Work Text:
Sometimes the Ice King recalled bits and pieces of things he couldn’t describe.
Sometimes, when he saw shiny black or cold white, sometimes when he saw a little child jumping around, he got these strange feelings. There was something about campfires and cans of soup and those old television sitcoms that he was missing, and there was something about a word that started with- was it an “M”?- that was just out of his reach.
All the while, chubby little black and white things waddled and slipped and slid all around him. They were worse than being alone, because they were incessant little reminders of the important thing that was just out of his reach, and the memory of that- that special thing- deteriorated every day he was trapped in this ice kingdom. If he squinted, each little quacking ball of icy fluff just barely resembled it, but none of them gave him that “aha!” that he’d been searching for. Something he knew with certainty was the name “Gunther”, but he once questioned if it even had anything to do with those other things that made him feel so strange.
Every day, he scoured the remains of his hollowed mind for any scrap of a clue, pacing the icy hallways of his castle. It was all so much snow and ice. It was all packed layers, squeezed tighter and tighter by the centuries of scarce snowfall, and they locked him inside with miles of chipped passageways and snowdrifts. His domain reached farther than he could travel, and grew larger and further from greenery by the day. It all looked the same: each jagged ice tendril reaching the clouds, each hallway worn by hundreds of years’ worth of pacing, and each “different” little snowflake he could no longer make out the details of.
So he just kept squinting at the feathery little black and white creatures, and scooping them up with that strangely familiar “Gunther” word like jimmying a puzzle piece into a place it didn’t fit. And at this point? That was just good enough.