The following takes place a few hours after "The Wild Hunt."
"So, uh...looks like everything's sorted here."
"Uh, yeah," Finn said. He dropped out of the tree, rubbing his butt where he'd been sitting on the branch.
From her perch between two boughs higher up, Huntress Wizard looked at him out of the corner of her eye. He'd been in fine form while they still had a dozen terrified Banana Guards to escort back to their barracks, but he was never as confident without someone to save. Now he was hopping from foot to foot, glancing at her and looking away again.
Huntress knew how he felt. Since the kiss - since her latest moment of boldness that might have changed the course of her entire life - this crackling energy had grown up between her and Finn, this potential for anything to happen. And she wasn't sure what to do with it. She hated that her situation could be summed up with as meager a question as Now what?, but it was appropriate.
We both know you're totally in love with me. She didn't say things like that. Unless she was with him - her white stag, her unexpected boy. Her Finn.
Who wasn't yet hers in any way.
A quiet night had settled over the Candy Kingdom, at odds with the Grumbo's trail of destruction. Some lights still shone - bright yellow in the Princess's laboratory, blinking red on Starchy's radio tower - but most everywhere else, the city was dark and peaceful. Jake had briefly appeared, assured everyone he was OK, and limped home to sleep. Behind HW, the forest was at peace too, even if its guardian huntress was not.
They had time now. All the time they needed. And that, despite her utter confusion, wasn't such a bad thing.
She hopped down to land at his feet. "My place?"
It was farther away, but they'd be alone there. Finn seemed to be thinking along the same lines. He nodded.
They didn't talk much for the first few minutes of the walk through the forest. Both had so much to say it was impossible to know where to begin. Finn wouldn't want to ask her where she'd been during the elemental incident, for fear it had been embarrassing; she couldn't find a tactful way to ask him where he'd gone right before the elements went out of control. In light of all that, everything else felt too small to talk about.
"I met my mom," Finn blurted out.
Huntress broke into a smile in spite of herself. "Finn, that's great. Where was she?"
"On an island way off the coast of Ooo. She's kinda downloaded herself into a bunch of robots, but..." He shrugged. "You might meet her one day. I'm hoping they come back to live here."
Meeting the parents. The parents who were a brood of robots, sure, because when had anything in Finn's life been simple, but...the very introduction of something as simple as bring them home to the family into their relationship broke something in Huntress Wizard. In the dead of the forest night, when only the owls were abroad, she put her hands on her knees and laughed.
"Uh, is something funny?" Finn asked.
"Only in my head." Huntress touched his shoulder. "I'm just happy you found her."
He'd wanted to know something, so he'd gone and sought it out. She'd been like that, once: eyes on the prize. She was trying to get there again. Maybe the boy beside her wasn't an obstacle to that. Maybe he was the path.
Under the canopy, it was too dark for Finn to see her moving closer. When she laced her fingers into his, he sucked in his breath.
It was very cute.
When they reached her cliff house, she held the door open for him, then motioned to the other curtain past her little creek. "Let's go in my room. The view is better."
More boldness, but Finn didn't mind. They leaned against her windowsill and looked out over the starry sky, the million trees and billion leaves of the deep forest. Her creek glimmered in the starlight as it poured over the edge of the cliff. Somewhere far below, a forest lard glurped as it flopped itself from branch to branch.
"I need to know something first," Huntress said. "When we last met, you said you hadn't stopped thinking about me."
Finn blushed mightily. "You said you didn't want me to mention that."
"You can mention it if I do. All I want to know is, is that still true?"
"Listen, H-dubs, you've had the same junked-up week as the rest of us, right?"
You don't know the half. But Finn talked on. "I sailed off the edge of the world, met my mom, got Susan her memories back, and when I came back here, everything was bonkers and Simon was wearing a suit. Then Jake almost died. So I definitely stopped thinking about you like several times in there."
Huntress nodded. Tried not to grin. Everything was funny right now. All her emotions had been turned up to around fourteen out of ten.
"But you always came back when it was real quiet, no matter what else I was thinking of. So I've been working on this theory. When you really like someone, they're always a part of you, right? They don't have to be your whole world. They can just be there when you need them, as long as you're there for them when they need you. Like how music doesn't go away just 'cause you're not listening."
Huntress touched the side of Finn's face, enough to turn him to look at her. "Does that sound dumb?" he said. "I was thinking of it while I was saying it."
She kissed him, softly at first and deeply, so he would shut up.
He kissed back. Hands on her waist, hers in his hair, pushing back that bearskin hat he always wore. She wasn't practiced at this. But she could put a bit of magic in it just the same.
Huntress Wizard could have sworn the moon shifted in the sky, the stars spinning around its axis, before she and Finn broke apart.
He was the first to speak. "Can we do this?"
"I don't know. Let's keep trying and see."
"I don't mean this, I mean everything. Dating and romance and meeting each other's people."
HW took a deep breath. Whether knowingly or not, he'd cut to the heart of what was worrying her. But she'd started, just tonight, to think about it differently.
"I would not have said this a week ago," she said. "Remember how I told you you'd know when I was ready to have this conversation? I was kind of lying. I meant I'd know, and I hoped you'd know when I did."
"So...now you know, and you know I know you know." Finn counted it out on his fingers.
"Look." She took his hand in both of hers - of course she was going to when he left it vulnerable like that - and said, "I'm never going to be completely free of the effects of MMS. You're never going to totally forget about Fern. We can't keep waiting for things that are never going to happen before we're allowed to be happy."
She moved her hands down to his waist. "I'm happy now. I want you now. I'll figure out the rest in the morning."
"So we can do this?"
"We can do this."
They stayed there in the hollow tree, warmed by a fire HW lit, talking when they were too tired to make out, jumping each other when they ran out of things to say, until the larks replaced the owls above them, and the lards came to the creek for their morning drink.
Author's note: From the fact that I'm writing this story at all, you can probably guess that I love "The Wild Hunt." But I think it ended too early. What did it look like when Finn and HW made the mutual decision to stop fighting their respective crushes? Here's my answer to that question.
For the next few, just like Adventure Time itself did so often, I'm gonna try some experiments with time and perspective. I want to explore HW apart from Finn in a way the show never got the chance to, and also focus on the impact of this relationship on the other people in our lovebirds' lives. Hope you like it!
