A/N: This is set about a week after "What Was Missing" takes place. If you haven't watched that episode, get out of my house and go educate yourself.

The hum of amplifiers buzzed into her pink ears as she stumbled into the crowded club. It was a sweltering evening, and the clashing and rubbing of bodies against hers didn't help. She had left her crown at home, thinking it would be to presumptuous to tout herself as a candy monarch – she figured a bubblegum princess would not be well received in a dark almost-tavern on the outskirts of the Fire Kingdom. And, however used to people parting like curtains upon her approach she had become, Bubblegum wondered if this disorderly audience would have given two gumdrops even if they'd known of her status.

But as awkward as she felt, she couldn't leave. Not when the scrap of parchment, folded so obsessively into the tiniest square, weighed like a boulder in her jeans pocket. Blob, when did she ever wear jeans? But she was trying to impress the author of the words on that parchment. The irony escaped Bubblegum in the heat and anxiety, that she would put such pathological deliberation into every facet of this night, although the loose scrawl on the shred of paper was so painfully casual as to seem an afterthought. Playing a few songs Friday night. Eight o'clock, The Guzzling Goose. Wait by the side of the stage, where the stairs are. That's all it read. Bubblegum received it on Tuesday; by Friday morning she had gone through at least a dozen outfits, ended up buying her clothes at a store she had never conceived to enter before, wondered how to do her hair, decided finally on shearing it off as a shock (and as long as she refrigerated the sliced off locks, they could be reconstituted and reattached), fretted over what to say to this woman she'd spoken to last week for the first time in – could it have been years?

It seemed like centuries to Bubblegum.

Her internal soliloquy was sharply interrupted by the crashing of her forehead into a tattooed bicep.

"Sorry! Sorry! I must not have been looking, how clumsy of me," her voice rose to nearly four octaves higher than it would ever normally have as she rattled off a thousand and one apologies. Her eyes climbed up the mound of muscle she had bumped into, over a thick shoulder, into the eyes of a mauve ruffian, a drooping spotted mushroom lolling over his face, half obscuring it in a measure of what looked to the princess like animosity.

Thank Blob, she was saved. Candles across the room flickered and extinguished, plunging the establishment into darkness. Bubblegum bit down on her lip to suppress a startled chirrup, groped through the crowd until she was sufficiently convinced that she had escaped the mushroom man. And then, she froze, the sudden sultry thrum of a bass guitar winding through the shadows and snaring her in a web of steel mesh. Before she had time to remind herself that these were mere sound waves, the second punch came, expelling all the air from her lungs. A smoky voice, crackling like fire but ringing clear as starlight, rang out.

"Sorry I don't treat you like a goddess."

No. No, no! Bubblegum felt sick. She knew these lyrics, heard them before from the very same voice only days ago. The tavern became light again, though more intense and concentrated, lying on a trio of figures atop the stage. Bubblegum noticed almost arbitrarily it had come from a rusted, elaborate rig of skeletal pre-war electric lights. And with this observation came another: the voice was different. Yes, the lyrics were the same, they were proceeding as she knew they would, but the meaning behind them had softened since the last they'd been uttered. No longer were their questions sarcastic or bitter, but earnest and strikingly heart broken. The bass line wasn't predatory but doleful, slower and accompanied by the baying of a wolf-like guitar. A rolling shaker chimed in, a pitter patter that Bubblegum tried hard not to liken to the falling of tears.

The song came to its close with a haunting appeal.

"Why do I want to?"

Only the taste of syrup on her lips made Bubblegum aware that she was crying. She let her tears fall, unnoticed.

The figures on the stage shuffled, preparing for another song. Seven or eight other numbers, some meandering listlessly, some pounding like a steam engine, some howling hurricanes of orchestration. The one in front, on a stool, the owner of the voice and, naturally, the author of the note in Bubblegum's pocket. She wore a chalk gray blazer, long and boyish. Over her lap lay a sharp scarlet bass guitar, lathe-like edges providing it with its second purpose as a weapon. Behind the striking vocalist sat a guitar-wielding bear in vest, sunglasses, and boat-shoes. Adjacent to him was a slate blue rock man, rapping on his own limbs with drumsticks. But to Bubblegum, these two were inconsequential, mere supporting actors; she couldn't keep her eyes off the unassuming starlet, cradling her bass like a lost lover.

As the curtain fell, the princess pushed her way to the side of the stage, perching herself quite nervously in an alcove beside a short stairway. Minutes passed, minutes that seemed like hours and with each the monarch's throat constricted further. The bear stepped offstage, tipped his fedora at her with some pleasantry, followed shyly by the drummer. In accord, the rock man was followed by the vocalist, a smile dominating her pale face.

And, kissing behind the velvet curtains, with Marceline's tongue in her mouth and her arms flung about the woman's waist, Bubblegum could taste the regret in between them. She could feel the reconciliation that the song had aimed at. Dragging her index finger down the small of the musician's back, a sloping valley of snow, Bubblegum could feel them shakily rebuilding a tenuous relationship. With Marceline's cool lips pressed against hers, she didn't think about Peppermint Butler, she didn't think about the pantheon of Ooo royalty, she didn't think about the masses of Candy People each expecting her to be their very own perfect ruler.

"No more secrets," she muttered.

"Shut it, sweetheart," bit back Marceline. "No talking about any of that tonight, Bonnibel, no reminiscing or nostalgia or any of that plop. Let's just forget about it. It's locked up in the file cabinets of that Door Lord's little dimension. It's already settled."

Bubblegum closed her eyes and drank in Marceline's scent, river-stones and the thick air after a storm. She shivered as the woman's cold serpentine tongue hooked around her ear, hand reaching to enclose the peak of her breast, knee cocking in between her legs with a gentle but intent pressure.

"My house is closer than that palace of yours."

Despite all of the distastefulness of it, the perversity, the impropriety of it all, Bubblegum ground herself closer to Marceline's body, so close she could feel the dormant spark of heat in the woman's long cold chest, and whispered an exhilarated assent.