"Marceline, how old are you?"
The question is a surprise to the vampire. Random. Right out of the blue. Marceline blinks, inhales the content of the chilled night breeze into lungs not used to breathing. The wafted scent of cotton candy and bubblegum fills her nose, and dang it, she realizes—the kid's at it again with the questions. The trees of the Cotton Candy Forest fluff themselves up in the wind, their pink substitutes for leaves bouncing about. A few dappled specks of the stuff flitter off of the branches, whirling around in the air.
Marceline can catch a flicker of the tike's blue orbs if she focuses hard enough on her peripheral. She is able to just barely see the ocean of reflected stars that seem to want to flood her own gaze, and so she doesn't look for too long. Her attention focuses back down to her bass; the cool metal of the axe already shows the moon, round and melon yellow as it hangs like a heavy, bulbous ornament in the navy blue—but it could take another shining. She smoothes the flesh of her palm over the surface, rugged fingernails scraping along near the strings.
"... What'dcha say, kid?" she finally replies, a thin brow arching. Her eyes are still glued to the axe, and she can feel the princess's attention boring into her. A steady breeze passes through them, thick with the mingling scent of mint from the east, and the vibrations of Bubblegum's shivers travel through the ground and up into Marceline's sternum.
"How old are you?" Bubblegum revisits quickly, and her figure leans against the bark of a trunk. Her arms clasp backwards around the pole, fingers linking together to hold herself up as her legs remain on the ground. Her nape is pressed against the outline of the trunk, her head leaned back into the hard wood, and pink toes dig into the soft yellow soil, darker in the too-dim light.
Marceline sniffs slightly. "Sixteen, seventeen." She brings her bass down lower, setting it against the ground to rest its dorsal on the soil. She hears an interjection being made. "No!" squeaks the firm voice. "I mean your real age!" Bubblegum means business, she knows.
The vampire—now unaltered and no longer held down by the instrument—turns her head slightly so that her head faces the other. She's strung in the air, hovering with lucidity. "Why'do you care, Bittybite?" The smaller monarch practically beams up at her, dimples popping out at the corners of her lips and her eyes shining. "Because," she starts, and it's then that Marceline can make out the blush on the kid's cheeks, even through the purple darkness. It contrasts against the pink of her skin quite nicely, she notes silently in her head. "You said you've seen everything in the land of Ooo! Have you really?"
A smirk or a shadow traces across the vampire's lips. "Well," she begins to muse, and a thin fingertip, gathered with its comrades, rests upon the rough surface of her own jeans. The heel of her palm kisses the fabric gently. Marceline's eyes flash with ill veracity. "Maybe not everything in Ooo. But yeah-" A forked tongue is caught tentatively in the pause between pointed teeth. "I've seen a lot." The smirk—or the shadow—disappears and replaces itself, sewing on a haughty grin. Fangs dent into a grey lower lip. "More than you, I bet, kid."
Bubblegum wastes no time in opening the door to interrogation again after a grin taints her own lips. "Well of course you've seen more than me, but- but how old are you? How much have you seen?" There's something in the kid's tone now, probably the same sort of curiosity but stronger, much stronger—the tike could practically lift Marceline up from the ground with that kind of voice.
The vampire doesn't bother thinking; her mind is too calm to even consider the probability of her being able to remember what she's seen. Yet something's there, just barely grazing along what could be called memories: a lingering undertone of purple and black tones of the presence of her father, the crimson of the Nightosphere laced with flames that lick along her brain, her own kingdom seeping its way down into her sternum, and perhaps just a waft of the scent of tinted metal and strings, cotton and the clean air of buttons.
The wind whirls around her, nestling into the black tresses of hair that drape low down her back and end somewhere along the ridge of her tailbone. She doesn't think she's ever cut it or even bothered to trim it, but perhaps it could do. Gum brings her back to reality. She still doesn't recall how much she's seen. Not in one thought, anyway. "Well," she starts, and she's afraid her voice will drop and the kid will be at it with more questions pertaining to her age, and so she continues, lifting the tone higher. "I'm not sure how old I am. Around a thousand or so."
Bubblegum huffs out a cheery laugh that rings out into the trees and agitates the peppermint breeze. "But that's so cliché, absolutely cliché, Marceline!" She slides her frail form down the surface of the tree's trunk until she's slumped down onto the ground, hard and brittle and coated with sweet glaze. "Last time I checked, a thousand years old was only reserved for fairy tales and legends, twizzlers like that!"
Twizzlers, Marceline contemplates on the word; nothing short of what's thought to be a substitute candy curse, but sufficient enough. "Yeah, well," she murmurs, the haughty smile never detaching from its strings. "I may as well be a fairy-tale."