A/N: I blinked and more than half a year went by, and RE8 celebrated its first birthday since the last time I posted anything, lol. If anyone is still even following this at all, thanks so much for reading! I hope you enjoy this chapter!


Chapter 2

Without a timepiece, it'd been difficult to know how long had passed since Karl had left his factory gates. Hours, certainly, judging by how low the sun began to creep toward the tree line. He could tolerate the cold on most nights; he hated freezing his ass off, but it wasn't going to kill him.

But you, on the other hand, kid…

He peered at the little bundle, tucked in one arm as he used the other to keep his lapels folded over the infant. Not a peep from her the entire way, much to his surprise.

Enjoying your nap there? All cozy and warm. Damn bug.

A little smirk pulled on his lips. He'd been grateful for the lack of trouble, at least.

Karl looked up past the arboreal limits once again to see the hazy disc beginning to graze along the topmost of its foliage. Shit. Without shelter or food, this did not bode well. What the fuck was he even thinking here? And if he'd dared to be honest with himself, he couldn't have even been too certain of how well he might fare once evening fell, given his current condition. At the very least, it appeared that the cull had whittled down the roaming monstrosities along with their sacrifices, though he had no way of knowing how many of Redfield's operatives continued to sweep the area. Not a single one coincided upon his nomadic wayfaring, but the intervals of telltale ammunition that continued to rattle afar with the waning hours were a stark reminder of their lurking presence. He needed to be cautious. Any engagement would be a struggle in his current state.

Hidden beneath the snow, a jagged outcropping of stone caught the Lord unaware as the toe of his boot struck its edge. The weariness in his mind and body at last seemed to descend on him once he'd found himself unable to keep from stumbling to the ground.

Fuck—!

The hoarse groan that'd escaped his lungs misted in billows at his lips with each exhale as he labored to right himself back to his knees. With the press of his forearm thrown forward to break his fall, he rolled off his shoulder, now aching from the brunt of the impact. He glanced down at the bundle in his other arm—still undisturbed, to his unwitting relief.

Jesus, kid. You'd even sleep through a grenade blast, wouldn't you?

Karl chuckled in spite of himself. It'd come as an indubitable fact that the entirety of his factory's assembly floor going up in pieces would hardly stand to rouse him out of a good, hard nap. (An ill-chanced mishap he'd made certain to experience only ever once.)

Droll thoughts subsided, his attention descended again to the bleak circumstances at hand. He needed to be careful. Hostile engagement wouldn't just mean a struggle to come; it'd been a certain death sentence.

As though the Fates had come to conspire with Time itself against the wretched Lord, the crackling of snow beneath the distant cadence of footfalls roused his ears then, cutting across the eventide calm to bore into his very bones.

Fucking devil…

Karl clutched the infant closer in his good arm, open fist balling into the snow beneath him. Trickles of red tinted the ice in his grasp as his wounds left by the lycan's attack reopened. He listened on through the stillness. The steps had been too faint to be falling boots. Not Redfield's men, then. Good. Even stranger, though—they'd been far too light, as well, to belong to any of the cadou-ridden halfwits still skulking about. Then what…?

So tenuous in its sound, he turned his gaze just enough for a glimpse toward it past his shoulder. Karl's eyes narrowed at the approaching apparition seen against the misty grey. Donned in flowing black from head to toe. Too distinct, even among this colorless terrain, to be mistaken. The nerves beneath the Lord's skin seemed to calcify all at once, numbing him to his bones. His innards coiled. Blood and breath at a standstill. The entire framework of his being anchored solid where it lingered. Metal turned to glass.

How?

Just how could this be possible?

Donna Beneviento.

Alive.

The approaching figure seemed nearly ethereal, her graduated steps like plumes across the dead earth, shrouded amongst the drape of her long hems. Karl watched as her pace slowed—perhaps prompted by her hidden gaze beneath that veil coinciding with his own. The woman's silent presence always unsettled him. Faceless. Voiceless. Motionless. He'd always taken pride in being the one who'd been most privy to all the secrets in the room, even if most of them were his own. But that dollmaker? It'd always been an assumption that her reticence had been a mark of her simplicity. Never heard. Never noticed. Ever lingering there just against the walls behind the rest.

And yet, here she was now. Alive. And the rest of them dead. Just as hehad been. Had she, too, stood by in wait for this spectacle to play out to its finale? Just as he had intended? Had she truly been so perceptive? The knowing observer, soundly safe from within those unnoticed shadows?

Each of his compounding thoughts grew in their misgivings with each step of her approach. His nerves tensed ever more as those muted footfalls brought her nearer. What had she been but some animate shadow—without a face, without a voice—that had him so stricken by this inexplicable unease? The Lord sneered inwardly, scorning his own doubt and lapsing resolve.

Back on your fucking feet.

He drew the unstirring bundle in his arm closer as he turned toward the revenant. Strange how a second glance changes in perception. Still unreadable and soundless as ever, but how faint and frail she appeared to him now. That was all it'd been. He needed to stop being such a pathetic little shit already.

Each of the lady's ephemeral steps began to slow in their tracks before her entire being halted to grave stillness. Folded hands slowly unclasping. Veil hanging lower with the gentle tilt of her head. Her attention drawn by something that had caught her obscured gaze.

Wordlessly, those small alabaster hands reached forward from their sable cuffs. A solicitous gesture, but one that came far too swiftly across the discomposed Lord's guard. Karl threw his free arm between them as though to ward off an unwelcome ghost, only to see the apparition hasten to catch it. What could her intention have been, going for his injured hand like that? The sudden response triggered a visceral instinct within him, and he tore it away before immediately snatching her shoulder in its full grip. Bloodied fingers digging through the woolen cloth into the frail frame beneath it, he then gave a heaving shove with all his depleted might.

"Get the fuck away from me!" he roared, sending the small slip of a woman as far as he could from him.

Her impact with the frozen ground came hard from the sound of it, the stifled cry beneath her gasp of breath grazing at the barest fringes of his conscience once heard. He'd felt the grip of something close to remorse then, however fleeting. But the Lord's discerning wits regained its reason, harboring a stark reminder to heed—he had no idea what she was doing there. How she was even alive.

What did the dollmaker fucking want?

.

.

.

Get up. Get as far away as you can. Just go.

Donna felt her intermittent breaths hollowing out her lungs.

Stay out of sight.

The tempestuous drumming of her heart.

Go.

The paralyzing searing in her veins.

To what? To whom?

.

Always. The perpetual war between her two intuitions. Two faces. Two natures.

.

Where was she to go from here?

In her pensive daze, the dollmaker continued to linger where she lied, face numbing against the wet, frozen earth. The shock, the fear gripped her heart, urging those stagnant feet to go, flee, get away and stay unseen.

But there is nowhere else. There's no one else.

Everything rang. Everything stung. Her palms, her fingers digging into the dirt and gravel mingling beneath the ice. Her flesh beneath the modest layers that did little to ward the frost that enveloped it. And yet, she'd summoned the will to move that frail body. It was then that the sudden chill of the air upon her ears alerted her—the absence of the constant veil she'd never been without. The white of the unobscured environment had almost been blinding as she blinked, only spotting the smudge of black strewn several paces away where it'd been pulled from her head in the fall.

She sat motionless before the man whose hostility put her there in the dirt, senses numbed and back bared. Had it been a foolish lapse in judgment, or sheer ineptitude that left her so unwisely exposed and unguarded? Either way, she did not appear concerned, absorbed with an entirely other pressing conundrum upon her conscience. One that kept her attentions meandering, her hands slow to move, her being at a standstill at an unseen crossroad.

A choice

What was she to do?

The seconds dragged heavily through the thickened, unstirring air before her decision had been made, and those slight, alabaster hands scraped through the shallow snow for the silken hems of her fallen veil.

Some serrated sound sheared through the silence then, cutting straight to the idle Lord's ears.

What the fuck was she up to there?

Bearing all the bitter suspicion so natural to his instincts, Karl hadn't dared to move as he kept his narrowing vigilance on the woman. Lord Heisenberg was afraid of nothing, but he had the tact for caution when it served. The noises were drawn and sharp, like something…shredding?

Stark, wary eyes continued to follow as the dollmaker stumbled in a hobble trying to right herself against the ice and gravel, hand full with dark tatters dangling in her grasp as she faltered back around once again. And yet, the sight hardly compared to the glimpse he'd caught of her quivering gaze, her uncovered face now turned to him in full view. The haste in which she'd averted her glance did not escape his notice.

And there, loud against that skin as pale as her bare hands, he'd spotted the discoloration of contusions beneath her eye. The one good eye. It'd been enough to set upon the faintest traces of compunction quietly fermenting in the pit of his bowels. Had that resulted from his violence just now?

No.

The spotting of dried blood at her nostrils suggested otherwise. Her injuries had been sustained earlier than this. She, too, had seen her own share of trials, it'd appeared. Had that been the wrath of Winters as well? Karl wondered what punishment might have befallen the dollmaker in the man's warpath, but she'd steadfastly avoided the line of his probing gaze. Her reticence enduring. Her timid silence unchanged in its resolve, even without the aid of her covers to hide beneath.

It'd been difficult to tell from how fiercely her hesitant hands shook, even as she dared to inch her feeble steps closer. Had she been so reluctant to look his rage in the eyes? Or had it been shame for all those abuses she bore? The worst of such offenses lying unmistakably barefaced right in front of him—that hateful witch's 'gift.'

Without that veil, it'd been so obvious.

That woeful attempt at avoiding his scrutiny, as though simply averting her own sight from it would stop him from seeing. Like some child hiding from its monsters by crawling beneath the covers. All it does, instead, is welcome them all to stand by and wait.

But he was not the monster here—Miranda was.

Karl felt then, a familiar sense of pity resurfacing from his memory reserved for the frail woman. Some seemingly buried vestiges from before she'd ever even grown into one. With the images of the former Beneviento girl in mind, there had arisen too, some old, dead sentiment attached to them. One of those Karl had long learned to discard in order to endure. Let something else die in his place. He'll get to live to see another day, at least. Whatever it was, it'd been enough to unharden him just so.

He listened to those ambivalent footfalls that brought her to his side, so faint against the ice beneath each wavering step. She did not linger before lowering herself to her knees where he'd still been perched in the cold. Gaze still averted, she'd at least found focus, instead, in the red that stained his hand. She drew the torn appendage closer, her touch even more docile in its regard than before, as though to demonstrate her intentions in the absence of any voice.

Apprehensions quelling by the breaths, Karl watched then as she began wrapping one of the shreds of her veil's remains around his bleeding flesh. All in spite of his violent response to her proximity, she tasked herself with this diligently, touch so careful as to not further aggravate the open wound. It'd taken several wrappings, considering the near gossamer threads of the tattered thing. He'd bleed through them in no time, but they were better than the raw, open air, he supposed.

Even as she finished tending to him, Donna had spoken not a single word. Dared not even to look him in the eyes. She'd been close enough for Karl to see the visible breaths misting at her nostrils. Her poorly concealed efforts at hiding her trembling (as though the shaking of her hands hadn't been obvious enough.) No proper outerwear against the elements. Modest heels out in the terrain this far removed from the Village's most frequented paths. It was no surprise that she surely had been freezing. Again, the thought begged—what the hell was she doing out here?

The sight of that hesitant, trembling alabaster hand reaching forward halted the question upon his lips, gaze following warily its pathway toward him. No, toward the bundle clutched in his arm. She'd nearly flinched at his sudden response, an impulse as he suddenly drew away. Her gaze only coincided with his in a flicker before she tread closer once again–more gingerly this time, until those fair fingers found themselves grazing the face of the slumbering child in his hold.

Kid had slept through all of this, apparently. Plump little cherubic face completely undisturbed while the two wayward Lords hovered around her, looking worse for wear in their tatters and battered bodies. A calmer sigh escaped Karl's long withheld breath.

"You mind…taking her for a sec?" he voiced, all prior hostility shed from his hoarse tones.

A glance from Donna's lone good eye. She then silently reached with both hands to do as asked.

Her touch, as with any woman's, had come far more gently than his own ever could, and yet he'd still watched her with vigilance. Some instinct in him demanded her utmost care and caution with this task. He stared as she drew the bundle over her breast against her shoulder, like the kind of embrace he'd seen amongst some of the village mothers with their own infants. Another long grunt of a breath, and Karl heaved himself back to his feet, scooping his hat from the ground where it, too, had fallen from his earlier tumble.

"Where were you off to just then?" he questioned, fixing it back over his head. "Before stumbling into me here?" His voice trailed to hardly that of a murmur as he surveyed their surroundings.

Donna lingered where she'd sat, halted by his demand for an answer. By the time her silence drew his attention back toward her, she'd followed in rising to her feet. There'd been an economy to her movements by comparison to his own. A stillness. Grace, even. And with the child in her arms, silent as the grave like its handler, the dollmaker truly embodied the likeness of a haunting apparition indeed as she turned that singular, forlorn gaze low toward his boots.

"…Finding help."

A diminutive whisper that left his senses bewildered. So the lady ghost speaks. Even in such faintness, what clarity to behold of it, no longer dampened by that perpetual, smothering rag over her head. But the sparse words her breaths carried gave him pause. What a stupid notion, really. Was she serious? Karl narrowed his gaze with mordant amusement.

"Yeah? And I'm curious as to where you thought that was gonna come from," he derided, lips curling to a cynical little smirk. He gestured toward himself. "Big Brother?" The slow, disdainful tilt of his head followed, his humor's edge sharpened with his sneering intent. "…Or Mommy Dearest?"

Ah, a reaction.

Donna's gaze lifted at the very mention of that bitch, unflinching even as he matched it. It'd been difficult to decipher what had been conveyed in her countenance then. He'd only seen so little of it, knew so little to even hazard. But it'd been clear to him that it belied much beneath the surface, showing like a second skin, barely perceptible at such a distance. She looked uncertain, perhaps a bit troubled by the way her brow sloped, the way her lips grew taut. Even with one defective eye, he could swear that its still-functioning counterpart alone bore so much more in its depths than he'd ever seen of anyone else with a full working set. Something in him sank to see it, whatever it was.

"Miranda is dead."

Quiet as it'd come, there'd been something in the sound of that near-whispered utter, just as layered as her strange gaze. Might it have been a touch of sadness there he'd spotted? Or apprehension? Lament? He couldn't say for sure, let alone even guess for whom such sentiments she'd born. Such a realization he'd come to then at all. He didn't know a damn thing about this woman to make any reliable reading of what he could glean. It'd been unsettling. And he hated uncertainty.

With those words, so too had his faint sneer faded in the pass of the trailing breeze. The Lord's entire frame slackened, shoulders dropping as his arms grew heavy and limp at his sides. For that moment, his gaze only stared ahead at the lone other sharing that empty space. The dollmaker still had not shied away from it even then. Found her nerve, at last? He mused only briefly.

That pitiful waif? Hardly.

And still, she lingered. Patient. Waiting, perhaps? But for what? To see his response? To witness the rapture from within the depths of his soul at hearing this? To see how his unconscious body would dance, how his spirits would rejoice at this deliverance? Such news only archangels would herald upon this forsaken land. (And the dollmaker, thus, among such angels? He'd have laughed if it wouldn't have hurt so fucking much to. What a damned joke.)

And yet, Karl had offered none of these things. He hadn't felt any of it in his blood or his bones. It hadn't at all been as he'd imagined for so many long years. All the decades of his stolen life, simple as a heavy weight suddenly dissipated from his being. The iron ball pulling him down into the depths broken loose in a blink as he resurfaced. A merest breath.

A bitter one.

Ding-dong, the bitch is dead, huh?

Karl's presence returned within himself at last, blinking to see that excuse for a messenger still unmoved across the powdered expanse before him. Still watching as though expecting something, even if her insipid gaze showed nothing but her astounding haplessness. Another passing breeze cut across them then, enough to whip at her long skirts at her feet. He watched as she withdrew into herself from the onslaught, tugging the nearly forgotten bundle he'd entrusted to her closer against her breast.

So he, the Lord with nothing left, spared but only that embittering breath. It ought to have brought some semblance of quietude to his fractious soul. But it'd brought nothing. Nothing at all. He lowered his eyes away, gave a listless nod of the head.

Donna, ever silent, straightened in her sore and stinging joints once she heard the crunch of the pensive Lord's advancing boots. She shifted the tiny child once more in her arms, feeling the bitter, chill air scraping against her own bare skin. With a mumble of something inaudible to the sleeping thing, she tucked away the loose edges of her blanket to better shield her from the unforgiving elements. The other Lord brushed by, peripherally meeting her gaze only in passing before turning away again to trace across their surroundings. He'd remained soundless, listening for any stirrings in the air. When he'd found none, his eyes stopped on the western horizon just barely visible in the break of the treeline. The sun straddled the land and sky in its waning hours remaining over this earth, just beneath a shifting curtain into darkness above, where the faintest outline of a newly crescent moon began to take shape.

The thought eluded Karl's memory for only the moment, but he knew what lied beyond in that direction.

"…So," he spoke at last, turning to his lone companion. "Where are we off to, now?"


A/N: Donna-unveiled, finally! (...And in more ways than just one, lol.)

Thanks again to everyone who's read along. Please excuse my absolutely horrific pace with getting any updates out. It might be the tiniest fandom in RE existence, but I'll always root for Donnaberg, and I'll be damned if I can't even get far enough into this burning shipwreck to even GET to the Donnaberg, lol. (Yeah, this is going to be a slow-as-ALL-hell burn...whew.) I feel compelled to contribute even a tiny bit to what little content is already out there... ;u; Any reviews are much appreciated!

6-4-22