Bittersweet - Bubbline AU

Chapter Twenty Nine - Forgiving Is Not Forgetting

Hi again!

One more chapter for today, and tomorrow I may bring more two or three of them.

Good reading!

••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••••

The bags were already at her aunt's house. Well, not all of them, but the ones she managed to take away. A lot of things haven't been released by her parents. And the car was out of the question.

She stopped at her girlfriend's house door, her hand frozen on the doorknob. She didn't want to talk about all the issues of this situation.  She didn't want to ask her girlfriend and brother-in-law what it was like to be sure of their mother's love. She didn't want to ask Megan how it was possible that she was a multimillionaire in love with her own children, while her parents had no problem sending her and Neddy away when they weren't perfect enough.

She took a deep breath, entered the house and walked to the kitchen. She didn't say anything, just stood silently at the door, watching the scene.

"Mom, I swear I'm gonna beat his shit" - Marceline tried to keep a serious tone in her voice in the mid of a barely muffled laugh, trying to reach the apple that her brother kept out of her reach, raising it above her head and laughing.

Megan sneaked up behind him, and gave him a few nudges in the waist, making the boy squirm up. In that split second of vulnerability, Marceline retrieved the fruit and ran to the other side of the table, exchanging a high five with her mother.

"I can't stand the matriarchal dictatorship of this house anymore," Marshall muttered, and then burst into laughter with the two of them.

Bonnibel swallowed hard. Still silent, he slipped out, walked around the house, and entered the studio through the outer door. She leaned her back against the wall and slid almost in slow motion to the floor.

Tears flowed on their own accord, but her expression was frozen in apathy. None of it felt real. The world plummeted around her, and she stood there, waiting to be crushed under the rubble.

It wasn't until more than two hours later that Marceline found her there, when she went to get her bass. Lying in an almost fetal position, facing the wall with the same inert expression.

Marceline ran to her, and there was no need to say anything. The way Bonnibel looked at her was enough. Even so, she began to babble, her voice almost robotic:

"I... I took my things to my aunt's house. I needed to see Neddy... and I don't have a car anymore and you were at the records, so... but it's just that she lives too far from school and I don't have a car and... I didn't want to have to stay here, I-I don't want to bother you but I don't know if I have another place and-"

"Hey, my princess...", Marceline limited herself to hugging the girl when she broke down and started crying, as hard as she could. She didn't try to comfort with words, not now. She still didn't have enough good words, she believed.

But for a moment Bonnibel's mind was on something else. She remembered how she hated being called that word before. How fake it sounded in the mouths of the football team guys, but mostly how disgusting she sounded in Marceline's voice at first. And how it came to sound sensual afterward, carnal to the limit.

And how now it was almost the thing she loved hearing from her mouth the most. Her life was one step away from falling apart. But on that moment, being Marceline's princess was the closest she'd ever felt to being at home.

[...]

"So you really weren't aware of that?"  asked Megan. She, Marceline and Bonnibel were in her office, going over the paperwork she had received from her lawyers.