This story was one of my very first efforts in Adventure Time fanfics. I dropped it after getting into Finnceline more enthusiastically, and the basic concept wound up getting adapted into my on-going Finn-Thor idea.
I gave it an ending just a few hours ago; eventually I decided that it was decent enough as it was, even though finishing gave me a bit of a headache. I also realized that several questions weren't explicitly answered, but...meh, no big deal.
Also, the ending was VERY much inspired from the ending of a Kingdom Hearts fanfic concerned Dymyx. Pretty much directly adapted from it, and for that I apologize; the scene REALLY stuck in my head and it seemed the best way to end it.
...
When Finn was very young, so young even his abnormally accurate memories could pinpoint it, it was admired that he had skinned a bear when only an infant to make a hat.
Someone - and he never does remember who, because it doesn't really matter - told him that he was unconquerable.
No. Unconquered. Because some names cannot be wiped away by the cycle of rebirth, and the nature of a thing will shine through even the thickest of wrappings.
...
These days, after they found the Godspear of All-Searing Noon, Finn has a new tradition when he wakes up in the morning, washes his face and looks into the mirror.
When he does that, just for a moment as short as a solar prominence, he sees so many faces in the mirror, looking straight at him. The mirror seems bigger at these times, so it can fit the untold billions upon thousands of faces looking at him. Most of them are human - and that itself is surreal enough, seeing these faces that generally don't look much like him does but are clearly of his kind - but many of them are reptile-people of four kinds, some tall and lizardlike with feathers on their heads, some huge with short snouts and spikes everywhere, some big like swimming beasts from ancient rivers, and some small and beaked with leathery wings for arms, and all of them love him like small children love a protective father.
All the humans have glowing marks on their foreheads, like there's holes in them and inside are little suns that want to burn all darkness away from the world and save everyone, everywhere, forever. Their eyes glow the same way, crinked up as they look at him and smile at him like they're all his kids and they love him. The reptile-guys are harder to understand, and it takes him some time to realize that they're smiling just like the humans are.
He stares at those people in the mirror smiling at him, so happy and a little bit sad too, until they fade away and the world returns to normal.
He doesn't mention it to anyone, not yet. But those people are important to him. He just doesn't know why.
He does think, when he bothers to think about it at all, that those people, human and non-human alike, look like heroes just like him. For some reason, no matter what else happens in his day, it makes him feel better.
...
It started happening not long after someone went to the big chunk in the middle of the world where no one lives (and he hears sometimes people get sick when they stay there too long, and bad stuff happens to them not long after), and bring back the Spear.
It's his spear, now. Finn's always sort of wanted a weapon that won't break, ever, and this spear seems to fit. Nothing can break it, and he'd bet his hat that there's nothing it can't smash through if he tries hard enough. (It's not an idle bet; he loves his hat, but this spear is so strong that it honestly freaks him out.) Nobody else can take it; it's not that nobody else wants it, but he's the only one that can carry it around, with the weird exception that if he asks someone to pick it up, they can do it almost as easily as he can.
It just like some of those ancient movies he's seen (the good ones, of course), the ones with a hero who has a weapon that only he can lift, or that can only be moved around by the worthy. The similarity isn't something he thinks about often, since it doesn't seem important.
Finn was there that day those guys that took it from the huge crater brought it to the Candy Kingdom. They had been carrying it around in a huge wagon bigger than most roads he's seen, and the guys that found it, a pair of lizard-guys that look a bit like dragons with horns on (the good ol' dragons he knows, not the ones in pictures Princess Bubblegum showed him once that look like monster-lizards with wings, and that was weird), have to pull it by themselves. They're the size of dragons themselves, and they're still practically hurting themselves when they hit a bumpy bit in the road or go down too fast.
Later on, Finn had been told that they had been bringing it to scientists like Bubblegum and her friends to see what was so weird about it, and he had thought that all the excitement had been about the huge chunk of ground they were carrying around in their giant wagon (which was pretty dumb, in retrospect). So, he had seen the spear sticking out right in the middle of it, like a big gold thumb saying that everything was okay and awesome.
There were a lot of weird things about that spear. It wasn't just what a big spear had been doing there in the first place. There was also why someone had made a spear that wide wider around then Finn was, and longer than any weapon Finn had ever seen, or why it had been made from something that looked like gold but was much too hard and glowed like a torch in the middle of the day. (And also why everyone seemed a lot more excitable and adventurous around it; sometimes Finn thought that it was made of courage and leaked it to everyone around.)
While everyone had been talking, Jake had gotten the idea that someone should have been pulling it out, and it made sense to Finn. If you have a totally awesome weapon sticking out of the ground somewhere, obviously you wanted somebody awesome to pick it up and then do stuff with it, since if you wanted to get rid of it, you'd put it in a giant treasure chest and put a monster to guard it or something like that. True, Finn would have still found it and done something awesome with it, but he figured it was a matter of style. The idea that maybe someone had left it there after doing something important to pick it up later honestly hadn't occured to him or Jake.
So, with the use of a megaphone that was also Jake, creative insulting and the suggestion that the spear had a grudge against that one guy that you just knew had made fun of your mom, the two of them had gotten a 'pull that spear out of the ground before the nerds get back' game rolling. It didn't take long for people to forget the insults and grudge thing, but after someone had brought food and drinks and a musical band showed up out of nowhere, it just wasn't important anymore. People just started having fun trying to pull that spear out of the ground with sheer physical strength or magical powers or weird gadgets they had, and even when they couldn't do it, no one seemed to mind much. It was still fun watching the people after you try.
At the time, Finn was thrilled to see them being like that. That kind of thinking was downright heroic, even valorous. Later on, when he started to realize the spear was more than a spear, he wondered a bit more about that and the normally easy-going people of the Candy Kingdom.
No one could budge it, not even a little bit. Two dozen people had tried, with chains hooked up to moving machines that could smash through rock just by going really really fast (with a big shield on front, of course), with magically summoned hands made of yipping little dog-heads with a strange resemblance to Jake's second-cousin twice removed, and a whole bunch of other stuff Finn hadn't paid attention to and Jake was too lazy to remember; not a single one of them had so much as shifted it by an inch, though they'd done a lot to the earth directly under it. (It was probably a good thing the ground wasn't important to anyone in particular, or they could have gotten in trouble.)
Jake couldn't either, though Finn didn't think that was as much a big deal as it could have been, since Jake was in a hurry to get back to the food and his 'try' amounted to him giving it a little kick (to no effect) and saying, "Eh, I tried." And then wandering back to the food. Everyone had applauded him, possibly because they had gotten into the mood where they would have applauded the Ice King showing up to kidnap Princess Bubblegum on the grounds that it showed guts.
And with all those things considered (except for Jake's extremely lazy expression of an anti-try and possibly the thing about the Ice King), it was pretty surprising when he grabbed the spear and it literally jumped out of the ground, lighting up like a miniature star and a sound like the universe itself screaming for all things Evil to die burning in holy fire forever, topping itself off with a massive flare of brilliant sunlight that everyone in the next sixteen miles could see and only lasted for a second but was still so intense that it bled itself into every single surface area in it's path for the next seven and a half weeks, every single shadow within seventeen miles of that detaching from whatever casted them and running away even though that wasn't physically possible. Also, the lightshow was really pretty. (But didn't blind anyone, so that was nice of it. Or hurt vampires, dispite clearly being sunlight. It was weird like that.)
It got weirder than that, at least for Finn. The instant it came into contact with his fingers, he had one of the weirdest feelings he'd ever had, ranking right up there with the way Marceline and Bubblegum could make him feel, although this was less tied up with confusing but fuzzy thoughts and more with a sudden compulsion to find the most evil thing he could find and punch it into the sun, or failing that, a volcano. When that light flared up, it had been at Finn's touch, and Finn had suddenly felt like he had found an old friend he hadn't seen forever, or had suddenly remembered something he'd forgotten for way too long, and that light was met with a ache Finn hadn't known was even there burning into nothingness inside him.
The spear, all these weeks later still glowing with a vibrant light like a piece of the sun turned into gold-bright metal, made him feel like he had been broken up a long time ago and was a little more whole.
No one had any idea what the hell that had been about, but all agreed that it was pretty freaking awesome. Things did get a little more problematic when he and everyone else wandered off to hit things with the spear and see if they exploded in pillars of sky-scorching sunfire (they did, as a matter of fact, but Finn made it a point of friendship not to do that anywhere near Marceline lived) right before the scientists, including Bubblegum, came out to find a hunk of rock missing the magic spear they had brought all the way from around the world. (Nobody argued if it was magic or not; it glowed with holy fire, changed sizes every so often and no one seemed able to pick it up unless it wanted them to. It was either magic or science used to be a lot more awesome in the pre-Mushroom War Days.) When they did find Finn and get the spear back (and after they found it that it could make stuff blow up; they let him keep doing that to stuff for a while in the interests of scientific inquiry, which was an application of science so awesome that Finn used the phrase 'FOR SCIENCE' so often over the next three and a half week that the words lost all meaning), their various instruments intended for use in analyzing the spear kept jumping off on their own and running away after pledging themselves to the cause of Great Justice and Unneccesarily Capitalized Letters. The scientists themselves, including Bubblegum, also had an overwhelming compulsion to slay evil that distracted them from their work for five days after they spent sixteen hours of every day meditating on the neccisity of their work and trying not to think about all the helpless creatures that almost certainly needed protection from the forces of darkness right now. In the end their will wasn't strong enough, or in cases like Bubblegum's, they decided it was important to try it and used the power of science in slaying evil, which was later qualified a huge success and led many to declare that this use of science was pretty awesome.
They gave Finn the spear back, or more accurately they called up back to the Candy Kingdom to pick up the spear and stop it from compelling them to do good. (Upon reflection, they realized that removing a weapon that compelled people to do good things wasn't the best knee-jerk reaction, but by then he had already gotten it.) Since they let him keep it after he promised he'd pay attention to whatever it did and let them know of any unusual develoupments regarding the spear, he used in his next few battles that day. Since it kept shooting lasers made of coherent light when he thought it would be cool, somehow inspired him and Jake (and everyone around him) to even greater feats of valor than ever before, and was also pretty cool-looking, Finn decided to make it his new weapon.
He couldn't figure out later on just when he started calling it the Godspear of All-Searing Noon. The name came out of nowhere, he had no idea where he got the name and it seemed too over-dramatic a name to begin with, but it felt right. Jake thought so too, and so did Marceline (who voiced the overdramatic comment with gusto) after an accident with a half-dragon bear and the world's third biggest jar of preserved moose teeth led to her being right by the Godspear during one of the times it lit up without her being as protected as Finn would have wanted. As luck had it, it didn't hurt Marceline one little bit, even though it was clearly sunlight and brighter than noon on a cloudless day, which might have inspired part of the name; it actually made her feel a little better, and she seemed more resistant to regular sunlight when she was around it. This gave Finn the idea that it's light only hurt bad people, which he duly reported to Bubblegum.
Marceline said that was silly too, but Finn thought it was pretty obvious that she wasn't really convinced.
...
After using the Godspear in a fight with the Hobgoblin King (who was quite different from the Goblin King, as he was quick to point out; he had the fancy accent and paperwork to prove it) and accidentally destroyed the Hobgoblin King's fighting armor suit, Finn quickly decided that the Godspear was almost definitely the most awesome weapon he'd ever used.
The things he had been dreaming about seemed distant when he had it, like he could crack the worlds he had seen there open and shine the sun down and burn their darkness away. Everything that could be better would be better, and everything that would rather die than turn good would probably explode or something. He wished things could be that easy.
Time passed. The nightmares faded. More and more monsters were defeated, and with the Godspear at his side, him and Jake got more confident about what they can fight. This worked both ways, and bigger monsters and evils show up to attack Ooo; it didn''t go unnoticed, and around the third time Finn and Jake chased away a giant monster made of rotting meat and sixteen tons of severely malformed grinders, people noticeds how Finn was always there for them (and somehow they always forgot about Jake, the ingrates) and people started making up stories about him. They'd done that before (the Ice King's fanfiction was not the first occasion Finn had to sit down and listen to people make up stuff over him, Jake and their friends), but it's the first time everyone seems to know. People start making names for him about it, but he can't remember most of them.
Marceline was the only one who made up a name that sticks. She was probably joking when she called him 'Our Guarding Star', something about how Finn and Jake were always there and ready to fight whatever evil showed it's nasty face (when it had a face or even more than one, anyway) or another joke like that went over Finn's head. Bubblegum tooks it a bit more seriously, and perhaps it resonates with people too, and soon lots of people Finn had helped started using it as a shorthand for him, even though it had the unfortunate side-effect of people who don't know what he looks like thinking that Finn actually was a star that fights evil and therefore expect him to be taller.
Even so. The name resonated with Finn too; it sounded like a name that used to be his but had been forgotten for a while. He didn't really like the mental images it provides in some cases (stars are distant suns, after all, and sunlight hurts Marceline and that was just wrong), but in most others it felt right, and good.
Our Guarding Star. Hearing it never failed to put a smile on his face. It felt so natural that sometimes he thought that Marceline had just picked up on something that was just meant to be.
...
Soon, those events fall into the past, and Finn finds himself dealing with the here and now, and it's a lot stranger and weirder than he expects.
The Godspear is a strong weapon, but it's far from perfect. (It's innate nature as an expression of Valor notwithstanding.) Finn remains the furthest thing from invulerable. And if the Godspear's power had made him invincible, he would probably have discarded it or tried his very hardest to seal away most of it's power; adventures just wouldn't be fun anymore if all he had to do was point a spear at the problem and blow it up. For some things (like the Lich King, though by now he's only a bad memory), maybe that level of power is something the world needs, but he prefers to win with strength of arms, outmatching his enemies with raw willpower, and the occasional application of cleverness. (Though not too often. Thinking too much about a problem when he could just be smashing it and smiting the evil in question offends his nature.)
Even so, the Godspear remains an invaluable too, and thankfully is far from turning him into a one-man force of nature or something stupid like that. That would get boring real quick.
More time passes, more adventures happen, and his constant joy for adventure and the thrill of striking down everything evil that dares to present itself before him (or happen to be in his immediate vicinity, or be roughly around fifty miles where he might possibly hear of it or some other elaborately improbable statistic indicating the possibility of him becoming aware of said evil) pushes him and Jake into ever more escalating adventures.
He gets another nickname not long after, and it's a little more sincere but isn't something anyone speaks lightly. It comes from Bubblegum, and not long after he makes a trip to the Candy Kingdom after the thunder flies down from the sky in the shape of a guy with a giant hammer and wrestles Finn for twelve hours (because Jake dared Finn to challenge the thunder) and tells her the story, she cuts through all the embellishments Finn absolutely must make as an adventurer and she half-joking (in her way) and half-serious laughs at how he wrestled the thunder (and bonked him with his own hammer) and, in a moment of comedic seriousness, tells him that he is truly Unconquered.
When she says it, a not-unpleasurable shiver goes up Finn's spine like when Marceline called him Our Guarding Star. Once again, he's given a joke name that sounds like he's heard it before.
It's not a pet name, it's not a title, it's not even really a joke like Marceline thought Our Guarding Star would be. And of course, some attendent overhears what she says and tells people, and not so long afterwards, when people really want to put a shine on Finn stories, they use the word Unconquered like it's a royal title. And technically, both nicknames his female friends have given him are royal titles, and it doesn't hurt that they wind up being so after Tiffany tries to use them ironically to make fun of Finn only for Marceline and Bubblegum to take offense on Finn's behalf. (Considering that Marceline was considered a figure of absolute terror among people who didn't know her personally - and a few who did know what she was like in a nasty mood - and that Princess Bubblegum ruled the largest known kingdom in Ooo, Tiffany was lucky to get away with looking like a jerk. Or all his limbs intact, for that matter.)
It doesn't take long for his swelling ego to readily accept the names Unconquered and Our Guarding Star as his own. And it seems the instant he does, the Godspear reacts to it; Finn controls the Godspear through the inexplicable link he has with it, and while the Godspear isn't intelligent, that link does flow both ways, and if Finn can lay claim to the titles that have been granted to him, it must be that he knows something of their forgotten legacy. And not long after, given a little poke and prod by the Godspear's power and coming from somewhere deep inside the very core of Finn's soul, the dreams start.
(Not dreams though, not when it comes down to it. Memories, from another lifetime.)
They weren't bad. Not most of them anyway. But the ones that were bad, were really bad. After he woke up, he couldn't remember much of them, and he thought that maybe that was a good thing. He did remember things that he really wished he hadn't. The first and most persistent had been a place of...he really didn't know what it was. It was crazy, in a single word. In a few more words, it was complete and total chaos, a place where temples dedicated to whoever found them rose up out of the murk to be overshadowed by mountains made of rotting meat while a rain of molten glass fell from above, and then it would all melt away and become something else totally crazy. It had no dimension, no real measurements, no expression of realness except what was imposed on it and it got worse as you went on. It was wild, just a place made from weirdness and craziness, and there were things in there, and he beheld huge armies of shapeshifting things armed with weapons made from the last awful thoughts of murdered people and surronded by evil things that really did come from the nightmares of little kids and a huge monster big enough to chew up the world and think it was a splinter following right behind them, melting everything they touched into chaos and the madness of dream-logic, killing everything they found because they hated shape and form, wanted everything to go back to the purity of Pure Chaos and feasting on the souls of everything that lived as the world fell screaming into the madness it was wrought from. For them, there is no diplomacy, no mercy, no hope of peace; only straight-forward war, and the doom that awaits the enemies of the world. His enemies.
Then came the massive city made of brass in a place that was...somewhere, he wasn't sure where, but green light shone down all day and all night from a emerald sun that was also a four-armed demon that killed everything that offended him, and millions of demons, of all shapes and sizes and every possible purpose, danced through the streets singing and shouting like their lives depended on it as the city literally unraveled in the path of a huge wind that was almost totally silent except for a shrill insane laughing that would never ever stop. And that wind was alive, and it was something so terrible and evil that Finn knew that it must never be freed, and he also realized that this place was a prison, and everything in it, from the wind to the distant sands of it's realm to the city itself, were all alive. They were all monsters, all world-making horrors that had to be locked away for the good of the world and they ever got loose everything would end. He sees that city, a huge lumbering mass of crazy architecture and weird buildings that don't make any sense and a noise that never ever stops, and realizing that noise is the city itself screaming as it tears parts of it loose and crushes every demon it can deign to notice, smashing and pulverizing everything it can before it stops, and in the blink of an eye, starts trying to crush itself, screaming with such awful hatred against the world that is still nothing compared to the hate it feels for it's own failure and broken mind. Every living thing there screams and hurt and hates and is horribly broken in funadmental ways that may never be healed, and the most terrible thing is that they still don't understand why.
Or a place that looks like the world but duller; there's a thought that Marceline might like it here, but then he realized that was so wrong; this place was empty, just full of pain and confusion, nothing at all like what she surronded herself with. Undead or not, she liked the life in everything she did, and this place was dead, or at least the memories of death. Darker, all the colors muted to near-grayness, and there are humans there, real humans, but there's something wrong with them. They're so gray, so quiet, like people just rehearsing something that happened a long time ago but they can't do anything except act out long-gone habits. Even the stars don't look right, clicking far above like a gigantic machine that's just there to fix something into place. It's so dreary, and Finn eventually realizes that these people are dead and, for whatever reason, haven't moved back into...into...he doesn't know what they haven't moved into, but he knows they're supposed to, and they're just hurting themselves clinging to the memories of the people they left behind and the things they've lost. That is sad, and Finn wanted to help them, but he also saw a huge city in the center of this sad world, and in the middle of that city is a huge hole right in the middle of the world opening into straight blackness. There is no bottom to it, just this unending darkness that looks not alive and not dead, but something horribly different from either; it looks like emptiness itself, the pure evil of Oblivion, and he really didn't like how the edges of the hole looked chewed up from the inside, just as he can't help but notice that there are tombs around that gaping Maw of a hole, impossible buildings that hurt just thinking about and there's whispers of things that were killed but couldn't die, all their infinite possibilities crushed into this single awful fate and dying forever, screaming and weeping and howling with faint bewilderment; Finn realizes that they don't know how to die, don't know anything except that they are doomed to be trapped in that moment of dying forever. He wished he could help them, but he didn't think they even knew there could be help.
Those are the bad things he remembered most...distinctly, if not clearly. Details are lost when he woke up, things that probably would have helped him understand what he had been dreaming about or why he had been dreaming about them to begin with.
Except...
He did remember the dragon. It was like the ones in the pictures Bubblegum had showed him, but wrong in a way that he couldn't outright say but was still so very there that it hurt just thinking about it. It was big, and the thought popped into his head that maybe it was around fifty miles long, and it wasn't made of flesh or metal or anything like that, but shadows. Like every shadow in the world had been torn up and stitched together into the biggest monster he'd ever seen. He had seen it in the brass city that hated itself, flying without wings and skirting away from the silent wind, and the demons stampeded throught streets to get out of it's way; when the shadows touched them, they were still there but...they were changed. Finn didn't remember how they were changed, because his mind kept going totally blank when he tried to remember. He wondered if his brain was trying to protect him from it, so he guessed it was something bad.
He didn't know why, but just thinking about that dragon ticked him off. He remembered the way it flew with an obnoxious swagger, like it owned it's entire prison-world and the self-declared king of the universe, but it cowered when anything came it's way, flinching out of the way of even a passing rock. And the way it looked at it's demons, at it's little servents, made it seem like the biggest and nastiest bully ever to live; it didn't even look directly at them, it's empty eye sockets a little blank and jaws stuck up in a nasty little sneer as it did...things to them. It didn't care about them, it didn't care about how they felt or what it owed them as their boss, it didn't care about anything but itself. And Finn thought that maybe even that was too intense for the dragon to handle. He remembered that thing and he thought of the Ice King's tantrums and every ugly monster he'd ever had to stop from hurting people and every single bit of evil he'd ever seen (espicially the Lich King) and he saw a horribly amplified expression of those evils in that dragon, overblown and so far taken past the brink of reason that there was nothing to that dragon except hurting people and making everyone else miserable for no reason. It didn't have a reason to do something like that; it didn't need one. It was just spite, empty and cruel and evil in the worst possible ways imaginable.
It took him nearly two and a half weeks for those particular dreams to stop. Every single night, he dreamed of those places and what happened in them, and then he dreamed of the things in them and what they did or what was done to them. If Finn had been really paranoid, he might have assumed that someone was trying to tell him something, and the flood of unusually specific (and horrifying) dreams was pretty good evidence for that sort of thing. Eventually it got so bad that he stopped trying to sleep altogether, and when that didn't work at all (he just dropped asleep in the middle of the living room sixteen hours in his attempt to get away from dreams) he started going a little...loopy. The dreams got worse and more detailed, which was pretty much the same as 'got worse'.
He tried not to let his friends know. He pretended to be sleeping in when he spent several hours every morning desperately thinking happy thoughts, happy thoughts and wanting to lock those horrible things into the vault where he repressed all his unpleasant memories, but these things were just too big to fit. His friends noticed all the same, and tried to help, to varying degrees of success; Bubblegum tried to talk him out of whatever was bothering him, but unwilling to let anyone know about the frighteningly comprehensive nightmares and what they might mean about them, Finn won't let her know, and eventually she relents, believing that sometimes it is better for someone to work out their problems by themselves.
Jake and Marceline were more stubborn; Marceline was the first one to realize he was having monstrously awful dreams after she spent the very first night watching him sleep from a distance of approximately five inches from his face while squatting on his bed and making monster-faces for the fun of it, she was pretty surprised when he woke up screaming at an hour past dawn, clawing at his arms and frantically apologizing to something called the 'Neverborn' for something Finn didn't even do. After that, their course was clear, and Marceline and Jake independently worked on their own plans to help Finn get over his nightmares, since they realized pretty quickly that even though they both agreed that Finn was having dreams that were literally driving him crazy, they differed considerably on their approach to the issue, and Jake's idea of helping the dreams by making him sleep so hard he didn't dream by hitting him with something heavy didn't work out so well after he missed and wound up hitting a nearby dragon that took it personally.
Marceline, on the other hand, got worried about the whole thing (which would have been astonishing if Finn hadn't known her as well as she did; Marceline didn't have a lot of friends and something happening to any of them tended to get her upset) and starting getting convinced that some evil force was trying to make Finn go crazy. Accordingly, she went back to keeping a close watch on Finn when he slept (supposedly because she wanted to wake up him up if he started freaking out, and almost certainly not because she secretly thought he looked absolutely adorable when he was asleep and was utterly terrified out of her mind at the idea that something was trying to attack Finn through his dreams) and stands guard over him in the night, even when the sunlight returns and she should be going home for her own safety. Friendships are more important to her than her own well-being, because she's learned that she can heal but broken friends don't.
(And in all truth, if the Sun that Finn remembers in his dreams knew of Marceline's motivations, He would approve and weep in gratitude at the certain knowledge that here at least are people who believe in the things He was created to embody and uphold. He is the Sun, the shining beacon of hope that radiates goodwill and herosim into all things, and in the scope of his virtue there is more than enough room for a woman who is burned by a reflection of his purified awesomeness.)
Finn finds it incredibly weird that Marceline finds it neccesary to do this, though he understands that it's part of her unusual expressions of goodness, and he blushes furiously when he realizes why she's doing it in a way that Princess Bubblegum normally brings from him, which Marceline thinks is hilarious, which makes him blush worse, and it escalates from there. But, vampire-style creepiness aside, he does appreciate it; she wakes him up a lot from some unspeakable nightmare or another, and maybe it's because he was woken up before it could be finished being remembered (and he's starting to become certain they are memories and not normal dreams) but he never does remember what the interrupted nightmares are about. Eventually he gets used to the occasional restful night and waking up in the morning to see Marceline, more often then not wrapped up in a blanket and sitting on a chair in the far corner of his room, herself waking up shortly after Finn does, apparently thinking that none of this is a big deal. Maybe she doesn't, and thinks that this level of concern is what friends are always supposed to have. Finn finds it to be one of the nicest things Marceline has ever out and out done.
He gets more used to Marceline's night watches, her presence gradually becoming a more permanent fixture at their house (so much so that Jake makes jokes about her moving in with them soon, something that makes Marceline sputter in indignation, throw something at Jake and fly off home in a huff. It's not a particularily spiteful huff or a strong throw, so Finn thinks that maybe Jake might be on to something), and so it happens that after Finn tries to beat the nightmares by staying up so long that he'll be too tired to dream (the logic sucks, but he's going crazy enough not to care), he only manages to stay up a week and a half, a shamefully low number by his slightly skewed reckoning, going crazier by increments the whole time as bits of thought constantly fall out until by the time he finally collapses in the middle of the kitchen it takes him over fifteen (resume minutes to remember where he left the noodles in the cupboard.
Fortunately, not long afterwards, the dreams stopped. At least, those particular kinds of dreams. He stopped dreaming about giant dragons made of shadows and chaos-things that ate souls and the lands of the dead where nothing ever changed or got better. He stopped dreaming about them altogether, and his mental health gradually improved. His friends were relieved, and after a while, things got back to normal. (Well, as normal as they could be when Finn had a golden spear that shot lasers.)
Marceline and Jake still thought that there was something out to get Finn, and just in case, watched Finn sleep for a week and a half until he was back to normal. Marceline kept it going for longer, at least until Finn caught her sneaking into his closet when he was supposed to be waking up. He suspected she had an ulterior reason for it, but didn't ask.
(She didn't, actually; Marceline was just worried about her young friend. She simply chose to express it in bizarre ways.)
And Finn presevered, all the same, the stress of the dreams not stopping him from doing his duty as a hero. And, perhaps in response to his determination, the character of his dreams changed. There were no more nightmare realms of chaos or imprisoned demon-titans or lands of the dead, but things glorious and beautiful and simply good. These were a little easier to remember, surfacing up from his brain in the mornings after like bits of ice popping up from the surface of warm water, and even though the details tended to melt away just as quickly, the good feelings they left behind didn't. And one of the first things he remembered was a gigantic thing like a huge ship, only round like a planet and looking like the most awesome magical device ever. It looked so much like the sun, but he remembered Bubblegum telling him once that the sun was really a big ball of fire floating in the depths of space and that if it got any closer it would burn the entire planet to cinders (which led Finn to conclude that the sun was completely awesome), and this was something else entirely. Like what real suns only pretended to be, or maybe were an imitation was and this thing was the original thing they were all based on. And somehow, he got the sense that this thing was him, that he was an extension of the idea it was supposed to be.
The dream he remembers the most clearly is also deeply terrifying, because it has the ocean in it. But not just the normal ocean he's utterly terrified of, this ocean is worse, the apothesis of all evil oceans, a world-drowning horror that so desperately needs a Billy to defeat it. It goes from horizon to horizon, an endless expanse of green-black tides twisting underneath from the awful things with too many eyes and spindly teeth and sucker-laced tentacles tearing each other to pieces like gladiators at blood sports and melting in the water, because this ocean is made of water that's just as much every poison and acid ever imagined. It makes no sense, it's just cruel and pointless, but that's just the way this ocean is. And it makes it all the more worse because it's alive, a female and cruel god-titan unto itself (and it calls itself The Great Mother, Finn remembers later, not sure where the thought comes from) and it wants him dead, drowned, melted, dead and buried in her depths until even his memory is extinguished for all eternity.
And Finn (or whoever he is in the dream, and that dream-him burns brighter than the stars that would incinerate the world if they got too close) is there on a boat in the unknowable vastness of the Great Mother ocean, and perched on his head is his only friend in all the world, that sun when it is only a baby, and it is his task to make the sun set for the first time in all the world by carrying it to the end of the world and ferried there by the Great Mother. And the whole time, she taunts him and tries to trick him, for she is also The Sea That Marched Against The Flame, and he is the greatest flame that will ever exist. But he doesn't listen to her; he ignores her seductions, fights off her monster's attacks on the sun and blinds himself to the reality of her unreasoning hate, and all the vindictive spite of the acid courses of the Sea That Marched Against The Flame will not turn him from his duty to make the sun set. And at last, he reaches his goal and touches the sun to her waters and it is not doused; she is burned, and her hate is burned deeper when he tells her that he didn't do his job because he was afraid of the certain death waiting him if he failed. He did his job because he promised that he would do it, and that's all the reason he would ever need. The Sea pauses at this, as if in consideration, and he hopes against all hope that for just once one of the world-making titans will listen, and yet he knows the moment when she forces herself oblivious to it.
But even so, the good dreams are sometimes broken by horrors barely remembered.
Another dream is something he can hardly bear to wake with, and one night when he is thrown into wakefulness screaming and sobbing straight into Marceline's arms without any thoughts of why she was there or so eager to take him there, he can do nothing but howl misery and regret at a failure so vast and awful it broke the world and forced the star-chosen to convinced the dragon-soldiers to slay his own Chosen and they deserved to die, and all he can do is retell the crimes of Desus, who reduced his wife from a demigoddess embracing the principle of survival into a mindslave who knew nothing but pleasing him and enduring his torments; the evils of Arkady, who visited such horrors upon his female subordinates and forced them to never speak a word with the powers of oath-keeping burned into his soul; and a thousand other evils, of his vigil in the sky leading him to see the evil his blessed might has brought on the world by his maddened Chosen, that the entire world is shrouded in a thick black shadow of misery and vice that has spread from the fruits of his deeds and the pain of the world is all his fault, and then there was a book in which was written all the sins of the world, all it's criminals as judged by himself, and at the very end of that book, the very last name and condemned criminal is his own name, signing by his own hand and made unsteady in grief.
The Holy Tyrant was defeated by his Chosen. The Ultimate Darkness cast down by his designs. The Titans that had come before had been broken by the Chosen exalted beyond all other mortals - save for the kindly Emerald Mother and the saddened Great Maker in his mechanical life, both alone in their love for the world and humanity, and the capacity to feel as others did - and he had thought the world safe from those that should have safeguarded. His enemies had thought to defeat him, but they had not thought cruelly enough, and thus they never knew that what brought him down was not force of arms. Despair brought him down far greater than any mere weapon or force could have ever done. And here and now, he felt that pain anew.
He breaks then, a little, just as he did a long time ago. And Marceline is there for him, the moon to his sun, and he remembers a shining lady who was once his closest friend, brilliant in her cloak of the night and existing in all the forms that were the impossible made real, accomplishing through unreality what his mere perfection could not do, and he weeps a little, and this time it is not in misery.
(In the small madness of that nightmare still dripping it's acid into his soul, and on that precipice where he was more Finn and less the Shining Other, Finn kissed her, and she kissed him back. Neither of them spoke of it afterward, but they smiled a lot more when they saw each other.)
When he regained a modicum of sanity after weeks of those insanities, he thought that these dreams didn't feel like imaginary stories his mind are constructing from the things he knows and sees. They feel like memories realer than his waking life. The thought disturbs him, almost as much as the thought of 'These things are done' that echo in these dreams in a voice that is both his own voice and that of a much greater and older being.
A long time ago, he came to understand, there had been great evil, and a great being to fight it. But that evil was gone, with only splintered memories and still-lingering grief to remember it by.
Somewhere out there there was a world (and perhaps an origin for him) where everything was good and noble and they didn't need heroes anymore...
So then, the him-that-had-been had decided, he had no more place there, with his duty done.
More questions than answers, he thought.
...
In time, when things are cooler and calmer, and he has reason to think clearer on these things, he speaks to Bubblegum on this.
The conversation is long and meandering, dancing in and out of the soft and kind things that mark their relationship: Bubblegum is gentle in all the ways that he honestly knows he can't be. To do his duty, to be the hero the world needs, he must be the mailed fist bared towards evil and injustice with a blazing hatred in his eyes, shielded by contempt for vice and armored in disgust for it's wickedness. By virtue of who she was, she could be kinder than him, resolve all her own conflicts with diplomacy and understanding.
He admired that kind of strength more than other.
In time, the conversation took it's path towards thoughts of when rulers ceased to be strictly neccesary (and Bubblegum seemed to desire such a turn for her people, created by her own hand and love), and stirred by a far-off decision that had occured so long ago he could no longer remember it, Finn asked her, "What does a ruler do when it's people doesn't need it anymore?"
Bubblegum considered it for a moment, with all due weight and thought that such a question deserved, and she finally said, "I suppose the best thing would be for the ruler to find another place that needs it."
It struck a chord in him, and it felt faintly familiar, a decision he had reached on his own before there had ever been a Finn the Human.
He looked at his hands then, and unbidden, he saw not strong human flesh but sunlight shaped into the image of a mighty human man, blazing with such light that only the Changing Lady of the moon and the good darkness could dare to take his face in her hands and call him friend, his four hands to grasp his Compassion and Conviction and Temperance and Valor, and power enough in his Virtue and will to obliterate all evil wherever it may be and never ever stop fighting, protecting and defending and avenging, and somewhere in the past there was a world he had been made to protect but it didn't need him anymore, and yet here and now there was Ooo which needed it's heroes quite badly...
At last, insane though it was, Finn understood.
He wept a little then, but they were the tears of satisfaction.
...
The dreams stopped thereafter, when he decided he didn't want to remember these things from the him-that-had-been.
He did choose to dream of an origin, though: he remembered leaving the world he had been created to protect, and arriving somewhere else that he knew needed him, being a shining star appearing over the world before the great mushrooms bloomed in their destruction, but only just; the falling cloud-bringers falling overhead, and right then and there the making of his choice, and sunlight flaring so with a single exertion of a world-shaking power that he had been as he struck with his Godspear that embodied his infinite courage-
And then, the world changing in an instant, every mote of his glory reshaping it into something else. The ground beneath him utterly destroyed, hollowed out and his spear left there, his other precious Virtue-manifestations left to the world to guide it towards life again. Himself lessened, diminished and flowing through the life of the world, and a thousand years later, he was alive again, in the shape of the humans that he had loved so.
One day, for Finn and his friends, they found a gigantic mirror hollowed out under a mountain and used for a nightclub to keep out the riffraff by exploiting it's powers to show who and what a person really was (until the whole thing backfired when people kept looking really, really bored all the time or got grossed out by what the mirror showed what their friends looked like). And, in the spirit of things, they dared each other to look into it, and didn't think that by doing so they would show each other what they were like on the inside.
Finn was the first, and the only, one to try it. And the moment he did so, all the pieces fell into place, and the chaos in him found peace, and looking back at him in the mirror (and driving Marceline and Bubblegum and Jake and Flame Princess to their knees in slack-jawed astonishment) stood not a young human boy, strong and determined and too stubborn to give up when there was evil to slay (aside from when it was an emotional issue, but despair had always been his weakness), and instead there was a god standing there; a human-shaped figure of sunlight and titan-shattering will looking down at them with an expression somewhere between longing for their company and acceptance that it's time had passed; benovelence and humanity shone from his face in spite of the halo of solar light that turned the whole of it's body into a distant and mind-shatteringly alien figure, both kind and stern beyond all reckoning, fierce arrogance mixing with humane concern for all things.
The figure shone like the sun, a great and glorious star who had finally found peace in spite of the Shadow Of All Things that it had ultimately been born from, and the raging cruelty of the Holy Tyrant that had engineered his birth. He crossed his four arms as he looked with quiet satisfaction at Finn, and it was perfectly clear that they were one and the same.
Finn, the human who had onced been far more but was happier than the god before him had been, knew that something was expected of him. The magic of the mirror demanded acknowledgement, and he said, "I am Finn the Human, the Hero of Ooo."
The god in the mirror replied, almost so quickly it was a distant echo for all of it's thunder, "I was Sol Invictus, the Unconquered Sun. The Once-Guarding Star, The Most High, and the Holiest of Holies."
And, with all revealed, both Finn as he was and the part of him that had been the Unconquered Sun felt content in their smallness, and expressed satisfaction.