Chapter Two
Special Remedies

His heart was beating impossibly fast; he wasn't even entirely certain that he had a pulse. The image of the old widow and her henchmen replaced the darkness in his vision, haunting him with horrible memories he would rather forget. Mounted on a tiger, standing on the broken glass of the window… She had a lot of nerve breaking into his house, when his child was there, no less! Even so, despite everything in his past, he was so sure he had everything under control…

Damn fool.

The stripes on the tiger quickly morphed into the harsh ocean waves of that night. He held tight onto Finn as they coursed through the violent waters. Of course, Finn didn't take kindly to this unforgiving environment and was crying loudly. He tried to hush the child, but nothing would work. He didn't exactly blame the baby; he was scared too. His heart was still pounding.

A large arm chopped the water beside them, splashing them further and further away from the island. Clutching Finn close, he looked up to see a monstrous machine that looked almost murderous.

The Guardian.

His eyes immediately widened. "No! I'm not trying to leave!" he shouted despairingly, but the machinery could not compute. It could only comprehend that they were beyond the boundaries of the island waters; thus, they had to be Hiders. They had to be stopped.

Before he knew it, Martin found himself submerged in the ocean. He struggled to stay above water as the waves continuously crashed on top of him. He so desperately tried to swim back to the raft, back to his son, but he couldn't. The waves were too strong. Soon enough, he became buried under the water, ever so slowly going under…

"I'm so sorry… I'm so, so sorry Finn…"

The unheard apology echoed in his head as everything seemed to fade.

Martin's senses started to return as he regained consciousness. The feel of a blanket and pillow, the scent of hospital cleaning materials… Almost immediately he noticed that he could indeed breathe and was not drowning. In fact, he was completely dry, and not in his normal clothes.

Though, his head was also throbbing like crazy. It wasn't enough to impede his comprehension by much, but he winced at the immense pain as soon as he felt it. Maybe if he just laid there and pretended to be still be asleep…?

"Oh! Princess, the human has woken up," said the voice of what he assumed to be a nurse or doctor of sorts.

Drat.

"Thank you, Dr. Ice Cream," replied a kind yet structured voice, the princess. What kind of place still had princesses and princes? Or was that just a nickname? Did it even matter? She was probably just another doctor… along with the strangely named "Dr. Ice Cream."

As he heard footsteps coming in his direction, Martin simply stayed still in an attempt to execute his original plan. "Sir, I'd like to ask you a few questions. You don't have to sit up or even open your eyes. I just ask that you answer. Alright?" said the princess. Martin remained silent and didn't move an inch. "I know you're awake. Your brain is as alert as it can be with the amount of head injuries you have," she added, a hint of annoyance in her tone. Martin furrowed his brow instinctively. Due to his throbbing headache, he hardly even noticed wires that were attached all over his head.

"Well, it was worth a shot," he said, cautiously turning on his back as to not pull the wires that he now knew were present. Weakly, he pushed himself into a sitting position. He wasn't exactly sure what he was expecting when he actually opened his eyes, but he knew it only added to his preexisting headache.

His eyes first fell upon a hospital bed directly across from his own. With his blurry vision, he almost mistook the bed to be normal, but as his eyesight cleared he saw that wasn't really the case. While the full bed mattress and blue sheets themselves looked normal, the candy cane frame gave everything away. The walls were a mustard brown color, which strikingly contrasted the light colored checkered tiles that covered the ground. What startled him the most, however, was the other person in the room.

The person – the princess – sat elegantly on a stool at the end of Martin's bed. It was only the two of them. He knew that she had to be one of those candy people he saw before despite looking much more humanoid than the others, as her skin was a pale pink and her tied back magenta hair looked like actual bubblegum. She had on a lab coat of sorts, holding a clipboard; it made her look very professional.

Once the princess saw that he was at least somewhat acclimatized to the new environment, she decided to get started. "What's your name?" she asked, readying her pen to write.

"Martin Mertens," he answered absentmindedly, stuck in his own thoughts of the candy reality he was starting to accept he was actually in. Sentient candy… a whole town made out of it, actually! Was it some sort of mutation? Was this what they were scared of when they forbade anyone from leaving the island?

There was a small silence that followed his answer. The princess looked rather taken back, as if she was not expecting what he said. However, she quickly recovered from her brief moment of shock, hastily scribbling down something as she looked back up at him. "Okay Martin, how did you arrive here? We don't see many humans around here," she asked.

How did he get here? That sure was a bullet he wanted to dodge. He took himself out of his thoughts, giving the princess a fake exasperated face. "Look, it's been a rough few days. My head's throbbing like my brain's about to explode or something. I'm not exactly in a state to recall anything that big," he said, making sure to stress the pain in his statement. Ironically, it wasn't much of a lie.

"I disagree," the princess replied as she started to write something down.

"How come, Princess?" he asked, still over exaggerating his pain.

The princess put down her pen at looked at Martin. "Well, your head seems to have quite a medical history attached to it. Not only do you have damage due to physical trauma, but emotional trauma as well. Both leave noticeable differences in the brain. We have medicine and remedies to help with your concussion, but in order to help with your emotional trauma, you're going to have to voluntarily share what caused it," she explained. Her gaze turned expectant.

Martin sighed. She seemed the persistent type, and he didn't have the energy to go back and forth until she eventually gave up and let him be. Was this lack of energy apart of the emotional trauma she had mentioned?

"Uh, the details are kinda fuzzy, but I remember it was a stormy night… Extremely stormy…" he started, pausing to formulate what exactly he was going to say. "I was running from… something, er, some people. Yeah. So these guys were chasing me, and there was a tiger, too. So I was running from these guys and a tiger, but I was cornered at the oceanside, you see. I think I got on some sort of raft or something, but not without a fight. After I bested the tiger, I think the storm carried me away, and here I am now. It was a brutal fight, brutal. I'll spare you the details, Princess," he said, waving his hand as if to dismiss the subject.

The princess stared at him with an unconvinced expression, her eyebrow cocked. "You and I both know that's not true," she said flatly.

"What're you talkin' about? I'm tellin' the truth!" he replied in an offended tone that didn't really match his current emotions, leaning against the candy cane frame of his hospital bed. How would she have known if he was lying, anyways? Was it the dumb wires attached to his head? Nonetheless, he sighed once more. He guessed right; she was going to be persistent. "Look, thinkin' about it stresses me out, okay?" he eventually confessed, glancing off.

"That's the entire point of sharing it. It won't stress you out so much later if you just talk about it now," she reminded him, giving him a reassuring smile.

Martin furrowed his brow. Was she right? Should he just tell her the actual truth? He almost remembered Minnie saying something somewhat similar before, so it had to hold some scientific merit. Even then, he didn't know if she would even believe him this time around, considering some of what he said before was true, but maybe it was just because she could see right through his tricks (thanks to the wires, he suspected). Besides, she didn't know him, right? There would be no repercussions if he told. There was still the possibility that she was a figment of his imagination, anyways.

He ended up giving the princess a small smile and a shrug. What did he have to lose? "Alright, Princess, but you're in for quite a story.

"About, say, five years ago, I was just your normal vagabond thriving with my own business. People wanted a way off our cozy little island, and I showed them the path in exchange for gadgets. …Now, leaving the island was illegal, so I never went with. Unfortunately, those folks were almost always caught," Martin started, looking up at the ceiling. It wasn't until he actually tried to genuinely recall something that he noticed how fuzzy his memory actually was.

"So you were a conman?" the princess asked, her tone of voice noticeably different than his wife's when she asked a similar question. The princess sounded like she was poorly trying to hide the disgust she felt.

As much as he tried, he couldn't repress the thought that Minerva likely felt the same way about him now. Disgusted, disappointed, confused, fearful… disheartened. All things he caused by his past catching up to him. He was a conman, a dirty, dirty conman in her eyes that took her son.

Not. Now. Mertens. Pull yourself together. Thinking about it just makes it worse. Not now, not now, not now.

"I prefer the term con artist," he responded, pretending to brush of the statement that actually stung. He'd be a dead man before he showed weakness in front of someone, especially a stranger. "Anyways, one day there was this crazy little widow lady with, I don't know, a bodyguard or somethin'? She wanted to leave, and she paid up her end of the bargain, but she forced me to come with to leave the island. The Seekers found us after that, and I was jostled out of a boat and broke both my legs. I know, sounds unfortunate, but that's where I met the best Helper on Hub Island, Doctor Minerva Campbell." His expression softened upon saying her name, a small, genuine small smile appearing.

"Oh, she sure was something… At first, I just saw her as some opportunity to escape. I tried to charm my way out of re-ed- uhh, re-education, but it turns out she had a certain charm, too! We had dinner after I got out of the hospital, and things felt… different. She wasn't just another person I'd conned. Man, this is gonna sound cheesy, but… she had the kindest heart of anyone I've ever met…" he trailed off, his eyebrows knitting together. He stared at the bed sheets. "...Kind enough to help even the most pathetic blokes, heh… I fell in love with her.

"S-So!" Martin exclaimed, looking away in embarrassment. His face grew hot. Did he reveal too much, let down his guard too much? The Princess chuckled. "Uhm… Flash forward, we got married and had a son named Finn. One day, yesterday, actually, Minerva left for work, so I was left with Finn. Stay-at-home-dad style, yanno? The little guy was only six months old, easy to entertain. Late that evening, the widow and some bodyguard-henchmen-guys just come crashing through the window, wanting revenge for that con I pulled on them. I got a raft that I had stashed near our house… I was planning to just circle around the island, but it started storming real hard, and I guess we accidentally got in the Guardian's range or something?" The pace of his pulse started to speed up as he reflexively gripped his blanket tight. He made sure to look everywhere but the Princess.

He didn't exactly know why he was getting so nervous. What this too much? He had mulled over these exact same events tons of times before he start explaining them out loud, kind of. Sure, he felt overwhelming regret and loneliness, but never anxiety. Was it the mere fact that he was explaining everything out loud? To someone else?

The sound of pen against paper replaced the absence of Martin's voice. "Who's 'The Guardian'?" the Princess eventually asked, her voice full of curiosity.

"Uh, a giant robot that lived in the ocean outside our island to protect us or something. Caught a lot of Hiders, too… uh, people who wanted to leave the island," Martin responded, his speech coming out faster than intended. He nervously chuckled, rubbing the back of his neck and looking down at the blanket once more. "That thing attacked us, and… I needed to protect Finn. I climbed onto the Guardian, punched it in the eye, and subdued it with one of my old gadgets."

He paused, fixing his stare on one of the windows. Words began to spill out of his mouth without his control. "I don't know what happened to Finn. He… I can only guess that he just went sailing in another direction… I wanna believe he survived, but… I don't know. ...I don't know. In fact, I was pretty sure I drowned, but I guess fate had other plans, huh?" He gave a weak chuckle, finally glancing back at the Princess.

The Princess looked at him with a focused stare, as if she were analyzing his every word and movement. She then blinked, looked down at her clipboard, and quickly wrote something else down. Without looking up, she asked, "May I have a few of your hairs?"

"Uhh, come again?"

"I want to run a DNA test. There's a few humans here, maybe we can find out if one of them is your son," she said with a knowing smile. Though, it did look like she was smiling more to herself than at Martin.

"That would mean a lot, Princess, really, but I don't really think he drifted over here," Martin said with slight dismay in an attempt to cover up his lingering doubts. It didn't work at that well.

"Don't be silly!" the princess said, standing up from the stool with a smile on her face. "There's only really a handful of humans who actually reside here... Well, there's only one that's fully human currently, and even then… It's complicated. But the point is that it's not going to be all that hard."

"Alright, but I'm telling ya, he went in the opposite direction of me, so I doubt he's here," he argued, taking in a deep breath. In that statement, there was a poignant unspoken, "Don't even bother. I don't want to get my hopes up."

Despite Martin's reaction to everything, the princess still smiled at him. It was almost creepy, as if she knew something that he didn't. "It wouldn't hurt to try," she reassured hopefully. "Plus, I already have a DNA sample from the other human. The process should only take a few days, maybe more with how long it takes to analyze and match your DNA sequences."

Martin shrugged, silently sighing as he grabbed a few strands of his now dry hair. With an effortless pull, the hairs detached from his head. He handed them to the princess. "It's all yours. Knock yourself out," he stated, holding out his hand.

Of course, he knew whoever this other human was couldn't be his son. They just couldn't be. But hey, the princess was right. It wouldn't hurt to try, even if just to humor himself and buy him time to think of a way out of this weird place.

The princess set down her clipboard, reaching in her lab coat. She took out a pair of pale pink gloves, grabbing the hairs from Martin's hands. "Thanks. I'll have a member of my staff come watch over you as I start the test," she said, turning to leave the room.

"Hey, my connin' days are behind me!" Martin exclaimed lightheartedly, jokingly crossing his arms.

The princess spun back around to face him, chuckling slightly. "It's not that. It just takes a bit to get the results, yanno? It might take a few days, and we don't need you dying on us," she said, her expression faltering slightly. She muttered something inaudibly to herself, something like her previous statement, but not exactly…

He couldn't piece the phrase together. Furrowing his brow, he asked, "Say that again?"

The princess simply shook her head, causing Martin's brow to furrow further. "It's nothing. Hey, Peps!" she shouted at the opening.

Within a second, a small peppermint creature in a fancy navy blue tuxedo came into the infirmary. He walked in with his hands behind his back and a smile on a his face. "Yes, Princess Bubblegum?" the peppermint creature answered.

Hey, so that's her name! Fitting, Martin thought as Princess Bubblegum walked up to the peppermint creature.

"Watch over this washed up human. I have to go to my lab for a bit. Keep him fed and his vitals in check," she instructed.

The peppermint creature curiously glanced at Martin for a second, before returning his eyes to the princess. He gave a small nod in understanding. "Of course, Princess," he answered. With that, Princess Bubblegum quickly left the room with Martin's hairs in her gloved hands.

The peppermint creature smiled at Martin, waving at him. "Hello! I'm Peppermint Butler, the Princess's loyal, royal servant," said Peppermint Butler as he took Princess Bubblegum's place on the stool at the end of Martin's bed.

Martin pursed his lips in thought as he awkwardly stared at the sentient candy being. After an uncomfortable silence, the human finally said, "Totally hypothetical here, but if I were to lick you, would that be weird? Would you be offended?"

Peppermint Butler simply sighed. It was going to be a long 'bit.'