The song used is Remember Me by Ben Moody. This idea of using song lyrics as narratives for a story was in my mind for a very long time and I've attempted time and time again to finish a music-based story but this is the first published work so I hope you enjoy it. Please do review and tell me what can be improved. Listen to the song for full effect.
Remember Me
I was too late to go home
Morning was closing in on me
Reaching for a heart that always slips right through my hand
There's no starting over again
Marceline Abadeer sat in her house, all alone. She had been so for a long time and she would be so for centuries more. The cave was getting lighter, so the sun must be coming up. Marceline would've once wanted to go out in the sun, with a brim hat of course, to wander around in the sun with her friends… but now all of it was centuries, a full millennium ago!
Marceline missed Finn. She missed Jake. She missed Bonnie. That was all in the past though. Strumming her banjo, where she picked up playing banjo was beyond her, Marceline crooned out a sorrowful tune for her long forgotten friends.
Maybe she had picked up the banjo during that incident with elementals and the world going bonkers. The memory lashed like a fiery, burning hot whip on her heart. She missed those days, when her friends were with her. Being an immortal vampire was finally truly taking its toll on her, it was emotionally destroying her. Without her friends, she was broken…
But she could not go back in the past.
Be the one I shunned a bit
Because I buried him a half a life ago
Marceline flew through the sky, another ordeal she had become all too tired of. It was no longer interesting to fly around, when she knew she could no longer fly to Bonnie or Finn and Jake. They were long gone, a thousand years. Yet, a thousand years was not enough to drill the loss deep into her heart.
She had learnt to change, she had changed. She had shunned her older self, yet she was still the same. When she had friends, all she wanted to do was to be alone and now that she truly was alone, she wanted friends.
It was all gone though, burned and buried under a thousand years of sunrises and sunsets. Flying by the old Candy Kingdom brought tears of nostalgia and regret to her eyes. Marceline realized, she never had spent enough time with Bonnie. But another much silent but toxic part of her asked…
Had she spent enough time with her mother? With Simon? With her father? With anyone she loved?
The toxicity within the new Marceline was burning her, tearing her apart. The questions it asked seemed to play a deadly game with her heart, testing her and poking and prodding at the seams of her heart, checking for the tears that would not doubt crash and burn what Marceline once was… the toxicity always asked the harshest, most unanswerable of questions.. The truth was simple, yet it was akin to death to face the reality…
Marceline Abadeer had changed.
I'm not running... tonight
Marceline finally slid back onto her sofa, humming a tune long forgotten. What was it? An ode to her own freedom, how she was so much greater than Princess Bonnibel Bubblegum and how she never thought Bonnie was a goddess.
It tore a bloody mess into her heart, to realize that she would never get to hear Bonnie admonishing her… that she would never get to hear Finn's laughter or to hear Jake listing out reasons why he feared vampires. Her mind started wandering, it went to BMO, his innocence was like a charm, now long gone. To Simon, whatever happened to her poor angel?
But this was not the first time she was realizing this, the last thousand years had been a mélange of realizations and rejections, a cyclical process of realizing it was all gone, then to reject this notion, to finally accepting it but not today, today, she would accept the truth once and for all. Today, she would not run from the cold and harsh reality, no matter how much it killed her inside…
Her friends were no longer a part of this world.
What a beautiful lie this has been
To think that all I had to do
Was hide a little longer
Wandering through Red Rock Pass, remembering how childish yet heroic Finn had been, to put his own self aside in favor of risking his life to fight the literal devil and rescue all those stolen souls. Right here, this very mountain had been the battlegrounds… and she had the honors to ride out alongside him.
This mountain was also a testament to another reality; Marceline could never accept that which was truth. Marceline always ran, ran from the truth, ran from her friends and ran from the pain. This was all cyclical and repetitive. A scene flashed into her head…
"Tell, what's the one thing you've noticed about the world since you beat me all those hundreds of years ago?"
"Everything repeats over and over again, no one learns anything because no one lives long enough to see the pattern I guess..."
Wherever that came from, wherever it went, the memory was now gone but it had pushed her to a realization… Marceline couldn't run from this reality. It was beautiful and blissful, her own lies. She always lied to herself in the most beautiful ways but Red Rock Pass testified to one harsh truth…
Marceline always thought she could run and hide from her problems.
But these feet won't run
This hurt is done
You have won
You have won
And I'm not running... tonight
Marceline was tired. A far part of her brain racked up another memory, of very similar quotes. Of a very familiar angel saying…
"I'm crazy tired Marceline, I think I have been for a long time."
A dry sob escaped her lips, seeing the very place these words were uttered in the distance. There, in the distance, where she had some of the best memories of her life. She had learned to live with herself in that very cabin, now shabby and tattered.
It was there that she had truly seen how far her friends were ready to go for her. Another dry sob accompanied this realization. Slight dampness on her cheek, one by one, the tears came. There was no place to run now. There was no time to hide. Simply put, once again, it was at this place that Marceline Abadeer had to learn to grow up, move on and learn to live with herself. It was all related to her childish delusions…
She had never truly accepted that Bonnie, Finn and Jake were gone.
I'm sorry it just isn't enough this time
Because I don't even have the strength to save a fly
No more but afraid
All her fears, all her lies, all her insecurities came back to haunt her. The fears reminded her why she hid and ran. The lies reminded her why there was no resonance in her words anymore. The insecurities reminded her of a past long gone, of blood running hot in her veins.
This pain was just too real. It was the pain of not knowing why all her fears, her lies and her insecurities were true… why they were taking the best of her. World spun around her, the bedroom Bonnie slept in swum around in her visions.
Marceline nearly fell to the floor, sobbing uncontrollably in memory of her friends. She had no strength to stand up; she had no strength to save anyone. There was no time and no strength. All of this had a reason, a very good reason…
Marceline had learned what true emptiness meant.
I've tried
I've fought
I've lied
All the times she had hurt her friends swum right before her eyes. Marceline the Vampire Queen knew she had been a grade-A jerk to the very people she called her friends. She had tried hurting them, she had fought them… she had lied to them
"You always know which button to press."
The other way around was much more true. She had always took advantage of her friends raw emotions, playing with them. Sometimes she attributed it to her prankster persona but not today… she knew was truly the one to blame.
She had finally learned what Finn had meant all those years ago on his twenty-fifth birthday, when he had mentioned ego death. She had to put her own pride and ego aside to see that there was an undeniable and unchanging truth…
She was toxic for her friends.
You have won
You have won
And I'm not running...
No I'm (I'm not running...)
Finally, the voices of her friends were becoming too much to bear. She was too lost in the din of voices, the warbled and senseless noise of voices mixing into one. She barely even registered where she was… in Finn and Jakes bedroom…
"I'm a thousand years old and I just lost track of my moral code"
An excuse for her inexcusable behavior. Anyone who believed these words, believed the excuse of moral code and age was truly deluding themselves. There was no nirvana in deluding, only in accepting that she, Marceline Abadeer the Vampire Queen, had been torturous and apathetic to her own friends in their life.
There was no hope left in her, maybe she never had any hope. It was as if a light had slowly dimmed over the millennium, wiping all of her joy and happiness away. The light was none other than the slow and steady stream of realizations, growing darker and darker still. She had learned a truth after all these years, after a millennium…
Marceline Abadeer had some pains that even time couldn't heal
Remember me the lonely
Remember me the weak
I surrender to this
Hopeless fight
And sink
into
the deep
High up in the sky, where she had once sang a song that held true today…
"Time will unbind our memory glue, and I'll be as nobodyish as all of you"
These words now had a meaning. She had lost, Ooo had lost. The struggle of two millennia was now over, there was no denying that. Her journey had come to this…
"Promise to wake me up in fifteen minutes."
Marceline smiled at the bittersweet memory, choking back a tear…
"Marceline, release the Finn bomb!"
There was so much Marceline missed. So many memories she wished she could relive…
"Do you know these oily-doilies, Marceline?"
How Marceline had fallen incomprehensibly in love with Bonnie, Finn and Jake…
"Sorry I don't treat you like a Goddess…"
She had been a true wad, through and through. She had been hurting the very people she loved. Now, there was no way to take it all back. Only one way, there was only one way to finally be with her friends, nay, her family. Bonnie, Finn, Jake, Simon and BMO all felt like family to her and she knew there was only way to meet them again…
Her passing would reunite her with her family.
While this story started out as a one-shot, I can do more song based chapters like this if you guys want me to continue. Just tell me in a review and I'll continue. I have some ideas.