marceline runs a hand over her scalp and the end of her ponytail. “hellions roll some strong shit, hey?” blame my head on this drug, the haze on the substance, the way my mind slants sideways until it passes all the way off the fucking shelf and into the depths i try to bury on the inebriation. it’s the weed, god, the alcohol, shit, fuck. the pink, fleshy insides of her brain fall off their perch and smash against the hard sculpt of her skull, squishing flat before starting to reshape into sentient, moving puppets of their past. she fixes the upper layer of her suit and swallows the question do you think i look pretty? it settles in her stomach like a mean black stone and her head spins.
her neck turns and her gaze offers jaewon terrible, terrible fondness as he palms and labels an old nickname not good enough. “you’re right.” she concedes with lilt, intoning his fact-checking is obvious but endearing. “but i couldn’t just go and let him call me seelie anything.”
his skin is so soft and she’s so, so sorry that she can’t stop her eyes from dipping over his abdomen, a smooth water-drop roll from collarbone to hips. there’s more muscle than ever before, though she can hear his younger voice defending the leanness of his shape. it’s their first time colliding tonight but she doesn’t have to have been standing with him to know how many girls had stretched their imaginative selves like film over the sculpt of his body.
their hands are together and somewhere there’s a glass breaking and the house screams. marceline hears nothing. her heart sweats, puts its hands over its ears. she looks at their fingers and feels gold molt down her throat, pausing her speech until it slides into her stomach and turns to gilded butterflies. she wants to ask forgiveness for whatever this is.
but then her grin is window-wide, playfulness coming in and out like air because jaewon is safe, so safe, even when he wracks her with fright it can’t survive. “shh!” she inhales, gasps, uses her free hand to messily cup over his mouth. “don’t you dare. she is a - no, you listen - she is a fine woman, jung jaewon, and you could do a lot worse than miss toni. i hope she finds you again.” her body turns to the street, mouth to the sky: “TONI -” she calls a girl that’s not there to make him laugh, to play this like a wrestling game because they’re not supposed to spar in bathing suits on a college porch. her eyes slate on him and her mouth stands open in the jovial threat of calling louder, like she might just summon the strange girl into existence.
her restless laughter takes a hiccupy bed as he raises his arm, and she tucks her own behind her back. the other comes to hold his wrist, pulling his forearm out. “oh yeah,” she teases, loud and unafraid when they have joy between them. “this is what makes you a real gangster. you and your finger puppets and your adoption centre up in your room - you’re basically a kkangpae.”
in the beginning, when the stars were still fireflies, his soul, once, perhaps, prayed to some god for some change that left him warmer, left the world brighter, and he was given marceline zhao, years younger, smile more beautiful and skin so much softer, untouched by mortal crime. between the two of them he’s the only sinner, and he thought – thinks – he’s accepted it, but something in him drowns again in the temptation to go far away from this noise and this procession of monstrosity, towards somewhere they can be people, without power or evil, and only the goodness of each other. ( but this is a forgotten dream. )
instead he laughs, and laughs until his sides begin to hurt, even with her hand over his mouth, and he yells in return, unintelligible, and does the same for her, as if to catch the name from her lips and crush it in his palm.
but instead he focuses – he’s distracted! that’s it – and his hand seeks out the one that holds onto her wrist, arm slipping down so he can, and holds it and holds it and doesn’t think about anything other than he doesn’t want to let go. ( because that’s what he always does, isn’t it, when he’s sober? ) “make me more finger puppets,” he blurts out, because it’s the first thing that comes to mind that isn’t venturing too far into places it’s learned not to go. “you should teach me how to make them! i gotta be a big boy, you know – be self-sufficient,” and learn to live without you. “it’s about time, isn’t it?”
he laughs because it’s something he finds funny, and she might not. he still doesn’t let go.
“will a kkangpae surprise you on your sixteenth? you remember, when we were on the balcony?” and he can’t recall if he’s already brought it up ( he has, hasn’t he? ), but it reminds him of that again, so he brings it up again, and there’s something that hurts about the memory that he’s been gathering up the courage to face, and still gathers when he brings her knuckles to his lips and presses a kiss, and holds her hand in his own as if it’s a flower, and unravels her fingers and traces engraved ink: “this wasn’t here that time, was it?”
