Chapter Text
“I wish for the power to keep Simon safe.”
Safe. Yeah right.
When Simon was kicked out of Golb, he hadn’t heard Betty speak, but somehow he knew what she said. He could feel it like a headache, her words projected to his own mind. He was protected from the hot ground and brought down carefully, but the force of falling such a great height was only one of many things twisting his stomach. He met the eyes of that monstrous thing, the force which had swallowed Betty whole and almost himself. Despite never having truly seen the great deity before, Golb didn’t feel like an abnormal sight. It was just another piece of the landscape, his focus all on the idea of it consuming his beloved Betty, once again separating them. And then the explosion.
Golb was a nuclear bomb, the air around the army and Simon himself curdling like liquid and setting the very world ablaze for a moment. When the dust settled though, no scorches were left, and only the towering form of Golb remained, it’s eyes different now. He didn’t know at the time, or at least he wasn’t supposed too, but staring into the beacons of light from the creatures eyes, he knew without a doubt his Betty was gone.
Maybe Betty had given him a gift, but he couldn’t see it then.
The world around him was blurry and dark staring at its, her, eyes blinding him and bringing tears to his eyes. He raised a hand in vain to block out the light, but the sun didn’t waver on him. He realized sometime around then he had stopped walking, lowering his arm and looking around. He was in the middle of the woods, somewhere on the south side of the river. Damn it, he hadn’t meant to be drifting off while he walked, god knows where he was now. He looked around, squinting at the tops of the trees for the tiny peaks of mountains or a castle to guide his way. He eventually spotted the ice kingdom, but it was practically a dot in the distance.
“Oh crud.. crud crud crud crud..”
He pulled his phone out to call somebody, but hesitated on his contacts as he very slowly scrolled over them. His call logs were depressingly empty, his most recent call to Marceline over a week ago and to anyone else easily over two months. He chewed on his lip and looked around before clicking on Marcelines name, leaning back onto a tree while it rang. Each ring felt longer than the last, but just before he gave up, she picked up the phone. Her loud laugh and some blasting background music assaulted his ears, but he was super releived.
“Simon!”
“Marceline, I-”
“Simon, you won’t believe what we’re doing right now! Me and PB are getting matching tattoos!”
He hadn’t heard her laugh in a while and his chest felt warm at the sound, but he only frowned to himself. They sounded like they were having fun. He tried to cut in and say hello when he heard Bubblegum in the background, but was pretty quickly rolled over again.
“Well.. trying to get tattoos! My skin keeps healing over!” There was laughter in the backround, Bubblegums voice as cheery as hers. “Well anyway, what’s going on with you, how’s work!”
It took him a second to even realize he’d been given a window to talk, cradling his bandaged arm to his chest like she could somehow feel it. Work was horrible. His whole DAY had been horrible, since not only did he barely sleep, work went bad, then he made the mistake of confessing personal things to Finn which made the bar bad, then Finn dragged him on some dumb adventure and his arm got torn to smitherines, which made his afternoon bad! He stumbled and stammered something for a minute before finally realizing he absolutely should NOT under any circumstance mention that stuff.
“It’s- it’s fine! Hey, listen, Marcy? I’m sorta in the..”
“WHAT?? Hold on! PB’S arm is clogging the machine!!”
The warm feeling in his chest hardened into a heavy stone and fell to his stomach slowly, clutching the phone harder. He didn’t want to be lost in the woods, but he couldn’t bother her either. She was off the line for a second before coming back, her voice nearly drowned out by the loud drilling sounds on her end.
“Sorry, we’ve gotta hang out sometime! I gotta go!”
“... bye, Marcy.”
He looked down at his phone as it beeped and went quiet, a sour emotion inside him. Marceline didn’t deserve sourness, but maybe he did. He looked around and groaned in discomfort at the setting sun, putting his phone in his pocket and running his hands over his bandages, the smooth yet textured feeling letting him think for a moment. He wasn’t sure how to get to the human city from here, since the ferryman which brought people up and down usually stayed near the lit parts of the river, but maybe if he walked long enough he could naturally find out. He set back down the worn trail on the riverbank, letting himself drift off again.
When he was Ice King, he didn’t ‘drift off’. The whole world was a drift for him, his understanding of current reality as slippery as ice and changing with each sentence. Reality was what he wanted it to be, and everything else tuned out into simply not existing. It wasn’t the same as this.
He missed it at times, being able to shut his brain off. He could stare at walls or get drunk enough to convince himself of any reality bending lie he wanted for a while, but nothing was as total and true as being Ice King. If something wasn’t in his mind in that exact moment, it just… didn’t exist. It ceased to be, unlike how he just tuned it out now, turning off noises and feelings to hide in his mind.
He’d actually been turning off his surroundings really well right now.
… like really well. Why didn’t he hear anything?
He forced himself to pay attention again, turning on his feet to look around to the other side of the river. His brow furrowed - it was quiet now. He must not have noticed, but there was a distinct lack of the usual chaos in this area, all the bugs and birds disappeared. Some part of him may have been grateful any other time, he hated the constant something. It felt almost normal now, but that in and of itself made it extremely and almost violently abnormal. He considered calling out to see if any noise would respond, but he’d rather not get mauled by a bear twice today, so he just turned and kept walking.
He expected to jump at a twig, be startled be a stray rabbit, riled up for the noise that broke the silence… but it never came. This side of the river wasn’t far off the path and he must still be going the right way, it was just quiet. Odd.
The forest came to an end on his right after a while, the trees thinning then opening up to one of the many grasslands of Ooo, a plateau surrounding the dipping field. He only breifly glanced over as he walked, but after a few times doing so finally processed what he was seeing. In the middle of the indented land was a massive patch of red stone, the grass long boiled away and hardened to rock. This is where it happened. The end of the Gum War. The end of Golb. …the end of Betty. He stared off into the plain for a while, sucking in a painful breath as he simply admired it. It was horribly like he remembered, and he could almost feel the prickling heat under his clothes.
His eyes gravitated to directly the rock he had stood, slightly worn by erosion and the spots around it where banana guards had died. Another thing he envied about Ice King might have started to be the memory loss right about now, seeing a place directly pasted from a memory, time leaving it unchanged. …mostly.
“... what?”
He mumbled to himself and squinted at the small blue pillar which had appeared in the center of the plain since he last was here. It wasn’t very large, but the light of the moon made it appear almost to glow, jagged and soft blue between where he and Betty had been. He took a small step forward on instinct, something pushing him forward, physically more than mentally. He felt like hands were pushing on his back to move forward, which startled him so much he took a step straight off the trail and tripped.
He yelled out as he tumbled a foot or two down the grass, his ankle twisting painfully and his face scrunched up into a pile of dirt. He lay there for a second in defeat before loudly growling in frustration, pushing his face up. The pillar was forgotten as he turned onto his back and pushed himself up, hobbling on his ankle.
“Damn it! Stupid- ow -trail! Ughhhmmmm!”
He shouldn’t be SO frustrated over barely slipping, but he had gone through too much shit in the last day to handle even one more minor inconvenience, brushing off his dirty pants and barely keeping himself from crying on the spot. The river sloshed behind him as as the ferry floated behind him, maybe having heard his yell. He jumped in startle, a few minutes overdue, and ran over to catch the ferry as quickly as he could, mumbling ‘ow’s’ under his breath from his ankle.
Only when he was on the boat and it began to lift from the water into the air did he remember the pillar, quickly turning his head like it may disappear if he didnt catch it. It was just… out of place, a pure blue, perfect rectangle in the middle of a cluttered battlefield. His brain slowly began to frost over with possible analysis until he heard the other people on the ferry making noises and looked down.
Eugh.
He was slightly distracted by the weirdos who kiss on the public ferry.