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Fionna just kept staring at her hands, seeing nothing but the white ash that had coated them hours prior despite having scrubbed them clean many times over. Simon kept telling her that it was OK, that Winter King was a bad person, but that didn’t make her feel any better about it. She’d accidentally sucked the magic right out of him, leading to his immediate demise. The look on his face as he crumbled to nothing in her arms would probably be burned into her memory until the day she died.
She glanced up at Simon, who was busying himself with the babies of the current universe they were in. He cooed and smiled at them as if he hadn’t just watched an alternate version of himself die by her hands, hadn’t watched her murder innocent candy people who weren’t themselves. It confused her to no end.
She looked back down at her hands again and wondered if what Prismo had said about her being a hero was true, because she sure as hell didn’t feel like one. She felt like a villain.
Her attention turned back towards Simon again. Intelligent, kind, and severely depressed Simon who was currently smiling more than she’d seen him do since they’d first met him only a few days prior. If what she’d done in the previous world didn’t qualify her as a villain, then surely this did. What they were asking, were expecting of him would ruin him and make the man currently before her cease to be. Was that the kind of thing a hero would do?
The phantom memory of ash and decay filled her nose once more and she sniffed harshly to try and clear it away — wanting, craving to feel something other than the disjointed thoughts bombarding her psyche.
Every time she closed her eyes she saw Winter King’s last moments. Every time her lips parted she tasted his lips on hers. Every time she rubbed her fingers together she could feel his remains on her skin.
Would it ever end, or was this her new reality: to be forever trapped in an eternal nightmare created from her own wrong doings.
Simon inquired if she was OK a few times and she just shook her head each and every time, not feeling up to talking about it right now, and most definitely not with him of all people. Looking at his face only conjured up more images of Winter King and she was just waiting for the other shoe to drop and shatter the numb indifference she currently felt, for it to shatter her into a million tiny pieces that not even God or GOLB or whoever was in charge could ever hope to piece back together into anything that even remotely resembled the person she used to be, the person she thought she was.
Eventually, he left her alone entirely, lying down in a pile of pillows and taking a much needed nap alongside several of the babies who’d been clinging to his legs for attention, one of which resembling what she was sure was a vampire with her grey skin and teeny fangs.
She shook her head for what had to be the millionth time. What Simon did here or anywhere else was no longer any of her business nor did she deserve for it to be. The only thing she deserved was to receive a punishment that would seemingly never come, no one else seeing the fault in her actions but herself.
And so she just sat there, sniffing ash that was long gone and absently wiping her hands on the pillowed ground, soiling it with her filth.