doooooog | Grass Finn Bullshit

Grass Finn Bullshit

"Finn!" Jake cupped a hand beside his mouth, the other six or seven busy putting away their haul from the Bargain Kingdom (a store, not a government, for once). A ninth hand sprouted to gently retrieve the vuvuzela from where BMO was absconding with it. "You hungry, buddy? They had a huge special on boar meat, I'm thinkin' sloppy joes!"

"THEY LEFT!" Neptr chimed in, sullenly, from his perch on the stair. "FATHER AND GRASS FATHER. NOT NEPTR."

"Oh yeah. Well, don't sweat it Neptr, that chicken coop is the kinda thing that changes a man. Better to skip it."

"NOT A CHICKEN COOP, A DUNGEON ADVENTURE."

Jake's coordinated dance of arms flagged for a moment, doubt curling in his gut. The prickle of concern was followed immediately by guilt. What the hell was he worried about? Two Finns were better than one. He could stand to cut Fern a break, even in his own thoughts.

"Welp, you can help me on a culinary adventure if you want." Jake's gaze dances from the meat to Neptr. "Whaddya think about Sloppy Joe Pies? Has a nice ring to it..."

---

The sun was slung low in the sky by the time Jake heard the familiar sound of Finn's return up the treehouse steps. Alongside the involuntary prick of his ears, the dog feels a smile start to spread. No matter how capable the kid (teenager) had become over the last decade, Jake was pretty sure he'd never lose the sense of relief that came over him when Finn came home safe.

Lately, lingering misgivings aside, those feelings were starting to blossom towards Fern as well.

"Hey boys!" Jake lets the smile grow to a grin, craning his neck over the arm of the couch. "Y'all have fun out there?"

Jake felt suddenly cold, as if some cosmic entity had reached its hand down and pinched out the contented flame and safety of home. His voice lost its usual buoyancy, standing up from the couch.

"Wait, what happened?"

Finn said nothing, standing there looking as if he'd been through a woodchipper. Blades of grass clung to his hair, his clothes, even stuck to the razor sharp line of blood at his exposed stomach.

"I know that look!" BMO chimed in, sounding pleased to be the one with the answer to Jake's question. Neither the boy or the dog seemed to hear him in that moment. "You just killed someone."

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No outburst comes, just a long, uneasy silence while Finn absorbs what he was saying.

“Too much like Dad?” Finn looks perplexed, an uneasy feeling in his chest, like he was treading into waters a little deeper than he knew how to handle. “We love Dad, why would that be a bad thing? Why would you guys fight about that…”

"We do love Dad!" Jermaine was quick to agree, holding up his hands. Crap. This was heading quickly into dangerous territory. He finds himself hoping Jake will be so grateful to be rescued, he overlooks all the ways in which he's fucking up with their baby brother. "But he was... a really hard guy, that's all. He didn't let anybody in. I just didn't want you to feel like you had to be... okay, all the time."

He tentatively stretches a hand out to clasp Finn's shoulder, "I mean... tricking yourself into being able to fight the way you used to is pretty cool, but. I guess I can't help feeling like it also sort of sucks. Does that make any sense?"

Finn was staring at him like he’d sprouted another head. Or maybe some weirder thing that their brother couldn’t do. He steps back, brushing Jermaine’s hand off his shoulder.

“I…no that doesn’t make sense!” Finn didn’t like this conversation, he didn’t like how it made him feel. The door was starting to glow behind him, but that only made it feel worse. It meant there was truth to what Jermaine was saying. “It doesn’t suck, it…”

He flounders, grasping for the right words and failing to find them. Settling for a bludgeon when he needed a needle.

“You don’t even know what it was like, or what I was going through, how can you say it sucks?”

Jermaine froze, watching the door start to glow with a stark intensity. It silhouetted Finn, wreathing him in a strange golden light that caught him at the edges. It was kinda beautiful, in the way that only an artist might notice. One way to distance himself from the emotional weight of Finn's expression and words.

The thrum of the door's singing grew louder, underscored by Finn's voice raising right alongside it.

Quietly, once Finn finished and the two of them shared a few moments of tense silence: "... The door's open."

Finn’s anger slips, and he turns to look at the door. It was open. His shoulders slump a little. The door was opened, but it didn’t feel very good how’d they’d done it.

“Jermaine, I…” Finn’s mouth presses into a line, looking down. He makes a frustrated sound.

"It's okay," Jermaine starts to put a hand up on his arm, but hesitates. He ghosts it there, a few inches away, not eager to pull it away either. "You feeling better doesn't suck, alright? I'm the one who sucks, for making you feel like it does."

Jermaine wasn't lying, but he was also a little worried about getting through the door before he got too deep into this apology.

"Let's go, okay? Jake needs us." When in Rome, why not do as Romans do. Jermaine thought back to running around dungeons with Jake and his father. "This is just... a dumb mind maze, getting in our heads. We're too smart for that, right?"

“You don’t suck…I guess it’s just. Maybe a little bit of a sensitive subject? For me.” Finn says glumly, in the understatement of the century. He looks up at the opened door once more, smiling a little at Jermaine’s transparent attempt at motivation. Transparent, but effective. “Yeah, we’re too smart for it. Gotta keep our eyes on the prize.”

The prize being Jake. He grabs Jermaine’s hand and pulls him along through the door.

Edited 2022-12-02 07:24 (UTC)

Content to be pulled along (and away from the vibes of the last room), Jermaine was briefly unburdened by fear of what was to come. It couldn't possibly be worse than the Awkward Family Conversations door.

Smooth stone pavers gave way slowly to the familiar wooden floor of--

"Oh no." Jermaine whispers, looking around. They were home. Home-home. It looked the way it did when their parents were alive; which also happened to look an awful lot like when Jermaine kept it. Just, warmer, somehow. Full of the earmarks of a family that lived there, instead of one lonely dog with one lonely chair.

Then again, their parents never had bars on the windows, did they?

"Great. What's this gonna be?" He asks, looking around anxiously. "Are we gonna have to fight our parents as zombies or something?"

Finn was, however, already rooted to the spot, silent.

On the far side of the room, bathed in the warm soft light of the room, their Mom. She looked as real as anything else in this dungeon, and exactly as he remembered her the last time he ever saw her. She was wearing one of her wide brimmed adventuring hats, and carefully packing a number of vials of clear liquid in her well worn bag. She’s taken that bag on countless adventures and explorations, Finn remembered it well.

“Finny, why don’t you hand mommy her neckerchief, sweetie?”

Hearing her voice, even in some fantastical magic-induced illusion made Finn’s heart race, excitement and joy and aching nostalgia flooding in all at once. He might have even responded to that request, if not for the quick thumping of feet from behind him as someone runs past. Him. Only…maybe five years old. How old had he been on this day? He was pretty sure five. Just a puppy.

“Mommy, here!” Baby Finn was holding up for her a crumpled silk neckerchief. Real Finn takes a step back, toward Jermaine. This was too much, he couldn’t do it. Whatever it was, it was too much.

Jermaine's own mind was racing, processing through what he was looking at in fits and starts. Unlike Finn, the scene appeared less like a warm, safe dream made terrible by the knowledge it was about to painfully end. For Jermaine, it appeared spliced with his nightmares.

Dark omens peppered it like grim warnings; bars on the window, an ugly scar Finn had now carved down his baby brother's back in the past. Finn never loved wearing clothes back then, going around shirtless whenever the weather broke 70. Only Jermaine could swear it had to be 90, at least. Had to be. The air felt stifling.

He gropes around for Finn's hand, closing around his robot one accidentally. Jermaine has a flash of random realization when he does -- he really... Never liked touching this hand, did he?

In front of them, the scene plays out.

"There! Now, how does Mommy look?" Margaret finished tying her scarf in expert fashion, setting the knotted end coquettishly off center. "Pretty smart, hm?"

For all her demeanor seems so normal, her usual bright and cheerful self, there was a worry there that seemed all the starker with hindsight. Their father had been missing for weeks. It wasn't unusual for him to be gone long stretches, but he always found a way to get in touch with Mom somehow. Always.

Edited 2022-12-02 12:36 (UTC)

Finn was transfixed, unable to look away from the exchange, gripping tightly to Jermaine’s hand. Listening to his younger self chatter to their mom about how pretty she looked and could he go with her?

He looks around the room, trying to figure out what they were supposed to do. It couldn’t just be stand around and watch…there must be something. A door or a piece of a puzzle to solve.

“Now, now, Mommy’s got to do this one on her own,” he heard her say sweetly. Picking him up and giving him a kiss on the nose. “There will be plenty of adventures for young pups when I come back.”

Now, from his older perspective, blessed with the knowledge of what was to come, Finn could hear the strain in her voice. The worry that she was fostering. He hadn’t seen that at all, back then. It had felt like any other time to him, his parents going off on just another expedition.

His baby self was starting to tearfully protest when he notices the clock. Its face so familiar it almost didn’t strike him as out of place…except he’d never seen that clock here, in their parents’ house. He and Jake had decorated that clock when he was young, quite awhile after their parents deaths. He’d probably been eight or nine (time was so hard to pin down when you were young) and on day two of a miserably persistent rain storm that trapped them inside, that had been driving Finn (and Jake, through him) stir crazy. Jake had suggested a project, said it would help pass the time.

So it shouldn’t be here. He nudges his brother with his elbow, pointing in its direction.

“Jermaine…look. That clock’s from our treehouse. It doesn’t belong here.”

Edited 2022-12-02 19:34 (UTC)

"Now, now, sweetheart." Margaret poked him on the nose, shouldering her crossbow as naturally as she might a handbag. "You be good for your brother."

Jermaine knew which brother was home, just a surely as he could anticipate Finn's response.

"Jakey?"

"Not Jakey, dewdrop, Jermaine is just in his room there. Go ask him to play with you if you get bored, alright? And if you get hungry, be sure to let him know."

Then the protests started, the renewed requests to go with her, the generalized whining that used to drive him up a wall when they all shared a house. Jermaine loved Finn -- he was their little brother, he wasn't legally allowed not to -- but he hadn't always been the most... patient with him, growing up.

Jake was the shining star back then, to just about everyone but especially Finn. Nevermind that he was running with a bunch of delinquents and getting into trouble constantly, even if everyone but Jermaine loved pretending they didn't know about that.

Yeesh, the longer he was here the more his late teens seemed to be creeping up on him. Blech. Not a time he'd ever willingly relive, even if this mind dungeon wasn't giving them a choice.

Wait, had Finn said something?

"Huh?" His reply came out soft and sort of numb, following his finger to the clock. "Oh. Weird. What do we do with it?"

“I don’t know…but it’s got Jake on it. That has to be significant, right?” He lets go of Jermaine’s hand and walks over to the wall with the clock, trying not to get too sucked into the scene playing out in front of them. It was just a trick, he knew. A distraction to pull their attention. Maybe.

The background sound of him teetering on the edge of a tantrum was vaguely embarrassing, despite the fact that Jermaine had lived through this already. He takes the clock off the wall, looking at it solemnly.

Jermaine couldn't flip the switch as surely as Finn could, frozen in place as he stared.

"Jermaine!" He heard his mother call, brow knit. Finn was at her side, still sniffling, holding her hand. "Come on out for a moment, Jermaine!"

"Whaaaat?"

The ungrateful, unpleasant sound of his own voice made Jermaine's guts churn. Who knew how accurate it was -- everything else here was colored by his perception -- but Jermaine didn't have the presence of mind to remember that.

"Your brother needs you, son!"

He could see baby Finn wiping at his eye, looking miserable. But not just bored or frustrated by the subpar substitution of his favorite brother... he looked embarrassed. Out of place. Shy. It was strange and unpleasant, looking at the little kid who seemed determined to hang onto his mother's hand, hurt feelings soaking into his posture and expression.

... And then, everything began going in reverse. Quickly

"What the--" Jermaine turns to teenage Finn, looking at him with his finger on the clock. "What did you do?"

Like a wind up clock, the reversal slowed... then began again, in a haunting echo of the last five minutes.

“Finny, why don’t you hand mommy her neckerchief, sweetie?”

Finn freezes like he’d been caught stealing from one of Jake’s hidden snack caches.

“Whoa…” the scene was playing out again as if nothing had happened. “I just…was messing with the clock, and moved the minute hand, like this…”

To illustrate, he pushes the little cut out picture of Jake again, moving the hand counter clockwise a couple inches. Immediately, the scene responds, playing in reverse again before coming to a stop.

“-hand mommy her neckerchief, sweetie?”

"Whoa..." Jermaine echoes, distracted from the ennui of the memory by the novelty of the clock. "It's like a turntable for the saddest biz that ever happened to us."

He looks around, brow knitting in disapproval.

"What are we supposed to do, lay down a sick beat and remix the last time we saw our Mom? Pretty squirrelly dungeon, bro."

“No way man, we can use this…make it so she doesn’t leave, or something…” Finn was looking at their mom again, a kind of wistful, desperate tone to his voice. He knew it was just an illusion, they weren’t going to change what really happened…but, wouldn’t it feel good? To do it here?

Finn walks over to the scene, holding the clock hand in place so things weren’t really moving forward. He snatches Mom’s worn adventure pack, tucking it quickly behind the couch. A favorite hiding place of his when he was young. He shoots Jermaine a pleased look, letting go of the clock hand.

“Finny, why don’t you…” She stops, frowning down at the table where the bag had been a moment before. “Well, that’s odd, I would’ve sworn my bag was here just a moment ago. Finny? Did you move Mommy’s bag?”

"Finn, that can't be how this works..." Jermaine trails off, realizing midway through his sentence that Finn was going to test his theory no matter what he said. Watching him grab the adventuring pack (we can touch stuff?), Jermaine sinks down into a chair and waits to see how the scene plays out.

"No!" Baby Finn announced, as confident as he was loud. Margaret methodically checked around her person, before moving down the list of usual hiding spots. Between her boys, a host of demonic artifacts, and the clutter of their home, things went missing often. But when it came to finding things in the chaos, their mom was the expert.

She walks right over to where Finn stood, clutching his clock. She was so close he could've touched her, rubbing her chin thoughtfully.

"Finny, are you sure you didn't move it?" Finn's past self shook his head assertively, prompting a fond (if tired) chuckle from his mother. "Well then, how do you explain this, sweetie?"

With a smooth tug, out comes the bag from its hiding place. Suitably impressed, baby Finn claps his hands by the door, utterly unaware of what he was celebrating.

"It takes a little more than that to pull the wool over these eyes, lambchop." She was walking away from Finn again, towards his younger self. She promptly leans down, giving him a kiss on the forehead with a wink. "Your mom's a seasoned detective, or didn't you know?"

"This is pointless, Finn." Jermaine chimes in, voice soft and thick with an emotion he couldn't articulate. He didn't seem to be looking at the scene. He wasn't looking at anything at all, gaze fixed on the kitchen table and it's five chairs. "It can't be solved. She's always going to find it."

Edited 2022-12-03 00:09 (UTC)

“No,” Finn responds sternly, a determined expression on his face. “No, we can do it. We just need to figure it out.”

There was a single mindedness to his focus, bordering on obsessive. He pauses the scene again, hides the bag in a more esoteric place, one he didn’t remember even using as a kid, up high on a bookshelf.

It only took her a few minutes to find it.

Next he tries the back of the closet, hides some of the other things she needs too. All it accomplished was her getting stern with baby Finn, presumed culprit. Over and over he hid the bag, moved things. Over and over she found it.

Finn wasn’t paying any attention to Jermaine anymore, stalking around the room and looking for ways to outsmart this phantom of their Mom, desperate for a way to make her stay, and avoid the inevitable.

“Something has to work!” he proclaims, exasperatedly, voice high and thin with stress. It wasn’t clear if he even thought this was going to be a solution to their puzzle or whether it was something else entirely. Some other, deeper need that was blinding him. “We can make her stay.”

Reaching out in frustration, he tries to push the younger version of himself. His hand ghosts through the little Finn, and doesn’t cause much more than a momentary confused pause. He felt angry tears in his eyes, and that just made him angrier. All he could seem to affect was himself, and how he felt. And that was getting worse and worse.

“Just, stay!” he shouts at their mom, pushing everything off the table with a crash. He grabs the crossbow, the one she never went on expeditions without, throwing it on the ground and driving his heel into it. It splintered with a loud crack. “Stay here!”

Disassociating from the grim scene playing out in front of him felt like the most natural thing Jermaine could think to do. Blur your vision, wait for the shapes to break apart, start marking out a painting in your own mind. Something so far removed from what was in front of him, he could carefully excise his responsibility to his brother and... do as Jake did. That was what Jake did, right? Let Finn work out whatever he needed to work out while sitting on the sidelines, sandwich in hand?

The crossbow smashes into the floor with a splintering crash. Finn hadn't thought to pause the flow of time and their mother reacted as anyone would. She gasps, pulling Finn close to her with a high shout to Jermaine to come outside. Something was amiss in the house, he heard her say, you need to come with us now.

And in the center of room, there was Finn. Almost an adult now and yet so freaking young, panting and sweating and looking as if the wrong sort of touch might cause him to splay open at the seams.

"What's happening out here?" Jermaine heard his own voice call, watching himself step into the hall. He looked almost the same, save a fresher face and few less grays in the muzzle. You might not even know he was only around 22, for how settled into his adult self he appeared to be. If Jermaine remembered right, Jake had a different look every week. Guess being golden boy meant you got the luxury of phases.

Jermaine pauses, looking inward for a moment. What the hell kind of thought was that? He squeezes his hand into a fist for a moment, staring at it thoughtfully. Was this place making them go back in time...? Regressing to one of the darkest times in their lives to stall them out, trap them forever...?

He looks back up at Finn, at the hot tears streaming down his face as ghosts of their former selves talked urgently about the demon pestering them and what to do about it. Moving through his own miasma of discomfort and sadness, Jermaine pushes himself forward towards him.

"Finn," he says, voice even and controlled. "I think I know what we're supposed to do to move on."

He puts one hand on the clock and the other over Finn's.

"Can I have this?"

Edited 2022-12-03 14:28 (UTC)

“What?” Finn’s voice was thick with emotion. He wasn’t asking what they should do, but really hadn’t heard Jermaine. He was still watching their mom and himself, through blurred vision. They looked alarmed, although his mom was determinedly making plans for how to handle whatever manifestation was plaguing their house. He felt a pang of longing, missing her intensely. Her protectiveness. Her voice, her touch.

Feeling Jermaine’s hand on his, he tears his eyes away to look at him. It brings him back down to reality a little, seeing his brother, as he was now, not just as he was in the past. His gaze shifts down to the clock he was gripping like his life depended on it.

“Oh…yeah. Yeah.” He lets go.

Jermaine doesn't linger. It would be cruel. One look at Finn's red face and smeared tears and snot tells him that marinating even a moment longer than they had to here was going to make this that much harder.

With a quick motion, Jermaine dials the Jake-hand back to the beginning. Around them, dishes reformed, a vase of flowers reoriented itself on the table, Mom's crossbow unsplintered, and her adventuring bag returned right by her side.

"Finny, why don’t you hand mommy her neckerchief, sweetie?"

Jermaine doesn't look Finn in the eye as he takes the clock, smashing it hard over one knee.

The sound was deafening; alarm chimes playing loudly over the excited babble of Baby Finn while everything shifts. The scene they'd just been immersed in was now playing out through a cutout of an invisible wall, out of their reach.

On all sides, they were surrounded by a white expansive void. Jermaine doesn't hesitate for the second time, opening his arms to Finn and inviting him to hide his face against him. Silently, a few of his own tears begin to well up.

"C'mere, brother. You don't have to watch this again."

Finn almost wants to watch again, but it’s a compulsion, and not one that has any purpose. Putting your hand too close to flame just to see. He didn’t need to do it to find Jake.

He already knew this scene. It was engraved on every part of his heart, he didn’t need to see it again.

He turns to Jermaine instead, his open arms inviting and warm in way that was uncommon. Finn was taller than him and he has to crouch down to meet him there, unlike Jake who could just stretch his arms in a looping hug or bring himself eye level. It made him feel sad and nostalgic for how he wasn’t his brother’s little brother anymore.

He covers his ears with both hands, burying his face in Jermaine’s fur.

They stay like that for a long time. Jermaine listens, but doesn't watch, as he and his mother and him have a little spat about Finn. His last words to her -- as if he would ever need to be reminded what they were, by a mind dungeon or anything else for that matter -- hit like a sock to the gut. Whatever, Mom, I'm in the middle of something! Just go, everything will still be standing when you get back!

Only it wasn't standing now, was it? Their parents graves sat behind a ruin of ash and support beams. But they were dead, and the dead didn't mind things like that. That's what Bryce told him, anyway.

In some small way, maybe he should be glad he had last words at all.

Finn's were sweeter, but he was sweet and it was only fitting. He stood on tiptoes, hugging her tightly with a bye bye mommy that would rot your damn teeth. Jermaine squeezes the much older, much less innocent boy in front of him a little tighter.

Margaret chirps out a peppy be back soon, boys! and steps outside. The open door she walks through was full of blinding white light, slowly blending the scene with the white that already surrounded them. In moments, the keyhole Jermaine was peering hole was just more nothing.

"Hey." Jermaine murmurs, patting Finn on the back to indicate he was speaking to him. "It's over, Finn. You can look up now."

The muffled sounds come to an end, and Jermaine pats him on the back, his voice much closer.

Finn looks up, seeing there was nothing but the vacant white, almost a little disappointed. But it was for the best. The sense of accomplishment was completely absent again, and not just because Jermaine had been the one to ‘solve’ that particular challenge. He stands up straight, sniffling and wiping his face, feeling drained.

“Well. What’s gonna happen next?” Some of the determined enthusiasm had been dampened, replaced with a somewhat tired and drawn tone. He thinks of Jake, reminding himself that this would be worth it as long as they can save him.

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