This will be a two-shot. The next one will focus on PB-Marceline interaction plus Marceline realizing she's a vampire. This is more Marceline being changed and the process thereof. Next chapter is going to have more fluff. Promise, even it it's just friendship fluff for now.
Marceline didn't know how long she'd been lying in the ditch. Time was being slippery again stretching into long shadows that fell across her face as the sun cycled overhead.
She was dying, wasn't she?
Her body felt cold, the kind of cold you got when you stuck your bare hands into the snow. Marceline shivered, her eyes moving lazily down her deadened limbs that were slowly turning corpse grey. She cleared her throat to try and scream, yell—but her voice gurgled wetly in her throat and Marceline recognized the rusty smell as blood. She whimpered, and didn't try to speak again.
Another day passed, maybe—daynightdaynight—and the sun was high overhead. Marceline closed her eyes and basked in it, taking a labored breath that rattled in her chest a little. She felt a little warmer, like the sun was a heater taking the edge off the deathly cold.
The sun blazed down.
Marceline twitched a little, furrowing her brow when she broke out into sweats. It was getting hot, way hotter, too hot. She let out a choked half-groan when she felt her skin blister.
The sun continued to beat down.
God. What was that sound? Oh, that sizzling. Just her skin, just her garbled screaming and weakness. Marceline's breath came harshly as she scrabbled at the tall weeds and grass. Shade cast from the embankment of the ditch was only a few measly feet away. She dragged herself forward a few inches, her belly sliding through mud and ditch scum, before her shaking arms betrayed her and left her face down in the muck.
The sun. Inescapable.
Her clothes had been trash to begin with, but now it felt like she was wearing rags held together by sticky blood. There were gaping holes, exposing her skin to the burning.
Make it stop. Make it stop. Mom. Dad. Simon. Help.
She was writhing now, her conscious going fuzzy to black and back again. She couldn't open her eyes anymore, not when they felt as if they'd been seared and welded shut. Marceline felt bleached out, like the heat was reaching her bones and turning them brittle.
"Hello, is anybody there? I thought I heard someone—oh my glob! Oh glob, oh glob, oh glob." Marceline felt a pair of knees thud into the ground beside her head and out of the corner of her eyes she can barely catch a glimpse of pink skin. Then the strangers shadow fell across the majority of her exposed back and Marceline let out a shuddering cry of relief. She doesn't care who or what is sitting next to her, she's beyond that point now. But...
Someone came.
Bubblegum is a scientist. She doesn't do tears, or big gestures of emotion that don't really do anyone any good and certainly don't fix the problem. That's why, when she catches sight of a stranger lying prostrated in a ditch, she doesn't throw a fit. Or vomit.
She's dissected too many things to be worried about the scent of blood, or the tacky feeling of it when it got on her skin.
Her retinue of guards are still up on the embankment, looking down at her with concern. "Do you need help Princess?"
Bubblegum takes in the grayish skin, the third degree-burns, the slight infection from lying in tepid slime for days. She nods. "Send a runner ahead to Peppermint and tell him to have the infirmary ready." she says, and she says it a tone of voice that makes them all stand at attention. One of them, a licorice whip, snaps off a quick salute and bolts in the direction of the Candy Castle, just visible on the horizon.
"I need help getting her out of this mud hole."
None of the guards even think about complaining about the dirt when their princess is right here, kneeling in it. They get to work, stringing their belts between two pikes as a sort of makeshift stretcher, and Bubblegum ignores them in favor of slipping off her jacket and tucking it around the bloody girl's shoulders.
She looks so very human in a world where humans are a dying species. She looks about Bubblegum's biological age but things like that can be deceiving (she knows, oh she knows). Bubblegum's fingers brush hair that feels too soft and, unbidden, her pink fingers are entangled in it. She marvels at this simple thing; this organic, natural feature that humans are born with.
Bubblegum is reluctant to step away when the guards move to lift the girl, but she does because she understands that humans are fragile.
Aren't they?