(In the vast forests of Ooo, the uncharted dark places where the ground was the ruins of failed civilizations and determined wood grew up in ever-rising cathedrals to survivalism, there was a boy who was alone.

In another timeline, in a continuity where things went better for his childhood, he was found by dogs and taken home, raised to be heroic and fierce.

But not here.

The baby became a boy, and the boy became wild and fierce, so young but strong enough to wrestle down monsters and make them his meals, to survive with strength of arm and cunning (though perhaps not too well at that second part) and dwell in these wild places where only monsters dared walk among the remnants of the dead who came before.

The boy learns at the feet of the forest wizards who educate the beasts who can speak and think, learns to speak properly and have the learning of things, but never does anyone care to take him in like he wishes. He wants to run in a pack like the wolves, to hibernate in community like the bears; even the savage brutality of the monstrous things he fights with a simpleminded awareness that he should because they like hurting people and it's good to fight them, even they had others to call 'friend' in their own twisted way.

Not him. He is alone. A freak among the dark places.

Still young, he ventures outward, daring to go to the strange places he has only heard of, to the light of civilization, in hopes of finding someone or something like him or at least someone to be his friend and let him stay with them…

On the way, though, still years shy of his tenth birthday, he finds a shrinking apple and eats it, and suddenly the world is so much bigger for him, and life gets a great deal more complicated.

Three long nights and sleepless days after she had broken up with Ash, and moving back into her lovely tree house, Marceline stared at a picture she'd hung up on the wall of him and her, the two of them holding hands and smiling for a picture wizard.

She sat down on the floor of the upper-level room that had been her bedroom before they'd moved out of here and into his own house and stared at the picture. They were hunched over and facing each other, slanting their arms up and tilting their knees in so they looked like they formed the outline of a heart, and Marceline wanted to gag at how stupidly sappy that was. "Ugh," she muttered to herself. "Why'd I let that picture wizard talk me into that…"

She stared at the picture. She was grinning like a dumb love-addled little girl and Ash was smiling back. She stared hard, as if the picture would show little cues on his face, body posture tell her all the clues to say if he'd been lying the whole time and just stringing her along to be his little servant with benefits (and she shuddered, little soft cries switching out with horrid growls with a feeling like her throat muscles were vibrating with the violence of it), or if maybe, by some stupid change…

Maybe, she wondered, his feelings had been as genuine as hers were when they moved in here, and he stopped caring about her except as an extension of his wants later on.

Marceline growled again, and lifted the picture up, muscles standing rigid like twisting snakes, about to throw it, and she stopped. Breathing heavy, she slowly put the picture on the ground, face-down so she couldn't see it. The picture was a memory, and memories were important. You didn't dare let yourself forget anything, no matter how much it hurt, because then you could start forgetting the good things.

Simon had taught her that.

She stared at the ground and tucked her legs in, wanting to cry and shutting down the impulse. She'd learned a lot about shutting things down so Ash wouldn't whine about things and make her life obnoxious and annoying; boyfriends weren't supposed to do that, she thought, and hugged her knees so tight her legs started hurting. They were supposed to be there for you, they were supposed to listen to you and want to just hang out or cuddle instead of all that invasive intimate stuff, and they were supposed to be your friend before anything else. Heck, it was right in the name. Boy-friend.

Marceline stared silently at the floor. She rubbed a finger on the ground, tracing the grain of the wood, the good and solid sweetness below her feet. She was spending a lot of time on the ground now; flying was good, flight was like dancing on the music of the world and the beat inside her soul, but it was so hard now and she didn't know why, it just hurt even trying and all she could do was stare up at an empty sky alone without to grace it.

But home, inside this tree house, that was good. Things had been good here; when they had still been living here, Ash had been… okay, not a good friend, he was just too stupidly self-centered to come even close, but he'd been a decent boyfriend. That was good enough for a little while, better than just being alone all the time or trying to make friends with people who just freaked out and ran away from the freak (and she ground her teeth; all her life, she'd been the freak, the outsider, the thing that just wasn't like anything else, before the Mushroom War and after Simon had forgotten who she was and when the new people had started to come out, she was just always too freaky one way or another). After they moved out, he'd gotten worse.

She ground her teeth again, fangs bringing up little sparks with edges more like metal than they looked. She should have known how stupid it was, giving him all the power like that by moving into his place, and she should have kept it all on her terms, that made it safe and… and besides, she was the Vampire Queen, she was the daughter of the Lord of Evil, she was the scion of the Nightosphere, he was just some dumb-headed punk wizard who stopped caring about her as a person long ago, if he ever even had-

Marceline punched the floor, trembling and still trying her hardest not to cry. It cracked, and the noise snapped her out of it. Her hand didn't so much as itch, but the wood had splintered, and there were small holes here and there.

She stared at her own lovely floor, broken and busted because she couldn't control herself (just like a little kid, just like how Daddy kept saying she was still his little girl and he'd never see her as anything but a child who kept wandering off and ignoring him) and clapped her hands to her face and she just screamed, long and low and so frustrated she just wanted to break something. "Freaking Ash," Marceline snapped, stomping on the floor and powering herself up with a machine-like flex of her legs, hitting the floor so hard it shook and pushed her up into her feet. "Freaking Dad. Freaking all the freaking things!"

She stomped over and opened the window; cool night air blew in, and some of the heat making her head ache dissipated. Not enough, but some of it, enough to make her feel a little better and get a bit of a grip on herself. She stood there, staring out at the grasslands, at the forests and trees far out there, spreading into distant and forgotten ancient ruins for who-knew how far; the Candy Kingdom bright and shining in the places where the forest had been beaten back, and for a moment Marceline wondered if maybe she could risk going back there, if maybe Princess Bonnibel Bubblegum wasn't still mad about the thing with the dragon transformations and sneaking her potions that made her into a giant blob-monster and super-hungry at the same time, it had just been a joke and Marceline hadn't thought that it would be a big deal that Bubblegum ate nearly forty percent of her subjects in a frenzy, they survived in her and she restored them to their bodies afterwards, what was the big deal-

Marceline remembered her shouting. She flinched, like the loud words in her memory were harsher than being slapped in the face or hurt more than sunlight. Her hands squeezed the windowsill without thinking, and the wood cracked under her strong hands. She sniffled, feeling like a whiny jerk, and without really thinking about it wiped stinging wetness from her eyes. "I said I was sorry," she muttered. "…Why's she gotta be so intense all the time…"

No, the Candy Kingdom wasn't an option. Not yet, not for a while, maybe not even after it broke down and the lights when out and Bubblegum went wandering again to spread science to Ooo again.

The frost-peaked mountains in the distance caught her eye; it might be fun to go snowboarding, maybe make a snow-monster and chase the penguins and see how the snowlems were doing-

She thought of an old man, older than all the civilizations and kingdoms of Ooo, old and mad and so horribly unaware of everything he had lost.

She sank to the floor, knees gently propping her up, and she sniffled again, a pressure pounding her head like someone was hitting her with a hammer. "No," she said softly, her shoulders trembling. If Bubblegum was a no-go, even the possibility of running into the Ice King on her own, of seeing Simon Petrikov-that-was and him not even knowing why he kept following her…

"No," She said again. And that was all.

Marceline stared into the sky for a long time. The clouds were pretty, thick and dark against the stars, and the moon shone through them like a lovely glowing coin. Like maybe God (and she didn't care who this Glob guy was, there was only one way to define the Almighty for her) had flipped a coin to decide whether or not to make everything, and it had landed scarred-side up, but life was so important He made the universe anyway because you just couldn't leave some things to change.

The thought made her feel a little better. Not much, but it was something.

Marceline wasn't much for brooding; mostly, she just thought of it as getting all 'soul-searchy and weird' but it tended to happen when relationships went sour like they had with Ash. Memories of him weren't quite so strong here in this home, but it still reminded him of her (no matter how much it had been her home before she had him move in), and that hurt right now. She sighed, thinking of clearing her head for a few years.

"Fire Kingdom sounds nice," Marceline mused. She'd met the Flame Princess, an absolutely adorable little spark, cute and huggable (and she just knew that fire elemental would be a real knockout when she was grown up, oh yes, wouldn't that be something to see) and every so often she was let out of her lamp to play and learn under controlled visits, and Marceline had come once as an ambassador of whoever felt brave enough to give Marceline responsibility, and the Flame Princess had been such an attentive student; maybe she could drop by and hang out for a while, maybe build her way up to getting Flame Princess to like Marceline a bit more and maybe want to date the Vampire Queen when she got older; she liked the plump and curvy ones, and fire elementals had a real thing for 'being wider at the bottom than the top' (as Bubblegum used to say, with a perverted little giggle)…

Thinking fondly of plans and future adventures, Marceline smiled into the sky, already thinking of things to send to Ash and get him out of her life and focus on something else, trying not to think that what she really wanted right now was just something to hang out with, a friend-

A cry, faint and small enough that she twitched her ears to make sure she'd heard it at all, rang out from the forest. She turned her head, frowning slightly in surprise. A boy from the sound, and strangely familiar like she'd heard it's like years and years ago.

She focused on a small copse of trees a fair distance from here, a weird-looking bunch right in the middle of the grasslands, and Marceline tilted her head curiously. "What the stuff," She muttered.

The cry sounded again, slightly louder and totally inarticulate. There weren't any words, just a rambling bunch of noises like growling and yelling at the same time. It sounded like a kid (probably about the age of the Flame Princess, Marceline's overactive imagination supplied, and she was old enough to have remembered countless generations, and recognized the subtle little tells she had absorbed without realizing it), in pain, hurt by something, and something was seriously weird about it-

And, perhaps the thing that got her attention the most was how unbelievably ticked off it sounded. Raging manticores having dragons biting their butts off didn't sound even half as angry as that, like whoever was making that noise was going to rip someone's head right off and shove it down the hole and they would still be so ticked off they'd rip right through a tree and keep on punching and hitting everything in sight until the whole world and everything in it was dead-

A third time it screamed, louder and angrier than ever, and Marceline was intrigued enough to go see what it was.

Without thinking about it, she drifted right through the window, riding on the sound of that impossible rage, a massive depth of emotion not dissimilar from her own moments of total apocalyptic fury. She didn't pause to think that she was flying again, only that she was, and for the moment Ash wasn't even a little weight in her head-

She flew off directly to the trees where she heard the scream. Maybe it was something she could fight; that sounded fun.

Leave scattered and blasted before her, as though an invisible aura scared everything around her into getting right out of her way, and she crashed into the dark undergrowth so hard a large crater flattened for fifteen feet around her.

Marceline's hair shifted wildly, tangled spikey shapes moving around her body, and her blue-green eyes narrowed as they adjusted to the scarce available light. Moonlight filtered through gaps in the leaves, dim and faint, casting twisted shadows all around and turning the high thickness of the trees into pillars coated in pale darkness-

In the middle of the copses, a tree had been busted right through, as if it had exploded, or something had hit it hard enough to break it apart as violently as if it had exploded. Broken pieces of a stump were all that was left, chunks of tree scattered all around and of varying size; a spear-like shape tangled in the branches of another tree here, a full quarter of a chunk rolled down right into a nearby river there, and the tangles of branches all over the place.

The crying voice was especially loud now, and came from underneath a particularly large and knobby branch, which was violently shaking and moving around as something tiny underneath it tried to move it off, but it was too large for it to get a decent grip.

Marceline walked over to it, staring and wondering what the heck had happened here. The branch rocked to one side, trembling and sliding over, just moments from rolling over completely… and then it fell to the other side, and was answered with a muffled scream of incoherent rage that, Marceline noted now, sounded young.

Like, as a matter of a fact, a little kid.

For a moment, she wondered if there was a tiny monster under there, or this whole thing was a new evil creature with a particularly incompetent way of hunting. She shrugged, thinking that maybe she'd have a good fight if that was the case, too curious for anything else and put a hand underneath the branch. It went still for a moment, the little thing under it probably surprised as the weight went off it.

Marceline barely had to exert herself. One-handed, she gave a small twist of her wrist and the branch went flying, crashing into another tree and bouncing into the ground. She gave it no more thought as she looked down to see what was underneath it, and stared.

In the shallow marks the branch had left, there was a tiny boy squatting down there, blinking up at her with a mixture of gratitude and shock. He was the smallest sapient thing she'd seen in a long time, smaller than dogs, smaller than even gnomes; he was smaller than pixies even, a tiny little boy no taller than some of the mushrooms she saw sprouting from the undergrowth here. His stocky body, perhaps a bit plump with puppy-fat underneath the tangled mess of cloth he'd managed to stitch around himself in a crude coverall, heaved and shook with exhaustion as he sat up, blinking cutely up at her.

Marceline blinked. She had definitely not been expecting a miniature person to be under that thing. "Uh, hi," She said, wondering briefly why he was just staring at her. She got down on one knee and leaned down to get a closer look at him.

The mini-boy shook a bit as her palm hit the ground, so small and light that the relatively small impact of her hand bracing against the ground like that still made him bounce up a little. He fell over, his shoulder a barely noticeable weight against the crook of her thumb, into the fleshy area where it met the rest of her hand.

He felt amazingly warm. And she was a little surprised when, as he braced his hands against her hand and pushed himself up, she actually felt it; the little guy was strong, perhaps as strong as if he'd been a large man around her size, but at his tiny stature it was vastly more focused and actually hurt a little bit.

She found herself half-smiling. "What the heck are you?" She wondered aloud.

The tiny boy stared up at her. For a moment, she found herself thinking that he looked like one of those guys who naturally ought to have a hat; his cute little face was ringed by a huge mess of blonde hair that was proportionately as long as her own hair, perhaps a bit shorter, totally covering his back in a unkempt but unbelievably beautiful mane. A hat, she thought, ought to be perched on top of all that hair. Maybe not one of those stupid pointy hats like the gnomes wore, but a nice animal-themed hat (maybe like the ones the hyooman tribe under the Candy Kingdom liked; she'd helped them out a while ago, showed them to a nice placed called Beautopia, and there'd been a big and absolutely adorable preteen girl that she thought would make a good hero someday). Preferably made from the skin of some savage beast.

The boy squeaked, "Hi!" and grinned up at her, falling over and lacking backside on her hand. She jerked her hand away, as if burned, and leaned in even closer. The boy just giggled and rolled around in the dirt, mood totally swinging the other way. For such a small creature, he was loud; certainly loud enough for her to hear him all the way from her house. Right here and now, he was loud enough for her to hear clearly; she honestly would not have been able to tell that he was so small just by his voice. Which was weird, she knew that he shouldn't be physically capable of being that loud.

The boy spread his arms up, not much bigger than some of the dirt clods, and smashed them down into the ground and spread them around, making a dirt angel. Marceline smiled despite herself; the kid was adorable. Being rescued from the branch looked like it had put him in a good mood.

She remembered the screams of animalistic rage, though. Putting that voice to this happily giggling little boy didn't quite make sense. "What are you?" She asked again. She poked him right in his little tummy; not much wider than one of her fingers. She glanced at her hand for comparision, an while she did, he giggled at it.

He sat up suddenly, his hair tangled and messy from the dirt. He looked right up at her, keenly interested and eyes wide. She wondered why he didn't run, or panic; she was a giant to him, a titanic woman big enough to swat him down or eat him in a single gulp. She had no intention of doing either, but she was starting to wonder what the kid was thinking; either he was all kinds of crazy-levels of brave, or he simply didn't think she was scary.

He seemed to think for a second, brow furrowing and a hand scratching deeply into his head. With a great air of importance, he proudly said, "I dunno!"

Marceline grunted. "Where'd you come from?"

"I dunno," he said again. He pointed vaguely towards the distant woods, at the more dangerous parts of Ooo. "There, I guess."

Marceline raised an eyebrow. "Huh." She frowned at him. "Where the heck are your parents?"

He looked blankly at her. "…I have parents?" he said after a moment. He looked frankly stunned. He frowned. "Never met them. Buncha jerks, just leaving me out there!" He crossed his arms and made an adorable little pout.

Marceline chuckled and patted him on the head hard enough to knock him over. He toppled head over heels, rolling over and landing on his butt. Sitting cross-legged, he was still making that pout and having his arms crossed. "What the heck happened to that tree?" She wondered, not asking him, just wondering.

"I punched it until it exploded 'cause it was stupid-looking," The mini-kid said proudly. "Then a branch fell on me." He scowled. "Jerk branch! And it was too big for me to get a grip on it and shove it. Jerk!"

For a moment, Marceline wondered if there was some kind of innuendo that she could get from 'jerk branch', and she decided that it would be trying too hard. She looked at the tree, or what was left of it. "…Yeah, that's one butt-ugly tree." She snickered. "Heh. 'Butt'."

The boy made a noise like 'pfftt!' "Hee! You said 'butt'!"

They both giggled. Marceline stood up and gave the tree a massive punch that ripped it to even more splinters, and the boy goggled in amazement. "See?" Marceline said smugly. "That's how you slay an ugly tree."

The boy clapped. "Wonderful!" He said, mumbling other words that he clearly didn't really know how to pronounce. "Wonderful!" HE mumbled a bit more, and managed, "You're wonderful!" He giggled again.

Marceline stood over him proudly, casting him into a shadow. He goggled up at her, eyes wide and mouth open in a delighted grin. She had to smirk at how dumbly confident he was; he wasn't even slightly scared of her. ORdinarly that would bug her a little bit, but he was such a non-threat to her that there was no point in trying to intimidate him, and it was just kind of cute. "Heh," she said, and leaned over to poke him in the stomach again, trying to get a reaction out of him. He grumbled at her and tried to swat her finger away, never mind that it was bigger than him. She stuck her tongue and flicked him, sending him rolling into the dirt again.

He landed head-down about a foot away; a massive distance for someone so tiny. It didn't seem to bother him. "Hooray!" He said cheerfully. "I'm having an adventure!" Suddenly he sat up, completely serious, and said to her, "Why you shaped like me?"

She stared down at him. "…Huh?"

"You're shaped like me!" The boy wiggled his arms, apparently believing that helped whatever point he was making. "See?"

Marceline looked at herself, and then at the boy. For a moment, she thought she knew what he meant. She shrugged off the notion and pointed at herself. "Uh, no. I'm not." She indicated her pointed ears (and his were round and small), her blue-gray skin (and he was sort of pinkish-yellow, she guessed), and general vampire-ness. "I'm blue. I got awesome-er ears than you! And I'm way bigger, pixie-boy."

He pouted. "Are not!" He paused. "…Okay, you're bigger than me. But the other stuff don't count!"

Normally she wouldn't have bothered to get involved in an argument with a stranger, but it was hard to resist the impulse to bicker with a kid arguing with her on her own territory. She leaned down, crouching so low that she was bracing herself on her knees and hands like a beast, and brought her face right in front of him. "Oh yeah?" She said, her breath gusting right through his hair.

He crossed his arms and scowled defiantly (and cutely).

Nobody, Marceline thought coldly, nobody dared argue with her especially when they were so much tinier. "I got better teeth too!" Her lips slid back and her jaw shifted; her teeth enlarged, a set of razor-blade edges suddenly in front of him, all shining death from her mouth.

To her satisfaction, he jerked back, falling right on his butt with his eyes wide. He scooted back, alarmed, and she advanced on him, one ponderous dragging pace after another.

He bumped right into a rock, and she kept advancing, until her mouth was right in front of him. "And I'm way bigger than you," she reminded him. "Big like the big things that eat smaller things. Get it?" She hissed, baring her teeth again, and opened her mouth so her hot breath went right into him, giving him a good long look at her open maw for a moment, so close to him that she could have stuck her tongue out and licked him up and slurped him right into her mouth if she'd wanted to-

The boy growled with surprising violence, still cuter than ever, and substantially less cute when he punched her right on the spot between one of her lower sets of her teeth and the gumline, sending a sharp shock right through her head.

Marceline the Vampire Queen, most powerful of all of Ooo's denizens, daughter of the Lord of Evil, Scion of the Nightosphere, and holding just about a dozen other more awesome titles, reeled back from being punched by a little kid so small he could have fit inside her, clutching her mouth. "Ah!" She screamed. "What the flip?!"

The boy stuck his tongue out.

Moving on emotion, Marceline swung a hand back, as if to swat him; he braced himself, fists up and- wait a second, she thought to herself, freezing in place when she saw he was grinning, dancing on one foot to the other, flexing his shoulders around.

He was grinning, the little brute was grinning. He wanted to fight her, he thought it'd be fun to fight her, Marceline the Vampire Queen, who even if she wasn't the biggest badass Ooo had ever seen she'd still be an absolute giant compared to him.

Marceline stared down at the pugilistic little kid, her mouth open. An odd noise that sounded vaguely familiar bubbled out, choking and sputtering, and she realized that she was laughing like an lunatic before she fell on her back, kicking and laughing and screaming at how outrageously stupid all that ways.

Her feet hit the ground again and again, powered by her muscular legs and pounding the earth with enough force to knock the boy back and off his feet, and again and again every time he got up, making little shockwaves that ripped up the ground under him. When Marceline finally got a handle on herself, wiping a tear from her eye and still giggling a little, he was unearthing himself from a big pile of dirt that had closed over him, looking a bit scuffed but unharmed.

Marceline sat up, and let out a solitary giggle or two before she looked down at the boy, smiling goofily. He looked up at her, crossing his arms and trying to look impressive. Her mouth twisted up just looking at that, and she had to turn her head aside and giggle to herself for a few more minutes. "Okay," She said. "Okay, okay! I'm done, geez…" she made a 'pfftt!' noise and wiped more laughter-tears from her eyes, smirking down at the mini-kid. "You, you seriously want to fight me?"

"Yeah!" he brought his fists, punching the air a few times. "C'mon, I dare ya! Let me at you, I'll show you! Fight fight fight, blood blood whoop, whee!" Her fingers went over him, grabbing him by the back of his primitive coveralls. "Hey! Put me down!" He scrabbled uselessly for her fingers, trying to punch his way free, blue-gray fingers as untouchable and invincible as fleshy pillars of earth.

She brought him up into the air, and he squeaked a bit as she brought him directly before her face, dark lips quirking up in a smile, her fangs dimpling. "You know what?" She said softly.

"What?" he said warily.

She lowered her head, and her forehead gently tapped against his body, her massive locks of her swallowing him up like a gentle ocean. "You're all right," she said, pulling her head back and putting him down on the ground.

"I already knew that!" he said, trying to strut on the dirt and look cool.

Marceline stood up, and she became aware of the mini-kid becoming very still and quiet as she got to her full and rather impressive height, looming over him like a primeval titan from ancient myth. She smirked down at the kid and floated up into the air, smirking wider at his sudden 'ooh!'. "Later, kid," She said, putting a hand up to her head in a mock salute, and flew away through the trees.

The boy looked bewildered, but he still waved at her. "Bye-bye!" He said. "I told you we were shaped the same!"

Marceline made that 'pfftt!' noise again. "Don't get ahead of yourself, kid!"

When she got home a short while later, she didn't feel the need to get ready for an adventure in foreign parts, or to get all moody over Ash's stuff. She contented herself for a while putting Ash's remaining things away into nice little boxes to drop off at his place later on, and then leave him to his own devices for the rest of forever.

She smiled as she tucked into a big plate of red gelatin later that night, and found that she was actually feeling pretty good about herself.

Her mouth still ached a bit, and she rubbed it with a thoughtful look on her face. Not because it hurt, but that she had been hurt at all by something so apparently harmless.

She hadn't met anything that could give her a real fight in a long time.

Marceline smirked.

Well, she thought. At least she'd found something interesting.