>Pepper: Attempt another Kris <3< Belona fic.

When Belona wakes up, she finds herself face-to-face with an uncomfortably familiar smirk. A finger flicks her nose, followed by a high-pitched cackle.

"Well, well! Look who's finally up!"

Her hands dart down to her belt but grasps nothing but air. Kris Randall taps her forehead, her smirk growing wider by the second. "Nope! First and only rule of the game, bitch. No weapons. Wouldn't want you to kill me when we finally fall into each others' passionate, hateful embrace!"

Belona gnashes her fangs, fists tightening. But try as she might she could not move. She looks down the best she can and sees that a thin sheet of ice has coated her armor.

"Let. Me. Go."

"Only if you promise to remember!"

And just like that, she turns tail and springs down the path, her gleeful and mocking laughter ringing through the air. Belona doesn't give a shit about this stupid, humiliating game that the xeno set up; all she wants to do is to twist that scrawny, frail neck until she wrings out all the heretical blood out of it. She roars, and charges after her.

Down the path goes, winding around a familiar castle hive (hers? No, no time to think, had to find and catch and CRUSH that xeno insect) and into a forest. In her rage, however, she neglected to notice the sudden and copious amounts of swamp water. She fell in, gurgling. The world flashes blue and--

--and for the briefest of moments she catches a glimpse of a blue sky, a checkered battlefield splotches with red, the looming shadow of a gargantuan, tentacled demon with breath of fire--

--and she feels someone jerk her by the collar of her robe. She sprawls onto the floor, coughing and sputtering, rough carpet pressing against her cheek. Through blurry vision, she could see strange yet familiar figurines, old FLARPing armor that she had outgrown sweeps ago, mingled with stuffed earth beasts with bulging button eyes.

Then Kris's cheerful voice pipes out, breaking her thoughts. "Tsk, tsk! You really should be more careful! We don't know what would've happened if you drowned!"

She lashes out, aiming for her throat, but the xeno is quicker than her and dodges out of the way. She dances almost lazily around the troll, her voice sing-songy. "Is that the best you can do? I'm so disappointed! You gotta do better if you wanna keep this hatemance up~"

"I don't hate you that way!" she screams. She makes another lunge but Kris sidesteps.

"Missed me again! You're really bad at this, aren't you?"

A chair is overturned and splintered beneath her armored feet. Belona punches and punches again, each one more wild than the last. Kris leads her out the door, dodging her punches with a practiced ease, laughing and taunting all the while.

She turns a sharp corner, and just like that, the xeno is gone. Nostrils flaring like a bull, Belona glares at her surroundings, scanning for her target.

"Over heeeeeere!" rings out that peevish voice. Kris waves from the entrance of a cave, casually resting against a slab of fallen rock. She hops off and ducks into the cave, just as Belona make your way down the hill.

She barely registers the fact that the stones look strangely like her, or the fact that the cave looks very, very much like a yawning mouth of a certain troll. Gravel flies everywhere as she punches her way through hanging stalagtites, roaring like a madwoman. Eventually, she finds herself at an open clearing, with Kris standing dramatically upon a tall rock, holding up a troll skull.

"Alas, poor Corbin! I knew her well; a bitch of infinite idiocy, of most masculine build."

Belona's enraged scream echoes through the cave, rattling loose pebbles. Nimbly, the pink xeno leaps off the rock just as Belona crashes through it. Kris sticks out her tongue and cackles. "You're gonna have to do a lot better than that, Bologna!"

A clumsily thrown punch misses and slams through a wall instead, revealing a bloody yellow eye.

Cracks explode through the cave, tearing through the roof and walls. The ground shudders and heaves and gapes open its maw, allowing Belona to catch a glimpse three discs (green pink and grey) before a torrent of skulls spew from its bottomless pits.

Belona throws her hands up in a desperate attempt to stop the deluge, but cloth is not the best material to anchor a troll down. With little effort she is swept away--

--by a brusque hand to the side. She begins to protest but her superior does not hear her as he faces the creature himself, a hideous and shark-like grin slicing through his face that never leaves, even as his guts spill onto the field in a purple pile--

--by the tide of bones, deeper and deeper into the cave until she's falling, down down down a waterfall of skulls.

She kicks and struggles and gasps, finally surfacing to a large room. The fireplace crackles, sending flickering shadows dancing against the walls. A stuffed hopbeast fixes her with a frozen, orange eye, buckteeth bared in a grimace. A little behind it is Kris, leaning against the wall, cut and bruised from the skulls though she still chuckles. Belona pushes herself up, feels sharp shards of bone dig into her palms. She freezes as she gazes down at the skull below her.

It is hers.

Looking around, she feels sick as she recognizes her tiny horns dotting each and every skull. Kris catches her gaze and giggles. "You finally getting the picture, bitch?"

Her skulls crush beneath her boots as she slams the human against the wall. Still, Kris smirks, and as Belona tightens her fists she realizes that the human WANTED this. Though she was bruised and bleeding, she wouldn't. Stop. Smirking.

(But wasn't there something infuriatingly attractive about that fragile little face--? No! She was a xeno, a filthy xeno, a lesser creature who whipped her blood into a boiling frenzy so badly that it was hard to think straight through the haze of blue--)

"Whatcha waiting for, Bologna?" Kris sings out. "Punch my pretty little face in."

And her grip tightens up a notch as she imagines that stupid smirk becoming nothing but a red smear. Kris chokes, but still she manages to grin and bear it and Belona can't take one more goddamn second of that smile--

It's the most painful kiss she's ever given. She bites down, hard, tasting iron and warmth as her lips mash against the xeno's, fingers digging in deep. The human tenses, if only for a fleeting second, but she complies with a bite of her own. Kris's hands rise up to her head, clutches and yanks at the coarse troll's hair. They stay that way for what seems to be forever before finally Belona pulls away, gasping for breath as her face and tongue burns.

"You suck at kissing," she says, but her red face says otherwise.

"The truth, human scum. Give me it."

"Hah! You still don't remember? You ARE dumb."

Belona stares into Kris's blank, unyielding eyes. Grey, brown, and red begin to blur into a rapid splatter. Something warm runs down her neck. Gingerly, Belona touches it. Her fingers come away smudged with blue.

Then everything comes back in a flood. Images flash through her eyes: black carapaced monsters, hordes of them everywhere metal against then under skin, pressure pain gurgled scream blue blue everywhere until finally at last she quietly drowned in the sea of color rising to her eyes and sunk into a void.

"Any bells ringing in that small head of yours?" Kris is now beside her. Red and yellow patches bloom on her skin, ringed by frost. Outside the windows, darkness swallows the last vestiges of green and pink light.

Realization hits Belona, and her hands tremble. "I'm stuck here with you," she spits, and Kris claps her hands. They crack like brittle stone.

"Congrats! Little Bologna finally figured it out! And come on," she adds, impishly grinning, "is it really that bad? We have an eternity of sloppy, hateful makeouts to look forward to!"

A skull slams into Kris's face. She yelps and stumbles back, cupping her frozen hands around her broken nose. When Belona advances Kris punches her. Down they went, punching and screeching until they eventually end up sitting against the wall, Kris clutching Belona's broken fingers as they watch the darkness outside swirl.