Day 4: On a Date

Day 4: On a Date, or "The Long Ten Minutes"

"Take a break," she tells you, hovering in an undulating pattern just above and behind your head. Her hands thread between the layers in your hair. Gooseflesh pebbles your neck and shoulders as she kneads her way through it to scrub the rough of her finger pads into your scalp. But you have important work to do; you have a kingdom to run.

"My work is important, Marceline."

She chuckles, just once, and annoyance flares in your chest.

"It is," you insist, plunging an elbow backward. It connects with a jean-clad thigh; Marceline hisses and twists up and over your head. She hangs there, upside down and frowning. Her hair spills like ink over your desk, obscuring your paperwork in a shifting pool of night.

"It is," you revisit, but quieter this time and without the physical backup. After several moments, during which her frown only sets more firmly in the creased corners of her mouth, you look away and knot your hands uncomfortably in your lap. The elbow may have been overkill, but you stand by what you said.

"You're ridiculous," she says. The indignation that flickers behind your eyes at the remark whips your head back around. You open your mouth to rebuke her again, but she's quicker than you are.

"Relax, brainlord, jeez. I'm only fooling."

"I have work to do, Marceline," you huff and make an attempt at brushing away the ocean of her hair between you and your documents. She laughs again, shaking the sea like a storm.

"Ten minutes," she promises, sinking lower, spilling more ink over everything. "Ten minutes, and then you can do all the important work you want."

You sigh and mentally calculate your chances of being able to move her hair without her help. They add up to miserable, and you trust your math.

"Fine."

Her teeth shine with her eyes as she grins.

"Great, awesome." She swifts around you and lifts you bridal style from your chair. You throw an arm instinctively around her neck to steady yourself in the embrace, but when you clasp your other hand over the wrist of her arm over your stomach, you realize—no, not instinct: habit. You ponder the implications of the difference until the night air makes you shiver.

Marceline halts, looks at you. The motion drapes a thick, swaying curtain of black hair over your conjoined arms and your fingers twist in it of their own accord. You add that to a new list in your head, for further study. Meanwhile, she chews her own lip, considering something.

"Tick tock," you tease.

The remark jerks her eyes from you and toward wherever your destination is: restarts her flight too. You relax your fingers in her hair so it can billow behind her again.

You stop on the coast. The air is markedly colder here, and when she gentles you down onto the cold sand of the beach, you shiver again. Your vision goes black then, and you panic before you realize that Marceline has tucked her sweatshirt over your head. You swim through to the other side of it so you can look at her.

"This way," she says before you can complain, pointing to a hulking shadow bobbing in the waves. As you inch closer, it gains substance—metal—and color—green gray. It curves like a boat in some places, and clearly it floats, but it has no deck, no mast, nor sails. The surface of it is uneven, but the rounded cylindrical shape of it reminds you of liquid medicine capsules. You have no idea what it is.

"It's called a submarine," she answers your unvoiced inquiry. "It lets you—"

"Dive underwater?" you guess, having mentally dismantled the word already.

"Yeah."

"How did you," you begin, pause, restart. "Does it still work?"

"I didn't bring you all the way out here just to look at it," she tells you as if she can't believe you thought anything else.

"We're actually going to…to…" you realize that you have no words for the situation. A rare occurrence; you have a large vocabulary.

"Only if you want," Marceline hedges, kicks at the sand.

The equivocation confuses you. How could you not?

"Absolutely," you tell her, and she beams at you.

She carries you over the tide on her back, and you lock your legs around her narrow hips (another habit for the list) when she has to let go of you to unscrew the circular hatch at the top of the submarine. The inside is lit somewhat, and you ghost your fingers over the various screens and instruments that line the walls, a cobblestoned mishmash of ancient technology.

"Most of those don't work," she says. "I was only able to get the movement stuff going, really."

You can hear the downward edge to her tone that tells you she wishes everything did what it was supposed to. As enraptured at you are with the arrays under your hands, that tone draws your focus back to her, floating in the gloom.

"Show me?"

She nods and then jerks her head to the left. You follow her, footsteps echoing against the metal. At the dead end of the capsule is the tiniest room, encased in a latticework of metal and glass so the night sky above you is visible. Marceline vaults the only chair, landing hard in the seat.

"You're gonna want to sit down for this part."

"Where?" you ask. She waggles her eyebrows at you. "Of course."

You shuffle around the chair and hop shortly into her lap in as dignified a manner as the close confines will allow. A slithering arm hooks your hip into her stomach.

"Ready?"

"Oh yes."

Marceline shifts, extends her free elbow upward, and pulls down a long metal rod that screeches with the movement. The vehicle lurches, bobs, and begins to sink. Soon the dim flickers of the submarine's lamps make the ocean around your bubble a sea of pitch. You cling to Marceline, who has always been your safety in the dark, your pillar truly named. Fear is not a response you generally have, but below the surface, ghost lights from a relic of a destroyed world your only light, trapped beneath the sea, swallowed whole—it seems reasonable. Marceline, to her credit, refrains from ribbing you. Instead she lets you cling, clings back even, and impresses the crown of your skull with her lips. The tenderness assuages the terror a bit.

"Bonnie," she whispers to your scalp finally. "Bonnie, look."

You force one eyelid partially open. The sub's lights are off now, moonlight filtering like silver tea through the water. Shadowy shapes propel themselves through the murky glow, and your curiosity suppresses your fear for a moment. You lean away from Marceline, straining to discern the details of these puppets in the water.

You gasp as another hulking figure moves just beyond the glass. In the sifted light you can make out a smattering of spots and stripes on an enormous grey body, an unblemished white belly connected by five pairs of gashes—gills, you realize. The beast looms closer, turning, and you see the massive filter pads behind the endless rows of dwarfed teeth. That confirms it, but your conclusion is impossible, so it comes in a whisper.

"Rhincodon typus." The Latin comes from a dusty volume of pre-war animal names you once found completing a short chair leg's wooden plunge to the ground. You remember, vividly, the picture that accompanied that name, however, and the description.

"Say what now?" Marceline's voice pulls you away from marveling at the shark that once held the prestigious honor of being the largest in the world.

"Whale shark," you tell her, and then crane your neck back to look at the enormity of it again. "It used to be the biggest animal in the world. The only member of its family too."

A thought occurs to you.

"They hid," says Marceline's quiet, careful whisper. You suck in a breath, afraid to break the crystal nostalgia she creates. "The world ended, and they hid. They hid, and they were spared. Lots of the sea is the same as it was. The ocean never cared much what people did in the first place I guess."

"You didn't plan this part?" you are genuinely surprised. The whale shark is just so perfect.

"Yeah, I lassoed an enormous sea monster with my rockin' tunes and he traded his time tonight for a song."

You smile, giddy despite her sarcasm. She seems upset that you ignored the gravity of what she said, but the fact is—you just reasoned out its next significance.

"It's us, Marcy," you tell her.

She is instantly confused. You scrub your fingertips into the wisps of night at the nape of her neck and hold her eyes in your gaze.

"The gentle monster, untouched by time"—you flex your fingers into her skin—"the only member of its family"—you look down at yourself quickly—"It's us, Marceline."

She smiles helplessly at that, beautiful in the dancing illumination. Then she shakes her head, smile splitting into a confident grin. No, you realize, not confident—

"You're almost right, Bonnie," she whispers.