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 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.

Jermaine watches him for a few seconds, taking a deep breath as he collects his own thoughts and emotions.

"Heh, I dunno..." He chuckles weakly, stepping forward with Finn. "Maybe every kid who ever bullied us will jump out and give us noogies or something."

Finn wipes his face again, forcing a smile and laughing a little.

“What, you mean Jake?”

Maybe it was the adrenaline of what they just went through, or the stress of the day, or the fact that Jermaine was truly exhausted, but something about Finn's joke wasn't just funny. It was downright hysterical.

After about forty-five seconds of sustained, wheezing laughter: "What the grease man, you gotta warn me when you drop a truth bomb like that."

“It’s wasn’t even that funny, Jermaine.” Despite that, Finn was laughing too, some kind of emotional overflow making it impossible not to. He shoves Jermaine lightly, annoyed that he’d dragged him into his contagious laughing fit. Annoyed but also, feeling better.

Drying his eyes, Jermaine shoves him back, too tired and limp from laughter to do a very good job of it.

"Oh man, Finn, when we find that guy he's on the hook to make us, like, the best meal of our lives." He closes his eyes, imagining it. "Like, food so good it makes your mind melt. No stops left unpulled for our thank you dinner, y'heard?"

An unassuming door had appeared in the whiteness and the two dutifully trudge toward it, Jermaine distracting himself from whatever grim reality was on the other side by imagining Jake's spread.

Edited 2022-12-04 13:55 (UTC)

“Seriously, he owes us, big time,” Finn says with a grin. It felt good to joke, even if it was transparently a cover for how stressed and worried they both were. Finn absently hoped that this ordeal was almost over…seeing Jake’s face was just about the only thing that could make it all worthwhile. Although, part of him had to admit that it was nice to spend some time with Jermaine…even if the circumstances were about the worst one’s imaginable.

“You ready for whatever this thing’s gonna throw at us next, bro?” Finn opens the door, and seamlessly, they’re standing in the entryway of the treehouse. He knew it too well for there to be any doubt, even if it seemed…different in some way he couldn’t put his finger on. There was no treasure piled in the room and there was a slight chill to the air, a staleness.

“This is the treehouse…” he says, although he’s sure Jermaine knows just as well as he does. Finn wastes no time scrabbling up the ladder at the far side of the room, a distant hope starting to form that maybe this was where they were meant to find Jake. It was home after all, their current home…what better place to find him?

The room at the top of the ladder, however, hardly felt like home. Finn looks around in confusion, the room that he thought of as their kitchen barely resembled one now. There was no real furniture to speak of, just an array of some of their dad’s less dangerous or actively cursed artifacts, scattered in haphazard organization, half of them in boxes. The stove was there, underneath some cartons, but it didn’t look like it had been used in years. There were none of their pictures on the wall, no curtains on the windows, it even smelled empty. Nothing to indicate that anyone lived here.

“This…it’s like when we first came here.”

Jermaine walked with a touch more trepidation as he realized where they were. Even earlier that day (glob, just a day? It felt like it had been a year since they arrived), Jermaine recalled walking up that rickety old ladder with a pit in his stomach.

Everything about the place was so emphatically his brothers', in form and function. They'd built it together, refined each corner with stories. Finn's height scratched into a post in the treasure room, the vegetable garden out front, the scattering of treasure that surely had a story behind each doubloon and ruby... a million little artifacts to a life built together. Two-gether. A family all their own, even divorced from Joshua and Margaret in a way. The fresh start Jermaine never had, surrounded by ghosts every day in their childhood home.

He never imagined it looking like... this. A tomb of their father's obsessions. A flophouse when their Dad was too far to come home. He runs a hand along the uneven wood slats that made up the wall. How long had it looked like this after Jake and Finn came to stay?

"Dusty..." Is all Jermaine can think to say in response to Finn's observation, a shadowy echo of his first thoughts on Mars. "You think Jake's here?"

Distantly, almost as if responding to his name, both of them hear a familiar voice.

"Heh, sorry, man... yeah, no. Not happening. I don't even live there anymore, dude."

It was Jake's phone voice, going from casually dismissive to actively agitated over the course of a few sentences. It sounded as if it was coming from the game room.

Despite their last experience, Finn can’t help the gut reaction to hearing Jake’s voice. He tries to temper his expectation, that this might be another trick or test of something kind…certainly all signs pointed to yes on that part. But still, he hadn’t heard Jake’s voice in weeks and it really hammered in just how badly he missed him

“Jermaine, c’mon, that’s Jake, we have to see…” He grabs Jermaine’s arm and pulls him along, dragging him into the next room and through to the game room. His voice had a hopeful note to it as they approached. “Jake?”

"That's not Jake," Jermaine provides helpfully, walking over to the center of the dusty room. He picks up an old phone tossed haphazardly in the center of the room. Squinting, Jermaine realizes it looks.. familiar, somehow.

"Finn, wasn't this Jake's old phone?" Was Finn too young to remember that? "I think I remember him having one like that when Mom and Dad died."

Finn knew, but it was still disappointing. He was growing weary of the emotional game this temple was playing. He could fight monsters all day, but your own personal demons were a lot more exhausting.

He steps over to look at the phone in Jermaine's hand.

"I..think so?" He squints, trying to remember, trying to picture the phone that Jake used back then. Jake never let him touch it, he remembered that much.

"'Cuz you're a baby, man, you'll get candy or jam or whatever all over it!"

Jermaine looks up at the sound, ears perking up a little as he sniffed the air. The voice was undeniably Jake and sounded as if it was coming from right outside the door, but his nose got nothing. Not even the ghost of Jake through his memories. The sentence made no sense either... Then again, Jermaine barely knew what the hell Jake was saying half the time anyway.

"Not my fault you can't keep up with my flav-uh, brudd-uh."

The voice sounded as if it was coming from just behind him. He turns instinctively, goggle eyed at the empty space. Same as before.

"What the..."

Finn spins around, looking in confusion. It was Jake, but…always just in the other room, just beyond a corner or door. It was a little disorienting and extremely frustrating. But it felt like they were getting close…

“No way man, you missed by a mile-”

“What’s he keep talking about?” Finn demands, looking toward Jermaine, as if for answers, his fists clenched in annoyance. He looks around again, frowning, addressing the open air loudly. “Jake can you hear us? What’s the deal?”

The boomeranging echo of voices was off-putting. So like their brother but so off too, as if they were recordings being played out of time and out of context. Something to lure them... Maybe even trick them.

"Hey, bro, look at me. Just shut him out for a minute." That was hard while Jake's voice was sounding overtop them, but Jermaine pushed on. "Do you remember where you guys slept when you first moved here?"

Finn turns his attention back to Jermaine, looking flushed and anxious. Some small, unkind part of him was tired of this, tired of Jermaine, and just wanted Jake back.

“We…slept in the den. That’s the room with the wood stove, so we could keep it warm at night.”

Finn remembered how much fun that very first night had been, like camping, Jake had said. They had sleeping bags and even set up a blanket tent, like they were outside. The lit candles and Jake cleaned roasted them hot dogs in the fireplace, and told him stories until he was too tired to keep his eyes open. It was a good memory, even though he knew eventually the fun had worn off and they’d had their tough times here.

But that first night was perfect.

"It was perfect for me too, buddy."

The voice is so warm, even out of context. Jermaine found himself feeling some type of way about it, brain buzzing with the strange sense of loving someone and feeling completely outside them. He nods to Finn, gesturing towards the ladder.

"C'mon, let's go. Maybe we'll find something there." His voice came across thicker than he realizes, clearing his throat. "You lead the way. I think this puzzle is gonna be all you, brother." Everything was, with Jake.

"Yeah, well. You never needed me like he did. Finn's my guy, y'know? Always has been, always will be."

Jermaine's ears go back a little at the voice, a strange sense of shame at that. It felt wrong to be hurt by it -- Finn was a kid, why would he be in competition with him? -- but he was. The embarrassment followed swiftly after it.

"Just... lead the way, Finn."

The words were so heartwarming to Finn, but…they were also difficult to hear out loud. In front of Jermaine, an open, if illusory acknowledgement that Finn was so much more important than he was in Jake’s life. Finn was old enough to know that his older brothers’ relationship was…complicated. A lot more complicated than his was with either of them, but he still can’t help feeling a pang of guilt. If he hadn’t been a baby for such a long time, maybe all of them would be closer…who knows?

Finn was quiet, climbing up the wooden rungs to the next level. There was a loose one about halfway up, a small sign of the disrepair the treehouse had been in when they’d moved in. He points it out to Jermaine as they go, climbing out to see the familiar sight of their blanket tent pitched in the middle of the room. He pauses, hesitating near the top of the ladder.

“It looks the same…just like that first night.”

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