A/N: I liked a Tumblr friend's idea of writing snippets of interaction between Bubblegum and Marceline as the former ages. Here's the first one. =) I'll try to write three or four more.

I hope you enjoy it!

Words: 2,774

WATCH IT WORK – [PART I]

"Where are we going?"

"I toldja, kid. A special place. Now stop squirming—I'll drop you."

Bubblegum blows a raspberry into Marceline's throat. Her lips splutter just above the vampire's pair of bitemarks. "You will not."

"Yeah?" Marceline grins down at Bubblegum and makes a great show of loosening one arm. "Sure about that?" The girl's legs slip into open air. Her dress gutters against the breeze and she provides a giggling squeal, noosing her grip tighter still about Marceline's neck. "Because," Marceline continues, feigning haughtiness, "I don't know about certain other monarchs in the vicinity, but when I say I'm gonna do something I'm usually pretty serious about it."

She unhooks both arms and lets Bubblegum dangle. The princess shrieks, scrabbles at Marceline's shoulder: but she's just a kid and not very strong, and a scuttering second later her fingers slip free and she's falling, falling down into the night like a pale pink comet trailed by a tail of laughter.

Marceline watches her plummet about ten feet before sweeping beneath the princess to catch her again. She narrowly misses a flailed fist to the face. "Higher!" Bubblegum demands, chest heaving, hair a springy snarl of tangles. The moonlight flashes sharp over her smile and she begs, "Please? Please, Marceline? Take me higher!"

Kids made of sugar are way too freakin' hyper, reflects Marceline as she obligingly makes for the clouds once more. This is maybe the tenth time tonight she's indulged the little monarch's plea for aerobatics—it probably won't be the last either. Truth be told, Marceline doesn't mind. The queen has hundreds of amicable acquaintances but not many close personal friends, much less does she know anyone who's willing to worship her the way Bubblegum does. So what if the princess is eight years old? To someone like Marceline, whose birthday stopped mattering over a thousand years ago, time and age are both concepts largely left ignored.

An elbow sinks into her ribcage. Marceline winces. It will admittedly be nice when Bubblegum's not so pointy, though. "Bonni," she mutters, "hey, c'mon. Watch it, okay?"

"Sorry, sorry!" Wriggling around to better face her chauffeur, Bubblegum slides her arms back around the vampire and sighs. As they gain altitude she darts out the occasional foot, kicking curiously at the tentacles of fog curling low beneath the clouds. "Are we almost there?" she pursues.

Marceline squints into the west, where the horizon is a smudge of grays and purples like fingerprints on a window. "Yeah. About ten minutes. Maybe less." Feeling her small friend's jitter of anticipation, she urges, "If you listen and you're quiet"—and she lowers her voice, hoping Bubblegum will get the same idea—"you'll hear it before you see it."

Bubblegum squinches up her face and sucks in her breath to hold it. She makes it about thirty seconds before gasping out, "I can't!"

"Quiet," Marceline reinforces. "Not silent. Breathing's golden, Bittybite." As her cargo gratefully resumes respiration, the vampire queen gives Bubblegum a jiggle and murmurs, "Just listen. Close your eyes and listen."

The swish of her feet slowing to a halt, the princess sinks sidelong into Marceline's elbow and obeys. She licks her lips. Her cheek rasps the collar of the bomber jacket Marceline found in the depths of her closet and gifted to the girl to keep her warm on nights like these, when the wind is sloughing in from the east and bringing with it the red-orange promise of autumn. Below them the shadows of the clouds march across the land like footprints, and Bubblegum twitches suddenly and asks, brow furrowed, "Is that your stomach? That noise?"

She makes a tipping motion with a hand, seesawing her fingers back and forth in the pale blue moonlight. "Nope," Marceline disagrees. "Nice try." There's a glimmer in the distance then, a faint whisper of movement. Smirking, she flicks her eyes between it and the princess and wiggles her brows. "Look," she says, and Bubblegum does, straining at the bower of the vampire's arms.

"Oh!" Bubblegum's mouth forms the shape of that sound, round and soft and dark. She points, sticking out a finger as she might a flag. "Marceline! Marceline, is that—" Her hand slips and she folds down over Marceline's wrist like a bag of flour, the zipper of her jacket raking at the vampire's thumb. "Is that the ocean?" she wheezes, scrabbling for purchase. "Is that really the ocean? Marceline!"

Princesses are slight, slippery little creatures, and it takes all Marceline's inherent skill at wrangling to keep Bubblegum from taking an unplanned dive down south. "Geez, yeah," Marceline laughs, and chases that with, "chill out, Bittybite. You're slowing us down. Do you wanna get there or what?"

"Yes! Yes, I do! So go faster!"

Bubblegum swats at Marceline's hip. Her open palm smacks into the ridge of it with a sharp whap and Marceline jerks midair, snapping at the princess next, "Yo! Not a horse here!" Too enthralled by the glitter of the sea in the distance, though, Bubblegum makes no reply.

Grumbling, Marceline lets it slide. Within minutes they are close enough to smell the surf, and just as the moon whispers into the sky's ninth slot the vampire queen touches down on the beach. She lowers Bubblegum to the sand. She expects the princess to shoot off toward the water immediately, but instead Bubblegum eases back against her and gropes for her hand and just looks, looks down the coast all thalo and soft for the moonlight. The sand is unmarked in all directions but for the speckle of shells near the tideline and the scalloped swoops in the dunes where the breeze goes to bunker, and the air is full of the relentless schoom-shaaaa of the waves.

"This is the end of Ooo," Bubblegum says thoughtfully. She worries her fingers between Marceline's, not because she's scared—or at least the vampire doesn't think so. Bubblegum doesn't look scared. Tipping her face up to the queen, the princess purses her lips and nudges, "It is, isn't it?"

Marceline scuffs her boot in the sand, toes it off, and agrees, "Yeah, I guess it is. Take off your shoes, kid—leave 'em here."

They shed their footwear together. Somewhere out beyond the breakers a fish jumps, and Bubblegum smiles and points to it silently. Marceline nods. Tightening her fingers over the other monarch's, the princess leads the vampire down the beach, taking turns shifting her eyes between the waves and the dunes. "What's out there?" she asks. "The maps all end here, with the water."

Shrugging, Marceline replies, "Islands. One or two."

"And beyond those?"

Marceline hesitates—a second. Another. And then: "I dunno, Bittybite."

Dragging her feet in the sand to slow them, Bubblegum pouts. "You do so know," she insists. "You're old, Marceline." The vampire queen twitches, aiming a glare at her cohort. With the tiniest of smirks the princess resumes, "And with age comes wisdom. Right?"

"Might wanna work on your diplomacy there."

"Marceliiiiine." Bubblegum gives the vampire's hand a studious yank. "Come on. You do know something, don't you? You always know something. Tell me!"

The waves purr. In each swell there is a wink of starshine, an eye blinking over and over, and Marceline blows stale air through her fangs and says, "A long time ago—"

"How long?" solicits the princess immediately. Marceline doesn't bother feeling offended—Bubblegum's a constant well of questions no matter the subject, her interruptions as expected as each day's dawn. The vampire reaches up with her free hand and rubs her thumb over her bitemarks in answer.

"Before these."

"Aaaaah," realizes Bubblegum. "Before the primordial ooze, then."

"I can and will suck out your brain, Bonnibel."

"You don't like chewy stuff," dismisses the princess easily. Wrapping both hands about Marceline's wrist now, she pulls her friend toward the nibbling surf and nudges, "A long time ago?"

The first of the waves sweeps over their feet, all froth and foam. Bubblegum dances, the too-long sleeves of her jacket whup-whupping down across her fingers; Marceline smirks and digs her bare toes into the wet sand. It's been a long time since she came to this place—since she walked on a beach. Since someone she cared about held her hand. "A long time ago," she starts again, "there wasn't an Ooo." She opens her mouth to go on, pauses—falters. Another wave bubbles gently up to her ankles, soaking the cuffs of her jeans. "There wasn't an Ooo," she repeats.

"Okay." Bubblegum stops and leans down to look at something in the water. It's a bit of seaweed strangled around a stick, and she pokes it and goes on, "So what was there? If there wasn't an Ooo?"

"A big mess," mutters Marceline. Bubblegum looks over her shoulder at the vampire, holding the seaweed now between thumb and forefinger, her other palm leaving the queen's grip to cup the sodden plant almost tenderly. Thinking suddenly that this is no place for cynicism, Marceline shakes her head and amends, "It was the world, that's all. A huge, massive world and this was only one place among thousands, and the rest were all out there."

She gestures to the sea, its glittery sprawl going on forever and ever into the night. Bubblegum's eyes follow the motion. "Out there," she echoes. "Not islands." It's not quite a question.

"Not islands," confirms Marceline anyway. "Well—I mean. Yeah," she backpedals, "there were some islands. Really big ones."

Bubblegum straightens. She's squinting hard at the horizon, her mouth curled, her eyes assessing. She's a smart kid—heck, smarter than maybe most of the other monarchs in Ooo. "Something happened to them," she observes. "Right?"

"Right."

"A war. Wars. The Mushroom Wars," the princess murmurs, and drops her gaze to the seaweed again. She begins to disentangle it from the stick and proceeds down the beach at a slow march. Marceline follows. "Why"—and Bubblegum asks this quietly—"were there wars at all?"

"You've got a library at your castle, kiddo."

"Yeah. But it's mostly," Bubblegum confides, "full of cookbooks."

"…considering all your peeps are made of food, that's pretty, uh… morbid."

"Not at all! My people have to reproduce somehow, Marceline."

"Oh great, so it's all sugar porn, huh?"

"Ew," the princess determines, and presses next, "really, Marceline. Why did the Mushroom Wars start?"

Marceline sighs. "I dunno. I don't," she reinforces when Bubblegum whips around to frown at her. "You've gotta keep in mind, I was little myself when everything went from bad to total shitstorm, Bonnibel—younger than you, even. My mom died and my dad wasn't around and—" She stops because Bubblegum's face changes: it softens and dang it, Marceline doesn't need sympathy from an eight-year-old. Clearing her throat, she mutters, "Anyway. I don't know why people started fighting in the first place. They'd been doing it for a long time before I was born, you know, pushing buttons they had no business being around to begin with—"

"What's that mean?"

The vampire queen considers. At length she replies, "They were bombing each other. Lighting the world on fire. Bada boom, baby."

Bubblegum says nothing. Instead she drops the seaweed and reaches for Marceline's hand again, and her palm is cold and wet against the vampire's flesh.

After a moment Marceline continues, "All those other places I mentioned before? They might still be out there, Bonnibel. Or they might've burned into nothing a long time ago."

"You've never checked to see which it is?"

"Nah."

"Why not?"

Squeezing Bubblegum's hand, Marceline says, "Sometimes it's better to wonder and hope."

The beach is getting hilly, the waves struggling to scramble up the sand. Bubblegum digests Marceline's words and eventually hurls the seaweed into the dunes. "They should have talked to each other," she informs the queen at last. "Those people. Instead of pushing buttons, they should have just talked to each other. Talking fixes everything."

"Yeah? You think so?"

"Uh-huh. You're a queen, Marceline—you should know that."

Glancing aside at Bubblegum's mutinous expression, Marceline allows, "Sometimes people don't want to talk, Bittybite." The princess scowls, a protest on her lips, and Marceline finishes, "But there's nothing wrong with trying to make them listen."

Placated, Bubblegum smiles. Skimming her heel through the surf, she kicks clots of foam toward Marceline and agrees, "Yeah, okay." And then, "Where does the beach go? Where are we going?"

"Who said we're going anywhere?" pursues the queen, grateful for the shift in topic.

Bubblegum's smile blooms into a grin. "You did. You said we were going to a special place. Did you really fly us all the way here so we could walk on the beach? It's cool—but it's not special."

"What if I did bring us here to walk on the beach? Long moonlit stroll—"

"You didn't. You're not that boring. You don't stroll."

"Now that," agrees Marceline, "is a true story." She stops and peels her hand free of Bubblegum's. Stooping to squeeze the water from her jeans, she urges the princess to, "Look out west. See anything weird?"

West: where the beach gives rise to hills, and the hills to cliffs, and the cliffs to—

"There's a thing—a bowl!" breathes Bubblegum. "An upside-down bowl against the sky!"

"Mmm-hm." Slapping her hands dry on her hips, Marceline picks up Bubblegum and makes for the huge curved thing sticking out like a thumb on the cape's bluff. "It's an old place," she says. "Most don't remember it. Any guesses as to what it is?"

"Closer," commands the princess. She does have the decency to add, "Please?"

Marceline complies. They drift in a semicircle around it, the wind cold off the ocean but questing too, ruffling Marceline's hair and her small friend's dress. Against the stone cliff the bowl is faintly green, metal eaten by the mold of years. There are holes in it too, yawning and dark, and vines creeping over its lower walls. Through one of the holes a long, thick pole protrudes, slumped in its moorings, its end a glass eye looking out over the ocean. Marceline drifts up alongside the last and polishes it with her sleeve.

"I've never seen anything like it before," admits the princess. She taps her fingernails on the glass, ting-ting-ting. "What is it, Marceline?"

"Telescope," Marceline replies. She lights on the pole and walks down its length into the housing dome. "This place was an observatory. Once upon a time, people used it to look at the stars."

It takes Bubblegum but a half-second to realize, "This is a giant magnifying glass?"

"Bingo."

"Awesome! Can we look through it? Does it work?"

In answer, Marceline hops from the telescope's pole onto the dome's tiled floor. It's green too, nibbled by moss; the smell of rust is pervasive. The seat at the telescope's base rotted away long ago, but there's still a pedestal where it was and upon this Marceline plants her eager charge. "Here," she says, tapping the eyepiece. "You can move it too. Just be careful. Shit's ancient."

"Probably younger than you," teases Bubblegum. She grins and lowers her face over the eyepiece. A moment passes. Two.

Marceline thinks the princess is unimpressed until she realizes the kid's holding her breath again.

"Like it?" she asks. Bubblegum gives the tiniest nod, mute, and Marceline pursues, "Whatcha see, Bittybite?"

Bubblegum leans back with wide eyes and looks at the vampire, her lips parted, her hands flared over the telescope's smooth casing. "They're like salt," she says. "Salt scattered everywhere up there, Marceline!"

"Yeah. Infinite tablecloth, spilled shaker—whatever. Maybe you can write some lyrics for me one day." Leaning over, the queen takes hold of the scope's rotating handle and insists, "Let me show you Orion. Dude's got a belt you won't believe."

They spend hours looking through the telescope, and in the end they only stop because Bubblegum is falling asleep standing up and Marceline's eyes are watering too, reduced to faucets in her face. Stars are suns, after all. Distant or not, they still sting.

"I don't wanna go," the smaller monarch moans as the vampire makes to lift her. She is almost unconscious not a moment later, limp and sprawled and sleepy in Marceline's arms, her fingers still crooked as though curled about the telescope's handles.

"Hey, don't worry," Marceline assures the dozing princess. "We'll come back."

"We will?" yawns Bubblegum hopefully. "Promise?"

"Sure. There's lots more to look at." As they drift free of the dome and out into the night, the vampire smirks heavenward. "I mean, c'mon. It's a big, big sky."