Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Betty flees from Simon and his madness in a rush. What's that thing done to him? She rushes past a street lamp, bright yellow glow blinding her briefly, and immediately finds herself in an endless plane of snow as far as she can see. What the hell. Is this Simon's doing? He was making it snow...

She wanders for a while but doesn't hear anything or anyone, just the occasional rushing of wind followed by a gust of snow. It's cold, freezing, as one would expect, but her skin doesn't turn red and she doesn't actually feel like it's doing anything to her. It's just cold with no other effects.

Off in the distance, after a while, she thinks she can spot a group of people all huddled together in front of a building. It might be something else, but they stand like people and shuffle awkwardly like people, so over she goes! If nothing else, it might be nice to huddle together and try and get warm. Maybe one of them knows what's going on.

She gets kind of close when a couple of them startle and yell, before she can actually make out much of what they look like. The snow in the air is really thick. They all immediately pile into the building they were standing near, and she runs up to the door. Locked.

Betty bangs on the door. "Hey! Let me in! Do any of you know what's going on?" No response, though she can hear the people inside moving and whispering among each other.

"Please? It's really cold out here. I want to know what's going on." No response. "I'm- I'm going to get in there!" Fearful whispers. "I'm going to bust down the door!" More whispers. She... Isn't going to bust down the door. "Just let me in, please." Nothing. She leaves, dragging her feet in the snow.

There's not much to be found. She wanders the town for a while and passes out in one of the more intact houses, waking up hungry. Nothing in the house, or the next, or the next. That's not great. Everything beyond the town seems to be an unending veil of white, so frankly she doesn't think she'll be finding anything out there.

Poking around the town shows it picked clean, other than the house she can't get into, with the people hiding from her. She saw one watching her search the town. No idea what their problem is. The houses, too, are weird. No light switches, no plumbing, mostly wooden furniture. Nothing electric at all.

A bit of distant laughter on the wind. She perks up at the sound. Someone laughing means they'll probably talk to her, right? She looks back at the weird people house. Shut up tight again. Hey, she isn't going to follow their judgement. She's harmless, and they hid from her. They'd probably cower from a dog.

So she chases after the laughter. Somewhere out in there, someone who might know what's happened is. Or maybe it's Simon. It doesn't sound like his laughter, but he was careening into it when this happened and it didn't much sound like his normal laughter either.

And then right in front of her is someone not at all dressed for the weather, a... Dog with a skull for a hat? And floating overhead, a kid with a mechanical arm and Simon's crown. Did she get sent to the past? That is the last thing she thinks before the cold overtakes her and she sees no more.

Betty wakes up shivering and losing feeling in her fingers. She can't move her legs. Someone breaks glass nearby. Or- Or ice? She's confused. The cold is actually doing normal things now. Her arms are free. What's she... Her legs are encased in ice. Betty opens her eyes. Frost clings to her glasses. She pushes at the ice. Punches it, which hurts her hand but does shatter it. Fragile stuff.

She stumbles away from the ice that was holding her, for whatever reason, and takes a look around. There's dozens of other people in the same situation as her. Fresh out of ice blocks or still half in them. Something about them looks really weird, other than their clothes, but she can't pinpoint it.

Maybe she should help everyone else out. Betty gets to kicking at and prying away chunks of ice from other people. This one wears a puffy vest and otherwise plain clothes, this one looks like some kind of DJ, those three look like peasants in stories, and a lot of people somehow look like a mix of all that and hipster fashion. Maybe it's best if she doesn't stick around. She really just wants to find somewhere to warm up.

Despite having been in that false-cold for only about a day and a half, maybe, it's weird that the late fall air is actually doing something to her now. She's shivering. Roaming for a bit yields her easier results than during the blizzard, though. There's a town that looks to be nearby, and it doesn't look quite like the other town she found a day ago. Or, well, it's probably been longer. Who knows how long she was frozen.

Point is, that's somewhere she can hunker down for a bit. There might be people there, too, if someone already got out of the ice mess just... She checks the sky. About north of here. At any rate, that's the place to be! It doesn't take long to get there, even with her legs hurting like they do from basically nonstop walking. Betty sits on a large rock just outside of town and groans. She really needs to work out more if this is making her hurt.

Town itself is pretty barren, again, but it does seem a bit more advanced than the last one she visited. By that, she does just mean that they've got a building made largely from stonework, which makes no sense at all, compared to the structure of everything else in town, but wondering about how that happened can wait. It's a unique building! She wants in!

The doors are boarded up, which is either a very good sign, no one inside, or a very bad one. Something being inside. Betty pries the boards off easily. They weren't nailed in very well. She inspects the nails briefly. Rusted through, kind of squared off. Blacksmithed? That would be interesting. She wonders where the smithy is. Betty shivers and leans against the door. She doesn't want to be here, she thinks suddenly. She wants to be home.

Pull it together, Grof. Inside. Have that breakdown later. Stepping inside, she isn't exactly met with warmer air, but it's certainly less gusty. More importantly, there's rows upon rows of bookshelves, stuffed to the brim with books of all shapes and sizes to match. Betty grins and rushes up to the closest shelf to look at a book. Any book. Fascinating construction, the spine sewn together and carefully attached to a stiff fabric cover. She's only seen books made like this from hobbyists.

This one seems to be a record of harvests across multiple years. She has no idea why this is in a library, but that's fine! There's got to be something useful. History, or how-to guides, maybe local myths? Anything to tell her about this time period. She-

Betty collapses against the bookshelf. She's in the past. There's no way she's ever seeing anything or anyone she knows ever again, this is just too far back. Unless she can invent immortality, she's going to be stuck here for the rest of her life with nothing familiar or worth caring about. She just- She just needs a moment. She's going to make a nice life for herself. It'll be okay.

She won't like this but it'll be okay. She'll make a time capsule, maybe. Send a message to the future to say, "Everyone, it's me! Betty Grof! Magic is real and I've been stuck in the past! Don't forget me!" With the way the world was going when she stumbled here, they may never find it. War on the horizon, and all that. She muffles a despairing laugh by biting a knuckle. There's an upside! She doesn't have to experience the possible war!

Alright. Deep breaths. Just do something with your hands, Betty. Come on. She stands up and mechanically runs a hand down the edge of a bookshelf until she finds a particularly awful-feeling book. It's rotting, when she looks at it. Ew. As much as it pains her, she's probably going to have to get rid of this one before it becomes a health hazard. She just takes it off the shelf and sets it a bit closer to the door for now.

Hours later, she's got a sizable pile of rotting books and a deep pit in her stomach from both dread and hunger. She's taken off her sweater, finding the library to be fine enough as temperature goes after a while, and has set that to the side. There is also a lovely encyclopedia she's found, shelved next to a bunch of blueprints for buildings and children's books. This place badly needs the Dewey Decimal system.

A loud bang comes from the front entrance, and Betty flinches badly. She runs to the entrance, encyclopedia in hand. "Hey! What's going on over there!" She rounds the stack's end to see a bunch of weird people. She doesn't call them weird lightly, they look like if someone tried to make scene fashion out of the unsellable parts of a thrift store and the dye from a craft store. The three of them look at her, one in giant sunglasses, one in fishnets, among other things, and one with blue hair and a sleeveless jacket.

The blue-haired one pushes the fishnet one forward, who pushes them back in return. Ultimately, it is the blue one that responds. "Burnin' stuff! Hand over those books!" They grab at her encyclopedia and she hits them over the head with it without hesitation.

"Not a chance. Get something from the rotting pile if you want to burn things I haven't read yet, asshole."

"Don't talk to my gang like that," The sunglasses-wearing fool finally says, shaking out of his vague staring forward pose.

Betty snorts. "Then don't mess with my stuff-" She pauses, looking at him a bit closer. "Wait, I've seen you before." He stands up straighter, looking angry, maybe? She can't read his expression with the glasses. "You were out there in the snow! With the dog and the boy with the crown?" He takes an awkward step back.

"Boss?" Fishnets asks, sounding nervous.

"We're leaving. Can get something else to burn." He sounds incredibly blank. What on Earth did she just uncover by saying that? She almost feels bad about it- oh my god they have noses. That's what was so weird! Why do they have visible noses? She's so caught up in that wonder that she barely notices as the procession leaves the library. Weird stuff.

Betty snaps back to reality a bit later to see the front doors of the library open. She closes them and goes back to her books. The best thing to do here is probably to fish out nonfiction, if she can even tell it apart from the fiction at a glance, and put that in a pile to read. Sadly, the encyclopedia probably won't be the most useful thing to her.

Shockingly, most of the nonfiction is generally grouped together, though there are some books about magic in and amongst the more technical textbooks and cookbooks. Those cookbooks could be nice, frankly, but this is still awful organization. She leafs through a handful of pamphlets about "the dangers of magic." Actually, she probably shouldn't scoff at that, considering that she time traveled and her fiance is cursed by a gaudy hat. Ahem.

So she opens the first one, written by one Marceline Abadeer by hand. It goes over generalized spells, mainly. The next talks about preservation of food and what to do when, as preservation spells go. The handwriting is atrocious. The next has a step by step guide to making light. It also goes into some honestly horrifying detail about not doing this while near a lot of ice or glass, lest one risk blinding themself.

Half the pamphlets are filthy and barely hanging together, but are suspiciously free of any manner of rot. "Preservation spells!" Betty laughs. Alright, she's in a halfway decent mood. Magic clearly exists, and she's got what's probably a joke guide but may genuinely be something worthwhile right in front of her. Let's see. The instructions are poorly spelled and shaky but seem to run along some reasonable set of logic.

Light is energy, heat is energy, so to make light, she's got to convert the heat in an area into light. With magic. Naturally. The actual how of how to do that is, frankly, bullshit, but Betty is willing to give it a go. Something about asking the universe politely to do this one thing for you in a particular way. Feeling a bit silly, Betty closes her eyes and gives it a shot.

What little heat there is in the air drains. She opens her eyes to a small sphere of clean, white light right in front of her. It looks like fire, if fire was as clear as water and didn't flicker. She tentatively sticks her fingers in it and pulls them out immediately, the intense cold hurting the moment she touched it. This...

This is progress.

Chapter Text

Over a decade. Over a decade in this place, and Betty still lives in the library. It's home now, and will probably be home until something destroys it, or until she makes it back to the present. It has settled quite well into the status of home, though!

Traps probably aren't most people's idea of homely, but Betty has had a very long time to get used to the idea of dodging certain bits of carpet or opening the front door in specific ways to deactivate most of the mechanisms for the day. Sometimes there's reasonable visitors to her library.

Just today, even! That nice little kid with the white eyes just like hers have become. She wonders if he's dabbled in magic. Probably, considering that really is all he visits the library for, books on magic. He treats them well, so she even lets him borrow the books instead of just reading them inside the building like most visitors have to.

Betty sighs and leans back in the air, lounging. She's a bit bored, frankly. Should probably get used to it, who knows how long she'll have to just exist on the fringes of society? It's not like she knows exactly how far she's gone through time. There's got to be something other than her books to pass the time. She's read basically all of them, except for a few dictionaries and sets of encyclopedias.

She should take up writing. That sounds nice. A journal to start with, maybe, but if she wants to write a book she'll want to invent printing presses. There's no chance she's writing it all out by hand- Oooh, there's probably a spell for that! Or she can invent one. It'll lean away from the equal exchanges and dip into her own magic. A bit dangerous, that.

Oh, her door is opening. Betty shoots up to her loft, haphazardly arranged atop the bookshelves, and lands. Who's it going to be this time? Another gang member to kick out, still smoking? Some random person braving her lair? She giggles a bit to herself and watches two- three? Three. People step inside.

The reason for the confusion is that one of the now tentatively labeled 'people' is a cat. If you stood it on its back legs and shoved a minifridge into it. Actually, as it's a calico, the cat is probably a she. Whoops! Anyways, that's probably a hallucination. Accompanying her are a young girl dressed in the local style, including a rather nice hood. Oh hey, she doesn't have a nose! Betty smiles a bit at that. Must just be homesick. Definitely...

Oh. That third person, the first to enter but last to catch her eye, is Simon. Simon, if he were older and more haggard and not wearing shoes, goodness. Betty briefly humors the idea that Simon tore his way through time to find her. It's a nice thought. A very nice thought. But he probably hasn't. Betty skitters backwards on her loft, onto her nest of blankets and pillows, and hyperventilates for a moment.

She finally takes a very deep breath to settle herself and goes back to watching. They've entered the labyrinth of bookshelves. Under the light of the magic lamps she's set up, the girl and cat seem bothered, but her Simon looks only slightly ill-at-ease. He mutters something under his breath about the shelf arrangement, but otherwise seems to understand her system of organization perfectly. He would, if it were him. It's Dewey Decimal.

The group wanders for a good while. It's nice to watch people who clearly respect library etiquette. Even- oh, what's his name -Jay doesn't quite have that same respect towards shelving and keeping quiet. Well, he's quiet, but more out of fear than habit. Of course, these people are all fake, but it's still lovely.

Betty has been walking the entire time, which is probably how the cat "hears" her. She looks directly into Betty's eyes through the carefully chiseled holes in the combination roof/floor. Betty immediately sets to floating. It really won't make a difference, as the cat is still not real, but it makes her feel better. She's not used to feeling hunted in her own home. It's novel. It better not happen again.

The cat whispers something to the girl and the faux-Simon, dragging them both out into the open. She then performs a spectacular display of ignoring the laws of reality by simply extending her entire torso up to the loft, Simon and girl in each hand. Betty makes eye contact with all of them. And then she flees.

She never built cover up here. Stupid! Just because no one had figured out how to get up there before doesn't mean they never would. Betty glances back and readies herself for a long night in the rafters waiting for these illusions to just go away.

"Betty! Wait!"

She stops dead in her tracks, halfway to the roof. Turns around and floats back down to the three.

"I..." She swallows. "Haven't heard your voice in years. I though I'd forgotten it." Simon's face crumples, and he holds out his arms as if to hug her. Betty laughs a bit, eyes flooding with tears at the sight. She shakes her head and dries her eyes. She doesn't want to just pass right through him.

"What happened to you?"

Betty blinks at him. "Shouldn't you know? Wait, no, you're probably-" She shakes her head violently, when the girl breaks in.

"How do you two know each other? I thought you hadn't been here before." Betty studies the girl for a moment. They're traveling. That lends credence to the impossible hope that this really is Simon. She pushes the girl over with magic, just to see if it works. It does.

"Hey!" The cat yells. "Don't touch Fionna!"

Betty shrugs. "Didn't touch her. Anyways. I went through a portal. Now I'm here."

Fionna stands back up. "Woah!" She grins. "Was that magic?"

Beaming back at her, "Yes! I figured it out not long after arriving- or maybe a while. I was frozen for a bit. Subjective time, very short!" Betty shakes a hand vigorously for a moment. "I reason that if I can just live until the modern day again, I'll be able to meet up with my Simon again." She stares directly at this Simon, wondering if he'll contradict anything there. Claim to be hers. He doesn't. He's... He's false. This is fake.

Fionna and the cat start talking with each other excitedly. Betty tunes them out and sits on the floor, arms wrapped around her knees. The fake Simon sits down across from her.

"You know, I thought I could save you," She looks at him over her arms, voice muffled. "Just live forever, or at least long enough to get that stupid crown off your head. It'll still happen. I just hope I don't go completely off my rocker first."

The fake Simon looks immeasurably sad at this. "I think I know what the portal was, but it doesn't make sense." He rearranges to sitting cross legged, and puts on his lecture face. It's been so long since she's seen it. "I made a portal to a thousand years in the past in my own timeline-" So... His own timeline. He claims to be from another universe, then? Fascinating. "-when I was briefly freed from the madness of the crown, to apologize to my Betty for whatever I said that had driven her off."

"Ooh, keep going!" The cat interrupts, sitting off to the side. Fionna gives two thumbs up as well.

Simon, disgruntled, "As I was saying. I opened my portal to the past to reach you, so if you went through that same portal, my counterpart should be here too. At any rate, this couldn't be the past, unless time runs backwards between this universe and my own."

Betty flings herself upwards, glaring wide-eyed at the fake Simon. "This is the past," she hisses. "It is, and all I have to do to get back to my future is wait. Do you understand me?"

Simon stands up and puts a hand on her shoulder. He says something but Betty's mind is static. He's touching her. She grabs his arm and then his shoulder, then enveloping him in a crushing hug. She presses her ear against his neck, listening for his heartbeat. He's real. His story- Is his story real?

She takes a long look at the girl and cat from over Simon's shoulder. She pushes out of the hug, leaving a hand on each of Simon's shoulders. "You're real."

He tentatively pries one of her hands off of him. "Yes."

Betty breaks into breathless giggling. "You're real. This is the future. I don't have anything anymore." She grips Simon's shoulder tightly. "I don't have anything."

He frowns a bit. "I... Don't know what to say."

"Take me with you."

The cat stares, open-mouthed. Fionna yelps, "What?"

"The- however you got here. Traveling through dimensions." Betty stares directly into Simon's matching blank eyes. "Take me with you."

Fionna and the cat cheer, "Yeah! Let her come with us!" But Simon looks at his feet. She knows this look.

"No." Betty breathes, voice cracking. "No, you can't leave me here. Please. I don't have anything." He just shakes his head. "You can't do this."

"Yeah, Simon, why not?"

"Cake, I don't know if I'm allowed. What if we just make more problems? The Scarab is already after us, we don't need to give him more reasons..."

Betty draws back. "Following rules. You're just afraid of consequences. I was always the one who did important things. You'll hang back forever, waiting for someone else to take the lead by force, won't you?" She claps her hands over her mouth and lands again, realizing she was floating.

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay. I get it."

Betty shakes her head. "Please leave."

"Wait," Fionna says. "We're looking for the magic crown."

"Don't know, don't care. Only other person who cares about magic lives north of here. Go away."

Simon nods at her. "Okay. Please be well." Cake stretches the three down from her loft and leaves her in silence.

Betty stays there curled up on the floor for what seems to be an entire day, until a bright light swirls into place in front of her and a half-formed voice asks her if she'd like to help some friends in another dimension out.

She walks through the portal without hesitation and finds herself in a bustling city. Another world. Maybe this time it'll work out. When Fionna, shockingly there, as is Jay, directs her towards some red thing, she hits him with everything she has. She won't waste this chance.