A/N: First of all, I do not own Adventure Time and I can pretty much guarantee I never will unless the current owner gets incredibly generous during Christmas and gives the show to a random passerby on the street.
This is my first fan fiction (Gah! Kill it with fire!) so it's obviously never going to look perfect, but I want to try to make it the best it can possibly be. So, my lovely readers, I'd treasure some feedback of all kinds. If you see a detail that is way out of line or some glaring spelling error, tell me so I can fix it. Also, I apologize for the shortness of this prologue. I'll try to make the next chapters longer. Pinky promise!
If you end up liking this and want to read more, I'm horrible at updating quickly. However I won't quit writing this, no matter what!
Enjoy!
Prologue: Whispers
Hello, my name is Simon Petrikov.
... What-mon? Simon? Simon... Petrikov? Oh, God, that name was so familiar! But... who? Who's name was it?!
I'm recording this tape so that people will know my story.
Simon's story? A foreign emotion welled in the Ice King's chest, rising like the tide and overwhelming all other feelings. He needed to know! He would die if he didn't find out! ...But then again, he already knew, didn't he?
But everything changed when I came into contact with this item. Simon lifts a beautiful golden crown out of an unlocked safe.
No. No! NO! It was an impossibility. He'd never seen this Simon Petrikov before in his life! Not once! It couldn't be... it couldn't be him.
...I jokingly put it on my head.
The worst decision in his life. What in the world possessed him to put that horrible piece of metal on? He remembered everything now. It had made him feel powerful, handsome, perfect. As if.
That's when it started: the visions.
He had them constantly now, so much so that he practically saw them during his dreams. They were always there, haunting him endlessly. He often found it hard to figure out what was real and what was not. It was beyond torture to him, for he knew they were the reason he had gone slowly insane. It was hard being a human when you knew you weren't one anymore.
I fought with them, shouted at them until I realized it wasn't real, it was the crown! I quickly took it off, but I saw my fiancé in front of me, looking at me with such contempt!
Oh, Betty! His Betty, his princess, the love of his life. She had left him to wallow in his misery alone. Alone in the dark, she was his candle, his only hope for fighting the shadows creeping in. Then she was gone, oh so easily. That scared him more that the crown had, if someone you love can so quickly turn against you and leave you to the wolves.
I now see the visions always, whether or not I wear the crown. They tell me the secrets. The secrets of the ice and snow.
One of the things that he remembered most vividly was the transition. One day he'd taken the crown off... but nothing had changed. That was the turning point; there was no more going back, no more chance of undoing all the wrong within himself. Simon Petrikov was slipping away and some new creature was being reborn from the ashes.
As you can see, my skin is beginning to turn blue and my body temperature has been lowering at a supernatural rate to what is now about 30 degrees Celsius... I don't know when it will end. I'm really scared.
...He had been scared. This was somewhat of a shocking revelation, for he had managed to forget this small detail. He had been scared... and he still was. He was scared of what he had become, and he was scared of what he would be in the future. Most of all, he was scared of forgetting again that he had been scared.
I know my mind is changing, but I'm already too far gone to know what to do. I want people to know that if I do things... if I do things that hurt anyone... please, PLEASE, forgive me.
Forgive me? Pathetic! How could he even ask for forgiveness from others when he couldn't even get it from himself?!
Just watch over me until I can find my way out of this labyrinth in my brain and regain my sanity!
And without knowing it, someone had been. Finn and Jake were always there, keeping him from doing things he knew that he would've regretted and fixing things that he had done wrong. How ironic; he never thought he'd see the day when he'd be thankful for those two, but he was.
Maybe... maybe they could show him the way out of his twisted thoughts and protect him from the demons in his own mind. Maybe they could keep him from spiraling out of control even further. Maybe-
The Ice King awoke with a start, salty tears frozen on his face and his heart thundering wildly in his chest. For a moment he was Simon, brave, desperate Simon, but his thoughts rapidly began to cloud.
"No," he cried into the air, "Please, no! I can't take it anymore!"
Then he was the Ice King with muddled thoughts and confused feelings, most of all a profound loneliness and that he was but a stranger in his own mind...
and the feeling that he had just been reacquainted with an old friend named Simon Petrikov.