Marceline didn't know why, but around Finn's house now, it almost always rained.
The treehouse was a sentinel in the darkness, overlooking the hills where Finn and Jake lived, a checkpoint in her territory, and she should have been able to see the moon, bright and white and shining in it's eternal lover's-orbit to the world, and the skies remained dark as they had been for the past two and a half weeks with the massive black rain-clouds stretching over the entire area that people had come to consider Finn's territory, an erratic and twisting zone moving from here to the Candy Kingdom and criss-crossing with Marceline's territory not unlike the winding paths two great beasts of power might make when they amiably crossed paths and going all the way to the boundaries of the Fire Kingdom and the borders of the Ice Kingdom. Over all of that was the storm, radiant in it's darkness and blasting noise and fury enough to blot out the world for the spans of the seconds of it's booming, winds whipping hard enough to spin unattended things a great distance (and yet somehow it never got anyone hurt), the shape of lightning crackling and shining behind layers of cloud so very much like a dozen hearts beating in sympathy with the World itself. It rained, and it was one of the stranger weathers Marceline had seen; so much rain that it was enough to drown leaves and build up the water in small collectives around plants and hollowed branches until it overflowed and came crashing down in wet bursts and gushing streams, and for all it's volume the rain was not hard, but soft, gentle in it's own wild and glorious way, and it seemed to be a herald of something greater to come.
Someone stop me before I go all mushy, Marceline thought, floating in the middle of it all with her arms spread wide for the rain as it dripped down her body, soaking her shirt into a shapeless mess and running through her hair like wet and bracingly cold fingers, the wind stirred by the storm churning around her with all the intense and improbably gentleness of a lover's embrace, and she shook her hair as the thunder boomed again, water slucing down from a mane of hair so soaked by rain that it slucied down with second-quick briskness on the base of her ears and racing down her back and brushing against her sides before splashing down to the ground, and another wonder came then, her sides tickled as the water impossibly sparked with tiny arcs of electricity here and there hard enough to make her laugh. But that's fan-freaking-tastically beautiful.
Around her, the storm screamed and whooped, wind tearing down and crashing with all the joyful fury air could muster, the storm-clouds a wondrous black spiral overhead, neatly marking where Finn's life was lived, and it seemed to Marceline to be one of the most beautiful things she had ever seen, even though she had seen many things in her life that storms ought to pale against; immortality brought a death to ennui, though, and every experience felt like a new one if she didn't concentrate hard, and sometimes it was just like being a child again, the entire sum of reality fresh and untested and all for the taking and it was just so damn beautiful-
She heard a voice, familiar and beloved and calling out to her, it's meaning drowned in a fresh blast of thunder, and in the diminishing echoes she heard a thin collection of brief syllables resounding in tune with the last wavering remnants of the thunder, and again the voice called out, "Marcie, Marcie!" Another flash of lightning split the night into illuminating starkness, the shade of the night washing back in the void the light left just in time for the thunder to roar so loudly that windows rattled, like the joyful screaming of some long-lost primeval beast just so full of satisfaction to have finally come home, and she saw him running down the hill from the treehouse path, a smaller exuberant figure of a boy adorned with blue that just fit so well with the storm, bear-hat askew in the winds and carried away by a blasting gust only to be grabbed by a too-quick hand. His hair looked darker than it really was, cornsilk-blondeness going reddish at the roots and Marceline knew it was a shame that she couldn't see his oh-so-pretty-pretty hair now properly, astonishingly fluffy even slicked down by the falling rain in a tangled mess on his scalp.
She turned to him, floating gently down until the tips of her toes sifted through blades of grass and squished into the welcoming touch of mud so thoroughly drenched that it was almost liquid. Her own voice called out, strong and jubilant and just so full of life she couldn't resist twirling in the air a few times with a laugh maddened by exuburance. "Finn!" She said. "Get over here, come over here, you get over here right now."
He did, already accelerating towards here when she started to speak, and he skidded on a fortuitously placed mud puddle, and slipped, tumbling through the air and catching himself, bounding awkwardly on one foot until he nearly crashed right into her. Marceline moved, faster than sight permitted, and she grabbed him right out of the air, jerking him out of his trajectory she heard him make a startled yelp, She spun in place, her personal gravity spinning them both around, her floating and the master of the moment and him totally reliant on her and hands clinging to her arms with all due fierceness and trust even though he had barely a few seconds to even notice he had fallen, let alone realize she had grabbed him-
They spun for what felt like forever and lasted for six second, expending the momentum, and with a final gleeful flourish Marceline pulled him into a hug so tight she could feel his muscles under his plump front, her arms constricting his arms but not well enough to stop him from impulsively hugging her tightly enough to knock the wind from a girl made of less sturdy stuff than her, and for perhaps a few seconds more it was a hug more intimate than anything she'd felt from any moment with any of her past lovers (some despised, others mostly forgotten and a few loved), his legs locked up against her belly and knees nestled just under the inner swell of her hips; he went totally still for a moment, shocked by her audacity, and she could feel his jaw muscles pulling his mouth into a delighted grin and nuzzled his face into the base of her throat, eyebrows slightly ticklish against the slight ridge of collarbone, laughing honestly and every bit as beautiful as the storm around them and hugging her even tighter. His astounding mess of hair was a wet but lovely cushion for the sharp lines of her jaw as she rested her chin on the top of his head and laughed, pretending that the happy dampness sliding down her cheeks from her eyes was just falling rain.
The storm was beautiful, and so was this moment, so potentially brief in retrospect but seeming to last as impossibly long as this storm had.
She whirled around again, just as madly twisting as the winds pulling her hair into thousands and thousands of little strands with all the efficiency of hands that knew her hair as something comfortable and familiar, and planted Finn firmly on the ground, bending down and back up whip-crack fast; the faint sound of a kiss on his forehead was the only indication of it, and the warmth of his skin still lingering on her lips.
"It's raining!" Finn yelled, and she saw that his eyes were shut tight and he was grinning like a maniac in spite of the adorable blush tinting his face a tasty scarlet. "It's raining and we're outside!"
She threw her head back, scattering more water all over, and with the wind, it was like standing under a small waterfall to catch the vapor. "No, it's storming!" She correcting him, not knowing why it made her so excitable but it was beautiful and awesome and good and she really didn't care why it was so cool. "Ain't it awesome!"
Finn grinned even louder. "Yeah!" He called out, and that one word said it all. He looked straight up at the storm, still welcoming and good in spite of it's fierceness and power, and he laughed. The storm thundered again, and lightning flashed out, and it was only a backdrop chorus to Finn's laughter, and this seemed to perk him right up so that he laughed again, and it thundered even louder, and that was so dramatically cool that both Finn and Marceline laughed like mad-things, joyful in their madness and loving every moment of it. He spread his arms wide to the storm, welcoming in the rain, every bit as open and gleeful as if he were greeting an old friend he hadn't even known he had missed.
"Hej!" he called out, and Marceline almost blinked; the storm boomed out an answering peal of noise, uncannily like a beast answering the call of a master that had finally come home, and Finn just laughed harder, the sound of it merrily dancing closer and close to some unseen edge and fully prepared to jump right off. He shook his head wildly, water scattering everywhere, his hat still gripped so tightly in his hand the water sluiced from it even when caught in the constant downpour.
He looked up at her, all earnest smiles and enthuiastic love, and Marceline saw that he was so seriously soaked that his shirt was little more than an outline around the softly defined and decidedly non-linear shape of his upper body, his stout form so charming that Marceline had to control the impulse to hug him again and even harder this time. There was muscle there, certainly, defined and well-honed, and it was comfortably sheathed in layers of chubby boy-padding, and it resulting in a boy-man who felt like a teddy bear when she hugged him, and her thoughts wandered when she saw him studiously looking up into her face and trying to stop his eyes from wandering, and she noted with some amusement that the rain was surely having an equal effect on her own clothing and she just laughed harder at it, giving Finn an affectionate smack to the shoulder, comradely and with it's own brutish affection.
They both laughed at that. The storm seemed to bring it out in them; under it's auspices, there could be nothing but a sweet and utter freedom, every single worry and concern dropped aside as so much empty weight, and then there was nothing but joyful buoyancy lifting up the spirit into the same heights as the storm occupied.
Spirits growing higher and higher, Finn seized Marceline by the wrist. "Marcie, come dance with me!" He yelled, to be heard over more of the thunder.
"What?" She yelled back.
"Rain dance, we gotta rain dance! When you're outside in a storm, you gotta dance in the rain! It's like a rule!"
Marceline didn't answer right away, and when she did it wasn't verbally; her hand twisted, grabbing him by the wrist and flying into the air, bringing him with her and she swung around and around, landing on the ground again and twirling Finn. "If you can keep up!" She said.
His foot crashed into the ground and thunder pealed again, his face set into a challenging grin. "If you can keep up with me!" He retorted, and grabbed her by the wrist again, pulling to his side and out again, stepping away in time as she took an aggressive step forward, the side of her hip brushing him just over the ribs.
Step towards, spin away, move in again, dancing around each other and laughing madly the whole time, a furiously energetic and mutual frenzy in both mind and body, both vampire and boy moving with such mad ferocity that was matched only by their partner. It was completely without purpose and unexpected and probably a bit dangerous and thus it was so perfectly suited for them. For how long it went on, Marceline couldn't say; there was just the wonderful perfect economy of motion and the joy of having someone so perfectly suited for it all by her side and totally unafraid to match her, and the knowing of it was sweeter than the finest taste of red-
Her dance felt like a song expressed entirely in physicality, her tall and long-limbed form contrasted by his smaller and stockier shape and the seeming differences obvious to her as complementary factors, and it was a song of all the good things she knew, a dozen good things she suspected and twenty-five really good things she thought absolutely had to exist or else the universe was a waste of space, all wound up and wrapped down into a silly dance that nonetheless was suddenly the most important thing she had done ever: she grabbed him in her arms and spun him around again, daring gravity to let loose and allow him to fly as she could, to give her a person that could understand what it was like to soar away from the blessed earth, and yet she dared not put it to the test and let go.
In the brief moment when she spun him back to the ground and permitted him resumption of the dance, she saw his eyes briefly glow with the same sky-born light that tore the clouds asunder, and yet in that moment there was no lightning to reflect it, nothing to make the illusion that electricty was spilling out from his soul and crashing into his physical body and lighting up the world-
And then he was moving again, joyous and free, as wild as the storm itself, and when he laughed the storm echoed thunder. Soaked to the skin, hair going a bit more reddish with every year and making the seeds of legends with everything he did; mighty and brave, an earthshaker who seemingly felt no pain. (But she knew that he did, and the knowing hurt sometimes.)
He was the storm, Marceline thought. She grinned and said, "Hey, Finn!" She pointed up. "If this keeps up, people are gonna think you made that happen and they'll start calling you stuff like the Storm Lord or something! Think that'd be cool?"
Finn's eyes locked with her, and for an instant, there was a glimmer of dim recognition, as if of a name he had forgotten a very long time ago. "Sounds awesome!" He said, and from the tone of his voice she knew he was thinking of all the cool things he could apply that to.
They both laughed then, and the dance resumed anew, with an energy that even the storm could not equal, and for the duration of the dance Marceline knew that even in a broken world like their's there could be so very many absolutely perfect moments.