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It turns out, when the end comes, that it never could have been any other way.
The perfect full circle logic of it is almost joyous, the reckless adrenaline of falling, of endings, of mutually assured destruction.
This fate, Bonnie decides in the moments she has left, was written from the start. Every past version of her would scoff at the idea, say fate doesn't belong in a scientific mind. Maybe it took the ending, to make her believe.
Two girls in the apocalypse, secrets living in Bonnie's head that she will never tell a soul, sweet things that went sour, bitter, salty as blood. Hands clawing at a cheek they once cupped.
Of course, it would always be this. The two of them, at the very end, unable to let go.
You're mine, The Star said once, before she was The Star at all. The days she held the name Bonnie will never let pass her lips these days, holding it to her like the last relic of something long lost, long hated, long loved.
Bonnie doesn't remember the rest. She will not let herself remember. The flashes come back in dreams sometimes, but she never lets them surface beyond that. Beyond flickers of laughter that didn't ring cruel and cold, hands clasped between two children of the devastation, comfort in the closeness of someone else just as lonely, just as doomed.
That, and those words, you're mine. Like that was a good thing. Like it meant something precious and close and held, maybe, like she wanted it, like she was Bonnie's, too.
Were those the last days before everything had started to fall? Before the days The Star sold it all for something approximating a father? Before the days Bonnie called her monstrous like it was already fact, words ringing with the death knell of a self-fulfilling prophecy?
They are days she'll die before she lets herself remember. Even now, in the length of the last few heartbeats (if either of them really had a beating heart), she won't let them in.
Your life is mine, The Star said once, a different time, somewhere in the long years of fighting. Everything I've taken, and look at you, still coming back for more. I'm almost flattered.
Nothing about me is yours, Bonnie had told her, like they'd never had anything of each other, like my enemy didn't still mean mine.
The Star laughed then, cold, and Bonnie stifled the echoes of another time. Your time, your weapons, your every furious little thought. You put your whole life into trying to beat me, and it never even works. How sad for you, and yet you still keep trying. Tell me again, how your life isn't mine.
Bonnie's hands had wrapped round her throat then, fighting till The Star left her in the dust, one hand pressed to the gummy strips of torn flesh where her eye used to be.
You're mine, your life is mine, and something in Bonnie is furious that after all, it's true. Here, at the end, her life in The Star's hands. Only the inverse is true, too. The Star's life is hers, held here, and there's a perfect symmetry in that. The almost satisfaction of mutually assured destruction.
Together, then.
Together, or not at all. Together, or peace, and peace is not an option.
The last breath, the last moment, and the name she never lets herself think bursts into her head.
I guess you were right, Marceline. In the end, the two of us. In the end, you were mine. In the end, I was yours.