bubblegum bitch

chapter fifteen

a/n

how do you fix something that was supposed to be unbreakable?

It was a mistake. I know that now.

It was a mistake to let her hold me until I stopped crying. It was a mistake to let her in my window that night. It was a mistake to let her kiss me, to let her give me her time and her love. It was all a mistake, but I can't bring myself to regret any of it.

I still see her face in my mind every minute of the day, I still hear her voice, her natural scent is still hanging in my room and I am lost. I can't be this person, this neglectful leader. My people need me, and every day since she left I have been wandering the halls of the palace that I built from the ground up, my eyes empty and searching. Even my citizens know that there's something wrong.

It's just that nobody knows how terribly, terribly wrong I was.

How wrong I was for thinking that it was her fault, when all along it has been mine. I am the only person I can blame, and everything needs to change now. I need to change.

I am hiding from her. I am waiting for the dimness in my eyes to grow into brightness, for all of the signs of my moving on to come into the light. 

Still, I see a shell in the mirror. Still, I am waiting for her to love me.

~

I don't leave my room the next day. I sit at my desk and have Peppermint Butler bring me stack after stack of neglected paperwork. My mind quickly falls into the steady rhythm of read, sign, next page. It would go way faster if I just signed everything without reading it, but if I'm really taking the kingdom back into my own hands I need to know every little thing that happens.

When I finally stand from my desk and walk to the window, my spine cracking a shocking amount, the sun is almost down and there's this gorgeous gradient of a sunrise on the horizon, turning my room soft shades pink and gold and purple. The air is warm and thick and it smells like summer and pollen. 

It's these times, when everything is quiet and the only scent in the air is of the ground and the sky, that I miss the world before. Before the Lich and the Mushroom War. Before everything fell apart. Of course I'm proud to be where I am now, standing in a world that I made myself. But everything used to be so much simpler.

There's only one other person who really understands that. Only one other person who's lived long enough to know just how much everything's changed. And I want to talk about it with her, to reminisce. 

But she's off limits now. 

Marceline, I mean.

Responsibility demands sacrifice.

And oh, how much I've sacrificed. I want to go back to before, before I met Marceline and Finn and Jake and Ice King and Gunter, before I knew about the Lich and before I built the kingdom and before my uncle and everyone. I hate it here. I hate looking around and seeing everything I've built. I just want to rest.

How can I ever possibly rest with all of this on my shoulders?

A cold breeze ruffles through my clothes and I shiver, coming out of my thoughts and leaning against the windowsill. Finn and Jake are walking through the courtyard, kicking at stones and laughing and shoving each other around.

The sacrifices I've made.

Nobody would even care that I'm gay. All of those stupid ideas were left behind with the Mushroom War- that's one part of the old world that I don't miss. They wouldn't care, except to say that I would have been so good with Finn. That we would have made the perfect pair. He's a hero, and I'm a princess. Perfect, right?

No.

No, because he's young and careless and he knows nothing of responsibility.

Also, he has a dick.

~

For the next week I hole up in my room or my lab, working and thinking and making decisions.

Number one decision: I cannot be with Marceline anymore. Not alone. I'll be polite and say what I need to say but I cannot love her anymore.

Number two: The kingdom needs to come around. It's fallen apart. I need to fix it. My body wilts with exhaustion even at the thought of it, but it needs to be done.

Number three: I have to find a boyfriend. Not Finn. Just someone, to give me the appearance of having things together. One of my suitors. I'm thinking someone who came from out of the kingdom, someone I don't know. Someone new. 

~

The next week I tentatively suggest visiting with a few of my suitors to Peppermint Butler. He looks stricken for a moment and then leads me to the hall, treating me like a deer, like I'll be scared off if he moves too quickly.

The hall is sad and filled with boys who all have no idea what they're getting into. Most of them old. I remember only too vividly the problem with Braco so I choose carefully. A boy who looks nineteen and says he's seventeen, who stands and shakes my hand and smiles and tells me that he's waited a long time to meet me.

We go for a walk in the garden and he tells me that he was raised by his mother in the same hills as Finn and Jake, says again that he's been waiting a long time to meet me, says that he'd like to take me on a proper date, says yet again that he's been waiting a long time to meet me. He seems very determined to get that message across.

~

And so, I have a boyfriend.

~

Marceline seems to be avoiding me. Or maybe it's just that I've been avoiding her, and I'm too good at it. Either way, I've barely seen her at all in the past week. Just flashes in the hallways, when she nods at me and opens her mouth as if to say something and then looks away. I hate it. I miss her.

Oh, the sacrifices.