2. Hide and Seek
With that nasty little incident behind him, Jake inflated himself until he was as big as a blimp, and just as full of hot air. He sailed the wind, high above the clouds, and reached the tree house he and Finn shared only a few minutes after saying good-bye to the Guardian of the Well, who'd chased the horizon with a sanguine skip in his step until he finally vanished from Jake's sight.
Spotting the tree house beneath him, Jake gradually deflated until he had returned to his normal size. Using the map as a parachute, he floated gently onto the grass. Then, he took off at once to show what he'd managed to get his hands on to his best buddy in the whole wide world, and couldn't they do something really, really cool with it, pretty please? Dogs can be like that sometimes.
"Hey, Finn, check it out! I spent all morning digging this puppy up!" he shouted as he rushed up the stairs to the living room, Finn and Jake's favorite area for chilling out, gorging on ice cream, and playing video games when they weren't out having adventures. "It's a treasure map. It has a big red X on it and all that jazz! Wanna see what it leads to?"
Jake stumbled to a halt, and not a second too soon; had he kept running, he would have bonked his nose against the polished mahogany. Finn had shut the living room door, an unusual occurrence. Jake jiggled the doorknob and found it locked.
He knocked on the door three times. "Yo, buddy, are you in there? We gotta go, man, adventure beckons," he called, but no one said anything in return. Impatient, he pressed one ear against the door and listened intently, hoping to take advantage of his advanced canine hearing. He could have sworn he heard quiet whispers on the other side, and maybe, just maybe, some laughter as well.
"All right, dude, that's enough. This is weird. I'm coming in."
Key hand time. Jake, resourceful as always, kneaded his hand until it fit snugly into the keyhole and picked the lock in a matter of seconds. He started to push the door inwards, but, almost at once, a much stronger push opposite his slammed it back into place. Jake stumbled backwards and landed squarely on his behind.
He got on his feet and rubbed his aching rump. "What's the deal, man? That was totally not cool!" he said, indignant.
"Sorry," said Finn. He sounded frazzled, as though he'd managed to outrun a hungry icypede only minutes before and were still in the process of catching his breath, which, on the whole, he did much more frequently than he locked doors in the tree house. "I'm really sorry, dude, I swear it! I didn't mean to hurt you. It's just… not the best time for me right now."
"Not the best time? Well, why not?" said Jake, scratching at the door. He couldn't help himself. Instinct. "Look out the window, man! The sun is singing, the birds are shining, and the fungal growths are making really funny sounds in the hollow logs. Seriously, how can it not be the best time right now?"
"It just isn't, okay?" Finn said. "You gotta give me a little time."
"…fine," Jake said sourly, kicking a nearby dust bunny. "How much time do you need?"
"I don't know. An hour."
Jake's eyebrows almost leapt into orbit. "An hour? That's practically the whole day!" he cried. "C'mon, Finn, what could you possibly be doing in there that's so important?"
He tried forcing the door again, but, again, Finn forced it right back into place. "Look, I'm having some… problems, okay?" he said. "Human boy problems. Really gross stuff. You wouldn't want to come in anyway."
Jake thought about it for a minute. "Human boy problems?" he asked, quizzical. "What kind of problems does a twelve year-old human boy have?"
"We… uh… we, uh… we bleed from the butt!"
"Whoa, are you kidding? Get out of town!" Jake exclaimed, incredulous. His eyes, already as big as dinner plates, bulged from their sockets until they the size of beach balls. "Dude, you've gotta let me come in and see this!"
There was a really long second of really awkward silence. "Are you nuts? What's wrong with you, man?"
"Come on, Finn," Jake said, jiggling the knob some more. "You've gotta let me satiate my scientific curiosity."
Finn, it's cool. We can re-schedule. I had some stuff to do today, anyway.
"No!" Finn shouted, though Jake was pretty certain he wasn't talking to him. "I'll take care of this, I promise! Please don't go…"
"Huh? What was that?" Jake asked.
"What was what, dude?" said Finn.
"Don't you play the fool with me, Finn; I definitely heard something with my advanced canine hearing."
"That's funny. It must have been that imagination of yours."
"Oh, no, you don't!"
Finn shouldered the door with all his strength, but this time it was futile; Jake, flat as a pancake and mushy as raw dough, squeezed himself through the crack under the door. Like the Blob. He got to his feet and looked around, but there wasn't much to see. Only Finn, sitting in the middle of a totally dark room.
"I don't see any blood," Jake said, just a little disappointed.
"Um…"
"And why'd you close all the curtains? We gotta get some sunlight up in here, man," he went on, more disappointed still. He started to walk toward the window, but he hadn't taken so much as a single step when Finn lunged at him and held him by the shoulder, as tightly as he could with such a little hand.
"No! You can't!"
"Why not? All this darkness is getting me down."
"Don't do it, man! No sunlight! It's important!"
Jake stomped his foot, crossed his arms, and frowned. "Listen up, Finn," he said in his huffy, parental, authoritarian tone. "I'm not moving an inch from this spot until you tell me exactly what's going on. Oh, and no more of this 'bleeding from the butt' funny business. It's clearly nothing half as awesome as that."
Finn sighed sadly. "Okay, Jake, you got me. Do you really want to know what's going on? Do you really, really want to know?"
"Of course, man."
Finn looked around, apparently to make sure no one else was listening. "All right, dude, listen carefully. You're the only one who can know."
Jake nearly twitched with anticipation.
"The truth is… I'm going through my Goth-slash-emo phase."
For a moment, the clock on the wall ticked uninterrupted.
"Huh?" said Jake, tilting his head to the side in confusion. "What's that?"
"Oh, you know," Finn said with a nonchalant shrug. "It's something humans my age go through. We wear a lot of black makeup, listen to really loud music about blood and death and stuff, and stab our own faces with sharp metal thingies."
Jake rubbed his chin. "I don't know, man. That doesn't sound like you at all."
"Sure it does. Look, I'll prove it to you," Finn said, waving his arms around like limp, skinny noodles. He cleared his throat. "Oh, woe is me, life sucks so hard," he cried. "Nothing is math, there's no Cosmic Owl, and Alex DeLarge is on my online display image."
He started to gently nudge Jake out of the living room, still in the midst of his virtuoso performance. "Now, go," he went on. "Go. Leave me to my misery, or so help me, I'll go to a Halloween party dressed like the Crow."
"Okay, okay, man. Jeez," Jake said ill-humoredly as he stumbled into the hall. He heard the door shut and lock behind him.
Finn, meanwhile, leaned back against the door and wiped the sweat off his forehead.
"Is he gone?"
"Yeah… yeah, I think so," Finn said.
"Awesome. Can you let me out, please?"
"You got it!"
Finn took off his knapsack and undid the straps. Immediately, a big black bat fluttered out of it and made its way to the corner of the room, where it hung around for a moment or two before shifting its shape in a puff of black smoke. Marceline, for of course it was she, floated near the ceiling, looking more than a little fatigued.
"Sorry about that," Finn said, sympathetic. "You know Jake, he sure does love hunting for treasure. Anyway, how about that new song you wanted to show me? I'm all ears, baby."
Marceline harrumphed and blew a lock of slick black hair away from her eyes. "I'm not in the mood for music anymore, Finn," she said.
Finn's expression soured. "Huh? How come?"
"You really don't know, do you?" said Marceline. She chuckled the sort of chuckle that makes little boys question, in the back of their minds, if they're being patronized. "I swear, you really are clueless sometimes. You totally fail at girls."
"Ghwuhh?" said Finn, summing up his confusion as pithily as possible. "What's wrong, Marceline? I thought we were rocking out and having fun."
"One does not simply 'rock out' like that, Finn," Marceline explained, inserting finger quotes where appropriate. "You need patience. Inspiration. You gotta be in the zone, y'know? And I can't get in the zone if your dog won't stop sniffing around, interrupting our alone time."
Finn frowned. "Hey, don't talk about Jake like that! He's not my dog, he's my friend!"
"I'm your friend, too, aren't I?"
"What? Of course! I…"
"So why do we always have to schedule our get-togethers around him? Any time I want to hang out and do stuff with you, you push me aside to go on an adventure or something stupid like that. It's always, 'Oh, sorry, Marceline, Jake and I are going to go save a princess. Sorry, Marceline, Jake and I are going to go fight a monster. Sorry, Marceline, if you hold my head underwater for three hours I will die.' It's very uncool, dude."
Finn had begun to sweat. There were a million and one sticky wickets in the Land of Ooo, both literal and figurative, he could effortlessly scurry his way out of, but this, as it turns out, wasn't one of them. "Look, I'm sorry," he said, his head hanging low. "I don't mean to neglect you like that. It's Jake, you know? He needs an awful lot of attention. If you leave him alone for too long, he goes into full freak-out mode, and… well, that's just not the kind of thing you want to be exposed to."
"Uh-huh."
Marceline was getting ready to leave. She opened her umbrella, a gnarled, blasphemous-looking affair expertly crafted by the ghouls of the Night-O-Sphere for maximum protection from the sun, and began to drift out the window. She didn't get very far before finding herself anchored to the room, though; Finn was clinging to her ankle and showed no signs of letting go.
"Ugh! Finn! What are you doing?" she cried.
"I'm coming with you!" Finn said, more heroically than anyone hanging from someone else's ankle had any right to. "Please, you've gotta let me show you that I can have epic fun times with you. Give me another chance, okay? It's gonna be totally math, I promise!"
Marceline sighed. "Well, okay… but you have to do everything I say!"
"You have my word, milady."
"That's more like it," said the vampire queen. "First order of business: get off my ankle. Like, right the hell now."
Finn happily obliged. "Now what?"
"Hmm." Marceline rubbed her chin musingly. "Do you own a cardboard box? It needs to be big, like, for a fridge or something."
"Do I ever!"
Marceline, all traces of resentment gone from her being, cackled delightedly over steepled fingers. "Awesome! Go fetch it for me, will you? I'm going to show you how to really have a good time!"
No more than a minute later, Marceline streaked across the sky, holding Finn with one arm and the cardboard box with the other. Together, they made their way to the far north...
To be continued...
