Chapter Text
Nowadays, the Scarab was never alone.
Not all company was made equal. Especially not Prismo's. He was insecure. Vapid. Desperate. He would surround himself with mortals to make himself feel better and lower himself to their standards. Most of all, he was harebrained and distractible.
So he clutched his handful of a few precious minutes a day and did what he had to. That was when Prismo was talking to several people at once – when he overstretched himself and his attention began to slip. That was when the Scarab carried out his duties whether his superiors wanted to or not. Unlike any of these rejects, he cared.
So he inspected. He audited.
That was all they had in the Time Room, of course; Time. Time. All of it, an infinite amount forever – or none, depending on how you looked at it. That was a bad idea. Give someone very, very angry time and they’ll become more dangerous than you think.
There were many deep places in the Time Room; places that Prismo clearly didn't want him to see. And they were filled to the brim with dirty laundry.
It made him somehow hate the Wishmaster more with every passing day. Every filthy trick he’d pulled, every dirty-dealing, every time he skirted around the rules, even the universes he made legally made his chitin crawl. It was flippant and repulsive.
The role of the Wishmaster was to teach people an important lesson. To show people their actions have consequences, that words are precious and sacred, that no matter how bad things may seem, every fibre of their reality was interwoven and vital. This was the order of things. It was their own follies, their own words that were supposed to trap them, and the Wishmaster simply granted it.
It was not their place to meddle.
One of the worst grievances he'd discovered was a ploy to get two mortals into the citadel using paradoxes, loops, and clones. He'd split a human being in two and cursed one to a lifetime of inadequacy and torment, and what for? A vain attempt at immortality? He'd made one sleep forever and shoved the other paradox inside a weapon of all things – Prismo really was a jailer. He was only the newest victim. Those poor idiots couldn’t have possibly known what they were doing.
It was messy. It was so, so messy. He thought of that whilst watching Fern on the screen over and over, the moment he was born, the moment he died. He could think of a thousand ways he could’ve done the same crime, greased the same palms a million times more efficiently, but wasn’t that just scum like Prismo rubbing off on him? He couldn’t sink to that level. But he could watch. He could judge him.
So there he was, up among the islands. His flat shadow cast between them, into the dark places, into the one room he was never shown, the one place sacred even to a filthy ingrate of a Wishmaster like him.
Maybe it could be the most delicious irony of all. Maybe that filthy trick could be the thing to finally bring him down. No – bring all of them down. If he planned carefully, he could ruin each of their lives with blistering efficiency and peel away that false sense of victory they earned through lying and cheating their way to the finish. Even Golb, if he played his hand well enough. Even Golb. Imagine that. The thought was just intoxicating. Maybe she’d turn him into a smear on the wall in an instant and end his suffering before he even had to be taken away to the Citadel and crystallized.
He was so close. His shapes ghosted over the walls, over the soft sound of a sleeping body, hovered above him in the quiet.
He could almost touch him. He could do it himself. But it couldn’t happen like this.
One step forward.
Prismo’s human body was awake.
Ten steps back.
A human and his mutant were walking the infernal snaking halls of the Time Room. They were the ones who had woken him up.
Three to the side.
The Scarab caught one of them in a loop and made them walk it twice. Two humans, two victims. The extra instance he caught in the labyrinthine coils, and with no Time to speak of, he kept wandering – wandering, wandering, never aging, never changing, always lost.
One forward. Wait for it.
And oh, it would be worth it. Even if they saw through his ruse, even if those idiots untangled Prismo’s tricks enough to blame anyone but a fleeting instance of Finn Mertens, it would be prison for another. The Time Room, the Citadel, what was the difference?
And so, great Beast, show me your true form.
The Scarab faded away just as the disheveled form of his prisoner finally burst through the door – just as he ran to the bed and shook Prismo’s shoulders and ended everything.
The very instant he had control over the Time Room, he already had the remote in his claw. The portal was opening. They were apprehending Finn. Of course they were, untangling this cosmic crime would take time. A fraction of a nanosecond in this vile box, that was all the Scarab needed to win.
And so he wrenched himself free from the walls, screaming and roaring and peeling his shimmering carapace out from its two-dimensional prison. And he pressed precisely the right button.
He appeared in the icy caverns of some multi-eyed thing that thought itself Simon Petrikov and rolled his head with a series of vile crunches. His joints felt stiff. He hadn’t been himself in a long time; neither had the Ice King. That was a shame.
He grabbed the ruby-eyed monstrosity by the neck and kidnapped it to the stars, threw it into the stratosphere, watched the monster inside burst free and unfurl screaming and wet like a hatchling. It exploded into life. It was so full of hate. He felt kinship in that. Be free, wild thing, and do your worst.
The crown fell from its body as its tendrils whipped out. It launched into the stars and the Scarab caught it.
He felt the freezing metal in his hands as he drifted there in that dead dark space. The stink of the wish-magic it was giving off was so maddened it nearly shook and quivered in his grip.
Oh.
Oh, it was even worse now. He could feel it.
They’d gone out for a hike that morning. Not an adventure, a hike. Simon had made that quite abundantly clear to Finn this time. Marceline and PB had come too, that was becoming something of a family unit these days. It was nice. Having that was nice.
They’d gone up the grassy plains, up hillsides that almost reminded him of home where if he closed his eyes and inhaled he almost could forget the writhing vista of insanity just beyond the horizon, the colors, the shapes, the alien jagged peaks and castle turrets; he could just breathe in the smell. Bonnibel was organized and ready with emergency supplies, GPS, packed lunches in individual bags, a spare parasol and red erasers. Every time she reminded him of Betty it put a new knot in his gut. He told himself he wasn’t going to start the day like this, so he did what he does and swallowed his feelings until the knots all tangled up into a convenient ball. It was more portable that way.
They were patronizing him, but he’d learned to let himself enjoy that. It wasn’t because he wanted to. His happiness was fragile. Sometimes his brain just had to take the path of least resistance he didn’t go absolutely off the deep end, and he let it. Maybe that was one of those mechanisms sane people were supposed to have and he shouldn’t look a gift horse in the mouth.
He took charge of the route anyway. Some practical old-world skills kept Marcy’s feet on the ground and Bonnibel’s doohickeys away even when they had to cross a fast moving river, and that felt good. They stopped for cowboy coffee and ate lunch on the hill and enjoyed it.
They were moving again, later, some time later and some place vaguely, the memory wasn’t right – they were doing something, in any case. There was a smell like the tightly wound air before a storm. Something wasn’t right. The clouds cast them in deep shadow. They kept moving, but Marcy seemed on-edge and gave up any delicate illusions of needing to walk. She took off in a grizzly shape and became a black smear on the sky.
All he really remembered was her calling out for them to run, and then a crackle and a bang and a clatter of strange light.
Something opened up behind him. And a pair of ephemeral hands pressed a cold golden weight onto his head that made everything prickle and his stomach sick and the world fall away, and his knees hit the grass, he didn’t know where he even was, he didn’t know who he was. It was happening again. It was happening again and he remembered this feeling, this deep dark cold embrace that felt like an old friend. He didn't need to see what had happened. He could feel the crown's presence; he intrinsically knew.
His eyes turned pale and unfocused. He stopped experiencing and started watching.
They were having some grand battle behind him with whoever had done it, probably, he was vaguely aware of Finn's sword clashing on something but it didn't matter. That wouldn't help. It had been done now: It was all over. That was it. All his years of incredible effort and force of will and grit and introspection undone in one stupid, inexplicable act of fate.
It hurt. Physically, it hurt, he could feel the madness tearing through the cleansed slate of his mind like the first crater, the first mutagenic explosion. Every cell of his body that had been written to and changed by his trauma tried to tear itself apart on the spot to avoid feeling what he was about to feel again. His mind was too weak, especially now, especially with the softness of distance and time and space to heal, and every edge of a word he caught hurt, it hurt so much. He was doing something. He was sure of it. He was scaring them.
Whatever had happened, his visions was red. A Wrong red. An angry red. All of it. Then it was black.
Then he was lying on the grass. His knees hurt where they’d thumped into the earth and his side hurt where he’d dropped onto it.
The crown was gone. It was there, and then it was gone. It was nowhere. It was like it had never existed.
All it needed was a moment.
Simon knew well enough by now that the world was built on the back of moments. Moments like Betty’s choice, moments like the first bomb dropping, like that bus pulling away from the curb.
There was something Marceline had said to him during one of the slow dim evenings in during his recovery, the tender winter hours where they did nothing but sit on the floor and talk. There was so much to catch up on. It still didn’t feel like there was enough time. Marcy had lived so long. She’d seen more than anyone should.
What was the one thing about the world she’d noticed the most? Someone had asked her that. As an antiquarian the answer and always stuck with him like a scar.
That little family of his had their arms hooked under his and they were rolling him over and shaking him, grabbing his face, pleading with him, and tears were falling on his skin but they weren’t his.