Author's Note: This is my headcanon. :) I think that a mutated Betty turned into Bubblegum, which is what this whole story centers on.
There will be five chapters. Critique? Ideas for future stories?
Warnings: Dark. Sort of.
Apocalypse kind of thing going on.
Some out-of-characterness for Bubblegum because you know, with this theory...
Bombs. Mentions of death/pain.
I don't own characters or poem.
Cold winter night
Star-fed sky, reaching upward
Like stairs, we climb
To a higher place–
Beyond where we normally go
-Don Iannone
Betty walks out of the rubble but crawls through the streets. Her legs hardly carry her anymore. She's never hurt so much, never felt so utterly sick. The snow falls around her and her hands are freezing through her soaked gloves, but she makes no move to stand. She wants to just let herself fall, to stop crawling, to stop trying, because it's finally happened.
They've dropped the bombs.
After so many years of school with terrified teachers and students at the prospect of war, it's finally happened. Betty never believed it when she was in school. She got worried when someone brought up the tension or how many bombs they had or have, but the idea seemed too far-fetched, too otherworldly to actually happen. The last bomb drop that she learned about had a horrible aftermath. How many had they dropped this time, here?
Betty keeps crawling. She'd been in the basement with all that stupid candy when it hit, thinking of Simon and wondering where he is now, and worrying about the horrible weather they'd been having over the past year or so. Above her, people were working happily with the machines, making the candy and stealing bits of it when they wanted to. Her sister was up there, laughing and dancing with her boyfriend during break, and then everything hit and everything went to hell.
She was kept downstairs with the candy and everyone else down there for hours, not realizing that the bombs weren't an air burst, that they hit, that they were all still in danger.
Betty knows she's a strong person. Her parents were never around and she had to take care of herself. She'd grown up knowing that. She's a survivor. So she keeps crawling.
Candy sticks to her – she has no idea how or why it's still there, clinging to her skin and hair. She doesn't remember much, all she remembers is her sister laughing, saying that she'd be back sometime later, the huge boom and the workers running downstairs to find Betty, standing terrified at the stairs with a few other workers. She remembers her decision to look for survivors, to get them to safety, to try and find something more (really, she was looking for her sister). She remembers everyone begging her to stay and pushing past the rubble to walk outside.
She could've been down there for hours or for minutes. Or for days. Moments. Years. She doesn't know.
She remembers falling to her knees and struggling to keep going.
Right now, she's still crawling, searching through layers of snow and ice for her sister – snow and ice that couldn't've been there if she'd only been in the basement for a few hours. Every inch of her is in pain, every vein screaming. Her stomach tumbles around and twice she's vomited. Her head feels like nails are being driven into it and ripped out with rusty nail removers. Her skin feels on fire and she desperately wants to stop, to give up. It wouldn't be so bad, to quit and just die.
Maybe Simon's dead. Maybe in heaven Simon isn't crazy. Maybe in heaven Simon was still himself, maybe he still loved her, maybe her sister was dead and there too. Betty's thoughts are twisted and tangled together, but still, she crawls forward.