"Finn?" she called out in the same calm and hyper-calculated tone she was notorious for throughout the Land of Ooo. "Finn, I know you're home. My goggles betray your heat signature. I know you're up there. Please just come down stairs and open the door, I come with news."
There came no reply.
"Okay then, I'll come to you."
The front door was unlocked and creaked open like an unoiled machine. The Princess of the Candy Kingdom stepped her pink and blue boots lightly over a carpet of dust and discarded items-trash and food remains being chief among them. The couch across the room was the only visible area that appeared to still be in use, as decrepit as that particular piece of furniture was. Princess Bubblegum looked at the red box with a glass window mounted to the wall besides the couch. It read "BREAK IN CASE OF EMERGENCY." She suddenly felt the weight of her heavily impregnated backpack pulling on her shoulders. A sigh of sorrow emitted from her saccharine lips. She looked up the staircase, seeing the fetal-laid heat signature of a boy she once knew and a man the Land of Ooo once revered. She lifted her goggled away from her beady eyes of wine and took each rotting, wooden step with caution toward the closed door at the top landing.
"Knock knock," she said as she swung the door open.
The room was dank and the air stale. Atop a bed of flattened pelts laid a youngman, familiar to her only in appearance. He had ripped blue-jeans to his knees, muddy black boots, a hole-riddled henley shirt the color of a summer sky, and the hood made of bear fur that had at one point in its existence been white.
"I know you're awake, Finn, I've-"
"Read my vitals, yea, I know," he returned in a voice far deeper and weathered in grief than she remembered.
"Finn, there are pressing matters."
"Then press back."
"Well, I am pressing back. I have my entire kingdom at work at the current moment apporpos. But I think you should involve yourself as these new developments concern you, too."
He sat up, holding his knees and keeping his back to her.
"Nothing concerns me anymore. You know this, PB. I'm not your hero or anyone else's. Those days died with Jake."
In a solemn voice, she replied, "this concerns him, too."
Downstairs, the two found their bums back downstairs to the couch, feeling the ever-harsh coils under the woefully-flattened upholstery digging into their hindies. Princess Bubblegum had put on cherry-mint tea and served Finn and herself in a chipped mug and empty vase which she looted from the kitchen cabinets. Hardly fitting, but she made do.
"The state of your treehouse saddens me, Finn."
"Thanks."
"The state of your hygiene saddens me further. You haven't cut your hair or seemingly bathed in weeks."
"Mhmm."
"You've lost more teeth, from the looks of it."
"You done?"
"Not quite. Your arm is a nub. What happened to the mechanical arm I made for you?"
He blew the scraggly blonde bangs away from his eyes as he furrowed his brow. "That mechanical arm was built for me nearly a decade ago. Machines get old, Princess. They get old give up, just as I have."
His eyes welled as he nodded toward the red box with the glass window and the Princess followed with her gaze. She smiled thinly and thoughtfully as she slinked her bag off of her shoulder and onto her lap, unzipping it from the top, and exposing something metallic and green.
"I thought you might be due for an upgrade, so I made something for you," she said.
"Nah, I'm good with my nub."
"Nobody is good with a nub, Finn. You will take this and enjoy a better quality of life."
"I will not," he argued like the feisty boy she remembered.
"You don't even know what it is yet."
"A new arm, duh."
"Well, yes," she said with a roll of the eyes, "but this one is special. One that just might
Cooperate. You know, in case of an emergency."
Finn used his long nails to scratch the patches of hair growing thickly on his jawline as
he thought on it. "You came here, practically dragged me out of bed by the toes, and are now handing me a new robot arm somehow different that my old robot arm. Cut to the chase then; tell me what this visit is really all about so I decline the invitation and go back upstairs."
A look of disappointment flashed across the princess's pink face. "You know what? Have it your way then." She rose to her feet and tossed the heavy arm unceremoniously onto the young man's lap and much to his shock.
"Good Glob, PB."
"Good Glob, nothing, Finn! While you have been hiding in this tree of decay, wallowing in your own self-pity and deprecation, I have been monitoring the Ice King's Palace."
"Fat lot of good is it to monitor the palace of a dead man."
Her eyebrows furrowed and she made an audible growl. "The palace of a dead hero who actually stood up against evil instead of crumbling like a dry cookie."
"I'd rather have lost my own life on that mountain that have lost that of my best friend and brother," he gnashed.
She took deep breath to calm herself as she made her way to the ajared front door. "I know you would have, Finn. Only Jake would not have given up the fight so easily had you been the one to fall. He would have pressed on. And he certainly would be listening to what I had to say instead of insulting my very presence as if I'm an inferior."
Finn spoke up as the she was halfway out of the door. "Princess, wait. Look, I've donked up good, I know that. And I am so so sorry. I'm sorry that I let you down. That I've let down Ooo. That I crumbled like a cupcake."
"Cookie."
"A cookie, then. Just tell me why you came. I'm ready to shut up and listen."
"Very well. There have been earthquakes in recent days. My aforementioned surveillance of the Ice King's Palace shows it at the epicenter. I am worried, Finn, and so should you be. Simon gave his own heart to imprison the Lich King in ice."
"I all gave out hearts to stop the Lich."
"You do not understand because you were no longer in the fight when it happened. I am not speaking in metaphor. Simon literally reached into to his own chest and seized his heart, the organ which channeled the magic of the crown throughout his veins. Upon ripping it out, still pumping, he smashed it against the Lich, creating a block of Ice denser than the base of the mountain itself-trust me, I divided both their massed by their respective volumes. You know, for science. Point is, Simon gave up his own heart and life for you. For me, for Marcy...for the prosperity of Ooo."
"Now it just sounds like you're trying to make me feel worse than I already do."
"This is not about you, what part of that is unclear?" She grew increasingly frustraited. "Simon used the full of his powers to seal away the Lich for good, and I am afraid that these earthquakes are disturbing his prison. Worse yet, I feel that deep down, somehow, that the earthquakes are no act of Glob but are being deliberately triggered."
"Who could be powerful enough to trigger earthquakes?"
"Exactly. I do not know myself, Finn, not yet. But I was hoping you would be good enough to investigate. I would do it myself, but if something were to happen to me before I can make final preparations in the Candy Kingdom, the land of Ooo is donzos."
He chewed on things a bit, digesting the heartbreaking fate of his old nemesis-turned-endearing friend, Simon; rolling around in his head like a marble what it means to be a hero and just how far from the core of its meaning he had drifted to. Finally, Finn nodded to himself, fixed in a distant stare.
"I'm in, Princess." He blinked and looked up at her rosey glossy face, remembering what it was like to have someone to care for. "Homies help Homies, always."
"It is good to have you back," she replied genuinely.
"I'll scale the mountain and look into the old palace, but I ain't doing it with your arm."
She shrugged. "Use the arm or don't. It is up to you. But without Jake, your trek will be a fine deal more treacherous up the frosty inclines. I have something else for you. If you will not accept the arm, I hope you at least have the sense of mind to take this." From her bag she withdrew a freshly knitted pink sweater with a bedazzled heart on the chest. "It gets cold up there, yanno?"
He smiled as the feeling of nostalgia coursed through his nerves like a warm liquid. "I do. You made me a sweater just like this the very first time I fought the Lich King."
"Mhm. I do not need you to get to close, as I know it will be hard for you. The Lich should remain secured in his icey cell, but I would just rather be certain for sake of all the living. A quick peek into the palace to make sure the ice still holds and let me know if you find any suspicious characters. If it helps, think of it as an adventure."
"Sounds like a heck of a time. Will do."
"And Finn."
"Yea, Princess?"
"Shave your face. Your beard looks terrible."
"Okay…"
"No, I am deadly serious. It is a great pain to look upon. Like, I know you idolized Billy who had an undeniably had a long, gorgeous beard. Simon grew a nice one, too, all silver and lucious."
"I get it."
"Yours though is just sad. Patchy like a poorly sewn quilt, or a garden whose crops were planted absurdly far apart, perhaps by a blind greenskeeper."
"Son of a Bleeblop, I heard you already!"
"Shave your face, Finn."
She closed the door behind her and continued on her way, leaving Finn scrambling to remember all the things one might need on an adventure. He made himself a sandwich of canned fish and acorn butter as he scribbled his mental checklist into a physical one down the length of his arm. He took the last bite of his sandwich and set to it.
"Backpack, check. Apples, check. Fresh pink sweater from PB, check-check. Um, I guess that's it then." He shrugged, tightened his boot laces, slipped on his backpack, and walked out of the tree house and into the fresh morning air for the first time in ages, finding the sunlight as brilliantly invigorating as it were absolutely searing to his eye holes. The old treehouse had nearly vanished beyond the horizon before Finn had a jarring recollection.
"Dirtballs, my sword!"