Marceline sucked one of the marshmallows dry. It wasn't bad, but she'd discovered that most red things tasted pretty much the same anyway. Her eyes drifted to Bonnie, seated on the log closest to her, only to find that the princess's eyes were already on her.
"Enjoying your mallow?" Bonnie asked with a raised brow. Marceline just shrugged and threw the white glob into the fire, wondering absently what pink tasted like.
"This reminds me of that one time that we lost all our important stuff and we had to form a band to open that singing door but we failed because we were missing the truth," Jake said. "But then we triumphed in the end because we're so awesome."
"Oh yeah." Bonnie placed a finger under her chin, nodding. "I guess that was the last time we all went camping."
Marceline blinked. Had that really happened? It all seemed so ridiculous and far-fetched.
"It's too bad we don't have our instruments now," Jake said, itching his head.
"We should tell ghost stories," Finn cut in with a gooey grin before biting back into his s'more. Crumbs fell out of his mouth while he talked, earning a laugh from Marceline. She was finding weirder and weirder things funny as she gained more memories, she realized. Almost as if whoever she was before was leaking back into whoever she was now.
She didn't know how to feel about that.
"Princess, you start."
Bonnie, who had just stuffed her face with chocolate and cracker and candy, looked up at Finn in shock. "Me?" she said around a mouthful of food.
"Yeah, why not?" Jake stretched part of himself into a blanket and draped it over himself and Finn. "Scare us good, Princess."
"Alright, let's see…" Bonnie wiped the chocolate off of her hands and onto the log beneath her. "I've got it. Let me tell you about the doppelgangers." She waggled her fingers and everyone laughed.
"Legend tells of a creature so horrifying that even uttering its true name can make someone wet their pants," Bubblegum started, eyes narrowed and hands folded into claws in an attempt to be scary.
Cute, thought Marceline. So cute.
"Because of this, they are known simply as the doppelgangers.
"They say this creature looks like a friend," she continued, dropping her hands to her lap. "Someone you've known before, maybe even someone you're close to. Someone you love. It draws you in with smiles and warmth, sings your favorite songs and laughs out all your favorite jokes. It knows things nobody else knows and it will want you to follow it to a place you both love, but you'll hang back, because something is off."
Marceline crossed her arms and raised an appreciative brow. Bonnie was actually pretty good at this. By the looks of wariness on the boys' faces, Marceline wasn't the only one who was enthralled.
"Beneath those familiar eyes something else is shifting. A shadow. Something black and wrong and twisted and you'll try to step away but you can't, because fear is taking over."
Finn gulped.
"You won't even know why you're afraid. 'This is my friend,' you'll think. 'I've known you all my life.'
Jake's tail twitched, and he made a small noise that sounded almost like a growl.
"Don't be fooled," she said, "because the shadows don't care about you. No, the shadows want to devour you. They want to eat your eyes and replace them with their own so they can live your life and destroy what you love. They want to smell your fear while you stand there frozen, while they circle you and smile their broken smiles and laugh their fractured laughs and run their talons down your spine with the fingers of a friend."
Bubblegum shifted her hooded gaze from Marceline to Finn to Jake; slowly, deliberately, she looked at each of them in turn. "Don't be fooled, because these creatures could be anyone. They could even be you!"
With a burst of movement Bonnie pointed to Finn with one outstretched finger and Jake with the other. The two boys looked at each other and screamed, pushing themselves off one another while Bonnie looked on and laughed. "You boys are too easy."
Marceline shivered, though it was warm outside. It was a story meant for children, that much was obvious, but something about it didn't sit right. Didn't match. Something itched at the back of her mind, insistent. She knew that story, and that wasn't how it ended. Marceline clutched her head in her hands, trying to remember. How was it supposed to end?
"Not you too Marcy." Marceline's head shot up and her eyes landed on a grinning Bonnibel. "I knew the boys would fall for it, but not you too?"
Marceline laughed, but it sounded hollow. "Yep, you got me. Haha. Ha…"
Jake groaned from the ground where he had been pushed by Finn. "I need some ice cream."
"You and me both, kid," Marceline mumbled in the direction of the fire. Jake got up off the ground and faced her.
"We brought some. It's in the cooler." Jake pointed his thumb over his shoulder at a small blue box laying on the grass beside the boys' tent. "We have strawberry, I dunno if that's close enough to red or not."
Marceline blinked. "It is," she said, and rose from her log.
Marceline followed Jake the thirty or so feet to the tent, hands shoved into the pockets of her hoodie. She shivered again, thinking of Bubblegum's story. Of eyes made of shadow…
"Tell me about it," Jake said, guessing at her train of thought as he, too, shivered. "She's always been good at that stuff." They reached the cooler and Jake noticeably relaxed. "Thank Glob for dessert," he said. "Sugar fixes everything and that is a fact."
Marceline wasn't so sure about that, but some of the tension fell from her own shoulders anyway. "Jake, were we good friends, you know, before?"
Jake opened the cooler and rustled around for a bit before producing an awfully large tub of ice cream and a few bowls. "Yeah, I mean, sure." He pried the lid off the tub and started scooping. "When we met I kind of had this predisposition towards hatred of vampires due to a societally-influenced mindset of prejudice and ignorance." He handed her a bowl filled with pink ice cream. "But yeah, we're cool now."
Marceline chuckled. "Well that's good."
Jake leaned against the tent and stretched his arm into a spoon. "The princess said you're not sure you want your memories back."
Marceline shrugged, staring down at the pink blob in her bowl. "I don't know. A fresh start sounded nice, even though I'm not really sure what I'm running from." She watched the ice cream melt in the heat of the night. "The only thing I remembered when I woke up was loneliness and—" Marceline didn't want to mention the color pink, especially since she now knew why that color was so important to her. "—and I'm scared of where that loneliness was coming from, and now I don't feel so lonely anymore." She glanced back at Bonnie and Finn, who seemed to be having some kind of intense conversation. Finn had moved from his log to the one Marceline had been sitting on before. She looked away. "My brain has other ideas, anyway."
"How so?" Jake said around a mouthful of ice cream.
"I keep remembering stuff." Marceline scooped a bit of ice cream into her spoon and sucked the pink out before letting the now-white glob slip to the ground. "I don't want to, it just happens. I'm just worried about remembering something that matters too much, and getting lonely all over again."
Jake nodded, contemplative. "Well the way I see it, nothing in life actually matters because we'll eventually all give in to the Abyss someday."
Something prickled in the back of Marceline's mind. "The what?"
"You know, the Abyss? The Void? Oblivion?" Marceline stared at him blankly. Something was clawing at the edge of her mind… "Death?" Jake poked her with his spoon-hand and the feeling was gone.
Marceline looked at her hand, at the blue-grey skin that marked her for what she was, what she would be forever. "Vampires don't die," she said.
Jake just shrugged. "Maybe not naturally. Nobody knows for sure, though, because nobody's lived long enough to find out." He shoved his spoon-hand into his mouth. "But you are the last one, which means all the others met their ends some way or another, right?"
Marceline frowned and sucked more pink from her snack. It didn't taste as good as she'd thought it would. "So nothing matters, eh?"
Jake shrugged. "Nothing. And everything."
"Do you always talk in cryptic circles?"
Jake tossed his empty bowl aside and began to eat from the tub. "Nah. I'm just saying that if nothing actually matters then we get to decide what to care about. And—and if we deicide to care about something, that just makes it mean a whole lot more than nothing. It's everything!" He brought the tub to his face and licked the inside clean. "It's all about perspective, Marcy," he finished, voice muffled from within the tub.
"Huh," she said, tilting her face back toward the stars. "Perspective."
"That was a wicked story, B," Finn said, brushing dirt and dried grass off of himself as he rose from where he had fallen off of his own log. He took a seat on the one next to Bubblegum, where Marceline had been sitting before she'd gotten up to follow Jake.
"Thanks," she said smugly, satisfied with her audience's reactions to her little story.
Well, nearly satisfied.
Truthfully, it hadn't been her story at all, but one Marceline had told her years and years before, during one of their own impulsive camping trips. Bubblegum had hoped telling the story tonight would trigger a response in Marceline, and for a moment, she had been sure it was happening. The vampire had looked disturbed, at least, as if she were on the edge of a memory.
But for the life of her, Bubblegum hadn't been able to remember how it was supposed to end. She settled for fear by comedic timing, and had scared the boys well enough, but maybe that was why Marceline hadn't remembered. Because it was Bubblegum's ending, and not hers. Or maybe Bubblegum just hadn't told it right…
"How's Flame Princess?" Bubblegum asked Finn as she risked a glance in Marceline's direction, not really caring about his answer. She and Jake seemed to be deep in conversation about something important, judging from that crease between Marceline's eyebrows that always appeared when she was thinking hard. But what on Earth could those two have to talk about?
"Phoebe? She's good." Finn prodded the fire with his stick. "I still haven't totally forgiven you for trying to, you know, kill her."
Bubblegum sighed and looked back at Finn. "Right. The science was sound, though. It was very likely—there should have been an explosion."
Finn's face twisted into a grimace and Bubblegum waved her hands frantically. "Okay, okay, I'm sorry! I could have handled it better, I guess." Her gaze drifted back to Marceline. "It won't happen again."
Finn nodded, but he didn't look thrilled. "Marceline seems like she's doing well."
Bubblegum sighed. "I suppose."
"What does that mean?"
"I'm just worried we'll never get the old Marceline back."
"I don't know about that." Finn poked his stick through one of the marshmallows and thrust it into the fire, all conversation about Flame Princess forgotten, for now. "People change all the time. You aren't the same person you were ten years ago. I'm probs not the same person I was two months ago. People grow and change just like everything else."
Bubblegum stared into the fire. She wasn't sure how to feel about all that.
"But also," Finn continued, checking the status of his marshmallow before returning it to the fire. "People stay the same, like on the inside. Their important bits, you know? Jake will always be my brother, that's something that will never change. I'll always want to go on adventures with my friends, probably even after I'm an old fart and can't move anymore. You'll always be… nurturing. You'll always want more than you have, because you want to be surrounded by life." Bubblegum's brows rose. Finn, it seemed, was becoming wise beyond his years. "And Marceline is the same, probably, even though she's changed."
"You don't think experiences have a bigger impact on who you turn out to be?"
Finn shrugged. He removed the charred marshmallow from the stick and popped it in his mouth, nodding in gooey bliss. "Of course they do. But they probably just build on who you already are." He thrust another mallow into the fire, then made a righteous fist with his other hand. "Your core."
"Finn, there is no scientific evidence that anything like souls exist in—"
"I don't know Peebs." He waved her off. "That's just my two cents."
Bubblegum bit her lip. Maybe Finn was right…
"Why do you care so much anyway?"
The question took her off guard. "Why do I—?"
"About Marceline? All the two of you ever did was fight, and if you weren't fighting you were avoiding each other. What gives?"
"Well…" Bubblegum stared at her hands, as if the answers to all of her problems lay within her own pink skin. "She and I have a complicated past, but…" She looked at Marceline fully now; the vampire had her face cast toward the night sky. "She was always there, you know? A constant in a world of shifting variables. And losing her, the way it happened—" Bubblegum took a deep breath—"I think sometimes loss is a kind of measuring tool, one we use to gauge how much someone really means to us." It was cliché, she knew. You don't know what you have till it's gone. But it hit the mark. It made her mad, really, how true the sentiment was.
Finn was frowning at her. "I think I know what you mean, aside from the science metaphors."
"I just wish I had been a better friend." That was the second time she'd uttered that phrase, and it sounded flat to her own ears. Wishes and regrets were useless.
"If you wanted any ice cream, you're out of luck." Finn and Bubblegum both jumped in surprise at Marceline's voice. "Jake ate it all." Finn scooted back to his own seat but the vampire didn't sit down, just floated above and slightly away from the fire.
"Hey. You helped," Jake huffed.
Bubblegum covered her mouth while she giggled. She didn't want Jake to think she was laughing at him, even though she was. That dog's temper was something else.
Something small and cold alighted on Bubblegum's forehead and she reached up in shock. Nothing was there, just a cool, wet spot where the thing had been. She looked up at the sky first in confusion, then in mounting annoyance. Where minutes before the sky had been clear, clouds were now roiling their way across the stars, gaining speed by the second and spitting out fat snowflakes.
Of all the times…
"Um, I might be wrong," Marceline said, holding out an uncertain hand to catch a falling snowflake. "But isn't it summer?"
All at once a cold shock splintered through Bubblegum's limbs, and she was hardly surprised to see that everyone else's feet and arms were being frozen to the ground by large blocks of ice just like hers were.
A figure clad in blue crashed to the ground, and the icy impact that came in his wake put out the campfire with a sizzle.
"I see I'm late to the party," said the Ice King.
