Here's a Sugarless Gum for you guys—I got the idea while doodling a (bad) picture of Peebles and Marceline. Bubblegum's hair turned out too short and I had the idea to erase her crown so it'd be a picture of the past, you know? Anyway, it isn't much good, I know, but please read and review!
Princesses and Kings
(alternately: Why Marceline the Vampire Queen Will Never, Ever Wear a Crown)
"Why don't you have a crown, Marcy? All the other princesses do."
"'Cause I'm not a princess, duh."
"A queen is a kind of princess, though, right?"
He's looking up at her with those big blue eyes (and he never seems to get any less innocent, no matter how much he's grown), and for the first time in a very (very) long time, Marceline can't bring herself to crush the traces of naiveté she sees there. "Yeah, I guess," she says, ducking and sliding out of Finn's view for a moment before reappearing only inches from his face, legs splayed lazily in front of her. "So?"
He frowns, as if it's really that incomprehensible to him that a princess might not have a crown. "So why don't you have a crown?"
Out of the corner of her eye, Marceline sees Jake freeze at the makeshift stove in the corner of the tree house. He turns to face her with blank eyes, and she bares her teeth at him, hoping vainly that the gesture will scare him into submission. It doesn't, of course—he knows her better than that. He's known her longer than Finn has; he knows why Marceline doesn't wear a crown, and now he's just watching, waiting to see how she deals with Finn's unwittingly blunt question.
"Marcy?"
Slowly, she turns back to Finn, sizing him up. If she'd hedged a moment before, he probably would have bought it, but now he's caught sight of Jake and those big blue eyes are darting between the two of them. His brows are furrowed in a way that tells her he's determined—that even though she probably could steer him away from the scent, it would take more time than she was willing to spend on pointless distractions. So she decides to tell him the truth.
Part of it, at least.
"I don't like what crowns do to people."
His frown deepens. "You mean like the Ice King? 'Cause he's seriously globbed up in the head and all, but I think his crown's different than the princess', you know?"
Actually, it isn't so different—not really.
But it's one of those times she just doesn't feel like talking, so she forces a dry smile (and she's never been much good at it) and nods. "They don't get anything past you, do they?" she asks, reaching out and messing up his hair.
"Hey!" he protests through laughter, pulling his hood back up over his choppy golden locks. "Only FP's allowed to do that now!"
Marceline cocks an eyebrow. "Now?"
His face turns beet red, and her smile is real now—he's such a simple boy, really. He has no idea how very unsimple the world he's come to know as his home (the people he's come to call his friends) can be.
"Promise you won't put it on again, Simon."
"Only to protect us, sweetheart."
"Promise."
A sigh—she's such a stubborn child. "I promise."
She smiles, then—beams, and as dirty and unkempt as she is, he thinks she might just be the most beautiful thing he's seen since…
Well, since before everything went to hell.
She's going to be a heartbreaker one day, he thinks—she and that brilliant, just slightly lopsided smile and those sweet eyes that spark with just the tiniest hint of mischief.
He hoists her onto his back, only half faking the dramatic grunt that escapes his chapped lips, but it's worth the effort when he feels her giggling against his back, her little feet tapping out some invisible beat against his chest. As he picks up the last of their things and starts walking toward some unknown destination (and it worries him, that they're just walking like this, searching for some untouched paradise that probably doesn't exist, so he tries not to think about it too much), he hears her singing softly (possibly unconsciously) to herself.
"Making your way in the world today….takes everything you've got…"
Maybe she'll be a musician, too.
She's thirteen and stupid when the transformation reaches what she assumes is its final stage.
Simon doesn't recognize her anymore (most of the time, at least—sometimes she'll catch him looking at her with familiar, yet strangely alien eyes, and her heart will skip a beat because she thinks maybe he's coming back, just a little bit. But he's gone as soon as he's come)—he calls her Gunter, now, and she can't place the reasoning behind that particular name (or even if it is one).
She manages to take care of him until the day of her twenty-first birthday; she feels like she owes it to him, to care for him the way he used to care for her, back when she was just a child. Thinking back, she knows she probably would have been infected, had one of the victims found her before Simon had—hell, she hadn't even known what those creatures were until she'd found an old newspaper from God knows when rotting in a compost heap outside of an old supermarket.
On her twenty-first birthday, she meets a boy named Ash, and she's drawn to him at first sight. And how could she not be? He's the only uninfected person besides Simon that she's encountered in more than fourteen years. He tells her that he knows of a cure for the infection—that if she comes with him, he'll show her.
He tells her to leave Simon behind, and she doesn't want to, but it's only for a few minutes, and she desperately needs the company of another sane individual (even the deer and the squirrels and the candy seemed a bit…off recently).
She wakes up the next morning feeling lighter than she has in years save for a faint stinging in her neck. At first, she attributes this to having finally found a friend, but when she sits up, Ash is gone.
So is Simon.
Having been around for 800 years now and having watched the world collapse around her and come back to life again in the strangest ways she's never imagined, Marceline's pretty sure she's seen everything, even in this fast changing world.
It's starting to get boring, actually (and lonely, but it's always been like that—always, at least, since Simon left), when she first meets a very…unique…scientist on the outskirts of Los Angeles. By this time, the once dazzling city of Angels looks more befitting of demons, though a few stubborn lights flicker to life as the sun sets behind Marceline's back.
"Isn't she beautiful?"
Marceline barely lifts an eyebrow—it's not as though she were expecting him to be sane.
Nobody else has been.
"Yeah, sure, dude," she says, and is just about to set off (to where, she doesn't know, but wandering beats sitting in the same place for hundreds of years) when she catches sight of something even more unusual than the man standing before her. "Is that…" She gawks. "Is that a kid?"
"Isn't she beautiful?"
The last thing she needs is the responsibility of raising a child weighing her down, especially considering she's never really had a chance to grow up herself. Still, before the sun has set and the sky has completely darkened, she finds herself heading in a very general east direction with a small child cradled in her arms—the odd man waves her off with a stupid smile on his face, as if she hasn't just commandeered his…whatever it is.
She isn't sure if the child will be any better off with her than it would have been with the lunatic she'd taken it from, but it when it smiles up at her and attempts to wrap its tiny arms around her waist before settling for her arm instead, she figures she can't possibly have made things any worse for it.
The child smells just faintly of bubblegum.
She ends up delivering the child to an elderly couple (and it's the strangest thing, how people seem to be reappearing after all this time—as far as she knows they all died out after the war, and she's been searching for as long as she can remember. But then, they're not quite human, either. They're…she doesn't really know what they are) she meets some days later.
It's another 100 years before Marceline comes full circle, and somehow, where there were once piles upon piles of rubble and chemical refuse, an alarmingly pink castle now stands, proudly overlooking a veritable wonderland of candy flora and fauna.
She doesn't know why, but she finds herself staying close after that. She doesn't ever let herself get too close to what she comes to recognize as the Candy Kingdom or its many colorful residents (because she knows all too well what happens when you get too close), but she never strays too far.
And she'll never admit it, but maybe it has something to do with the achingly familiar couple that rules the land—maybe, just maybe, it has something to do with their little pink child who isn't quite so little anymore.
Bonnibel.
That's the name they gave her.
And it suits her, Marceline thinks. It's certainly an odd name, but it's got a kind of whimsical charm around it, and such a sickeningly sweet name seems a good fit for a girl made of what Marceline comes to realize is bubblegum.
The next 100 years pass by in a blur, quite unlike the 900 before it. There is, it turns out, something to say for the existence of other intelligent life forms, no matter how much she wants to believe she was better off alone.
Bonnibel turns out to be more than Marceline had ever taken her for.
She's very outspoken, and yet humble when she needs to be—she's by far the smartest person Marceline's ever known, and yet she's also unassuming and relatively naïve to the eyes of the candy people.
Bonnibel, Marceline eventually realizes, is more skilled at wearing masks than Marceline has ever been, and at less than a quarter of her age
Ever since her twenty-first birthday, Marceline's liked the taste of red (not blood, though—despite all the research she'd done on her condition, nothing had prepared her for the warm, gooey texture and metallic taste. She much prefers apples, tomatoes or even the odd bow tie).
She's never considered pink as an alternative; however, she finds herself growing more curious by the day.
At one point, she absentmindedly poses the question to Bonnibel, who's got her nose buried in her textbooks and is refusing to give Marceline the time of day. She watches as Bonnibel blushes to the tips of her ears and grins like the Cheshire Cat. She delights in this game of teasing the candy princess—it's becoming something of a hobby, and Bonnibel never fails to do her part.
Huffing, the princess informs her that pink is merely a form of red mixed with varying degrees of white, and could therefore be likened to a cup of tea diluted with too much water, and that if Marceline is quite finished asking stupid questions, she'd really like to get back to her studies.
"You taste just like diluted tea."
"Shut up, Marceline."
"It's called foreplay, Bonnibel."
Before she quite knows what's going on, the past 100 years start to feel like they've made up more of her life than the other 900 combined.
She meets Simon, again, and is torn between immense relief that he's still alive and can be a part of her life again and disappointment that there's nothing left of the man who had raised her when her own father couldn't be bothered to do so.
Relief wins, though, narrowly as it may have, and somehow, Marceline begins to settle into a routine for the first time in her painstakingly long life.
"Come on, Bonnibel, you can't be serious."
She's begging now, even though the words don't quite match. Bonnibel knows this—even if she weren't so ridiculously smart, Marceline's always worn her heart on her sleeve, no matter how hard she's tried to do otherwise.
"You knew this was going to happen, Marceline," she replies, her back to the vampire. "Don't pretend you didn't."
Marceline scoffs at this, clenching her jaw as the hot, unfamiliar tears start to accumulate at her waterline. "I knew it was going to happen, Bonnibel," she snarks. "I just always thought you were smart enough to find a better way to deal with it."
"Well clearly," the pink girl states, her words clipped, as though whatever she's saying is literally driving a knife into her gut, "I'm not, Marceline."
The vampire releases a dry laugh at this; she can't help it. Of course. If anything could cause the great Bonnibel Bubblegum to lose her omnipresent posture, it would be calling her intelligence into question. "Clearly," she repeats with only a moment's hesitation, her voice rough, but not rough enough to conceal the intense pain that was radiating through her body—a pain she couldn't make go away.
Bonnibel whirls on her then, her eyes hard and face red with either frustration, sadness or a blend of the two. "I've made my choice, Marceline," she snaps. She's using what Marceline calls her 'Princess' voice—cold, sharp and clean-cut. "Now get out."
It's not the words that pierce her; it's not the way Bonnibel looks like she might either chew her up and spit her out or throw herself into Marceline's arms if Marceline doesn't drop the subject this instant. It's the tone she uses. It's how she can remain so frosty and detached while Marceline's doing all she can not to fall apart on the outside (because inside, she's already in pieces).
"As you wish, princess," she sneers. She stands abruptly, an alarming contrast to her previous state hunched over on the edge of Bonnibel's bed, eyes rimmed with red, terrified of abandonment. She floats toward the door, but turns at the last second and spits on the dress Bonnibel had finally managed to settle on for her inauguration. Then she eyes Bonnibel herself, who looks torn between shock and heartbreak (and it's almost scary, how seeing her so miserable doesn't make Marceline feel even the slightest bit better) standing there in her sheer pink slip, her mother's (now her) crown resting comfortably on her head.
Marceline's heart shatters just a little more as she realizes how it completes Bonnibel, almost as if it had been tailor-made for her. "It suits you," she finally says, eyes flicking to the crown and then back to the girl wearing it, "your Highness."
"Marcy?"
"Marcy?"
"Marcy!"
Marceline snaps to attention, almost losing her balance. She catches herself at the last second, though, and glares at Finn, who subsequently turns two shades paler. Even Jake looks slightly alarmed. She realizes that Finn's never seen her truly angry before, and that Jake's only ever seen her in the in between, and forces herself to part from her memories completely.
Remembering wouldn't do her any good now.
"Scared?" she asks, grinning when Finn regains his color, plus an additional helping of scarlet.
"No!" he retorts hotly. After a few moments, though, he seems to calm down, his expression morphing into one of concern and slight curiosity. "Are you okay, Marcy? I've never seen you looking like that before."
"What'd I look like?"
Finn shrugs. "Like, I don't know, you wanted to set something on fire," he says after a moment. "Like, with your eyes."
She chuckles, thanking whoever may be watching that she doesn't have to force these things around Finn. There's something about his innocence and ceaseless optimism that kind of makes it impossible to be truly upset in his presence. "Yeah, whatever," she says in a disinterested tone.
"So…you don't like crowns, then?"
Marceline studies the boy for a long minute, aware of Jake's gaze burning into the back of her head. He wants to see how she deals with it, she realizes. Jake knows why she doesn't like crowns, after all. Jake had been at the castle that day—she'd seen him on her way out. He'd been flanked by Banana Guards, probably because of some robbery.
That was, after all, back before he'd known it was wrong.
"No," she says after a moment. "Not really."
After all this time, Marceline's come to the realization that crowns, magical or otherwise, change people.
Crowns take the few people she's learned to love and make them forget they ever loved her too.
At least, that's what happened with Simon (the Ice King, now).
Secretly, deep, deep down in a compartment of her heart she doesn't want to admit exists, she thinks maybe the crown didn't change much about Bonnibel at all.
I ended up staying up way late to finish this, because I lose my inspiration a lot of the time if I sleep on it. So I haven't had much time to edit or anything, but I hope you all liked it anyway!
Please review!