"She said Crona was fine...!"
Marceline darted through the trees, rain pounding hard on her back. She pushed herself to run and fly at the absolute peak of her speed, only slightly burdened by carrying Crona in her arms.
No, she thought. I saw him myself. He was healthy enough to leave the hospital on his own! I would have noticed if something was...
She grimaced at a potential idea. The succubus thorn? No, impossible—even if he got pricked by more than one, I killed all three of them. It would have become inactive by now.
Full of fear, Marceline looked down at Crona's face. Black veins rippled beneath his pale skin, overtaking his face with the pattern of a lightning bolt or a bare tree with innumerable branches. Worse, the veins were only extending with time; to think, it only looked like a blemish beneath his lip when he didn't wake up this morning. His eyes were dull and unblinking, and his lips remained barely open, not even appearing to take breaths—the only thing that told her he was even alive was his pulse. A mere hour had passed since she had awoken to find him in this state.
The streets of the Candy Kingdom were only a series of obstacles for her, taking a zig-zagging and erratic path until she burst through the doors of the hospital. "GET BONNIE!" she screamed.
/
Crona was hauled off to the emergency room within mere minutes of Marceline's arrival. She had hope that they would stabilize him, perhaps rouse him to consciousness. But five hours came and went with virtually no updates on his condition.
"So what's the problem?"
The room was abuzz with doctors. Some individuals were attending to patients in one-on-one treatments, but Crona's bed seemed to draw in the professionals like moths to flame. Of course, they all deferred to Bonnibel's expertise, hovering around her more than they were the subject. Between their scientific jabbering amongst themselves and the electronic screeches emitted by machines that densely populated the entire, long room, it was a mess of noise pollution for Marceline.
She found her teeth grinding together while she waited at the edge of the bed, completely in the dark while Crona was blocked off by a perfect barrier of white lab coats. She hated it, this feeling of utter powerlessness.
"Bonnibel."
No reply. She was so thickly absorbed in her work that she appeared oblivious—or ignoring Marceline outright.
Marceline's already thin patience reached its end, getting up close with the royal scientist as well as getting a better look at Crona. "What's going on?"
The intensity with which Bonnibel snapped around almost made her flinch. "I don't know." She said, her hands poised to strangle someone as she made a face that couldn't fully told apart from a deranged smile or an enraged frown. "His vital signs are normal, we can't find anything in his blood, and there's no obvious cuts across the body!
"And yet!" she vociferated creating a growing scene. "It just keeps! Getting! Worse! Look at him!"
Her lips pursed tightly thereafter, leaving to the imagination what sheer frustration was left to boil within her own thoughts. She looked ready to hit a breaking point, but Bonnibel resigned herself to a sigh, morphing into a deflated husk of her normal self, completely burned out. "I'm taking a break, Marceline. I'll leave you some privacy with him."
Bonnibel saw herself out, leaving her lab coat on a rack by the door. Marceline couldn't blame her. "Sorry," she mumbled, hoping Bonnibel might still be in earshot to hear.
The other doctors remained, perhaps too proud and too stubborn to admit they were running a fool's errand. They all had such concentrated looks on their faces, not showing the nervousness that was obviously creeping beneath the surface. The only one who showed outright anxiety was Peppermint Butler, rigid in stature, regarding Crona with a knowing and dour expression.
As intelligent as she knew Bonnibel to be, she knew the princess' butler to be infinitely wiser in supernatural matters.
She discreetly moved over to his side, hoping to get a conversation in without the nurses breathing over her shoulder, or potentially eavesdropping.
First, they exchanged a stare, a chat in and of itself as their eyes conveyed information that verbalizing would make redundant. Her eyes searched with caution, and his offered the answers she was looking for—cold and painful answers.
"I get the feeling," she began, with the appearance that she was talking to no one in particular. "That he isn't just sick with something."
Her gaze turned to Crona, condition worsening by the second. "And it's crazy to think, but..." She glanced at Peppermint Butler, far too subtle to be noticed by anyone in the room but the butler himself. "I bet some people would say that he's not sick at all. Not sick with anything that doctors could help, anyway."
She did away with the discreet nature of their meeting up 'til now, and hit him with an icy look. "I wonder what's come over him."
It was a completely innocuous statement, but she trusted Peppermint Butler was a man who could pick up on the nuances of words and their intended meanings. She wasn't prompting him with an innocuous conversation starter—it was a demand to be informed.
Peppermint Butler turned a shade whiter than he already was, if such a thing was possible. He mouthed something inaudible, and left immediately. Confident this was going to lead somewhere, Marceline followed behind at a safe distance.
/
The room Marceline encountered the skittish butler in was a small one, enough to comfortably accommodate two people and no more.
He stood upright with his back turned, only finding the courage to face her after a long sigh. "I'm concerned for him." He admitted, surprisingly forthright.
"You know what's going on?" she asked, eyebrows raising with some hope.
"Yes, and I fear I'm powerless to stop it." He corrected a certain shaking in his shoulders. "I came to learn something about Crona during your tenure as Lady of the Nightosphere. He and I set out with the intention of retrieving a couple of scattered memories from the day prior, and I found more than I bargained for."
His fingers twiddled incessantly before asking her, "Marceline, you are aware that Crona is an amnesiac, yes?"
An odd chill swept down her spine upon remembering the fact; she was filled with dread, but at what? "We've talked about his past a couple times, but I figured, y'know, it wasn't really the most comfortable thing to broach. I didn't press him on it, and we respected each other's boundaries."
"Boundaries, yes..." Peppermint Butler sounded disinterested with such talk, pacing back and forth and in a straight line. "I doubt you were able to get more than bits and pieces from him. As it turns, out there's good reason for that."
She listened and kept silent, but not without her grievances; Peppermint Butler would do better to get to the point in fewer words.
"Whatever awful things went on his past..." Peppermint Butler raised a finger. "Shattered his psyche beyond his repair. To preserve it, his mind developed its own defense mechanism: he forgot it."
She cocked a brow, almost snorting at how simple it sounded. Years worth of trauma, gone that easily? "Don't patronize, Pep, I know there's way more to it than the way you're phrasing it."
"That's true," he smiled easily. "It would be more accurate to say he only forgot it consciously. The deeper part of his mind took all the dirty laundry and pushed it beneath his awareness—a temporary solution to a permanent problem.
"To the point, then..." Peppermint Butler went on. "It was all locked behind a door in his head; I saw it myself. It was wearing down by the time I saw it, but now it's come completely undone."
Marceline exhaled a cold breath. "Meaning that he's gone mad?"
Peppermint Butler's expression blanked, and he looked to the floor. He fell silent, answering her suspicions without so much as a word.
She stood upright with a solemn sense of purpose, facing the door. Marceline refused to let herself be powerless. Not now. "Just tell me what's left to do."
/
Getting Crona out of the hospital was so easy that it bordered on pathetic; the only thing standing in her way was the doctors attending to him, but even they found themselves convinced to the contrary following one hypnotic glare.
Flying out from the window with Crona in one arm, the quiet calm on Marceline's face was evident. She knew what ailed Crona, and it was within her power to save him—that was all the reassurance she would need to stave off panic.
She didn't even touch the ground until she was a step away from the front door. Once inside, her gait was swift and single-minded, dragging herself and Crona to the floor of her room. Surprisingly, she was out of breath; she'd hardly paid attention to how much energy she exerted coming here so quickly. In spite of her inward anxiety, she controlled her intake of air and found a rhythm, knowing that focus would be a necessity for what was to come.
She shut the door, and turned out the lights, leaving them in darkness of the bedroom, save for the steady, orange flame of the candle sitting on the drawer above.
"I'm gonna fix this, Crona." She said, desperation and weariness infiltrating an otherwise optimistic tone. "Just gotta do what the butler said..."
She manipulated his position to ensure that he was sitting up properly, pulling him up to his knees. She sat similarly, only two feet way.
It was painful, but she forced eye contact with his vacant gaze. She saw that his face was a mask of black veins trailing above and below his forehead and jaw, and knew that this was something to be done here and now. She stared back with intentionally widened eyes.
Initially, she felt discouraged that nothing was happening, but as seconds passed, she became aware of the subtle changes. The rings of red forming around Crona's eyes, a sign of her successfully tethering to his subconscious. The already dark room turning more and more black. But most obvious of all was the noise so faint to the ears; the more and more Crona took up her senses, she could hear the quietest screams. Screams of an ethereal sort, too muddled to ever come from a human mouth. They were the screams of his soul, coming from a body that no longer responded to its own internal torment.
Marceline came to the realization too late that just by staring, she was venturing to it: the trailing depths of Crona's dark soul.
AN: Forgive me for putting a shorter chapter out this time; I'd rather give the subsequent events room to breathe.