A/N: I just spent my evening and early morning finishing the roughs of the rest of this fic, unfortunately it isn't that long, but I like it well enough. The updates will still be every few days because I seldom get more chances and because I am already working on a sequel.


Simone was trying very hard not to freak out, not to throw up, and not to groan with the pain she felt in her head. She was being led through a pink castle by a talking giant mint, wearing a maid outfit and walking. It was disconcerting to put it lightly.

The maid hadn't talked at all since they were out of the main hall. This whole place was weird, Gumball, who was apparently a scientist, and apparently made from gum, was a prince, which she hadn't expected. He was weird like everything was weird, it was just too weird.

She wasn't enjoying this place, not even a little bit.

"What sort of clothing did you want?" the maid asked, quite some time after they had left the main hall behind them.

"I used to wear a suit," Simone told her. "A shirt and grey or black pants would be enough though, if the whole suit is too much."

"Hmm," was the response.

They kept going for what felt like a long time, Simone couldn't detect any kind of direction, but she was pretty sure she'd never been there before. A thought occurred to her, as they did from time to time.

"Do you think you could cut my hair as well?" she asked. Her hair was almost to her ankles and it weighed her down.

She hadn't ever had such long hair before.

It was a lot easier than she had expected, somehow. She hadn't expected it to be difficult or anything like that, she hadn't known what to expect. She had found herself mildly surprised that the clothes weren't made of candy or something.

She was certainly apprehensive about a giant piece of candy wielding scissors near her head, but Simone let the maid do it regardless. Peppermint Maid had done her best to find clothes that would fit Simone and her preference. So Simone didn't expect the mint to hurt her. That didn't make it easier letting the mint near her head with a sharp object.

But the result was rather similar to how Simone had looked back before she had found the crown, sane. She had accepted that she had either experienced her absent dream or it had lasted a long time, her hair couldn't have grown that long otherwise. She wasn't sure if she preferred the notion of a coma or this strange world. If it had been a dream then so too must this be.

Simone found she preferred the idea of this absurd place being real to the idea of still being asleep, she had surely dreamed for long enough. But she couldn't remember any of it, she couldn't help thinking that that voice she heard had something to do with that and the headache definitely did.

She was sure that she needed to remember, but had no idea why.

Fionna reacted… interestingly, to Simone's drastic change of image when the woman came back some time later in her new clothes and new hairstyle. She still had her old dress in a bundle, kindly folded and packed for her by Peppermint Maid.

Her face fell at the same time as she appreciated the new look. Simone's spirits fell with the girl's reaction, she didn't know why it bothered her so, she didn't know the girl. Fionna didn't dislike the outfit, or the hair, but she was moved by the change.

Simone wasn't Ice Queen at all anymore, sure the dress hadn't suited her, but it had been what was left of Ice Queen. Simone saw in the girl's reaction that Fionna had liked Ice Queen, maybe she hadn't been aware of the extent, but she had certainly liked the woman. Now Ice Queen was firmly gone, never to be seen again.

It was with that last thought that the world faded, as if there was some force out there that was determined to prove her wrong. I don't want to be gone, that voice told her. Of course it was Ice Queen, what else could it have been? The world faded behind pain and a blanket of the memories that had been forced from her when she recovered.

Ice Queen had been a sickness, or the result of one at least and she had been cleared out when Simone had been healed. But what had happened, had happened to Simone, there was no denying that. She had been Ice Queen.

She recalled putting the crown back on her head and where the memories had stopped there before, they continued. Simone watched, a passenger, as the past played out, it wasn't a dream, that was certain. She saw herself, locked away in her own home, playing with ice and snow. She was forced to watch as she went out into the world and tried to find someone. This someone had been important and she put all she could into finding them.

But all she got was locked away again. They didn't take her crown though, a comfort object they called it. It didn't matter if she kept it, it may even bring her back. It wouldn't let her tell them that it was the source. It was why she had done what she did, why she heard that voice in her head. She didn't show signs of self harm so they let her keep it.

Why would they do that?

She stayed there for a while, concocting what would be the first of many terrible plans. The only reason they didn't thwart her immediately was because no one believed her, of course she couldn't control ice and snow, there was no such thing as magic.

And then zap, nineteen people frozen and Ice Queen was free, she wasn't really Simone anymore, she hadn't been for almost two months by that time. Ice Queen had been a result of Simone spending too much time with the crown.

She had been free to look again, but then it came. Cake had called it the great mushroom war and hadn't known of its magnitude if she could even speak of it. It had been what people had always assumed would come of the cold war. An arms race that culminated in nuclear holocaust had been one of the many possible, manmade, apocalypses that had been projected.

Simone didn't know where she had been, it had been a place deep underground, with many other people. They had been evacuated here, the people who didn't have homes, who didn't stay still, who didn't bathe. It was not a pleasant place and it shocked her when she found the memory of people dying and her only thoughts being that it was lucky. Lucky they died and were removed from the big room full of smelly people.

But then everyone started dying, hypothermia, pneumonia, starvation, thirst. Everyone in Ice Queen's underground bunker had died, except her. They had died of everything they could die of down there under the earth. Everything but what they should have died of.

She knew that it wasn't the only place people had been taken to, but after a long time she forgot that she wasn't alone in the world. She forgot that people had been hidden all over the world, and she forgot what people should have looked like. She played with the bones, pretending that the skeletons were people until she was sure of it.

She hadn't had anything down there but she hadn't died of it.

"Simone!" the voice was loud and it was hoarse and it didn't fit. She was alone, where did the voice come from. "Simone, wake up!"

Wake up? How could she sleep in that place?

"Ice Queen!"

That jarred her, pushed her free enough. Wake up, the voice had told her. Was she dreaming again?

She opened her eyes to find pink. She was in a silly pink palace with a silly pink man, a cute girl and her pet giant cat. She was lying on the silly pink floor and everyone was looking at her, concerned. What had she done now? She wondered.

"Are you alright I… Simone?" Fionna asked.

"No," Simone told her, wiping the tears from her face. "I am certainly not."

Her head ached much less now, like the pressure had been alleviated. It had, there wasn't so much pressing on her mind anymore. How had she gotten out? How long had it taken? Why had she lived, when so many died?

That was what bothered her, what right had she to live though what so many had not?

"We had better take you home," Fionna said.

Ice Queen didn't think of the castle she had carved from a mountain of Ice, she thought of the airy wooden house where Fionna lived with Cake. Simone shook her head, she wasn't Ice Queen, not any more. She was Simone, and she would stay that way.

"I appreciate that," Simone told the girl.

"Thanks for the clothes Gumball," Fionna said.

"It isn't a problem," Gumball told the girl. "Sorry I couldn't help with the memories."

"I think you did anyway," Simone told him. "I appreciate the clothes, and sorry for freezing you."

"I forgive you," the prince said with a smile. "I'm fine now."

"What did you mean when you said: 'I think you did anyway'?" Fionna asked as they left. "Did you remember something?"

Simone didn't really want to talk about it. "I did," she told the girl. "But I don't want to talk about it." She added the last when it looked like Fionna was about to ask what she had remembered.

Fionna didn't ask, nor did Cake, but Simone wasn't sure that the cat was interested.

Simone told them that she needed to lie down and Fionna again insisted that the woman take her bed. Again? Simone wondered about that, she didn't remember Fionna ever offering her bed before, but obviously it had happened.

Simone lay on Fionna's bed and wondered how she could get more of her memory back. Triggering it hadn't exactly been hard but it had been specific, and there was no claiming that Ice Queen was gone anymore. Ice Queen was quite certainly alive in Simone's head, or at least as alive as she had ever been.

It was hard to reconcile Ice Queen with herself, the persona had been the result of far too much time spent with the crown. She didn't like to think that she was Ice Queen, she didn't want to be responsible for what the crazy witch had done. But it had all been done with her own body and pieces of her own mind. She could distance herself but she couldn't deny responsibility, as much as she wanted to.

It seemed to her that Ice Queen wasn't any more alive that the characters in movies, Ice Queen had been just a persona that had gone on too long. Simone could easily assure herself that Ice Queen wasn't real in the same way that the characters in books weren't real.

I am not fictional, Ice Queen asserted in her head.

That had been what she was going for, if Ice Queen wasn't real it meant that she was at fault.

The bunker slipped back into view like a filter over the tree house she saw and darkened until it was all she could see and hear and smell. She had meant for this to happen, she had meant to come back, but she didn't want to be there.

The memory hopped, a little skip, she was still in the bunker, still void of food and warmth and people. But there was a new sound now, a new thing, a new smell. It was the sound of a wheel turning, gears grinding. It was the sound of a seal being released and fresh air rushing in, throwing up clouds of dust.

Ice Queen had stayed sitting where she was, hand in a skull, talking to herself. It was what she spent most of her time doing down there. The bones had long rotted clean what felt like it must have been many years before, but couldn't have been.

"Hello," a voice called. That jolted the woman, there was a person there, there were people.

She dropped the skull and it cracked on the ground but she didn't care, there were people now, she didn't need the remains anymore. Real people were better than the shadows she had held in her head for a long time. She didn't know how long she had been there, but she knew it had been far too long.

She pulled the door open to reveal a woman, she wore a suit and carried a big amulet that she never wore. There was a young child with her, a boy. They were both glad to see another person and so they spoke for a while, before Ice Queen had to go somewhere else. She didn't want to spend any more time staying still.

The woman had been Ms. Abadeer and the child's name had been Marshall Lee. Ice Queen had been told that the child was actually almost a hundred years old by that time, vampires don't age nearly as fast as humans obviously.

There was a lot of nothing for a while, there weren't clear memories for a long time. She had been in that bunker for a very long time, almost half a decade it turned out. But this was longer, almost three hundred years she did little in the wasteland of the world. She met few other survivors, she met a scientist who claimed to be made of candy and a woman who could set things on fire they way Ice Queen could freeze them. The pair didn't get along.

And then she found it. The perfect place. She had been to the poles before, but the world changed constantly and what she found now was what had come to be her Ice Kingdom. She spent a long time making it into the place it became, leaving the penguins alone as long as they left her alone. But she got lonely out on the ice by herself so she would talk to the penguins. She named them, but had little creativity when it came to names, they were all Gertrude.

There seemed to be a hole for a while, a place where nothing had been remembered and then there were kingdoms like hers everywhere. There was the Candy kingdom, ruled over by the squishy pink scientist, though he had been different then. There was the Nightoshere, Ms Abadeer had been busy. There was even a Fire Kingdom, which she stayed firmly away from.

Then there had been people, candy people, fire people, demons, and the vampire, into his teens, or eight hundreds, by that point. Ice Queen hadn't remembered anything, the gap in her memory had been where her recollection started. She knew she was older than that, but she knew little else, except that she was looking for someone. Her prince.

And then there had been Fionna, the squishy pink man hadn't died, but his experiment ruled now over the Candy Kingdom, Prince Gumball. Marshall Lee was almost an adult and there had been so many new places. People had experimented and caused the end of the world and now new experiments had taken over, Breakfast Kingdom, Blueberry Prince. The things people had made out of the wasteland were numerous and varied and very few were not ridiculous.

But they were there now. Great forests and talking animals.

Simone remembered it and thought it all seemed wrong. The things people should have thought impossible were common and the things that should have been impossible were accepted. It was a strange place, but she hadn't known that at the time.

Then there was Fionna, the tomboy, the last human. Simone remembered the trick she had tried to play on the girl, the day they had spent together and Fionna's visits to the dungeon. She remembered staying a night with them and a fit of coughing that had brought tears to her eyes.

And then she was back to the present, she had woken in a strange place with no recollection of what must have been a dream. It should have been, the scientist in her knew it shouldn't have been real, but she couldn't avoid the fact that it was. And the witch in her was stronger now that she remembered it.

Simone wasn't Ice Queen anymore, there wasn't anything that could be done about that, there wasn't any arguing that. But she wasn't really herself anymore, she wasn't the person she had been before she found the crown. She couldn't be. So she compromised. She was just Simone, but she was herself in the place and the product of what she had done and what had been done to her.

Cake was sleeping when Simone got up and climbed down the ladder, she was glad to be out of the dress, even if he had had it since before the war. It wasn't something she really liked, it had been a product of Ice Queen.

The voice was gone and it was good to have the semblance of calm in her head for the time being. She was still processing the things she remembered, but she remembered them. Maybe tomorrow she would break down again, the weight of her wait in the dark hitting her the way it had when she first remembered it.

But until then there were other things to think about.