wroughtandtempered | heart game

As you touch it—

You’re filled with spite, vicious and angry— the sort of feeling that would lead one caught in a trap to chew through their own leg to get free, as much to deny the hunter as it would be to survive. ...But as the feeling fades, you’re left feeling a little warmer.

Will you stoke the fire? It feeds on the self; you'll have to give up something that makes you you, however small.

Angry, vicious, desperate. He knows these feelings. They are a part of him he doesn't like. Eve seems to know anger a whole lot. Okay. So spite and self. Not a fun combination. He knows immediately if he gave up something here, someone would notice. They would notice right away. If it was big enough, it wouldn't be gone forever but it would be gone for a while. Until it came back.

He'll think on that for now. He wonders if the mirror will work. If they can find the last piece. MK goes looking at the trinkets now, checking them over on the bookshelf.

With the exception of the lacquer box on the bottom shelf, they're all too burnt to make out what they might have been.

Damn. No go there. Alright. He touches the lacquer box and sees if he can open it.

It opens easily, though something about the twisting patterns on the outside is vaguely unsettling.

The box is lined in red silk, which cushions a number of small trinkets. There’s a coin; a large diamond; a shard of something glittering but covered with dried blood (an icicle?); a lump of metal, shot through with some sort of impurity; and a clump of burrs.

Underneath some of the other items is the last shard of mirror, gleaming brightly in the light.

"Alright MK. You got this. Just need the shard." He takes a deep breath and goes for the glittering object covered in dried blood first.

You remember—

Darkness. Screaming. The sound of stone crumbling and the howl of wind— fighting the leaden weight in your limbs and the cotton in your head and stumbling to your feet, swaying. The whole world swaying dizzily with you as you drag yourself for the door—

It nearly hits you as it slams inward, and oh. Everything is so much louder now. You can smell blood, and bitter cold over the hospital smells of drugs and antiseptics, and—

—the whole fucking roof abruptly peels off.

You see— Gale?

(Fellow hybrid; occasionally sweet, mostly awkward; bitterly tired and carrying the blatant marks of abuse, just as you all did in different ways— you’d liked him, maybe had a crush on him—)

But— at the same time it’s him, it’s not. He’s grown huge, monstrous— it might just be the drugs but you think you can see something in his forehead, something that both draws and repels you at the same time.

You can hear him scream.

Ice races over every surface away from him, and— you bolt, mind blank with panic. You have to get out. You have to get out, there’s rubble and blood and quickly-freezing bodies everywhere and if you stop for even a second you’ll be one of them, but you are so fucking tired— but you have to— you can’t die here like this—

MK shivered as the terror and panic surge through him. Underpinned by that sadness of seeing someone you cared about become something else, something worse. And ice. Always fucking ice. MK swallows as he gently moves to set the icicle aside. He clears his throat and rubs his eyes. Okay. That was bad. At least he went with that one first.

"That had to be hard for you. I'm sorry about Gale," MK says softly then he grabs the large diamond.

You remember—

Ed scratching your ears, surprisingly gentle despite his rough hands. Bone-deep weariness; less bone-deep frustration. You’d lost the last game—dying in a torrent of glass, falling into nothing—but. You’d learned something from it, you think.

(That people could be kind, even when the situation pushed hard for cruelty. That maybe you don’t have to bite first. That going hard is a good way to get fucked over— fucking thank you for that, Balthier.)

—and yet, somehow, Ed doesn’t agree.

“We lost because we didn't have the stomach to see it through,” he says, and you’re so fucking stunned by his stupidity (so fucking enraged that he’d spit on what mercy you’d been offered) that your mind goes blank.

You could have gone as hard as Balthier wanted— could have hurt just for the sake of hurting, and you still would have lost, and what fucking point would there have been. You could have pulled a Rabbit and gone entirely overkill—painfully murdered every other team that challenged you—and sure, your team might have won, but at what cost?

What fucking point would there be to keeping your soul intact if you’re just going to throw away what makes you you?

But that’s an argument you can’t make—he’s made it blatantly obvious he doesn’t give a single flying fuck about that—so you try to go for reason. You have to live with the other teams, does he not see how fucking up relationships with them would be a shitty fucking idea—?

…apparently not. Apparently fucking not, and worse, he thinks it’s about being popular, not being fucking iced out of every resource you’ll need to live (the way you’ve been iced out of every barter and trade you’ve tried for years), and you lose your fucking mind.

"You get what you take,” he spits, and you find yourself grinning. He wants you to take what you want? Fine. You’ll take it, all right— out of his fucking skin—

...With those two trinkets shifted, you can get at the mirror without bumping anything else.

MK shivers at the memory. Kindness and torment turned into something else. Something ugly. But maybe a lesson that does kind of work. No one gets what they deserve, they get what they take. Or maybe also give. You can give too, give people what they deserve. Give the people who deserve it happiness and help. Give punishment to those who deserve it too.

Gently he picks up the last part of the mirror, ready for the pain.

You pick up the shard of mirror.

Instantly, pain slices through your fingers— but when you look there’s no sign of blood. Instead, you can hear Eve’s voice, faintly:

“Who am I? ...Is this all I am?”

"I think everyone asks themselves that, sometimes." MK responds. He puts the mirror back together and finally looks into the reflection again.

The last piece slides home and the last remaining cracks vanish. As they do, the reflection in the mirror ripples and becomes whole, the smoky haze obscuring the details vanishing.

In the cleared reflection, you can see Eve’s room— but the futon with its myriad pillows and blankets has been shoved out of the corner, revealing a stone trap door underneath.

"Whoa! Magic mirror!" That was cool! Maybe that was where the thing hurting her was. Time to try and move that futon. He'll ask Rinku for help too.

Rinku gets off the futon to pull it over, looking concerned at MK.

"MK-san, look! The blankets are actually warm, you gotta try it! ...Are you okay? Did something hurt you again?"

"Warm blankets? Okay, that's good. We gotta move the futon though. It has a trap door under it. I think that might be where the thing hurting Eve is. Can you help me move it?" MK is excited and clearly impatient all at the same time.

"Okay! Come on, let's go!"

Rinku nods excitedly and shoves the futon to try and move it out of the way. She'll stop to rearrange any pillows that fall over.

"I put the pillows in a circle. Maybe that'll cheer Eve-chan up more! Oh, right!"

Once they've gotten the futon to where they need it, Rinku takes off the crocheted blanket and drapes it over MK instead, with all its warmth and laughter. She shifts again and flies up to perch on his shoulder.

They moved the futon and MK blinked. He felt the warmth and laughter in the blanket and laughed himself. He nodded at Rinku on his shoulder.

"Let's do this," He moved down to knock on the stone trap door then try to open it.

Knocking does nothing, but it's easy enough to open once the leather straps holding it down are undone.

heart game - MK, rinku

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