Work Text:
Bonesaw had been alone for six months now - the woman in the suit's message occupied her thoughts, her dreams, and she could imagine Jack’s disappointed stare; he would awaken and know, and he’d slice through her carefully modified bones remorselessly. He would know she had disobeyed him, refused to enter stasis, and in the process she had thought so many things. Done so many stupid things.
Traitor. Riley. Bonesaw. Breadth. Depth.
The clones were growing nicely. The were aesthetically perfect - her art was still her pride, even as she was. (Was her art hers? Or was it her passenger’s?) But truly, what good was it to make art if there was no one to see it? There were two-hundred and some total, people growing in vats and connecting to shards that would make them more powerful than any of their real counterparts.
She didn’t know why she didn’t think of them as real. They were just as solid and human as the people from which they were grown. But she made them, their memories were falsified; they had never really lived, and they would never exist besides to fight. They would never want anything besides destruction.
Riley had wanted other things, once. Bonesaw had only wanted to show off her work. It almost scared Riley, now, what she had become.
She didn’t know why she was scared. She enjoyed what she’d done, engineering viruses and poisons and releasing them with a guileless glee. Cutting people up and changing their faces to use them as decoys. But was it Riley, who enjoyed it? Was it Riley, or that tiny little piece in the back of her brain that gave her all her powers? Was it Riley or Bonesaw?
She needed approval. She needed a parent, an audience, something. She had never felt so painfully and truly alone. She watched the clones mature at an accelerated pace, made Blasto sing until he died, and watched the rest of the Nine - her family - lie asleep in stasis, all while she struggled to maintain her conviction.
Breadth. Depth. Bonesaw, Riley, passenger, host; lonely artist, lonely little girl.
She would have to retard her growth to make them believe she had put herself in stasis. She knew, she knew, that Jack would see right through her. She was afraid of what would happen when he did. She just wanted her life back - her regular life, where she was Bonesaw, passenger and host the same, and she had her family; the Siberian still lived, Jack still sliced through crowds, smiling - people saw her work and they were afraid. She couldn’t remember her mother’s face, she didn’t want to remember her screams.
She didn’t know who she was any more, much less what she wanted. But it wasn’t this. It wasn’t this.
She was sitting in front of the computer, deep in thought; she’d been here for a long time. Hours? Days? Blasto laid across the room, unmoving, decay staved off only by her modifications. Jack unconscious eyes fell on her, even as he rested in stasis. They had none of the warmth they usually reserved for her - he was bad, he was terrible, but so was she. They were the same; they had always been. He praised her, and kept her entertained; he was always delighted with her work. He was her father figure.
She was the baby of the group. She was a cold-blooded murderer. She was a good girl. She was a supervillain.
Be a good girl, Riley.
The cognitive dissonance was startling.
“Golly gosh darn ding darn, drat, fuck!”
She wasn’t a good girl. She hadn’t been a good girl for a long time. Her mother and father and brother and cat were dead, and they had been for six years, because she was just too tired to fix them again. Hundreds, thousands of people were dead, because she had been bored and they were convenient.
Breadth. Depth. She had always been in the eye of the hurricane that was the Slaughterhouse Nine. She killed people for fun and then snuggled up with Jack or the Siberian or Burnscar because she couldn’t sleep.
It was ironic, she thought. She was having this crisis now, hair dyed black and deep bags under her eyes from staying up late tinkering with the clones, looking more evil than she ever really had.
She would never betray the Nine. She loved them. But she didn’t really know who she was, so who was to say she was allowed love? Was it her, really her, who loved them? She supposed she couldn’t say it wasn’t - even if it was Bonesaw, and not Riley, that so adored the Nine, it was still her. She was more Bonesaw than Riley.
Riley was just clinging on to life.
The clock was ticking down to the moment her family would wake up. She didn’t know who she’d be by then.
She hardly felt like she knew anything anymore.