notes: this was not even what i'd planned on updating and yet here we are. also i completely forgot about flame prince how could i. he'll be in here as well, so no worries!

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i could kid myself, in thinking that i'm fine

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iii.

Sunday morning found Fionna tucked away in a corner of the treehouse in her backyard. It was rather impressive, perched up in a gigantic old oak tree, and had been there for a long, long time. Or at least that's what people said. There wasn't any solid information about whoever built it, but there were initials carved into the wood. The treehouse looked weathered but it was kept up, especially when Fionna and her family moved in, and the blonde girl found her second home.

Her adoptive father had helped her fix it up, and over the years Fionna had added more creative touches to it. There was an old stained glass window Mr. Mertins had used to replace the previous broken one, which Fionna claimed 'gave it character.' She'd made chains of brightly-colored beads and baubles and stretched them from wall to wall. There were old Polaroid pictures stuck to one wall with thumbtacks, and colored rugs on the floor. Sleeping bags and blankets were shoved over into one corner, bean bag chairs placed about the open space, and throw pillows were strung here and there.

It was probably one of Fionna's most favorite places in the world, and if you were looking for her, it would be the first spot to check.

It was still raining outside, and the world looked very dull indeed, but not inside the treehouse. Candles that had been placed on shelves, the floor, and a chest in the corner had been lit, giving off a soft glow. An old radio on one of the shelves had been turned on and was playing some old rock song from the eighties, and a plate of cookies was sitting on the floor, waiting to be eaten.

Fionna had climbed up the ladder earlier that morning, sewing kit and the raggedy old stuffed bear under one arm, and had been in the treehouse ever since. Cake had brought her the cookies before she'd left for work, and only stayed long enough to ask about the thing losing its stuffing.

"Where did you get that thing, babycakes?"

"I um, found it. In the attic yesterday while Barry and I were cleaning."

Cake had raised a brow. "I don't ever remember seeing it before."

Fionna had panicked then, mainly because she never lied to her sister, and also because she hadn't thought up a believable excuse for how she came into possession of the stuffed toy.

"It was…it was in with some of mom's old stuff and I just thought…"

Cake nodded, seeming to understand, and left shortly after, promising to be home by seven and if Fionna needed anything, just to call or stop by the diner. Her younger sister had been relieved beyond belief, and silently swore that she'd never do it again.

Then, she set to work. She pulled out her needle and thread, some old stuffing she'd pulled from an old pillow in the attic, and began to sew. Mrs. Mertins had taught her how when she was younger, and though it had been a challenge, Fionna loved to learn new things.

She stitched up the tears and patched up the holes, painstakingly drawing the needle through the fabric time after time after time. It was slow work at first, but soon she got the hang of it and the task began to go faster. Or maybe she was just having fun, they did say that time went by faster if you were.

The radio switched songs to a happier tune, and she quietly sang along as she sewed and the rain pattered against the window outside. Fionna smiled to herself and reached over to pick up a cookie before leaning back and admiring her handiwork. The stuffed bear looked much better than it had before, though the material was still faded and it was still missing an eye. She'd washed it the night before, so the stains were gone and it smelled like lilac laundry detergent instead of moldy old house.

She stuck the cookie in her mouth and pulled out a blue button from the tin she'd brought along. Grandmothers always seemed to have old cookie tins filled to the brim with different kinds of buttons, and she had been lucky enough to come across Grandma Mertins' up in the attic the day before. She could remember sitting on the older woman's floor when they would visit her and sorting through the tin, not even a bit disappointed that there weren't any cookies in it at all.

Fionna positioned the button in the spot where it was to go, and picked up her needle again. She slipped it through one of the small holes with ease and down into the fabric before pulling it back up again. This was done several more times before she stopped, and with a final snip of the scissors, she was finished.

It wasn't the prettiest stuffed animal ever, or even the cutest, what with its gangly limbs and mismatched button eyes and faded red body, but she felt a strange attachment to it. Which was stupid, because she'd only just found it yesterday.

She picked up another cookie and traced the stitched smile on its face. There was a faded inscription on the left leg that said the bear's name was Hambo, and she laughed. What a name for a toy. Maybe it'd belonged to the mysterious boy in the painting, and had been lost. But obviously it'd been well loved, and so she couldn't imagine it just being left behind.

She pulled Hambo close to her chest and glanced at the initials scratched into the wood boards next to her. The crudely carved M.L. was still there, as if to mock her. If letters could laugh, she liked to think that they would.

The blonde stared at the markings for a long time, willingly them to tell her what they knew about the house and the bear in her arms and the dead boy in the painting. They stared back, and didn't say a word.

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Barry discovered Fionna nose-deep in a book on the history of their town Monday afternoon. He'd been searching for her for over an hour, and it wasn't until he looked in the library—which she hardly ever went to—that he found her.

He stared at her, as she had yet to notice his presence, mouth agape. "What on earth are you doing?"

Fionna's head shot up, eyes wide, but she settled down when she noticed her best friend standing in front of her. She lifted the book a little higher and gave him her patented What Do You Think look. "I'm reading."

Barry huffed and pulled out a chair before taking a seat across from her. "I mean what are you doing in the library—besides reading, don't even start—buried in city records?"

He paused, and strange look flitted across his face. "Wait. Do they even have those in the library? Is that a usual thing?"

"They keep them in City Hall, actually—in the records department. Which is kind of a no-brainer honestly, but whatever floats their boat," she shrugged, "not my job. I stopped by and somehow managed to convince cranky old Lemongrab to let me read them."

Barry wasn't fazed. "You snatched them when she wasn't looking, didn't you?"

She shrugged again, smile playing at the corners of her lips. "Whatever, I got ahold of them, anyway. That's the main point."

"Okay, so why did you technically steal these records from City Hall?"

Fionna waved a hand at him. "Shh. Glob Barry, don't say it like that. Especially not so loud, we're in a public place y'know. But okay, I'll bite. I needed to take a look at them. And," she rolled her eyes in an exaggerated manner, "I didn't steal them—they're public records and therefore open to the public. But Lemongrab doesn't like me very much—"

"That's an understatement if I've ever heard one."

"—and so the deranged woman probably wouldn't even give them to me if I offered her a sacrifice of the finest lemon tarts and lemonade I have to offer. She'd have me booted from the building—probably even do it herself—and then she'd put whatever I asked for on lockdown and summon demon guard dogs from the depths of hell to watch over it and then I'd never get my hands on them. Public records or no public records."

Barry stared at her. "Alright, overactive imagination aside, you never really answered my question. I mean, kind of, but in an extremely vague way."

Fionna grinned. "Oh yeah, that. I need them to figure out who used to own that old house at the end of Grassland street."

"Not this again," he groaned, dropping his chin into his hand. "Fionna, I thought you said you'd leave it alone after you were inside it the second time."

She laid the book on the table, and for the first time he noticed several open files strewn about the smooth surface, and huffed. "But Barry, can't you see? It's a mystery, and mysteries need to be solved. Come on, where is your sense of adventure? Nobody really knows anything about that house or the people who lived in it, don't you think that's weird?"

"What people?" Nobody's lived in that house for a long time, Fionna," he sighed.

She shook a finger at him. "Yeah but, someone did at one point in time. They didn't just build it and then leave it there for like, two hundred years or however long it's been standing. Besides, I just get the feeling that it's important. Like, super important. Spectacularly important. On an astronomical scale of extremely gigantic proportions."

Barry shook his head but smiled wanly. "Now you're just exaggerating. But if you really want to do this…just promise me you'll be careful."

Fionna beamed at him. "Cross my heart."

He glanced down at the information scattered across the tabletop. "So…where do we start?"

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She didn't notice the changes at first, they were either too subtle or she just wasn't paying enough attention. She did have a bad habit of not focusing on things as well as she should, after all. Sometimes things just flew right over her head. Things around her had been changing since the day she first set foot in that house at the end of the street. Or perhaps they'd always been there, and she was just too blind to notice.

A shiver here, a sudden and unexplainable chill there, the weirdly large amount of bats that hung around the woods near her house, or the breathy laugh she swore she heard in the wind every once in a while.

But it wasn't until something literally flew right over her head that she suddenly noticed.

It was a Wednesday, a week after she had managed to convince Barry to go with her to the end of the street, and it was chilly. Cake had made sure she was bundled up before she'd even left the house that morning, and she hadn't regretted any of the layers at all.

Fionna was walking back from school by herself, and had just turned onto her street when something swooped low and almost tangled in her hair. She let out a shriek when something sharp caught her cheek, and tripped over a crack in the sidewalk, falling into a heap on the cold concrete. She glanced around wildly, hair flying in the wind, looking for the offending…whatever it was.

She heard it before she saw it.

The crow had landed in a dead tree in the lawn of the home across from Simone Petrikov's. It let out a long mournful call, and seemed to stare directly at Fionna, who had pulled herself up to her knees. It screeched at her and she flinched. She felt a little dumb, because it was just a bird and sometimes birds got temperamental and maybe it'd just been an accident. But there was something about the way it was looking at her, the way it tilted its head and in that moment she could have sworn she saw its eyes flash red.

It called out again, trying to tell her, somebody, or whatever else something she couldn't understand before spreading its sooty wings and flying off. Fionna felt something wet and warm on her cheek and pressed her fingers to it. When she pulled away, her eyes widened at the blood staining her fingertips. Something shifted out of her peripheral vision, and she looked across the street.

The dead grass was littered with various plastic and cement penguins, and the whole house gave off an unfriendly air. The curtains hanging in the window fluttered from where Simone was peeking out of the glass panes. Their eyes met, and the older woman quickly pulled the curtains closed, leaving Fionna completely alone.

She glanced back down at the blood staining her skin and swallowed. The air suddenly felt colder, and the wind bit into her exposed skin and snapped its jaws around the cut on her cheek, making it sting more than it already did. Something welled up in her chest, and she scraped the palms of her hands against the rough sidewalk in an attempt to scramble to her feet. The whole neighborhood seemed less friendly and more sinister, the trees dark and twisted, bare of leaves and reaching for the sky but never to make it.

She couldn't shake the sudden feeling that she was being watched, not by Simone, but by someone—something else. It made all the hairs at the back of her neck stand on end and cold shiver ran all the way down her spine. Her body convulsed on instinct, but without her permission.

Fionna cast one last glance at the tree where the crow had been, and then she ran the rest of the way home and didn't stop until she'd locked the front door and slammed her own shut. She took deep breaths as she fell back against the door, sinking to the floor.

Her gaze landed on the stuffed bear smiling at her from its perch on her bed, and she closed her eyes.

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Later that night, after she was safely tucked into bed, cuddled up under piles of blankets and clutching Hambo close to her chest, she stared up at the ceiling. She'd managed to get Cake off her case about the cut on her cheek—"I tripped and fell, you know how clumsy I can be sometimes"—but her sister had given her weird looks all throughout the evening until she'd headed up the stairs to bed.

Fionna couldn't blame her, honestly, because she was pretty sure she'd been acting strange herself. She'd hardly said a word during dinner, and hadn't even asked for a second serving of spaghetti afterward. Of course, it was probably because her mind was preoccupied with other things that didn't involve school and the diner and almost blowing up the chemistry lab on accident while Barry stood beside her in a scorched lab coat while she tried to explain to the principal that no, those were not the chemicals I was trying to use someone must have switched them out I swear.

She turned over onto her side and squeezed her eyes shut. Paranoid, paranoid, paranoid. She was just being paranoid and nothing was really wrong. She repeated it like a mantra over and over in her head until her expression relaxed and her breathing slowed. She drifted off into a dreamless sleep, completely unaware when her window opened and something slipped through it and into her room.

It drifted over to her bed and stayed there for a few minutes before reaching out and brushing her fringe to the side. The angry cut on her cheek was a stark contrast to how pale her skin looked in the moonlight, and a long, slender finger traced the rough edges of the wound.

"You," he murmured. "It's you."

Flickering crimson eyes spotted the head of a stuffed animal peeking out from the mass of covers on the bed, and they softened. He brushed his thumb over her cheek one last time before slipping out the way he came.

Fionna slept on.

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end notes: it's so cheesy i know. i forgot how much fun this was to write. everyone actually plays a super important role in this story and i am already including foreshadowing what is this.