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From the outside, time was like one of those optical illusions. Everything that ever was, or is, or will be, stretched and squeezed down to be viewed from everywhere and nowhere all at once. She could almost picture it as a snow globe, though she was beginning to forget what exactly those looked like. An entire world caught in a sphere of glass, held in the palm of a higher being. The curved wall in that example was made of time in this case, everything from the very beginning, to the very end.
That influx of information would be enough to drive most mad, and Betty would readily admit that she'd fallen off the deep end long ago. The madness she gained with her magic was child's play in comparison to the unfettered, chaotic whims of the multiverse and beyond. She'd initially thought that Golb was somehow immune to it all, but when she merged with it, she was proven wrong. Golb could only direct the chaos, live among it without coming to harm. The madness of it all was ever-present, and the cosmic entity did nothing to shield Betty from that.
So, she often took to sorting through her old memories. Their life was a sedentary one, so there was plenty of time. Many tried to summon them forth, but Golb was chaos incarnate; any summons they didn't want to answer were ignored or left for another time. But there was one person in particular who had started to call more and more often, each one more desperate than the last. Most people eventually gave up, but not once in her life had Betty considered Simon Petrikov to be most people.
She could peer into his life; what had been, what was, and what would be. And in that mess of memories made and experiences yet to come, she saw him in his entirety, more wholly than she ever had before she merged with Golb. Betty saw days of a young, scrawny boy with his nose buried in a book, his glasses routinely stolen while he was called immature names. She saw a young upstart lose his footing as his expeditions proved fruitless. There was bitterness and heartbreak in him, clear as day, just like she'd seen in that fateful classroom.
There were a handful of passing crushes on nameless women in his past, but from the moment they'd met, she could feel all of his attention attune to her. She'd been his first, in every way that mattered. The first person to truly and fully support his career and life choices. The first woman who looked at him with adoration rather than disinterest or scorn. The first person he deeply, wholeheartedly loved. It didn't matter that his first kiss went to a mean-spirited dare, or that he'd had the occasional bad thought about her. His care for her outweighed everything else.
Sometimes, Betty would wonder if she'd made the right decision. If postponing her life and her studies for Simon had been a tipping point, a point of no return. That she'd thrown her dreams away and it was too late to get them back, that Simon would expect her to play second fiddle to him forever. She hadn't had a whole lot of close friends and supporters in her past either. But with Golb, she could see it all. Simon never wanted her to cast her dreams aside, he just didn't stop to realize the gravity of what she was doing. No one had ever sacrificed for him like that before.
In the same way she was Simon's first, he was her first as well. Her first serious crush on someone that wasn't a celebrity she'd only ever seen through a screen. The first person who prioritized her happiness and was content to live alongside her, no matter where they went or what they did. Simon was the first person in Betty's life to make her feel special, just by allowing her to stand by his side. She would never let herself forget that. The control over her and Golb's merged form strengthened when she remembered that, remembered him.
And maybe things were kind of... lopsided. She'd been aware of it at the time, but she hadn't had enough time to allow herself to realize it fully. The crown had happened, and then she found herself a thousand years into the future. Simon almost died, she got herself magic, and after running around with unchecked depression, obsession and insanity all at once, she made the wish that changed everything. The wish that saved him, and sent her straight into Golb's head.
Every choice, every trip abandoned and paper postponed, each and every sacrifice, had been made with Simon in mind. All the way to the very end. She liked doing it for him. It made her feel... important, to be there for someone like that. Simon soaked up her praise and support like a sponge left out to dry, all too eager for her to give it to him. But she hadn't liked spending a lot of time thinking about what she wanted. She also hadn't liked thinking about what Simon himself actually wanted.
Her memories were like files that she could sift through. On a good day, Betty could access them all, replay each and every moment in detail. So, she remembered Patience St. Pim's scheme, the way she threw all of Ooo out of whack. Betty had wanted so badly to turn the Ice King back into Simon that she'd lied to not only Finn and Jake, but the Ice King himself. She couldn't stand him not being himself, not for a second longer. All her efforts accomplished was upsetting Simon and getting in the way of fixing the elemental mess.
Simon... was her last love. With Golb, Betty held onto the love she had for him, but it was an imitation of what she'd felt when she was still human. A memory of love, not love itself. She would never find someone else for her - the brazen actions of the past, so absorbed in her own righteousness and obsession, assured that. There were many things she wanted to say to him, so many threads left untied, actions unresolved. She ached to answer his summons as they kept coming and coming.
But she wasn't herself anymore. Part of her was Golb, and would always be Golb. That was the truth of things. Answering Simon's summons would only be all too logical and harmonious, which ran antithetical to Golb's chaos and discord. Besides, what would she even say to him? How could she convey all of these things she'd come to realize while trapped outside of space and time? Betty was little more than a voice in Golb's head, given slight control of the chaos by way of her wish, but nothing more.
She took a sort of grim satisfaction, sifting through Simon's time, in knowing that she would be his final love as well. Neither of them were any good at letting go, she could admit. It should've worried her more, really. Betty knew about how his mood fell by the day, how he would inevitably work himself into a rut and depression like no other in her absence. But all Betty could see in those sad days-yet-to-be was love. Grief was only love from another angle, after all. Love from a different point in time.
Loss didn't need to be the end, either. There was an afterlife, as she now knew. Dead Worlds. Reincarnation. Golb, existing outside of time, didn't age. There was no growing old for a being of pure chaos, no inevitable crawl toward the end. But Betty had been mortal, once. She knew, though she didn't know how, that Golb could die. All cosmic beings could, in theory. She wasn't sure it would stick, if she'd end up in the afterlife or... somewhere else. But she could see herself caving to the inevitability in time.
That gave her some tiny shred of hope. If Golb died, she could be with Simon again. She'd fight through all of heaven and hell to be with him, no matter where she ended up or didn't end up. Perhaps Golb would revive without her consciousness merged into it. Or maybe she could kill chaos itself. It was a nice thought, though she doubted it. Betty was a woman of science, after all. She wouldn't believe anything without ample proof, least of all the idea that an all-powerful entity could die and stay dead.
But that was all she had, floating in the endless void of nothingness. Each universe was scattered in the distance, mere pebbles and debris, dwarfed by the sheer power and scale of Golb’s influence. There were an infinite number of paths before her, so many would-be futures to choose from. Gazing between the present and that sea of futures, Betty refrained from answering Simon's summons, no matter how badly she wished to. Only the bleakest of futures came from giving him what he wanted, as she'd done so many times. Simon would need to grasp his happiness on his own.
That happiness wasn't guaranteed; far from it, actually. Most of the futures she saw ended in him dying a withered, sad old man, or reverting to insanity as the Ice King. The road ahead of him would be far from easy, but luckily for him, he had friends in high places. Betty would nudge him in the right direction, use as much power as Golb allowed in order to put him on the best possible track. One day, they would see each other again, she knew as she watched his ritual fail and the effigy of Golb break. One day, but not today.