Broken Bonds - A Piggy AU

Chapter 1- Store

"Brayden! Are you listening?"

The barrier range dragon blinked himself out of his memory. "Listening to what?"

Zizzy sighed. "We- me, Pony, and Mimi- are going to the store to look for batteries. I asked you if you want to come."

Brayden nodded. "Yeah, that'd be nice, but why are there so many of us coming?"

"Well, Mimi needs to come because she knows which batteries work on the radio. Pony hasn't been out in a while, and I'm coming just in case a swarm of infected happens to be there."

"Sounds good. Let's go."

The trip to the store was relatively normal. Mimi was able to find the right batteries, Zizzy protected the group from who seemed to have been the store owner before she got infected, and Pony found some cool stuff to take back to the safe place, like stuff for the kids, games, and candy. "I thought I said this excursion was solely for batteries." Zizzy remarked when Pony showed her the bag of stuff.

When they returned home, Giraffy was waiting for them.

But Brayden took one look at Giraffy's horrified expression and he knew something had happened.

"Guys-" Giraffy seemed to be at a loss for words. "J-just follow me. I don't want to put it into words."

Giraffy led the other members to the top floor of the safe place. Brayden could hear who he assumed was Georgie sobbing. With a shaking hand, Giraffy grasped the handle of the twins' room and opened the door.

The sight was truly worthy of Giraffy's reaction. Zuzy was sprawled out on the rug , her eyes wide and her mouth slightly open, clearly dead. There was a large dent on her forehead, and a clump of bruising. Since Brayden was a police officer, he deduced that she had been bludgeoned in the head with some sort of object until she died. Surprisingly, Brayden found himself having little emotion for Zuzy's death.

Maybe I'm just used to losing people by now.

Zizzy, meanwhile, was devastated. She crumpled to the ground onto her knees and broke down into a fit of sobbing. Brayden had never seen her like this before; Zizzy was usually very collected and in control of herself. I mean, it's understandable. That was her sister.

"H-how did this happen?" Mimi's voice shook as she spoke, glancing around the room as if she expected someone to pop out from behind some furniture and kill them all. Nobody proposed an answer. Pony knelt down to give Zizzy some comfort.

His detective instinct kicking in, Brayden began to look around the room for potential clues. There was hardly a sign of a struggle, nothing looked missing or out of place, aside from Zuzy's teddy which the head had been torn off from. That's not too odd, whoever killed her must have been an adult, so it would have been easy to take down an 8 year old. Wonder why her teddy's like that, though....

All the windows were closed inside the room. Must have been an inside attack, I didn't notice anything disturbed throughout the walk upstairs. He turned to look around the beds, and realized Zee had been sitting there, her facial expression looking empty, as if processing what happened, realizing her sister was gone forever.

"Zee, you didn't happen to see anything suspicious around the safe place, did you?"

Zee shook her head, her gaze turned to the floor, avoiding eye contact. Poor kid. Zuzy's been with her for her entire life, it must be horrible to lose a family member like that, especially a twin.

Brayden glanced under the beds, spotting an odd, brown, lumpy thing just beside Zee's bed, in plain sight.

It was Giraffy's club.