Marceline's screams bounced off the walls of Bonnie's lab, traveled through the hole in the floor and echoed throughout the stairwell below.
The two of them had been at it for nearly half an hour, and Marceline hadn't been able to remember anything useful. Not even one stupid thing. Bonnie had flooded her brain with memories ranging from sad to devastating to even slightly happy, but nothing was working. It didn't help that Marceline was taking breaks about every five minutes, but there was nothing to be done about that. If she didn't let her brain take a rest she thought she might pass out.
"Do you want to take another break?" Bonnie asked, looking up from her notes.
Marceline waved her off, gritting her teeth. "I'm fine. I want to keep going."
"I'm going to try anger again," Bonnie said, and Marceline made an annoyed sound. They had tried anger twice already, and it had only yielded minimal results, none of which had anything to do with this 'abyss' everyone was talking about. But Marceline just braced herself, assuming Bonnie would know what she was doing by now.
A few smoky tendrils of memory brushed across Marceline's consciousness, but nothing emerged. A relief, to be honest. She was so tired of the pain in her head and in her chest and the weariness deep in her bones. She just wanted to go home.
She just wanted to be left alone.
Marceline drew in a sharp breath of air, but Bonnie didn't seem to notice. The princess was fiddling with the knobs on the side of her chemical machine, setting it to a different mix of brain-junk to pump into Marceline's head. Another round of painful memories and, well, pain.
"Bonnie," she said softly, standing. "I have an idea."
The princess looked up from her machine.
"Tell me what we were fighting about that day," she said. "Start at the beginning, and be detailed."
Bonnie straightened, frowning, but she told Marceline about the experiment interrupted. About her harsh words and her unwillingness to hang out because she was too busy. She told her about the destruction of her lab, and the way she had yelled.
Marceline just nodded throughout it all, listening. When Bonnie was done, she looked up at the princess.
"Now kiss me," she said.
Bonnie's eyebrows shot up. "What? I don't—"
"Please," Marceline begged, voice tinged with anger. "Just one more time."
Bonnie swallowed, but moved closer. Put one hand on Marceline's shoulder and the other on her cheek. Looked at her with those bright pink eyes clouded with some emotion Marceline did not quite understand, and leaned forward to place her lips on Marceline's.
Tears rolled down Marceline's cheeks right before she doubled over in pain, the memory coming forward at last. Inspired not by anger or sadness, but something in between. A loneliness that was too deep for any of Bonnie's fake chemical emotions to convey.
Loneliness—and fear. Fear, from the last dredges of confusion and anger and sadness and adrenaline with which Bonnie had been clogging Marceline's brain for the last thirty minutes.
Letting loose a silent scream, Marceline closed her eyes, and remembered.
...
"This isn't funny!" Marceline yelled into the void. There was no answer. The strange, roiling mass of black clouds and darkness below gaped at her in complete, eerie silence.
A sudden shadow loomed behind her.
The moon, obscured for a moment by a drifting cloud?
Marceline turned.
It took a lot to frighten the Vampire Queen. She had seen countless deaths: bloody, violent; planned, spontaneous. She had seen and known more monsters than she cared to remember, and had learned long ago that most of the monsters this world had to offer turned out to reside within the people you thought you knew. She had laughed in death's face, and death had laughed back. Her father was the actual ruler of the Night-O-Sphere, for Glob's sake.
But when Marceline turned and saw the creature belonging to the shadow that had fallen over her, she screamed.
Terror shot through her skin, through her bones as she took in the mass of flesh that blocked the stars with it's colossal, contorted body. It was dark in color, but Marceline hardly noticed such a small detail when she was so busy gaping in horror at the thing's faces.
It had hundreds of them, human faces, all made of the wrinkly, saggy skin of people long dead. They hung off its body like the melted clocks of a painting Marceline had admired when she was a child. Some eyes were half open, others hung open all the way—fixing Marceline with a thousand glassy-eyed stares that seemed to look right at her, even as they saw nothing.
Though it had no legs or feet that she could see, it seemed to be standing—swaying slightly in the wind as if it hadn't quite gotten it's bearings. As if it had just woken up.
Marceline took a step back, forgetting, amidst her fear, that she could fly. The thing stilled, then lifted what she could only assume was its head, almost like it was… smelling for something—like it was sniffing the air.
Then all at once it darted toward her, quicker than even her demon-vampire senses could perceive. Her scream was cut off before it could really begin as something like an arm shot out from the thing's body, stretched itself long enough to wrap around her arms and her legs and her throat. Marceline's eyes widened as every single one of the thing's mouths cracked into coarse smiles.
"Almost human," those dead faces said together. "Not human."
Marceline tried to squirm out of the thing's grasp, but it only shot more arms out of it's body to wrap itself tighter and tighter around her. She tried to transform, but it was no use—the thing had her.
"So many memories," the voices crooned. They sounded eager, and Marceline tried again to scream, redoubled her efforts to free herself. "So many years of memories."
The dark, rippling arms that held Marceline began to fuse together, stretching and merging like the pull of fresh taffy, and Marceline knew she was about to be swallowed up.
Pressure built up in her head until it was impossible to think. She thrashed one last time, but the creature's darkness covered her eyes at last, and she was submerged in an inky blackness as heavy as a blanket of night.
The pressure released her, then, along with the feeling of being restrained, and suddenly Marceline felt like she was floating, blind, in strangely thickened air. She couldn't remember—she couldn't remember where she was, or what she had been doing or—or who she was. Her body felt numb and hypersensitive; hot and cold all at once, and she was losing herself. She was drowning.
Then, a light.
Faint, like a lantern lit quickly with a very dim match—like the birth of a star.
Marceline forced herself to move toward it, even though she wasn't entirely sure what it was.
It grew larger as she neared and she realized that it wasn't a light at all, but a hole in the darkness—an opening. She reached her fingers toward it, grabbed the edge, pulled—
—and emerged, exhausted and gasping for breath, from the massive pile of dark flesh twitching on the ground.
The creature was screaming, shrieking, but Marceline did not stick around long enough to make sense of the situation.
She ran.
She ran, blindly, as fast as her legs could go, wondering faintly if there was an easier way to escape—something other than running. But the notion was gone in a moment, and Marceline slowed.
What was she running from?
She stopped, turned around.
Where was she going?
A color flashed through her mind—sudden and vivid and bright. The blush of a sunrise, a sunset. The cool taste of strawberries on a summer night. The flush of a lover's face in the midst of passion—warm and sweet and lovely.
The color pink.
...
Marceline gasped as she was slammed back into the present.
"Marcy?" Bonnie was kneeling on the floor where Marceline had fallen. She lay a comforting hand on her back, and her face was set in an expression of concern, but she just asked "Did you remember?"
Marceline nodded, too nauseous and rattled to care about whatever the princess was thinking. She pressed her head to the cool floor and took several shaky breaths.
Bonnie didn't speak, for which Marceline was incredibly grateful. There was too much going through her head right then—so much pain, both emotional and physical, that it was hard to think at all.
Marceline felt Bonnie's hand leave her back only to return minutes later. Something clinked in front of Marceline, and she raised her head slightly to find that the princess had placed a glass of red liquid in front of her. Marceline sat up and downed it greedily, starving.
The glass was half empty by the time Marceline's eyes widened in surprise, and she lowered the glass to her lap, licked her lips. "This is real blood."
She looked at Bonnie, who simply shrugged. "Not technically," she said. "It's synthetic. I've been developing it for a while, but I figured this would be the best time to test it. Blood gives you more energy than the color red, anyway."
Another experiment. Marceline stared at the glass for a moment before raising it back to her lips and drinking the rest. A welcome one, at least this time. She could feel the pain subsiding, her energy returning.
As she drank, Marceline could almost taste Bonnie's impatience—the princess wanted her to talk about what she had remembered, and badly. But Marceline made a show of drinking every last drop of fake blood, licking her lips slowly, as if savoring the taste. Examining the inside of the glass to make sure she hadn't missed anything.
Marceline knew she was being petty, but damn if it didn't feel good.
"It's a creature that steals memories," Marceline said at last.
Bonnie frowned. "A creature?"
Marceline nodded and placed the glass on the floor beside her, then explained the rest of the memory to Bonnie in as much detail as she could stomach.
"It's this giant thing with a thousand faces." She shuddered, remembering the sound of all those voices speaking at once. "It—it swallowed me up, but…" Marceline remembered the light—the hole in the darkness. "I don't think it got me. Not all the way."
Bonnie sat back on her heels, and her frown deepened. "What does that mean?"
"I don't know," Marceline said, rubbing her temple; her head had started to throb again. "I don't think it managed to get my memories. It was trying to, but it didn't." Marceline closed her eyes. "I think it just… hid them. I'm pretty sure it didn't even do it on purpose."
"I guess that explains why they can be recovered," Bonnie said, biting her lip. "But what about my candy people? If you were swallowed up, why weren't they?"
"I don't think it wants to eat people," Marceline said slowly. "I think it just wants the memories."
"So maybe it spit them back out," Bonnie mused. "But why? Do the memories provide some sort of nutrition?"
"I don't know."
"How were you able to take your memories back when it had already consumed you?"
"I don't know," Marceline repeated. "But maybe…maybe I had too many memories for it to handle. It was on the ground when I ran, I think I knocked it out."
Bonnie pursed her lips, and Marceline could practically see the thoughts warring behind her eyes. She stood. "If that's the case, my banana army should be enough to overpower it."
Marceline stood too, slowly, wincing at the pain that hadn't quite left her head. "What if it's gotten stronger?" she said. "When it attacked me, it was like it had just woken up. What if feeding on the candy peoples' memories gave it strength somehow? We should be prepared for that."
Bonnie looked at her, and something in her eyes hardened. "You should go home, Marcy."
"What?" Marceline cried, leaping into the air. "I offer to help and now you're just blowing me off?"
"You've helped all you can," Bonnie said, heading for the door. She paused before she reached it. "There's nothing you can do when the sun is out. And about what you asked for—I'll have it as soon as this is all over."
Bonnie left Marceline alone in her lab, seething and confused.
Who did Bonnie think she was, telling Marceline what to do?
You've helped all you can.
Marceline gritted her teeth. Like hell she had. Marceline had so much left to offer—she could fly and she could fight and she could even transform, for Glob's sake. She was a useful asset, whether Bonnie wanted to admit it or not. And she was the only one who had seen the creature, and could remember it.
It was raining, anyway. If the rain continued through the next day there would be no reason for Marceline to stay at home. And even if the rain stopped, there were a few ways Marceline could go out in the sun—most were dangerous, but she didn't really care. Not when there were so many lives at stake. To her, it was worth the risk. She remembered enough of her long life now that she was sure—living forever was a wasted gift, if you didn't live for something.
Maybe Bonnie was just trying to look out for her, but that was nuts. Marceline was easily the stronger of the two, at least physically.
Or maybe, Bonnie really did think this was all Marceline was good for…
One thing was for sure, Marceline thought as she kicked the lab window open and flew back out into the rain. There was no way in hell Bonnie was going to keep her from helping.
Princess Bubblegum listened to Marceline leave from where she had stopped on the stairwell directly outside the lab door.
Exhausted, she slid down the wall to land in a seated position at the top of the stairs.
She hadn't wanted to ask for Marceline's help because she didn't want Marceline to think she was being used—not anymore. Bubblegum was tired of the games and the lies and the pressures of ruling her kingdom, but it was something she was stuck with, might be stuck with forever. She hadn't wanted to make it Marceline's problem, because it shouldn't have been. It wasn't her problem.
Besides, if Marceline went home, she would be safe. And if nothing else, Bubblegum wanted Marceline to be safe.
Fatigue fell over Princess Bubblegum like a blanket, and she closed her eyes—just for a moment, she told herself. Just until she found the strength to stand.
But sleep caressed a silken hand over Bubblegum's brain, and it pulled her under.
