A/N: Chapter 2 ~ Morning sickness. How fun. This takes place about 9 weeks into Marceline's pregnancy (so a little more than 2 months).


Slick crimson smeared across the pale floorboards of Marceline's bedroom, in a horrible swipe beginning at the edge of her beast-skin rug. Blood, was Bubblegum's snap reaction. Oh, Glob, blood. And so she pounded on the closed door of her lover's bathroom, under which snaked the thin trail.

"Marceline, Marceline! Marceline, let me in this instant!"

A muffled cough was the only response. Something's wrong. I ruined it all, I did it wrong. Oh, Glob, oh, Glob, oh Glob.

"Marceline! I'll bust down this door if I have to!"

The candy girl's tears were already beginning to collect when the door slid open. Marceline's face behind it was pale, not its usual grey but a ghostly white. Small smudges of scarlet dimpled the underside of her chin and she was grimacing. Before she could start to grumble, though, Bubblegum grabbed her shoulders, eyes probing with concern.

"I-it's on your face . . ."

"Uhm, yeah. Maybe if you weren't so flippin' impatient I would have had time to at least clean myself up," she fussed.

"What happened? A-are you hurt? Is something wrong with the -"

"Jeesh, Bonnibel, calm your buns! It's just a little puke!"

Bubblegum was dumbstruck.

"P-puke . . . ?"

"Yeah, don't you know anything about pregnancy? Morning sickness," Bubblegum's brows knit together, and Marceline pressed, "Are you even listening to me?"

"Marceline, did you vomit blood?"

The princess' eyes were wild with worry, her brain racing with names of possible complications. Hypertensis gravidarum? What can I do about that? Get her back to the Castle, get her on a drip, keep her warm and hydrated. Do vampires need hydration? How do I distill the color red into a liquid?

"Princess!"

"What?"

"I'm a vampire, remember? I eat the color red, right? So when I'm sick, I puke red too. Calm the stuff down, will ya?" Marceline floated back to her sink, splashed a trickle of cool water on her face and wiped the red from her skin with the backside of her hand. Retrieving a thin scrunchie from her porcelain medicine cabinet, she pulled back her hair into a slipshod bun.

"I'm fine," she murmured, bearing back towards her bed. Bubblegum followed her, allowing herself to feel relief. Crisis averted. And then another thought came.

"Marceline, let me clean that up. Your floor, I mean. Where are the paper towels?"

"In the bathroom," her voice crackled from beneath thin navy blankets. After a small pause, the snap in her voice subsided and she spoke again, soft and meek, "But, hey . . . you could come over here and we could cuddle. It doesn't need to be clean right away."

"That's quite alright. It's no trouble."

"No, Peebles. Just come here?"

"In a moment," the princess knelt to the floor, wiping the browning stains in circular motions. She made quick work of the task, then tossed the crumpled sheets of paper towel into Marceline's wastebasket. All but one, from which she tore a red-soaked fragment. Surreptitiously, she inserted that fragment into a plastic petri dish. For study, she told herself with a smile.

"Bonni . . . ! Wanna bring that trash can over here with you?" Marceline called, words slightly obscured through her palm's barrier against her mouth. Bubblegum hastened to her lover's side, held out the wastebasket while Marceline wretched. It was interesting, she noted, to see Marceline like this. Vulnerable? Is that the right word? The older woman shuddered, tears pricked at the edges of her bright eyes, and she scraped the heel of her palm against her mouth's corner. Back beneath the covers she sunk, and Bubblegum followed her.

The bed was stiff, a far cry from the luxuriant plush of the princess' own, but she supposed Marceline rarely slept on it anyway. There had been no years of erosion to tenderize the block of mattress.

"Why aren't you floating, anyway?"

Bubblegum expected a snappy retort. Cuz you can't float, dipstick. Something to that effect. But Marceline's words came earnest, for she was too worn to maintain her front of aloof gruffness.

"It's too much effort," she mumbled, slipping one arm beneath a pillow equally as rigid as the bed upon which it rested. Her other arm whispered about her stomach, fingers playing out over the pale skin there. Wrapping her own body in a curve about Marceline's, Bubblegum laced her own pink digits between the longer ones.

"I suppose this is only the first step in the process, hmm Marcie?"

"I guess, yeah."

Bubblegum planted a cool kiss at the base of Marceline's neck, pulled a handkerchief embroidered with berries from her pocket, and wiped her lover's sweaty brow.

"You should rest."

"Nah, you came all the way here to see me, I should stay awake for you. Besides, I don't really need to sleep," the vampire queen nestled her fingers tighter between Bubblegum's, then retrieved her other arm from beneath the pillow and wrapped it protectively around her upper abdomen.

"Nevertheless," a second kiss met Marceline's nape, "I want you adequately rested throughout this whole pregnancy. What we're trying to do here is . . . well, risky. It's never been done before. You know how distant relations have been, historically, between the Candy Kingdom and your people. You've been queen for quite some time. No one would ever dream of this, the engineering of a hybrid offspring between two species, for all intents and purposes."

Bubblegum could feel Marceline's face draw into an expression of disconcertion. She could not see, but she knew that the sharp jut of the vampire's nose was flaring out, her lips reaching back to bare instinctually the white needles of her teeth, her slim eyebrows knitting together.

"By engineering a hybrid offspring, you mean me getting pregnant, right? The hybrid offspring is our baby?"

"Well, of course."

Marceline grumbled something about stupid science names, then continued, "So that's why you were so uptight before? About my puke?"

"I . . . I thought it was blood. I thought there were complications. I was worried something had gone wrong. It's all very . . . exploratory, what we're doing. To be honest, I didn't even know if the fertilization would work, nevertheless implantation. But it seems like everything's worked out."

The vampire queen only nodded, the bulk of her concentration focused on willing her eyelids open. She stretched her fingers wider across her stomach, splaying them out into a star. She let her eyes close, then, and she felt a small heartbeat throb through her middle. Satisfied, she let down her guard completely, and allowed the gentle rhythm, not unlike a steady baseline, lull her to sleep.