Shut Out
(It was something Marceline yelled at herself a lot about, later. Something she'd remember for a long, long time, even after Finn passed on and didn't come back, when the world moved on and forgot him, and after Simon was gone, and after there was so little holding them together that she was gone from Bonnie's life, for a while, and it was this:
When Finn spiraled, he spiraled inward. From the outside, it looked fine. But from the outside, you didn't hear anything about it just like the time he almost ate the food of the Fruit Witches on purpose, or the tower he built into space and almost didn't come back, or all the other times he very quietly and serenely did... something extreme.
It would be nice, she thought, to say she never felt like she screwed it up and wasn't there for him when he needed it, like he always was for her. It would be nice to say so. It just wouldn't be true, inside her heart.)
-----
From the outside, people said later, Finn didn't abruptly stop talking to everyone. He just slowly started slipping away.
A gradual process. He talked less and less to people. He didn't ask around for interesting puzzles or dungeons to delve, or asked around for monsters to fight, he just went and did it.
Marceline and Bonnie both heard less and less from him. He was an increasingly rare presence, he wasn't on the phone as much, he didn't show up at the places he used to hang out with them, movie night didn't happen...
(Marceline didn't know the particulars then. She just knew something was wrong, but she dismissed it.)
Finn spent a long time, thinking about it, when the coughing fits started to get worse. Jake was gone, by then. It didn't feel the same anymore. He started thinking a lot about cessation, and inevitability.
(Marceline found out later.)
He thought: "Will Bonnie and Marceline be sad when I'm gone? Will they care?"
There's a follow-up thought. It's sharp and bitter and the sort of thing you think after too long spiraling inward, too much time spent blaming yourself, and too much time spent smiling around them while thinking a lot about how ugly you are compared to them; how unwholesome, how brutish and rough and just out of place.
You start thinking maybe they're just humoring you. The goofy kid that solved all their problems and was probably more invested in... whatever this relationship was, then they ever wore. You start thinking a lot about how horrible the word 'humoring' starts to look.
(Marceline spent a good, long while upset about it.)
You think: No.
You think: Why would they?
Sometimes you think loud and angry about it, in bitter and painful thoughts that you'll never say to them so it comes out twisted and bloody. Its stuff that's had years to percolate and bubble up, that you never said to them and just kept privately wondering why they bothered with something that didn't belong anywhere anymore.
(Later, Marceline wonders if it would have been enough to just SAY how important he was; how important he had always been. That just about everything good in her life was because she'd met him all those years ago, and decided to hang out with him. Simon coming back into her life, her and Bonnie talking again, her finding peace with her mother's memory thanks to BMO... all of it was, in some way, because of him.
It didn't make her feel better, though.)
And sometimes it just leaves you in a tired whisper, and when the coughing starts, and you see the blood on your hands, and you know what the cost of having fought the Lich is, and you decide: maybe its easier this way.
He lies to himself and says they'll forget him fast, if they even care that much.
He knew better, deep down. But it was harder to see that.
-----
And its later, honestly not that much later but feeling too long to her, when she comes floating down to the places where someone matching his description has been hanging out, and her hand bangs against the door, so hard the windows shake. She could just break her way in, but somehow she's scared to just do that, like it will break some kind of spell and make everything come falling apart.
She just bangs her fist on the door, almost hard enough to smash it right off the hinges.
"Come on! I know you're in there!"
Bang-bang-bang.
She's not exactly yelling yet, but her voice is taking that slightly hoarse quality that feels worse; like seeing the cracks in glass before it actually explodes all over your face, or feeling the fractures in your bones from too much stress for too long about to make your whole body cave in from that final tiny bit of Too Much-ness.
"Finn! Please! It's me! You know its me!"
Bang, bang-bang. It's almost thundering now.
"Open the glob-damned door and TALK to me already!"
It's almost a scream.
And now, the next time she speaks, its after a soft noise. It might be something like crying. It might also be the noise a door makes when someone places their head against it, past the point where desperation is winning so hard there's nothing to do but feel the cold hopelessness slide its way through you.
Marceline Abadeer has been through a lot. She has seen centuries come and go; she saw the last great civilization disappear overnight, and she's seen too many kingdoms grow and wither away so fast that it was hardly worth acknowledging them at all.
And she's seen friends come and go; ashes on the wind.
'This is your fault' is in the back of her mind, no matter how much she knows that's not really fair to herself.
Somehow, this feels so much worse.
When she talks next, her voice is ragged, and her hands shake. She has slain tyrants and monsters, she has survived the impossible without blinking, and she has been the fixed presence around which the world turns onward. And now she feels like a child again, alone and lost and hurting.
Again and again, she thinks of people that she thought could have been her family, only for her to drive them away somehow, on purpose or not. Everything stays.
"Dude. Don't shut me out. Don't do this." And then, she almost can't say anything at all, a horrible miserable croak making the word come out small. "Please."
There's no response.
Again, she gently puts her head against the doorway.
An unfamiliar voice from behind her says, "You know the weird human thing?"
Marceline turns; too quickly to make it casual. Hope and fear and a bit of outrage at whoever THIS was intruding on the moment all cling together. She stifles it all down, puts on a serious face.
She wonders who this person is; it looks like a small stone, with tiny arms and legs. It's not anyone familiar, but she's too scared to think straight and just says, "Yeah? Who're you?"
The stone person shrugs. "I'm just a rock. Came to life about seven years back during some thing with wizard and meteors. Think I saw the blonde guy then. You know him?"
She doesn't bother thinking about the time frame of if she knew anything Finn had been doing at the time; not important. "Yes. Where is he?"
The stone person blinks. It's a surprisingly emotive response. There's sadness and helplessness and even a small bit of 'good now someone ELSE can deal with it' that makes her want to bite. The stone person says, "It's a long story," they say. "I'll show you out back."
-----
Marceline had seen the grave when she'd flown in. She hadn't paid much attention to it, with other things on her mind, and perhaps she didn't want to think about it. She can't think about it now. As soon as she saw it, and the stone person leading her towards it, everything shut down.
Everything went gray. A cold and numbing incomprehension oozed in, and she moved like she was on automatic.
"You see that kind of sickness now and then," the stone person says. "The walking death, some people call it. You get it worse when you get near the places the, uh. the Lich King used to have," and they trail off. The Lich has been gone for a long time, and still people don't like talking about it, or the places it's been.
Marceline is not thinking about it right now. She is not thinking about anything. There's just awful dread all around.
The stone person continues. "I don't really know who he was. He just showed up here a few months back, before I came here, and I guess he was a roommate or something." Marceline silently does the math and works it out; after Finn had talked less and less to them, like he was... ashamed of something. And some part of her keeps looking at the times they did talk; she's asking herself 'Was there something I could have done?'
She doesn't know.
"You cough," the stone person says. "You get weaker and weaker, like... the sickness eats something in you. And you start-"
"Coughing blood," Marceline says tiredly. She remembers a phone conversation with Finn, before he had completely dropped off the map. She remembers the coughing.
'Could I have gotten him, if I'd tried?'
She doesn't know.
The stone person glances at her. Marceline remembers her mother, and thinks about Finn. The same sickness. Somehow, she's not surprised. Her life is a closed circle, and the people she drives away without meaning to go out of her life the same way. "Yeah," the stone person says.
They start talking more, and Marceline isn't really listening. She's reacting, yes; she is speaking and responding to the lines she feels she is supposed to, but inside, she isn't thinking anything at all.
Some part of her, the greater Marceline, is peering out and going through all the times she was around Finn before he went off the map, and studying it for signs. For moments she should have noticed, that she WOULD have noticed if she'd cared, or if she was worth a damn, or if she even really DID care about him as much as she thought and, and it is too much.
She wants to scream. She wants to dissolve her body in a stew of nightmares, she wants to rip off her skin and run to the farthest places of the world with her monstrosity exposed for all to see, and she just keeps thinking monster recited over and over, a magic spell announcing what she's done to the whole world.
Huntress Wizard didn't notice it; Bubblegum didn't, not Flame King or any of the other people who could have, and somehow Marceline feels that her not seeing it makes it worse.
Her fingers slip. The umbrella falls down.
She barely notices. The sight of the unmarked grave, forgotten by the world, hurts a lot worse than the sun.
------
She talks to the others about it. That makes it better, in some small way; the world doesn't notice or care, but she can carry the news to everyone and see if that makes a difference. It does. There are tears, and there is mostly a stunned disbelief.
Somehow, Huntress Wizard hurts a lot more than some of the others. Flame King is calm, and you would have to notice the flames around the court of the flame people erupting to see what she was really thinking; she's not sure Lumpy Space Princess entirely gets what's happened, since she just keeps insisting Finn was in hiding somewhere, pulling some kind of a plot. "You'll see, he'll be back any day with some grody thing on his belt." Marceline doesn't say anything, just leaves. But Huntress Wizard's face remains calm, and composed; its a mask, Marceline knows.
She sees a flicker of expression, and when Huntress Wizard gravely thanks her, it says much that Huntress Wizard, normally so composed and so completely in control of herself, has to sit down.
Simon looks lost. He politely says 'No,' as if he can just deny it. There is a lot more to it. She doesn't really remember much. She remembers a feeling like a dam inside herself started breaking more and more as they spoke, and then it all came smashing apart, and there's just words, and hurt, and it was her fault and she did this and-
And he is just there, he sits there, and only around him does she let it all out. Later, she remembers the terrified incomprehension on his face, the denial, and it reminds her so much of when he had started losing himself to the crown that it hurts in too many ways to fit inside her heart right now.
-------
Bubblegum is technically the first she tells.
She first tells her, before anyone else, over the phone. And she is struck by how Bubblegum takes a long, long time to reply, and it is a very quiet "Thank you for letting me know," and the call cutting off which such violence that it punches through the gray misery. She finds out later that they had to fix the official Candy Kingdom phone, and works out clues from there.
Bubblegum cares. She was the first one of them to meet Finn, to care about him, to tie him to the world. She was always first for him, one way or another, and some part of Marceline thinks that Bonnie should have been the one to bury him. Whether its true or not, she has an image of him as a young boy being carried into the threshold of Ooo by her; as a young man, it should have been her leading his body out of Ooo.
And Bubblegum calls her down, and Marceline knows something with her is... wrong.
Her eyes are twitching. Her glasses are askew. Her hair, usually a shiny mass of bright pink, is dulled and somehow twitching here and there; she doesn't look right, with filth and grease and the faintly acrid smell of substances unknown to human scientific knowledge. She twitches a little more whenever she moves, and when she directly looks at Marceline, there is a terrible feeling in her.
Marceline knows desperation, and grief, and something that might be called madness. Bubblegum's eyes suggest things Marceline doesn't want to think about, desperate and clinging to a horrible possibility.
"We don't have much time," Bubblegum says. "We need to do this now, before any more decay sets in."
Marceline knows what she means, somehow. Shock cuts through the apathy she falls into with grief, and she says, "Do what?"
Bubblegum tells her. And she indicates a shovel.
"Hurry up, if you want to help," she says.
-----
The following night, they go to the place Finn had been crashing at, and where he had wasted away, letting himself be forgotten. Simon is there with them, and from the glances he shares with Bubblegum, Marceline wonders: did they talk about this in private? Where they planning something?
Did they start this as soon as Bubblegum heard?
The three of them have shovels. The three of them have a willingness to do what must be done.
She doesn't think it'll work. But she has to hope.
They leave that night. The work goes quickly with three of them, and Marceline all but rips the ground apart for all of them.
They leave an emptied grave.
-------
Afterwards, they don't talk much about what they did. Either the grave robbing, or what happens later.
There are bargains to be made. There are acts of genius too horrible and frightening to consider, and yet it's so easy for Simon and Bubblegum, and Marceline has to wonder how long they were planning for something like this.
"I've done something like this before," Bubblegum says as the procedure happens, taking its time to... do its work. Simon is there, watching it happen with a morbid solemnity that is somehow worse than anything else. Some part of her sees a shadow of the Ice King in it; not the madness or forgetting himself, but the willingness to do something she'd rather not admit he could do. "It's different with candy people. The mind plays a process; it's really like just waking them up?"
"And a human mind?" Marceline says. She hasn't spoken much. She remembers moving around in a daze, as though she were the dead one instead.
Bubblegum is quiet. The only noise is her machines working, of strange fluids sluicing through pipes, chemicals being electrified, and a portal to somewhere else opening up.
"I don't know," Bubblegum says, carefully, like someone trying not to scream.
"The soul has to want to come back," Simon says. His voice is quiet and tired.
All three of them are quiet for a long time.
They stare at the revivification machine. Lights flash, fluid gushes into a central chamber large enough to hold a single human form (a very large one, admittedly), and arcane energies Marceline doesn't want to understand reach out to some other world.
Atop of this, like a lightning rod, is a capsule containing a badly woven, threadbare pink sweater.
Marceline wishes she had something more tangible to give Finn a road home besides feelings and wishes and the desperate longing to tell him how much he means to her.
-------
None of them really talk that much about what happens at the end.
"I had to fight to bring it the rest of the way," Marceline says, when she is asked. She does not tell who she fought, or where, or why it had to be done. Her eyes are distant and tired, and its too exhausting to explain the how's.
Simon had arcane knowledge. Bubblegum had scientific understanding, and the two of them built something impossible, beyond the scope of her original de-corpsinator serum. Marceline had something else: authority.
Whatever price there was to pay, or that she made some thing out in the world do, she would pay it without hesitation.
And in the depths of the aether, at the very boundary of life and death, so close to a point of no return she couldn't dare have hope it would work out-
Doing the one thing she had to offer, to fix this, to save him-
(Marceline reaches across, holding up love and memory and all the things she wanted to say shining like a spotlight into the Dead Worlds.
There is a long moment of silence; too long, and too late.
And then.
And then a single hand, shaped by memory and stubborn self-image into a human arm, clasps her hand as she pulls him back in.)
And so Finn the human took his second breath.
-------
There was a lot, after that. Too much for her to remember as much more than a distant blur.
Lumpy Space Princess bragged about to everyone; that she had seen it coming, that she knew it was all a big scheme by Finn to fool some bad guy or another and boom he'd GOT THEM. Probably.
There were words, between her and Finn and Bubblegum, and some just between him and Simon, and a lot between himself and Bubblegum.
She doesn't know exactly what, between them all. There is something intimate and close and raw between himself and Bonnibel Bubblegum. It's friendship, yes. It's love, too, but its hard to say if it is romantic or not, or if putting a term to it would cheapen something that's too hard for either of them to spell out. But it feels private, and Marceline does not intrude.
She is there, all the same, when he meets again with Flame King, and the other people close to his heart in one way or another. There is relief, and there's anger, too. Sometimes people get enraged when the finality of death winds up not being a factor; lashing out is a part of that. But they still have time to make amends afterwards, once the anger is gone.
Marceline is not there for the things Huntress Wizard says to him. She leads him to Huntress Wizard, and departs, but she remembers the look Huntress Wizard gives her; grateful, not quite believing this was happening.
It said 'Whatever you did; what cost you paid. Thank you."
(Afterwards, she is not so shy with her feelings, or so unwilling to be honest about them. It is sad, that it can take a lot to say so, but such is the nature of love.)
And then, there is what happens between Marceline and Finn.
She and him, yes.
(She hugs him, afterwards. "I'm sorry," she says, over and over. "I'm sorry, I'm sorry."
She isn't sure what for, exactly. Just a generalized wave of sorrow and grief and relief, all mashed together and spilling out. She remembers crying.
She remembers the look on his face. She remembers the sound of him crying, too, and for a moment she felt as if they were a pair of children, alone on the world, scared and hurt and alone and making their own ways to live.
Everything stays. Perhaps it's not so bad, every time.
"I'm sorry," he tells her, and he has many words for what exactly; for not saying anything, for thinking they didn't care, for letting himself get beat down by the Lich's curse, for all the things he wanted to say but didn't or couldn't because he didn't have the words for it.
It shouldn't be real, she tells herself. Monsters like her do not get a do-over.
He hugs her, and it is real. He is there, alive again, his arm still gone despite the regenerative process, and that somehow feels like it makes it all feel more real. One arm solidly built and warm, the other smaller and colder metal.)
------
And so, time moves on, and they can almost forget that this happened.
Finn died. And now he wasn't. It was easier to pretend he never had.
But they remembered. And the inevitability of the future weighed down on them.
They spoke often, after that. Finn about his feelings; about feeling that he was... too awkward to be around them. That they were just better than him, that for so long ever since he'd been a kid he'd felt like they were humoring him, or when he was really upset and thought he was just a joke to them, or a tool that wasn't fun anymore.
Bubblegum sits there. She stares silently at the ground, and at the sky, and the weight of years moves. Memories of pajama parties and being like the child she never had the chance to be and always feeling happiest and freest around him dance on her memory, and in his.
Softly, she says, "Do you still feel that way?"
He looks down, and again, he says it: "I'm sorry."
"If something happens to you, if you start hurting, or think that you're a bother or that I don't care, that we don't care-" Bubblegum stiffens up, the weight of the things she wanted to say too much for her, and her face freezes up in an awful cluster of grief and anger and shame for everything she wanted to say, but couldn't until it was too late.
It wasn't too late anymore. She had brought him back; they had brought him back. But even so, she still trembled in the shadow of that grief.
"Please," she says. "Please don't do that again."
Marceline softly says, once more, "Dude, don't shut me out. Please."
(Behind them, Simon watches, part of them but in his own sad way feeling not exactly part of things. He turns his face away, and only later does Marceline realize Simon didn't agree to not do any of that, at least not then.)
Marceline and Bonnie put an arm around a broad shoulder each, and they lean into him, and each other. This time, he does not shrink away.
His robotic arm goes around Marceline's waist, his human arm around Bubblegum's shoulder; prosthetic of genius around the one invincible by birth and deed, the beefy arm around the one who was so completely built differently. There was a poetry in it.
He hugs them both, and they give voice to the things they wanted to have said, that they should have said.
And just for a moment, it all feels okay.
It's not something they can repeat.
"We can't do it again, can we?" Finn says, tiredly.
Bubblegum understands what he means. "I tried to bring Jake back."
His expression doesn't flicker.
"I don't know if it was because Jake was... gone longer, or if, well. I think you have to WANT to come back, and Jake..."
Finn sighs again. "Jake was ready to move on anyway."
Bubblegum nods again.
Marceline quietly says, "If its old age that gets you... I don't think there's a lot we can do about that."
Finn lifts his head up and stares into the sky.
"I miss him so much," Finn says quietly. "It was easier to just... let myself go, hoping I'd find him right away. And you found me. I guess... I guess I have to hang on, as long as I can, for you."
Marceline wants to say 'glad to hear it', or something like that. It sounds insincere.
She knows, one day, he will be gone, and this time, he won't come back.
She wants to accept the inevitability, but she has gotten so much back when it should have been past a point of no return. Somehow, it doesn't seem fair.
She closes her eyes, and listens to the sound of his pulse.
Things don't feel gray anymore.
----
(Across the multiverse, upon the brow of the All that knows it is One, it does not pass unnoticed.
It makes an alarm go off. It's not an important alarm, in the broad scheme of things. It's simply an indication of an unusual event. Few powers would care.
The Scarab did, in his role as an auditor of the cosmic powers, and it was not a point in his favor.
He turned his attention to the world of Ooo, and the universe it resided in. His expression flickered balefully as he contemplated that Prismo the Wishmaster had taken an interest in that world for some time.
Well. Perhaps that was an opportunity.
He would have to pay attention to this world, then, and bide it's time. No doubt an opportunity would come up.
----
Time passes, as it does.
Goodbyes happen, as they must.
Finn breathes a last breath, and that is the end of Finn the Human, as he enters the Dead Worlds.
And as he leaves them, too.
A thousand years later.
Marceline Abadeer returns to Ooo, on business of her own, and she meets a small cat-like hero named Shermy.
And across the span of time, across a thousand years-
It is a reunion.
"I think I know you," he says.
Everything stays, she tells him later, and thinks that it does not need to be a gray thing, or a sad thing to say.
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