Then he closed it, and twisted around on Jake's head, and looked at Ray with his whole face.
"It's not in here," he said. "So you're gonna teach me."
Ray was about to say no. It was the right answer. He had no idea how the breathing worked, only that it did, sometimes, for him, because a note in his pocket said so.
"Little bro, I don't think it works like that. It's kind of... my thing. I don't know if it'd work for anybody else."
"You don't know that."
He didn't. That was the problem. He thought about it for a whole valley, with Finn twisted around on Jake's head staring at him the entire time, not blinking.
"...One lesson," he said. "One."
"YES!"
...
The lesson happened the next morning, in the yard behind the Tree Fort, in the same spot where Finn had spent three days knocking Ray down with a practice sword.
Ray had thought about how to teach it most of the night, on his floor. He'd come up with nothing, so he decided to do it the way Finn had done it to him.
"Okay. First, you're standing wrong."
Finn looked down at his feet. "How?"
"You're standing like a guy waiting for a sandwich." Ray nudged the kid's back foot out with his own. "Wider. Lower. Like you're about to sit on a really small chair and you don't trust it."
Finn sank down. He did it perfectly, of course, because he was Finn and his body did whatever he told it to. Ray got into the stance next to him, hand on his hip out of habit.
"Now the breath. That's the whole thing. In through the nose, slow, all the way down. Like, down to your knees. Mouth shut. No talking."
"Why no talk..."
"That's talking."
Finn shut his mouth so hard his teeth clicked.
From the shade of the Tree Fort, Jake lifted his head. He had a sandwich on his chest and he'd been eating it lying down, which was a skill.
"You're doing it wrong," he said.
"How would you know?"
"I'm a dog. I breathe all day. I'm basically a professional." He took a bite. "The trick is you breathe through your whole body, man. Like a sponge. Through the skin. Through the elbows. Elbows are underrated."
"Do not breathe through your elbows," Ray told Finn.
Finn's eyes were already going toward his elbows.
...
Finn breathed.
He breathed in through his nose, all the way down, like Ray said, until his chest was so full it felt like a balloon somebody was still blowing into. Then he kept going. Ray hadn't said when to stop, so he didn't.
The yard got kind of sparkly. That was good, probably. Lightning was sparkly.
"Finn. Buddy. You can let it out."
He let it out. It came out all at once, with a noise like a duck with a cold, and he sat down in the grass very fast without meaning to. Jake was laughing so hard his sandwich fell off.
"You were purple," Ray said. "Like, really purple. Don't hold it. Just breathe it. Low and slow."
Finn got back up. He did it again, low and slow this time, and on the fifth breath he felt it. A tingly, fizzy feeling, down in his left leg, getting stronger.
"Ray! RAY! It's happening! I can feel it in my leg!"
Ray looked at him, and at his leg.
"Is it your whole leg? Or like, your foot?"
Finn thought about it. "...Mostly my foot."
"Did you sit on it?"
He had sat on it. He'd sat on it when he fell down. He shook it out, and the tingly feeling turned into needles, and then it was gone, and so was the lightning.
Around lunch he got the hiccups.
They came from all the breathing, Jake said, and every one of them went through Finn's whole body like a jolt, and every single time his heart jumped, because a jolt was what it felt like when it started. He knew that. He had seen Ray's hair stand up.
"Hic! That one! Was that one it?"
"That was a hiccup, buddy."
"Hic! What about... hic! That one!"
"Also a hiccup."
He got into the stance anyway, low, hand on the gold sword, and did the breath, and went "bzzzt" through his teeth for luck, and ran across the yard as fast as he could.
He ran at regular speed. He knew because Jake timed it, with a straw.
They kept going all afternoon. Finn breathed lying down, and standing on one foot, and upside down on the swing, which was Jake's idea. He breathed through his elbows when Ray wasn't looking, just to check. Nothing happened. Nothing happened so much that by the time the sun was going orange, even the hiccups had given up.
He sat down in the grass next to Ray, who had been doing the breathing next to him all day too and had nothing to show for it either.
"It's not working," Finn said.
"Yeah. I'm sorry, little bro."
Finn picked at the grass. He was a little sad about it, but not as much as he thought he'd be. He looked at his gold sword, lying next to him, and then at his fists, which had punched a vampire in the face last week, and then at Ray, who could make lightning and couldn't hold a sword right until Finn showed him.
"That's okay," he said. "You can have the lightning. I've got the punching."
"That's a pretty good deal."
"It's a great deal." Finn flopped back on the grass. "Also my elbows feel weird."
...
After that, Ray trained alone.
He couldn't take the gourds home; they stayed in the lab, wired to their gauges, where Bubblegum could watch the needles. So he did the other thing. He tried to keep the breath going all day long, the way he remembered the anime guys doing it, low and slow and all the way down, from the second he woke up on the floor to the second he fell asleep on it.
He lasted about four minutes the first time. He lost it because a bird landed on the porch rail, and it was a funny bird, and he said "Hey, little guy," out loud.
'Okay. Rule one: no talking to fucking birds.'
He lost it sweeping. He lost it eating breakfast at the Tree Fort, because Jake made a joke about pancakes and he laughed with his mouth full. He lost it every time Finn said anything, which was every few seconds.
Breakfast was the worst. Finn had started bringing the Enchiridion to the table and reading it with one arm curled around the page, like a kid hiding a test, and every time Jake leaned over to look, Finn slammed it shut and yelled "HEY!" Every single time. Ray lost the breath every single time too, usually with syrup coming out of his nose.
A couple of days later he could keep it going while he walked, if nobody talked to him and nothing was funny, which in Ooo was basically never.
The third session went a little better. The needle on the small gourd moved maybe two hairs instead of one. Bubblegum wrote that down like it was a big deal, and Ray decided to believe her.
She had a stack of old books on the lab table that day, the kind with the spines falling off, and she kept reading them between his tries with a pencil in her teeth.
"How's my sword?" he asked, around the fifth try.
"In progress." She didn't look up. "Again, please."
He knew that tone. It was the tone of a foreman who had lost the shipment and wasn't going to tell anybody until he found it. Ray blew into the gourd again and didn't push.
The fourth session started like the other three.
He sat on the stool with the waffles in him and the smallest gourd in his mouth and did it the same way he had done it something like a hundred and fifty times now. In through the nose. All the way down. Then he blew.
The heat went into his legs, like always. But this time, for the first time, it didn't stop there. It came back up. It came up through his stomach and his chest, slow, like warm water filling a tub, and when it got to his mouth he pushed it into the gourd.
There was a sound like a knuckle cracking.
Ray stopped. He took the gourd out of his mouth and turned it over in his hands. Right down the side of it, through the glassy stuff Bubblegum had painted on, there was a line. It was thin, thinner than a hair, and it went about halfway around.
"Wait. Wait, wait," Ray said.
Bubblegum took it out of his hands. She held it up to the light from the window and turned it slowly, and looked at the line. Then she looked at the gauge. Then she wrote something down, and underlined it twice.
"That's nine days," she said. She sounded almost surprised. "I had you at three weeks."
"You had a bet on me?"
"I had an estimate." She set the gourd down, very carefully, next to the other two. Then, quietly enough that he almost didn't hear it, she added, "It was a good estimate. You were faster."
'Holy shit. That was a compliment. From her.' He decided not to make a joke about it, which took real effort.
...
Jake dropped him off at the bottom of the hill at sunset, and Ray walked up the rest of the way to the cabin.
He didn't think about it until he was standing on the porch. Then he turned around and looked back down at the path. It was steep. It was the hill that had made him stop halfway every single evening since he got here, hands on his knees, saying things about his life choices. He'd just walked up the whole thing, and his breath was normal. He wasn't even sweating.
Also, he had come up the porch steps with one step. The broken one was still broken. He'd gone right over it without looking, like it wasn't there.
'Okay.' He looked at his own feet. 'Okay. That's new.'
Nobody else would have looked at it twice. He went inside with a stupid grin he couldn't get off his face, and he was still wearing it when somebody knocked on the door.
Nobody knocked on his door. Finn and Jake yelled from the yard, and Marceline came through whatever she wanted. Ray lifted the bar and opened it.
There was a peppermint on the porch.
It was a round peppermint about as tall as Ray's knee, red and white, in a black suit with a little bow tie. It had small arms and small legs and a very calm face, and it was holding a candle on a little dish, even though the sun had only just gone down.
"Good evening, sir." Its voice was smooth and polite. "My name is Peppermint Butler. I serve Her Highness, Princess Bubblegum."
"...Hi?" Ray looked past it, down the path. There was no carriage, no guards, no Jake. "How did you get here? How did you know where I live?"
Peppermint Butler smiled at him. It was a perfectly nice smile, and Ray didn't like it at all.
"I always know where people live, sir," he said. "The kingdom is calling."