Jake Addams April 24th, 20XX

I didn’t know what was going on, but his weird tone put me on guard, and I instinctively took two steps backwards. Finn was a lazy speaker, and his voice was on the deeper end of the spectrum, which sometimes made it hard to pick up some of his words when he mumbled.

But now I heard every syllable he said, and a hostile colour had replaced the tiredness I was used to hearing.

Still, he had just woken up from a faint, so I wasn’t as suspicious as I likely could have been. It would have been weirder for someone that had woken up to an active robbery to act normal.

“Don’t worry about it. Are you ready to go home?”

I waited for him to get up and shake off that weird attitude, but he stayed in that weird sitting position.

“Don’t brush me off. I dislike that quite a lot… or well, do I dislike that? Yeah. yes, I dislike it. A lot.”

He held a weird half conversation with himself before returning to focusing on me. Finn rarely looked me, or anyone, in the eyes, so the change was unnerving.

“Fine, sorry. What don’t you get? Who that person was? He was a dangerous person, but thankfully he didn’t hurt anyone here.”

I wasn’t sure what was up with him, but for now, it was probably safer to just play along.

He took in my answer for a second before shaking his head in annoyance.

“No, I couldn’t care less who that person was. What I don’t get is why I had to play dead for such a weak individual.”

As far as I knew, Finn had never done a physical extracurricular in his life, never mind a professional fighting discipline. He was a big guy, and I could see that the workout routine I’d helped him put together was working, but I wondered where the confidence to face someone like that came from. A gym body wasn’t enough to take down a professional fighter.

I prepared to call him out when I noticed something weird with his eyes.

His eyes had taken on a sickening purple tone as an intense red hue washed over his iris. I looked again, but they returned to the usual icy blue I attributed to him.

I shook my head and tried to snap myself out of the hallucination I was experiencing, but he spoke again and pulled me back into the eerie feeling that I was still in a nightmare.

“I want an answer. I thought I asked you not to brush me off? Perhaps you can’t understand me?”

His voice was ice cold and stiff, but the muddy yellow of confusion coloured it an awful shade and sent a chill up my spine. It wasn’t even that he was frightening:; it was something much more primal and instinctive… I needed to get out of here.

I tried my best to shake off the urge to sprint out of the room, but the sudden fear that clogged up my throat broke my voice when I responded.

“Well- I don't know how well you can fight, but I didn’t want to cause a ruckus. It was safest to just play along until they left.”

A mocking smile split the lower half of his face as he took in my answer.

“Safe… hmm. Your name is Jake, right?”

He got up off the couch in a singular motion and I glimpsed bright silver strands running through his head, but they disappeared just as quickly as the red tinge in his eyes.

Yeah. something was off. Very odd.

“Finn? What’s going on?”

He opened his mouth to respond before grimacing like someone had cut him off. For some reason, he really didn’t like being called his name.

“Yeah, you have to be Jake; no other sucker would have stuck around this long.”

I didn’t appreciate being called a sucker like that, but I gathered enough to grasp that the person in front of me… wasn’t Finn. From the distaste for me using his name, to the weird behavior. I didn’t know what condition this fell under, and I wasn’t even going to try diagnosing him, but I knew I couldn’t treat whoever this was as my usual lazy friend.

While trying to keep my calm and accept yet another strange happenstance in my already bizarre day, I spoke calmly and quietly in the hopes I wouldn’t set off who over I was currently speaking to.

“I… I’m Jake. But who are you?”

Considering how differently they behaved and how they didn’t respond well when I called them Finn.

“You-“

Once again, he started a response, but then his face twisted into an ugly grimace and he glared at me like I had just started a fight.

It wasn’t like this was the first time anyone had ever been glared at me, but the sheer intensity of it made me step back once again. It was like he could jump at me at any moment, and I wasn’t sure I could overtake my bean sprout of a friend.

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“Oh, no! Finn’s gonna be so mad at me! How did you know? Weird human… then again, he doesn’t even know I can come out yet. Don’t you think it’s unfair though? He lets Cai come out all the time but I have to stay in his head. Let me tell you, it’s really not all that fun in there. I mean, I just barely won the fight to come out while the idiot is unconscious. Let me tell you, those bugs are vicious fighters.”

I tried to piece together all the nonsense he said into a format that made sense, but it was a tough undertaking.

“So… you and another guy named Cai live inside my friend’s head… and Finn only lets the other guy out to… control his body?”

Putting aside how ridiculous it all sounded, the erratic behaviour of the current personality made me consider that there was a reason Finn never ‘let this one out’.

“Not another guy, a bug. A filthy bug that I could crush easily if not for those darn wings.”

I tried to nod understandingly and dig for more information, but he suddenly put two hands to his mouth to stop himself from saying any more and put on a scared expression.

He’d clearly said much more than he should have.

“Ahh! This is the reason he doesn’t let us come out to the human world. At this rate, he’ll never let me out again. That can’t happen.”

He panicked to himself for a few more seconds before suddenly lunging at me with outstretched hands. I barely had the time to note how large his palms were before he had my throat in a grasp.

I felt each individual finger span around my neck and cut off my airway as my friend tried to kill me.

I tried to choke out a question, but I got an answer before I could waste the little air I had left.

“It’s really too bad. First, I got to hear his first friend refer to him as a friend, and now I have to get rid of you with his own hands. He’ll be so devastated he’ll lock this memory far away with the other stuff he knows he can’t deal with… then again he has us so he’ll probably make it out okay.”

I grasped that ‘he’ was Finn and understood just how clean the separation between the personalities was.

A beastly sound came out of my throat as I fought to get his hands off my neck. But they were like steel clamps. I’d also spent too much time in shock, and by the time I got over it, I’d lost the strength to struggle.

My vision slowly went white and I could barely maintain eye contact with the unsympathetic violet iris when he suddenly screamed and his hands snapped away from my neck and to his head.

The screams weren’t particularly loud, but they were hard to listen to. It was probably crazy to sympathize with someone that had just tried to kill you a moment ago, but I tried my best not to hold it against Finn.

He wasn’t at all in his right mind.

“Ah. Ah- I- I’ll stop, I swear! You Bug- no, you’re lower than a bug, you’re just a parasite! Ahh- okay, okay, I stopped, I swear. No, I won’t do it again either!”

I gained enough of my vision back to watch him write on the floor and harshly kick a loose table into the wall of the room. While it didn’t break either the table or the wall of the room, the heavy dent it left made me crawl further away from him.

“Look, you can’t put yourself on the high horse like that. You would have done worse if you were here. He’s a nuisance! I was just trying to get rid of him before he causes any trouble! No- I don’t care that he’s Finn’s friend! He can just make more! And even if he can’t, doesn’t he have us? It took so long, so much for him to hear us. You can’t say you don’t have a lot more to say to him.”

He suddenly went stock still before intensifying his fight against himself.

“No wait! WAIT!”

His aggressive tone switched to a pitiful one, and he begged.

“Look, I’ll be better, yeah? How about this! We keep Finn in there and we take turns coming out? I know we aren’t strong enough yet, but if you just let me finish up here, he won’t even want to come back!”

After that scary last line, he froze mid-motion, and his limb flopped around his body like a corpse. It was only after I looked closely and caught his chest rise and fall that I could see he was still alive.

I was tempted to move closer to him and make sure he was okay, but the sight of Finn’s body moving like a string pulled it up into a sitting position quickly quelled the urge.

My body refused to listen to me and let me back up further into the wall as Finn turned around and faced me.

Once again, I thought the shade of his eyes flipped into a bright and unnatural green, but the ephemera went away as quickly as I saw it. I caught a few bright gold strands running through his dark hair, but I purposefully looked away. I’d seen enough strangeness for the day.

Finn slowly held up two arms in the air to show he meant no harm, and slowly got up. He got up without the use of his arms and plodded step by step closer to me. Although he had a kind expression, it was of the patronizing sort, and left a bad feeling in my mouth.

“Worry not, friend of Finn. I won’t attack you. I just came out to keep that beast at bay and to apologize in the hopes you won’t hold this against Finley.”

Well, I couldn’t hold a psychotic episode against Finn, but I didn’t think I could act like nothing happened either.

“I- I won’t. But - I’ll assume you’re Cai- Who are you guys?- or rather what are you?”

His warm expression cooled off at the name I used, and his smile flattened into a serious expression.

“I am Finn. as was the person you just met and as is the person you’ve known until now. We may go by different names, but I cannot allow anyone to separate us so cleanly. Friend of Finn, if you value your friend at all- no, if you value Us at all then remember this well.”

As opposed to the other personality that had wanted to take over the body, I saw this one’s motives were much less ambitious. Although he didn’t want to take it over, I could tell that this personality was desperate to maintain that they existed, even if it was just as a part of a greater whole.

“While I’m not as crass as Aies, who you just met , I also have no qualms with ending you in order to protect Finn. Realize and understand that as long as Finley is around, I and Aies are as well, and unlike the main, we never sleep. If we ever hear you say anything about this, to Finn or anyone else..”

He gave a calm chuckle that was somehow scarier than the psychotic creature that I’d met before.

“Well, I sense that you’re of the heroic sort and you’re the type to martyr yourself for the sake of others, so I know threatening your life won’t do much. Instead, if you ever expose this matter, I’ll simply take Finn somewhere far away and keep him there until we outlive all of his loved ones and he can start again.”

“How could you do that? Never mind the logistics, wouldn’t Finn hate you guys for that?”

Once again, he let out that chilling chuckle.

“Well, it would upset him for a while, but he has us, and he won’t be alone. Watch yourself, friend of Finn. If you are really his friend, I trust you’ll do what’s right.”

His eyes suddenly dulled, and he spoke in a light but still incredibly threatening tone,

“While I’m not as violent as Aies, who you met before, I also have no qualms with ending your life in order to keep Finn safe. Realize that as long as Finn is around so I am and if I hear you mention anything about what happened here to Finn or any other person….”

He chuckled in a bone-chilling manner.

“I am not locked into Finley’s mind and do occasionally have the opportunity to come out. I can and will end you if I need too.”