19 / smeagol
It's not something he hasn't asked himself.
"How long do you think we would've lasted?"
In 1994, she means. She brings it up because she hates the way he drinks the syrup right out of the bottle when he's cooking.
It's taco night. She's chopping tomatoes while he caramelizes onions on the stove, and he can feel her itching to smack the syrup bottle out of his hands every time he picks it up or stab it out of them with a pickaxe if this were then. But he already drank all the beer and the syrup they've been making is delicious. She keeps telling him to stop wasting it, but he insists Buck wouldn't mind a little tasting tax, and he says it with a flourish and a glug, to her everlasting revulsion.
"In what sense?" he asks. "Like in a dirty way?"
"Ew, no."
"What?"
"I never—"
"It was a literal last-man-on-Earth scenario. You can't at least fib to a guy?"
It's possible he's done some light fantasizing.
"I mean in the sense that we're coexisting now. Even with your so-called empathy we're at each other's throats sometimes." He watches her push a pile of tomato cubes to the corner of the cutting board with the edge of her knife. "I just wonder, if we were still over there, how long we would've lasted."
"Well, I couldn't be killed."
"Fine. How long before..."
"Before I killed you?"
She lets the confirmation hang in a pause while she watches him.
"My guess?" he says. "We'd have lasted about as long as we did."
There's some lingering pride in his own deception skills tinged with guilt, and extra guilt for the pride. To have harmed her with his sister's knife, he knows he isn't anything but a disgrace.
She goes quiet for a moment. Just as he has second thoughts, she resumes chopping tomatoes and pipes up again.
"What if there was no way out, though? If there was no hope for you, and we were really stuck. Do you think you'd respect our deal?"
"That whole 'your side and my side' thing? Probably not."
Why is she wondering?
"Sometimes I imagine the things I'd do," she murmurs while she works. "I'd learn how to cook everything, dance in fountains, get all my clothes from the most expensive stores... Not that I'd ever go back."
He likes her when her hands are busy. She voices idle thoughts and seems to relax into herself. He lets himself get carried away in the things she says, easily imagining exploring a vacant world with her, and destroying it. Falling into rampant vandalism and debauchery. He'd drag her down into his favorite nooks and crannies of hell, show her the fun in wickedness.
But then she wouldn't be Bonnie, would she? If she let him dredge out all her goodness, there'd be nothing left for him to want in her. Because it's her goodness that attracts him. Maybe it always has been.
"Truth now," he says, scooching the onions around the pan. "Say we did try splitting the world in half. How long before you'd come crawling back to me for company?"
"Kai..."
"It's a desperate place, my prison world."
He stops stirring to look over at her and meets her eyes so briefly before she looks away. She's been acting weird. He wishes he could claw some of her thoughts out from her depths, mine her truths like Dopey mining gems. Maybe not Dopey, he thinks. None of the dwarves really suit him. Maybe if they had a cousin named Murdery...
"I don't have an answer for that."
"I saw you," he says, turning back to the pan. "When I helped Jere-Bear Swayze play Ghost so he could show you that map... Seemed pretty lonely."
He takes no satisfaction in reminding her. Or even in remembering. Her hopelessness that day yanked on his new feelings so hard it hurt.
"Actually..." He turns off the stove and sets the pan aside. "Supposing there were no outs, knowing who I used to be, I'm pretty sure I'd keep you. Probably make you my plaything, it's hard to say now. You'd be more useful to me alive."
He isn't helping himself by rambling. She's stopped chopping again and looks a little horrified.
"I'm sorry, that's TMI, just old socio thoughts bouncing around in there. I just mean we'd last a while. Probably have a system in place where you slaughter me repeatedly and try to run, but I'd follow you like Smeagol follows Frodo. I was lonely too, you know. And so... bored."
He fetches two plates from the cabinet and starts lining them with taco shells.
"Or who knows?" he says, on second thought. "Maybe we'd just be doing this. Over there."
She stands beside him wiping tomato juice off the knife with a towel. For a second, her eyes look to his. He sees doubt in them.
"It wouldn't be anything like this," she says, and lays the knife on the counter between them, silver and shiny, and dull, and dangerous. She turns her back to wash her hands in the sink and he knows she's just daring him to pick that knife up, or not to. That she knows he won't use it against her is the point she's making. "You were right about one thing."
He feels his eyebrows lift in interest, his chest pitter patter as she mirrors him.
"You needed to merge."
She says it meaningfully. Almost regretfully. Like she isn't even sure of herself as she admits it. Drying her hands, she fixes him with a pitying stare.
"Your family should've believed in you. Before you became you. Could've saved us all a world of trouble."
As she walks out of the kitchen, she lets him know over her shoulder, unimportantly, an afterthought, a statement of fact and not a compliment: "At least you're cuter than Smeagol."
His heart.