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It was only a few months after Finn had returned to Ooo that he received the letter. It was from the new human… mayor, Something-Or-Other. There was an image of a blackened hole in the ground, surrounded by computer-chip debris and ash.
That used to be my mom, Finn thought, numb eyes roving over the words.
His mom had died in a sudden attack last Tuesday. Something about an explosion that decimated her and her computer banks, rendering her to nothing but a true memory - a human one, unlike the type she used to recover information about her denizens.
“You’ve been sitting there for a long time,” Jake fretted. Finn was sitting limply, dead-eyed, on the furs that covered his bedsheets.
“I know,” Finn replied. “I guess I don’t… I guess I don’t know what to do.”
“What do you mean? Maybe you could go back… like, for the funeral, or something. That was your mom.”
Finn pursed his lips, then scowled when he felt a tear slip down his cheek. He didn’t really want to cry today - not that he ever wants to cry at all. Jake fretted even more at the sight. “I just- I- but I don’t belong there. I don’t even know what humans do for funerals.”
Jake patted his back, stretching himself on top of the bed. “I think you’re overthinking it. You don’t gotta belong- you just have to be there, bro. That’s all.”
Finn wipes at another horrible tear. Jeez, when would it stop? He could imagine himself once again sticking out like a sore, blue thumb. Watching blankly as they try to ask him to speak or do some human custom he never learned. Flapping his lips about like an idiot. I was raised by dogs, Finn thought, abruptly, and then another tear fell. And then another. He thought about all the things his mom could have taught him and realized that he almost missed that more than the thought of her, then felt disgusting. He never really got to know her, in the end, not more than a day’s worth of conversation and a virtual hug. He never really knew her at all. But she had created a hole’s worth of regret, guilt, and sorrow, nonetheless.
“It’s not fair,” Finn whispered.
“I know,” Jake replied.
“Should I… should I really go?” Finn thought out loud, looking down at his hands, one of them made by a living piece of gum. His life was so different, his knowledge so foreign, like he wasn’t a real human but some other third thing in human skin. He never thought this before now, before he found the other humans… It really wasn’t fair. Ignorance was a great and terrible thing.
Jake stretched over his shoulders, covering him like a weighted blanket. It helped, a little, to feel his brother’s fur on his skin. “That’s up for you to decide, buddy. But if it was me… I think I’d do it.” Then his brother slunk away, probably to the kitchen to make him meatloaf. And so Finn was left alone in the bedroom to cry and think, if only for a little while.