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You can feel the cobalt strands of hair roll off your palms like dust. Out of one eye, you can see that, though he’s dazed, he hasn’t had enough yet. Your other eye throbs relentlessly, joining all the other bruises and bleeding gashes mottling your body. They’re pulsing adrenaline with every shivering breath you take, begging you to get on your feet and escape—
—But you, too, have had far from enough.
You lift one leg and thrust your heel outward, hitting him in the abdomen. He grunts—allowing you to roll over onto your knees. Pain shoots up your right arm like a bolt in doing so, but you grit your teeth, using your working arm to push yourself up.
You briefly acknowledge that he must have broken the bones when he’d grabbed you by the arm and threw you to the ground. You had grabbed onto his head in return when he leaned in close with that trademark scowl of his. And then you were caught in a tug of war, which ended with your back still on the ground and him furiously rubbing his left temple where there was more hair before.
No—the arm wasn't broken; he'd just dislocated it from your shoulder. Whatever, you decide. You’re left-handed anyway.
So you lunge at him with unhinged abandon, focusing every last drop of will in your being into clawing his eyes out. Your fingernails rake across his face—you can feel you've ripped into the wet flesh once, but not twice—it’s enough to make him stagger backwards, snarling.
For a moment, you consider retrieving your sword. It’s still there a little ways away, knocked out of your hand not very long ago. Too risky. Ragnell is also there, since you’d slashed at his grip and made him drop the weapon first. You glower.
Why hadn’t you brought anything else with you today? Not even your shield?
He throws a fist at you and you duck, slamming headfirst into him. He loses his balance, causing you two to fall to the dirt again, but you cannot let your guard down; soon, he is pushing back with all of his energy. Your strengths are locked into a wrestle, again—you blindly dig your nails where your hand has already constricted around his throat, and he’s struggling to rip you from him. You don't intend to choke him; at the very least, you won’t choke him this time. You’ve tried to on multiple occasions before, and you've never found success to be all that pleasing to you.
Instead, you close the distance between his eyes and yours. He’s sneering at you, and you growl lividly back at him, wanting to take the inferno raging through you and to set it all upon this single soul.
It’s a burning desire only meant for him to feel.
Suddenly you two are yanked apart by a disembodied energy—the chastising words are gruff, but they blur into muffled hums as the rush of energy finally drains from your body.
You blink your good eye slowly. Marth is there, in front of you, and he doesn’t look all that surprised.
You croak out a greeting, only half-sarcastic. He, having known you for all these years, only responds with his usual “hey,” arching his eyebrow at you. You find the rest of you is paralyzed while you’re floating in the air; the prince must have brought Mewtwo with him again. You say that your legs are still kind of okay, in a kind of begrudgingly pleading manner. Marth takes the hint, albeit he looks like he didn't want to, and he tells Mewtwo to release his telekinetic hold.
The prince has your sword, along with your cap, which makes you furrow your eyebrows—you don’t recall when it had fallen off—but you take both of them, coughing out a thanks, and then the two of you are off and plodding over the grass, leaving a trail ending in a scene littered with blood and bits of skin.
You look behind you, especially at him. Mewtwo is floating over him, glowing pink. He does that whenever he begins nursing wounded individuals back to health—It wouldn’t be too difficult, since all fighters registered under the professional leagues were already infused with accelerated regenerative abilities. Both you and he would heal, and then life would continue for some unnamed number of days.
Then somehow, your path would cross with his, just as it had a few moments ago—just as it had an infinite number of times before now.
You don’t know when you are going to involve yourself like this again, but there are two things you're sure of: that you had unfinished business, and that meeting Ike was always an inescapable reality.
White paint is plastered over the walls like a poor excuse at an apology: We’re sorry you have to suffer here. Please look at these monotonous walls for hours on end. In actuality, they’re clean—pristine, even—but in your years of experiencing all kinds of bodily injury, you’ve spent countless days staring at these same walls. You’re almost desperate to tear them down, but you yawn instead, pretending you’re armed with a paintbrush against the dullness, becoming the kind of world hero you have always wished you could be.
The daydream is so enthralling, so real, that the evil Dr. Mario’s voice sounds as if he were standing right in front to you—then you quickly realize he is. You clear your throat, even though you clearly had no reason to, and you assure the short man that you’re fine. The doctor simply informs you that Zelda is coming at the end of the day to take you home, and you watch him leave with a bouncy gait and a cheeky kind of whistle you’ve grown used to. Then you're left with the low whirr of the radiation machine below you, wafting out a constant flow of healing energy. Besides that, you have nothing else to distract you from the white walls, except your thoughts.
You hope Zelda isn’t going to chew you out when she sees your mangled form, but your heart sinks when faced with the probability that, like the sister figure she is, she will give you a talking-to, and your only counters are attempts to assert yourself (You should’ve been there—he was being—there's no way I can—he’s just so…).
All your energy has been spent already, so you end up deciding to go along with her today. Anything you do would be pointless; she’s much, much better at arguing than you’ll ever be. It’s just something in her nature.
The light thud, thud sound of footsteps echoes in the distance, and your spirits leap tremendously. “Howd’ya do,” you say in a mock accent when you feel you are within earshot.
“Well, I just got back from visiting Ike,” Marth replies, his voice in its usual charismatic swing. He strolls in casually through the doorway. “I think this is the first time you’ve torn his eyeball open. One point for you.” You shudder visibly, lifting your working arm to cover your face. You tell him that sounds gross, and Marth shrugs. “I’m just saying.” He studies the hologram monitor above you for a few seconds. “You think they’ll let you go before next Wednesday’s match?”
“Relax. I'll be out in a few hours,” you tell him, “but I think I still have two or three detentions to serve.” You sound like you’re joking, but the prince knows just as well as you do that you aren’t. He doesn't reprimand or question you for it, either, because this kind of situation has occurred many times before. You've also told him you don’t particularly mind the extended hiatus from smash matches, since you preferred to joke around with the other entrants rather than fight them.
Marth laughs, but only a little. “You’re lucky you decided to pick a fight outside official property. You two looked like you were going to rip each other’s heads off.” You let out a long breath, remarking that Ike actually had ripped your head off once in an actual match—or, at least, he twisted your head so strongly, so sharply, you blacked out instantly. Marth tells you he remembers it a little too well.
“I might rip my own head off if I stay here any longer,” you groan. To help alleviate your boredom, you and your friend talk for an hour—rumors you're surprised you didn’t know, future predictions for the fourth Rostering—and then you're left with the ghost of Marth's presence.
You stare at the ceiling, wishing you could see the orange tint of the clouds. You’d been briefly reminded of the many times you’ve caused Ike’s gruesome demise, which happened just as frequently as him causing yours. You once sliced him open, almost reveling in the sound of twisting his insides this way and that with your blade, watching him writhe as the light slowly faded from him. The aftermath left you a little more than horrified with yourself, and you never attempted that again, but the image, along with many others, remains vivid and relivable in your memory.
If smashers had the option of dying for good, you and Ike might have never indulged in killing each other at all. Instead, your existence has been filled with the cycle of death and rebirth, and it is a fact set in stone that your existence will continue as long as space and time allow. You and he have fought purely for the sake of bloodshed, each encounter having anywhere from days to months between them, every clash ending with a clear winner. You grew to hate the smugness that came over him while he dealt the final blow, and also to enjoy basking in the presence of his fading consciousness.
Such fatal fights were kept far beyond the eyes of the officials, though, and no one would ever suspect you to ever kill anyone, except the few who had already known. The general community of smashers only were aware that you and Ike were never allowed to be in the same match; this ban had only been lifted months ago. You'd learned to feign a rivalry in the eyes of the public, but, in reality, Ike could never be someone so easy to describe as a rival.
You would never trust your rival with your life, and you never expected you would trust Ike, but to give all of your fury, your pain, and your hatred, you also needed to give yourself.
You can remember the first time you struck him, too, and you can also remember making sure he was painfully aware of all the desires you had for revenge. You’re still not sure who the fault falls on more, since he’d been taunting you relentlessly for a while before that fateful day happened. You’d thought you would get him back by giving him a taste of his own medicine, since the two of you were going to be in the same four-way match for the first time.
You would have been satisfied with winning against him then, but he’d been especially caustic during preparatory hours, and you weren’t in the best of moods. You’d stood up to him easily, threatening him before, but this was the first time you made physical, voluntary contact: you landed an uppercut to his chin.
He yelled—you could see the blood from where he’d bit his tongue—and the rest of what happened is lost to history, but you know you two had to be forced apart as bloody messes before you both got the slip that disqualified smashers from entering tournaments for a couple of weeks. It would be the first of many slips, but that was when you swore you would make his life a living hell, and you glared at him with hatred in your soul. You'd locked gazes with him, and his eyes burned holes into your skull. Then he swore the same for you.
You’re sure you set that old sentiment to rest—you were over it in a few days—but every time you saw Ike, the same kind of fire ignited again in the pit of your stomach. You could always see it in his eyes, too: a wild rush that, for some reason, made him fight back with just as much vigor as you had passion.
Your passion only lasts for so long, though, and time and time again you've considered leaving him alone; if you had, you wouldn’t be feeling like rotting away in a white cotton bed right now, waiting for the light-rail ride home.
—But no one else has brought you closer to exhilaration.
No one else has given you the sensation of being on the threshold of death, the thrill of unrestrained valor against valor. No one else has his life in your hands, and no one else your life in theirs.
You are a match, and he is gasoline. He is a moth and you are a flame.
The feeling is mutual: there’s an almost childish curiosity that continues to ask, “How close can you get? How much heat can you withstand?” You want to keep burning; he wants to keep fueling the fire. You have no obligations. You simply, willingly meet his storm with a lightning rod, and you feel alive.
The leaves crackle against one another in the nighttime breeze. It hasn’t rained in a while, but the crickets are singing tonight, and you can see the moon as a small sliver of pale gold against the sky. You’re sitting on the front step to your door—it's a large platform riveted into the hollowed tree that is your home. Your legs dangle over the edge while you watch the grass ripple in the wind several feet below you, and you decide you want to rest under the stars for a while.
Zelda had much to say when she arrived. You’d started to drown it out, as usual, but the word “palace” caught your attention, and you realized you got into a scuffle mere days before the annual banquet that was to be held in Princess Peach’s castle. “Not like this!” she'd said. “You'll be half purple by then!” You then told her you’d try to speed the healing yourself, and she regarded you skeptically, but she ceased from chiding you after that.
You were able to put your ribs back together from where they stuck out from your chest at odd angles, and you can see out of both eyes again. You run your hand over your right arm—it’ll be fine in just a few minutes. The self-mending feels like a warm hum against your being, and you feel at one with nature for now, perfectly content being connected to the world this way. Self-regeneration, while developed to heal every kind of fatal injury, runs independently, like heartbeats. However, just as one can hasten or stall heartbeats, you know one can also bend the healing to his or her desires. You’ve sustained enough injuries to have ample practice.
Even though there are times when time must reign over willpower, you’re confident enough to let the mystical energy ebb and flow through you now, mending the blood clots and reattaching muscles to bones.
You feel a painless pop in your right shoulder, and you try moving the once-broken limb outwards. It feels new, risen from the ashes. You sigh, relieved you won’t have to worry about sleeping the wrong way. Folding your arms, you shiver against a sudden breeze against your skin. You’re only wearing a simple shirt and pants at the moment, since your regular clothes got sent out to get fixed again. You’ve had better sensations before—the kind that makes your skin tingle with anticipation rather than cold or fear.
It happened somewhere, some time ago—you don’t know how much time, but the details never bothered you anyway. You left a night party you found to be overwhelmingly boring, but not without having your fill of the beer keg. Drinking was heavily regulated during match season, but the few months of vacation were a time for uninhibited, sometimes feral, gatherings. You were only beginning to build your tolerance at the time, so you weren’t exactly sure where your legs were taking you when you began to move. You only passed exit after exit in the numb hopes of happening upon grass instead of linoleum. Perhaps you shouldn't have had so much of the heavy stuff, but it was too late to do anything about it now.
It was dark on the other side of one particular door you entered, and you thought you’d reached outside. Then you tripped over a pillow on the floor, and you realized you hadn’t. You woke someone up, to make things worse, and you could hear the bed in front of you creak as they rolled over. A sudden flash of light caused you to stumble backwards, rubbing your eyes.
A voice said your name. Even in your daze, you recognized it, and it made you stop dead in your tracks. You blinked feverishly, adjusting to the lamp light, and then at the person in front of you, and words instantly rolled from your mouth in questions and somewhat pointed remarks. You had happened to walk into the same room where Ike was.
You could see that Ike’s eyes were red, and he was swaying from where he was sitting; he must have wanted to sleep through his drunkenness. You turned around to leave without so much as an excuse, or you thought you did, because the next moment you found you’d fallen palms first into the rickety mattress. Ike was benevolent enough to shove you off, growling at you to go bother someone else. You were on the floor then, and he was looking down at you from over the edge. His glare was softer, you remember, probably from the alcohol, and you looked at his half-lidded eyes even as you crawled to the wall to help yourself up.
You stood there in bemused silence. Was it your drunken stupor making you too lazy to leave, or did you really want to stay here with Ike?
Then you opened your mouth again. “You know, you look kind of lonely.” You didn’t have the sensibility to regret the unfiltered words, but they’d already been said and heard. Yet another thing that only reversing time could fix.
Ike stared at you in response. “What the hell is that supposed to mean?” His question had come out slurred, but he lowered his brows at you as if expecting an answer. You hadn’t even the slightest idea of what to say. What could you say?
Maybe it was your lack of judgement that gave you freedom, but, regardless, you knew what your emotions wanted to do. You don't think you ever really knew what you thought about it, but you know that thinking would have stopped you.
You chose to feel. In the quiet, you acted, since words left your brain a while ago. You walked toward him with wavering steps, and he watched you warily until it dawned on him that your face was suddenly mere inches from his. For the first time, you saw his features up close unmarred, not swollen, and inexplicably magnetizing, and the world stopped, holding its breath, waiting for the slightest movement.
You barely acknowledged that Ike moved towards you first, even if it was just a little, but you fell forward, and he held you aloft with his palm in the rise and fall of your chest—you ran your thumb over his collarbone, with your open mouth hovering directly above his parted lips. He'd brought his arm upwards, and he brushed some of your hair aside with a tentative hand—you were tracing the contours of his visage with your eyes—and then you kissed him.
A heavy burden left you at once, and the world heaved a sigh, relieved to turn once more. All the blood that had rushed to your head began to swirl round your heart, beating faster with every push into the mattress and creak of the springs.
You broke away, and his irises were quivering, as if he were on the verge of saying something to you. You remember that you were about to mutter some kind of apology, using your hazy state as an excuse—then Ike reached out to you. He was silent as you felt him pull you forward again, shuddering into the the touch of your fingers following the creases of his shoulders. And you, in a blur of action and feeling, stretched across the bedsheets, and the room was dark once more.
You and he did nothing other than fool around with close coupling that night, but all else was forsaken and still except for the low murmurs and quiet sighs that came from that unassuming bed.
Every encounter after that fluctuated between making war and making love—either way, you both preferred to leave as many marks as possible—and you had the notion that the concept was supposed to be complicated to understand. It wasn’t, for you, but to explain the reasoning was another challenge: you'd never developed a crush or found Ike to be that attractive, which was the way most people started becoming intimate.
Even now, you and he don't meet like most people. Perhaps it began as a raw fascination—or maybe you’d been suppressing something that made itself known whenever your body settled into his, in encounters only known to the whispers of the night.
You were fine accepting him, whichever way the emotions surfaced, and that surprised you, even though you always welcomed change over stagnancy. But the fire burning in Ike’s eyes was the same whether his hands were wrapping tightly around your neck or running tenderly down your chest. You had no doubts he was fine accepting you, too.
So you met him with even more passion than you ever had before: for the both of you, tucked into every fist was a kiss, battering with hate and strengthening with love.
You don’t stir when the shadows move out of the corner of your eye, gently rustling some of the underbrush with the quiet plods of boots in the grass. You tend to be more passive on occasions like this. You continue to watch him from above as he plants himself unceremoniously on a large, mossy rock; you figure that you can reach him in less than fifteen seconds, so you’re in no rush to do anything if an idea ever strikes you.
Ike, too, is not in his usual outfit—you recall having soiled much of it earlier. He’s hunched forward a little, his elbows resting on his knees and his hands clasped together; he appears to be deep in thought, and his azure gaze is, for once, not at you, but sweeping over the forest surrounding the two of you. The trees grow as a tall and verdant army, broken only by the lone path leading to the clearing around your house.
He doesn't seem to care about being in plain sight. There are rare instances when he comes here to share a moment of quiet—not to speak, not to touch—only to watch the clouds roll overhead, and to drink in the sweet nectar of the moment where you both are at peace.
You press your palms into the wood where you are sitting, pondering over the possibilities. You think about finishing what you started this morning—you could take your bow and nock the arrow that could so easily sever the veins in his throat, or you might go over there unarmed and simply send your boot crashing into his face. You could also just give him the middle finger and head inside to where your bed is waiting. Or, better yet, you could do all of those in a row. Everything you ever wanted to do, you can do, and it wouldn't be enough to keep you from crossing paths with him again; this kind of bond you've forged with him, while ever changing, would not fade.
You decide you’ve had enough injuries for a few weeks. You'll snipe him the next time he incites you into anger. You don’t feel like pushing yourself, anyway; you'd rather lie down next to him under the stars that watched earth from above. Then you'd climb on top of him, place your lips on his cheek, pull down at his collar and bite down on the exposed skin ever so lightly—you'd fill him with your love, giving as much as you received, and you both would temporarily reconcile the vendetta, close all the wounds—
—You’ve done all of that before, and you’ll have forever to do everything again, saying nothing of the countless other things you can do at this very moment that will have you both colliding into each other, for better or for worse.
The minutes pass, and then you call out to him, causing Ike to lift his head. Your eyes meet his for the first time since his arrival here.
“What?” he calls back.
“Goodnight,” you repeat.
You linger in his presence for a few more moments. Tonight, it feels warm, and you savor it. Then, without another word, you turn around and disappear inside. You leave a single streak of blue running over the floorboards of your house, brightest near the door that you’ve consciously kept ajar. It’s been your established way of telling Ike he has a choice—to slide into the sheets beside you, pour poison into your ear, or to do nothing at all, perhaps. You don’t really care what he does as long as he means it, so you sleep soundly.
One day you might not feel so inclined to fight him to the death so often, and you’ll finally settle your unaging spirit and body. For now, you feel the turning dance of fire in your soul, and there are two things you’re sure of: that you, following your name, will find your life linked his to again and again, and that, no matter how many times you meet, you and Ike will always be unfinished business.