Chapter Text
the seventh night, bonnie crawled out of the burial pits with her bare hands. her legs were still a mangled mess, but they remained firmly inside of her burial pants, so from the outside, at least, it all looked normal.
for a flexible definition of normal, that was. bonnie wasn’t terribly fussed. she surely looked like hell had opened up on earth, and she certainly felt like it had, but there were more pressing concerns than the filth bubbling within and without. she took a momentary pause to hack up the remains of semi-digested lung from where it had stubbornly lodged in her opened trachea, glanced upwards to gauge the moon’s progress as she’d climbed out of the pit, and then she went her merry way onwards.
there was no one left to scream at the sight of her. it was just as well, though. no one left to protest at her existence. no one left carve her into little pieces of acceptability—not that there would have been much flesh for anyone to carve, now or then. as she crawled over a tangled system of thick, winding roots, a fragment of cervical spine in her exposed neck finally gave in to the pull of gravity, and fell with the soft scrape of bone on bone and sharp edge against rotted skin.
it hurt, a little bit, that scrape. good riddance, though. she’d endured that little fragment for a yard too many, the way it clung to the vertebra, as though it couldn’t decide whether it wanted to stay or not. make up your mind, she would have told it, were it a sentient thing. it was embarrassing to realise there were any part of her that could be so weak, when anyone could have attested to strength being her defining trait.
well, anyone. there was no one left, as far as bonnie could tell. the city smoked in the distance, the stench so strong she could smell it even from the burial pits. still, that there had been a burial pit to begin with, without or without burial clothes, seemed so—oh, there was no point in being delicate—she snickered through the gushing blood in her mouth.
by the time the moon was fully up, she’d made it to the wrought iron city gates. good time, she thought cheerfully to herself, especially without the use of her legs. the man who must have thrown her into the pit, or least thrown other corpses into the pit, lay curled around a flickering gas lamp, the back of his uniform bisected neatly down to his bowels. it was a cleaner end than bonnie’s had been, which would have been nearly unbearable, but for the pathetic expression he wore to his death. bonnie rolled her eye at the sight. she crawled on.
the demon that had wreaked such havoc in the city was nowhere to be seen. the same could not be said of the aftermath he left behind. still, if bonnie stopped and concentrated, she could smell him in the direction of the royal palace, where the prince had fallen while clutching his chest, allegedly the only untouched corpse in the entire city. she eyed the main street consideringly—she had strength enough, she estimated—but no. priorities. she’d been dead seven days already.
august, when bonnie finally found her, hidden beneath a half-collapsed wall by the library, was nearly unresponsive. her face was sunken in, her skin thin and cracked, heartbeat a weak shiver in her emaciated frame. bonnie took her ice-cold hands and watched her eyes flutter slowly open.
bonnie? she asked, her voice more an inaudible breath than a dried whisper.
well done on hanging on for so long, little freak, bonnie said fondly. how’s morality treating you now?
august ignored the question. the demon, she said, and when bonnie rolled her eye again, visibly, the pulpy mass of the ruined one on full display, added, in a matter-of-fact tone that never failed to piss bonnie off, blood.
bonnie shook her head. freak, she said again, even more fondly this time, and then she leaned over to press her mouth against august’s, even though her opened throat was right there. august had always been so precious about reciprocation, ever the stick-in-the-mud compared to her far more insidious royal brother, as though the obsession that drove bonnie ranked any less than the passion that drove her. even so, she pulled bonnie closer.
well, she tried. she had no arm muscle and no strength. bonnie understood her mind as always and snuggled close. august lapped like a dying kitten against the exposed muscle of her split lower lip, which was so very funny, for a human mortal who disdained such categorizations as ‘monster’ or ‘demon.’ bonnie couldn’t wait to present her with the demon’s head.
ah well. there would be time enough for it, now that she’d found august. time enough to persuade august, to kill the would-be god-king, to wander what remained of the world. bonnie patted her little princess’ head, looking down the road that would lead to the palace. too bad the old man hadn’t foreseen the two of them outliving him and his little prodigy. too bad she couldn’t have made her triumphant return before he and the prince croaked. but oh, it didn’t matter anymore. the demon would get what was coming to him.
she wrapped her arms gently around august and sighed happily to herself.