A/N: This will have a part two, eventually.

[insert slightly off-putting plea for reviews here]

Enjoy friends!

In the beginning the Universe was created. This has made a lot of people very angry and been widely regarded as a bad move.

-The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

Place Memory

Ooo is an island. An island at the edge of the end of the world. At the edge of the end of the world, on the other side of Ooo, is the crater.

The crater is time suspended, colored thinly brown and grayscale. Bits of old highway hang at its edge like strings frayed from a shirt two-thirds of the way to being sewing scraps, and at the end of them is a scraggly-rimmed plunge into a desiccated remnant of the past. Crumblecake concrete buildings with gaps like mouths and rustyred rebar teeth pepper its basin, leftover sprinkles from a civilization sundae that melted - in some instances quite literally - almost a thousand years ago.

There is a stagnant sort of horror to the place. It is not the sudden wakeup of a hacking cough in the night that steals the air from seizing lungs and cracks the whip of your spine upright and then bowed in supplication to the wheeze of it. It is more the loitering prick of a childhood monster under the bed, mostly done away with and forgotten. Until you wake in the dark and the light seeping under your door from the hallway isn't enough to convince you that you were not wiser at six years old than you are now.

Rationality does not find an easy home in the crater.

But stagnancy keeps more than stutterfall skyscrapers and childhood night terrors intact. And there was more there, when the crater froze and lagged behind the rest of the renewing world, than the contents of a hellfire sermon. Smack in the middle of the rubble, for instance, at what was an intersection once, awash in the headachey flicker-gleam of an oblong neon sign declaring EAT, is a diner that for its location and outward appearance ought not to exist at all.

(Rationally speaking, that is.)

Now, no one actually runs the diner. At least Marceline says she's never seen anyone working when she's frequented the place. Maybe the lack of actual staff is the reason for the menu's skinny-stick narrow range, but inadequate staffing aside, she also swears by the one thing it does contain.

"Fries," she proclaims. Her voice stretches the word into the sort of languid intimacy Bubblegum has certainly never associated with any food. "The fries, Bonnie. They will absolutely ruin all other fries for you. No joke, they're the tip-tops of hardcore eats. Perfection."

The princess can't help but giggle a little at the hyperbole. Marceline talks with her whole body most of the time anyway, and when she gets excited she punctuates with lanky sweeps of her arms and mock clawing at her face. She smirks in time with Bubblegum's laughter, through all the gesturing, wide enough that her fangs seem to disappear among their pearly-sharp neighbors in her mouth.

"I will," she affirms, "make a believer out of you."

"I'm sure you will." she laughs again as she says it, but the admittance is only half-patronizing. If being - what, friends? more than, lately - whatever they are, with Marceline has made anything out of her, it has been a believer in wonderfully impossible things.

Orgasmic fries from an unstaffed diner in the middle of a crater is about as wonderfully impossible as things get, too.

"Tell me, though," Bubblegum wonders to her, "if no one works there, how exactly do we get these fries?"

Marceline's smirk widens: her eyes are drawn momentarily to the slick sheen of moonlight in her mouth because of it. "That's your trouble, brainlord. You're all wrapped up in the 'how' of things. You'll see, okay? Maybe not how, but you'll get the 'what' of it and that's enough, trust me."

The tightness that creeps into her smile is only visible to Bubblegum because she knows where to look for it. Her curiosity flares with her intuition: she isn't just talking about the fries anymore.

"Look!" Marceline exclaims, before she can press her for anything more. "Look, here it is! Oh, prepare your tasty-buds for greasy paradise, Bonnie, we're here!"

Paradise isn't Bubblegum's first thought. No, her first thought gets lodged somewhere between electrocution and tetanus and the subsequent ones leak away from those until she's thinking wonderful things like building collapse and impact fractures and suffocation. It seems to be standing on two distinct and contradictory slants. She is not as well-versed in physics as she is in chemistry but her knowledge isn't so rudimentary that she cannot see the building for what it is: an impossibility.

"Marceline, I'm not sure this structure is entirely stable."

Marceline cocks an eyebrow halfway up her forehead and shawls an arm around pink shoulders. Her skin is cold where it touches bare to the back of Bubblegum's neck but the princess warms in the middle of her even so. The warm tingles into a shiver when she feels Marceline whisper ghosting fondness over her cheek, "Would I take you somewhere dangerous?"

"You take me to dangerous places almost exclusively."

"Well, okay, but I always bring you back too."

Bubblegum concedes that point, with a smile that creeps into her jaw unbidden: "You do."

She uncoils her arm from the princess's shoulders and slithers around her back to face her: fills her fingers with her upper arms and squeezes, solemn.

"Bonnie," the gravel in her voice gives the moment absurd regality. Bubblegum tries not to laugh: shakes a bit anyway. Marceline ignores this and continues, "Are you ready for the most fantastical fries ever to exist anywhere?"

The princess swallows back a fresh fit of giggles. Said giggles catch on a hitch in her throat, but she draws her jaw into a steady, regal frown. She cups Marceline's elbows in her palms, tilts her chin aloft a bit and stands clocktower straight. The vampire queen maintains her expectant silence. The neon signage behind her flickers dull and bright, strobing, but Bubblegum's gaze does not falter from her companion's face.

She smiles again, leaves reason behind with greater ease than she expected, and says: "Ready as I'll get."

Those giggles bubble back against her teeth when Marceline smears her hands down to clutch at her wrists, dragging her forwards into her past.