When Marceline was young, the world was coming apart at the seams. In that world, everything you touched turned to dust or disease or danger in your hands. The edges of things were sharp and fear was always hovering at the corners of your vision. When Marceline was young, she cried over the deer and rats that became her dinner, cried over the bodies of the dead and dying on the smoke-choked roads. She cried over the hurt and the sadness and the lonely treks through grey trees.
That was when Marceline was young.
Now, Marceline is old. She doesn't cry anymore.
She already feels old when Simon loses his last ounce of sanity and flies off shrieking into the night, leaving her behind with the hissing remnants of a snow-smothered campfire. She doesn't cry but she doesn't do much else either. She waits in that place for days, but he never returns. And after a week, the foul-smelling mist on the wind tells her it's time to move on.
She is older, though not too old, when the vampire lunges at her out of the darkness of an abandoned grocery store and leaves her twitching and gurgling in the canned foods aisle. The pale dark of the store recedes into blotches of real black slowly, slowly enough for her to remember that Simon always warned her to stay away from buildings at night. He taught her better than this. He would be so disappointed.
When she wakes up, surrounded by fallen cans of green beans and corn, she discovers that she need never be hungry or sick or hurt again. There is no longer anything to be afraid of. She is the most frightening creature she has ever met. Her appetite is incessant, but easy to appease with the help of new strength. And for a while, despite the strangeness, despite how terrifying it is to learn that sunlight will burn straight through her skin, she revels in the freedom from gravity and fear. The novelty wears off only slowly.
Marceline is old, older than everyone and everything that is beginning to emerge from the stinking piles of ooze down below. They shamble about for years and years, fighting and loving, living and dying. She watches them rebuild the world. Occasionally she eats one, just to see what it tastes like. She doesn't cry when they convulse into death under her teeth, but the swish of their warm blood in her mouth sometimes makes her feel sick. Eventually, she starts taking only their color. The world doesn't need her to make it a more dangerous place.
Marceline is already old when she meets the bubblegum girl, who after centuries has finally coalesced from a blob of semi-sentient gum into a picture-perfect, sugar-dusted young woman who wants to build a kingdom. She follows her for a while, floating silently through the trees above as the pink girl picks her way along the forest floor. There is no hunger. She smells like sugar, not blood, and her skin, so pale in the speckled moonlight, doesn't hold enough red to keep Marceline's attention. But still she doesn't fly away.
Marceline is old, and she is fearless. For some reason this doesn't stop her dormant heart from leaping into her throat when they kiss for the first time. And every time after that. She is old and so she loves intensely, with every fiber of her ancient humming soul, if she has one. The princess thinks that she does, and this is comforting. The princess thinks a lot of things, most of which Marceline does not understand. She understands, though, that the bubblegum girl gives her living death a meaning that she can hold onto.
Marceline is old, and so sometimes she forgets. Things get lost in the haze of successive moonrises, blurred together like one great big streak across the sky. Was that yesterday or last century? Sometimes it is hard to keep things straight. So occasionally she disappears: into herself, into the wilderness and wastes beyond the recently civilized plains of Ooo. Sometimes she loses track of time and returns to discover that she has been gone for months, for years. She apologizes every time but that doesn't stop it from happening again.
Marceline is older still when the princess tells her not to come back next time and shuts her bedroom windows in her face. Responsibility demands sacrifices, she says, but Marceline doesn't think responsibility has anything to do with it. She flies up high, into the colder air, closer to the stars. The wind is wild, blowing waves of motion rippling through the grasslands below her. She can hardly see it through eyes watering from the cold, but she speeds forward toward the horizon without bothering to look down. At first, she doesn't know where she is going: just away. Away from this place. Away from these mortals and their problems, their hurt. In another lifetime she can come back and they will all be gone. She will start again.
The human boy is young, and his crooked smile is honest. He reminds her of a time before war, blurry memories that she is fairly certain she made up herself. Still, they are good memories. She decides to stay a while, settles down into one of her old homes. Close but not too close to the Candy Kingdom, which by now rises over the plains in a monstrosity of cake and frosting. Close but not too close. When she flies over at night she can see the cotton-candy glow of Bonnibel's lamp.
Marceline is old. She is tired of these games. She can sing songs to the princess until the end of time, but the stubborn monarch will never go back on her word. As she has done before, she decides to leave and never look back. The forest shrinks into a carpet of dark green below her feet, and she turns her face towards the sea. Its blank surface stretches out into infinity, a horizon for new beginnings. She lets the wind push her forward, gaining speed and altitude. But then she finds herself in the Candy Kingdom, outside the princess's window. Of course.
They are both old now, but Marceline is older. And though Marceline is older, she is also younger. Gum will not last forever. Now their embraces have a deeper urgency, a desperation born of too much time lost. Still, life is long.
Marceline is old. Today, she feels it in her bones—her bloodless, unbreakable bones. They are so heavy. How many has she buried? The human boy. His dog. Simon, after his crown could no longer keep his ancient body alive. Unnumbered forgotten friends. She has buried them all. But today there is only one. Just this one.
When Marceline was young, the world was coming apart at the seams. Now, she is old, but nothing has changed. For her and only her, the world is falling apart. Everything turns to dust and disease and danger in her hands. The coffin, though, lies too solid, too heavy, on her indestructible shoulders. Its graham cracker walls refuse to melt away.
The candy people weep and wail and throw a dusting of sprinkles on top of their princess's grave. Afterwards, when they have returned to the cake and frosting homes that their beloved monarch built for them, they will toast her with glasses of syrup and promise to remember her name forever.
Marceline is old and she remembers how it is to forget. She stopped being able to picture her mother's face centuries ago. She cannot recall the name of her hometown or the way that sunshine can warm instead of burn. She knows that one day, not too soon, but soon enough, she will forget the taste of bubblegum and the sound of a saccharine laugh. And this knowledge is unendurable.
Marceline is old enough. She waits by the grave the whole night through, sometimes crying, sometimes singing, and sometimes laughing at the calamity of so long life.
When the dawn comes, she doesn't bother to put on her hat, leaves her gloves folded on the ground where she took them off at sunset. She turns her face to the glowing horizon and smiles at the faint burn of pre-dawn sunlight. It reminds her of scraped knees and motherly love, though perhaps this is one of those memories she dreamed up to make it through the long dark. Bonnibel would tell her it was real, even if it wasn't. Without such assurances, Marceline can feel her certainties slipping away into the blur of time. The sun creeps up closer to the horizon, washing the fields in a cold, pale light.
Marceline is old. Soon she will be nothing at all.