared at the roof. “But not that one you played today. That one was mean.”
Marceline laughed, and that was just as musical as anything she could have played on the guitar.