The Lemongrabs were dead, and there was no doubt about that. He'd been present when the Princess signed her name on their death registers, and the thin, curling line of her pen drew a circle round their lives to section them off from those left alive. Under her neat name was his own, scrawled with a still healing hand. The name Lemongrab appeared on that register three times, he morbidly still noted. You could swap them around and it would look no different. Lemongrab DECEASED, Lemongrab (clone) DECEASED and then his name;
X. Lemongrab, I hereby certify that I have witnessed
the verification of death(s), and consented for the body/ies to
be transferred into the custody of Princess Bubblegum for
post mortem examination and experimentation. I withdraw
all personal claim to the corpse(s) and consent to them being
returned at the will of the Princess.
Lemongrab Lemongrab Lemongrab
"Lemongrab?"
He barred his teeth at the locked door and mumbled at her to go away. She knocked on the door again and he hissed, hoping it was loud enough for her to hear through the blue painted door- though the paint had been chipping. The dust on the floor was speckled with bits of blue, and the wallpaper was peeling. There were patches on the walls like tan lines where posters and clippings had been tacked up and then torn down many many years ago, but the walls still held the memory of what had been there.
"Lemongrab we agreed that we were going to go visit his grave today."
I agreed to nothing, Lemongrab thought bitterly. The Princess continued to visit him once every few months for diplomatic dinners, but now they'd taken on a pitying element he didn't remember her ever having for him. After asking the usual dry questions about farming methods and foreign policy she'd fiddle with her spoon or tap the side of her glass before asking with forced casualness "So… how've you been?" and awkward, stilted conversation would follow where he tried to talk about his feelings honestly enough that she'd walk away from the conversation feeling like she'd accomplished something and wouldn't push him, while also avoiding the fact that a lot of his sadness and anger and self hatred was her fault.
During one of these conversations he'd mentioned offhand that he was angry about commemorating their deaths on the same day. They were different people, and Lemongrab 2 had died defending their children. It didn't seem fair that they were lumped in together under one anniversary. He didn't mention that Lemongrab 2 wouldn't have needed to die if she had saved them, because everytime he brought that up they fought bitterly until she ranted foreign policies at him and said in a guilty voice that her hands had been tied, she had to think of her reputation and stopped visiting for a while. He didn't bring up that the anniversary of their deaths was also his birthday, and he'd like to be able to actually enjoy it one day.
The Princess had suggested they commemorate Lemongrab 2's death on the day their life started rather than on the day it ended, as a way of flipping the narrative and focusing on the life that had been rather than on the fact that it ended. She'd been about to finish saying "It's what he would have wanted." when Lemongrab cut her off to say that would be nice. She didn't know anything about what they would have wanted, he thought. She didn't even know enough about him to recognise that these visits made him uncomfortable, and he was right in front of her.
And now on the 27th of August, here she was. Probably wearing the dark purple mourning dress she'd worn to their funeral, with a black veil half covering her face. She knocked her pretty pink fist on the door again. "Lemongrab I know this is hard but you'll feel a lot better after you get it over with."
Lemongrab slithered off the bed with a groan and dragged his feet to the door. He undid the lock and opened it a crack. "Go away."
"Lemongrab!" The sliver of her pink face that he could see seemed hurt and confused, "Come on, I'm trying to help you dude. I'm supporting you."
"Leave. I do not want you here."
"Lemongrab you're shutting yourself off from your emotions." she said through gritted teeth as she tried to force the door open while he leaned on it to keep it open only a crack.
"Bah humbug."
"Lemongrab I am here and I am being supportive and we are going to go to his grave and do funeral stuff and I wrote a whole speech inspired by trauma informed therapy-" she said in the commanding voice she used for ordering soldiers, "-that will make you feel tons better if you just give me a chance and stop being so difficult!"
"Nnnngh lump off!" She gasped. "Leave us alone. We do not want you here."
"We? Oh." She took a step back and took a second look at the name painted on the door. "Is this his room?"
Lemongrab didn't say anything, but he didn't shut the door either.
"I've never actually been inside his room, can I come in?" she asked softly.
He made a strained noise as he considered it. Eventually he gave in and opened the door. She stepped into their room, clutching a black bag to her. He noticed she'd cut her ankle length hair to only come down to her shoulders. Despite everything his hands itched to stroke it and have her be sweet with him but he pushed the feeling away, it didn't belong to him. She wasn't even his mother, any biological relation they had came from the parts of Lemongrab 1's corpse that had been sewn into his body, and any desire for motherly affection from her came from the broken bits of brain and memory that she'd pieced together and placed in his fractured skull.
He flopped back down on the blue four poster bed, turned away from her.
She took a few steps around the room, and sat down at Lemongrab2's old blue vanity table. He heard the creak of aged wood as she turned the mirror to face her and saw the huge spidering crack in the middle- with several shards of glass missing in the middle where a yellow fist had smashed it. She turned the mirror back the way it had been, facing the wall. Next she started opening the drawers and here he sat up and hissed "Don't touch ANYTHING!" at her.
The princess frowned at him but did as he asked, and placed the photo album she'd retrieved and been about to open back into the top drawer.
"Do you come here a lot?" she asked in the gentle voice used for addressing children, pets and people about to jump off a bridge.
Lemongrab made a noise and shrugged. "Nnngh I don't know."
She stood up and went over to their wardrobe, painted blue like the rest of their furniture. She looked over at him for permission to open it, he shrugged.
She opened the door and looked inside at their clothes hanging in the musky gloom, some moth-eaten, others untouched by the passage of time as if nothing had happened. There were copies of the same white uniform back to back, some more worn and torn and stained than others, a sailor suit, their page boy outfit, and finally a dark black dinner jacket that their brother had given them a long time ago. Hidden in a plastic bag behind a removable panel at the back of the wardrobe was the only skirt they owned, which they'd handsewed from an old white top. Lemongrab didn't mention its existence, or the one time he'd tried it on and hastily taken it off, terrified someone would see him. He'd realised with a sinking feeling as he looked at his reflection that he felt a similar but slightly different fear to them: being a normal, conforming, understandably masculine man people recognised as a man was the only part of him left that could be described as normal, and the thought of losing it was painful.
The princess shut the door. She stared at the chipping blue paint. "Do you like it here?"
"I suppose." He said stiffly.
She perched on the foot of the bed and clasped her hands in her lap. "Does it feel comforting to be here?"
"Nngh…Iiii suppose." He scratched at his nose and regarded her warily.
She smiled sadly. "It's a cute bedroom. You must have a lot of memories of this place-"
"Whyyy are yoouu doing these things?" He interrupted.
"Is it really so hard to believe that I'm trying to be better?"
Lemongrab looked at his creator. He had a lot of opinions and feelings about her, and sometimes it was hard to sort out which ones were his and which were a hangover from a life he'd never lived, but could remember like it was yesterday. Looking at her sat on a bed he had to remind himself wasn't his, looking at him so sadly he had an overwhelming desire to crawl over to her and rest his head on her shoulder and just be together with her. He felt guilty for how he was treating her, constantly trying to send her away. There had been a Lemongrab who looked forward to her visits more than anything, and who had longed for her to sit with him like this. And yet he could never trust her again, because Lemongrab 2 had never trusted her. Because he didn't trust her either.
"Hm… truly?" he asked. "Better how?"
She shifted awkwardly. "I'll admit that maybe when I called Lemongrab a failed experiment and… even the fact that I tried to create life as an experiment wasn't good." she admitted. "I was so interested in the science and to see if I could create a stable sour candy life that I never considered if I should, and then once he was made I had a duty as his creator to do what I could."
Lemongrab remembered those first few weeks in the candy kingdom, or bits and pieces of it at least. Constant tests, being hooked up to machines and scanned and poked and prodded, things going down his throat and lights shining in his eyes until he hissed and ran into the corner to hide. And then the psychological tests- being shown pictures of crying faces and asked to identify what they were feeling, being asked all sorts of strange questions about sharing and friendship, and no matter what he said she would raise her eyebrows and make a long note on her clipboard because he had once again answered wrong. Because that was all he ever could be. Wrong wrong wrong…
Weeks of learning in a million different ways that he was different from everyone around him in the worst possible way. Weeks of lying awake at night in the tiny room with bars on the window, listening to the beat of his lemon heart and wondering bitterly why she'd made him if she didn't even want him. Weeks of turning away from the security camera in his room and secretly, silently weeping when no one could see him. Weeks of staring into her disapproving pink face and despising everything she stood for as strongly as he loved her, if not more so.
He wasn't sure if she was remembering the same things he was as she propped her elbows on her knees and fiddled her thumbs together, staring at the wall with her usual guarded expression.
"But he was miserable and so difficult to be around, he started… to get violent. I was worried he'd hurt someone so I had to appoint him the earldom."She continued. "And then maybe I was in the wrong to create the second lemongrab. I guess maybe two wrongs really don't make a right, I just thought that if Lemongrab can't get along with others maybe he needs someone like himself… I really didn't account for them EATING each other!"
Lemongrab's heart sank. He began to feel that she was no longer talking to him, that some invisible audience had entered the room and she was speaking to them now. He almost said that they didn't eat each other. Lemongrab 2, who's room they were sat in, never so much as bit anyone.
"I've been doing some self reflection and I think that I create life irresponsibly to fix my problems and other people's without considering how that's going to affect the person I'm making." She turned to him with a half smile, "I mean imagine being born and being told that your purpose in life is to fix someone else's janked up garbage. I'd be screwed up too probably. Maybe that's why I took away your ability to create life, I didn't want you to make the same mistakes. Maybe it was even a mistake for me to…" her eyes widened and she cut herself off at the last minute, but it was a minute too late. He'd known what she was about to say. Maybe it was even a mistake for me to create you. "A-Anyway. I shouldn't just say a bunch of junk about myself- this is your day so what do you have to say?"
He hadn't realised, but at some point during her speech he'd balled his hands up into rock hard fists and his teeth were gritted together so hard it hurt his jaw. "Nothing." he spat.
"Nothing?"
"I have nothing tooo say to you." he said coldly.
She frowned at him. " I'm trying to help you move on."
"Leave." he hissed.
"Why can't you just accept my help? I don't understand you."
How many times had she said that to him. How many times has she seen him upset and written it off as him being lemon and being crazy and out of control and unable to control his overwhelming, lemony emotions that had nothing to do with her of course. Something in him broke… she was saying this here of all places. Lemongrab picked up Lemongrab 2's old pillow with a shaking hand and hurled it at her. She screamed, even though there was no way he could have hurt her. Her bag slipped off her shoulder and some of its contents clattered onto the floor as she raised her arms to shield herself.
"Yes I am aaaa broken vessel and imperfect soul." He hissed at her, crawling over the bed like a huge, scarred and stitched together spider, "I am aaaa failed copy and a failed experiment and a motherless wretch orphaned by theee world. I am all theee terrible things yooouuu believe me to be! And since I am so disgusting-" He got up close to her frightened face and muttered; "Leave. Me. Alone."
She jerked away from him and stood up, grabbing the strap of her bag, leaving without so much as a goodbye. She paused for a moment in the doorway and looked over her shoulder. "It's clear to me that you're nowhere near as stable as I thought. I'm restricting your rights to governance- from now you'll have to file any decisions you make about the earldom with me so I can review them. I'm putting you back under surveillance. This is for your own safety."
With that the door shut and he was more alone than he'd ever been.
Lemongrab sat in the silence for a few minutes, feeling numb. Why had he done that? Maybe he really was crazy. Out of control. Unacceptable. He'd never hurt her before. What was wrong with him?
He remembered her tests and her frowning face. If he really was such a failure, and such a freak, and so broken inside and so unable to relate to people, if loneliness really was his only stable relationship model, then why did it hurt so bad that she would never love him?
He saw a capsule of pills lying on the dusty floor- it must have fallen out of the princess' bag when she ran out of the room. He picked it up to read the label for something to do.
Past Life Regression Pills
PRESCRIPTION ONLY
Instructions:
Take one red pill to relive a repressed memory
Take one yellow pill to speak with the soul of your past life
Take a blue pill to unlearn what you have learned about yourself
Risks:
Blood clots
Headaches
Overuse may cause dependency (physical and emotional)
PLRs use nightmare juice as an ingredient, those allergic must not take at all costs
PLRs cause intense visions which can cause heart palpitations and have been linked to heart attacks in elderly users
Blue pills should not be taken before consulting friends, family, doctors and creating reminder materials, as in some cases they have caused total amnesia
May contain almonds
He unscrewed the child safety lock and peered into the capsule. There were many red pills, a few yellow ones, and almost all the blues had gone. He poured a few pills into his palm and cradled them. He put them on the rim of the bedside table and started to arrange them in patterns: blue red red yellow, red blue red yellow, yellow red red blue. He looked at his procession and considered what he should do. To his knowledge he didn't have any allergies, and he wasn't elderly, and he was full of lemonade so he didn't have to worry about blood clots. That only left headaches. Was he willing to go through that for a chance to see his brother again?
Of course, there was the question of which one he'd see.
But it was a risk he was willing to take. He opened his mouth and placed the yellow pill behind his sharp fangs, then he swallowed and lay down on the bed to wait.
