You both eat when no one's around most of the time. You've been ruined by the limelight- this is the most attention some of these people will ever get, but if people crowd a room enough you can still feel the camera flashes, hear the unimportant journalist questions who weren't watching the screens. That's your reason, anyway. You've certainly thought it to death because you're waiting to justify yourself to her and the words she never says to you.

Not that a lot hasn't been heard of her, but you know more about what the ghosts of my past do any given day than you do the only other person in the cafeteria at midnight. Clearly if she's here she's not taking on some black hat of the day for a quick buck. For that matter, neither are you, but you reckon she doesn't drive a racecar while doing it. At least, for as much as you know- you don't know jack shit about these people, and for those that do know you that's not surprising.

Trying to figure people out, that's the fun part.

She's a little more than a drinking game, though.

You count and she's six tables away- assuming the airtight little speck of blue and blonde is her. It has been a couple of weeks now, and when you drink enough things get blurrier than usual anyways. You assume it's her because it's almost like having an actual friend and not a hundred acquaintances who all know your name too easily- your stage name, at least.

Doesn't mean you have any actual words if she were to come up to you.

Though if you know anything about you, and if she's actually like you, she'll keep to herself.

Still, one more drink of the one piss-poor beer they have in the kitchen fridges makes you feel a little funny. You cross yourself with a smirk, hoping it's not making you too frisky. People crack about how into whips she is but you have a feeling you'd rather not find out, even as too many men and a decent handful of the women have already filled out the vague blur you know in ways that dictate interest for you. You think for a second- not the best move this late and even a millimeter away from sober- and move to pick up the sandwich you're eating.

You have it up like a dipshit waiting for someone to eat it for you for a good twenty seconds before you set it down with a clunk, mumbling an obscenity. You notice the speck in the distance, one you're not entirely sure isn't another Kirby costume, jolt at the sound. Even a whisper travels a thousand miles in empty space, you reason. You tilt your head as if you're any clearer to her than she is to you, and she resumes eating.

You sit there and wait until she's finished up, leaving her plate there and exiting out the door nearest to her. You notice the door next to you, one that hasn't been used since you walked in here, and leave the sandwich and drink half-finished on the table. You leave the same way you came in, and every step feels like you've gone nowhere at all.

~MoD~

You pride yourself on your pragmatism, even if it's for stupid reasons. Sure, you bottomed out towards the end of the tournament at a solid fourteenth, and despite searching the deepest depths of your heart for about twenty seconds afterward, could not find a solitary fuck to give. Fourteenth is sure as hell better than your first week rinsing last tournament, which many of those acquaintances have been sure to hassle you about. Plus, it's a nice payout, so you got what you came here for- enough money to give you more moments of shut-the-fuck-up time, time so peaceful and solitary you can't even remember your own voice.

Still, you find it a little bit fishy that the most you've felt all week has been when she won her match against Ness, who also ended his run with you. The two of you have been here all four years, and you like the kid more than most of the goons here, so it's a little sad that you found profit in his loss, but hell he placed higher than you anyways so he can have the last laugh. Opportunity awaits, however, in that your first thought hearing the news from the "nesting room" you lounge in before and after matches was that you at least had something to say to her.

Not that you're not perfectly aware how bass-ackwards this is. Counting your checks before they're cashed to get some alone time, and the most excited you get is getting to talk to a pretty woman you have literally never interacted with. The acquaintances you know have become the voice in your mind asking which brain you're thinking with, but the thought doesn't leave your mind even as you carry in a plate of highly disappointing reheated pizza from the kitchen and look for a place to set.

There are far too many people in a place once meant for twelve elite, so suitably there are twelve large tables fit for the population of an elementary school. She is one seat on one of those tables. You have no justification to sit next to her, but you do it anyways, not once looking at her as you stake your claim only a few feet down.

Though they may as well be inches.

Your little conversation starter stays on your tongue, underneath the pizza you don't have an actual appetite for. You're observing her out of the corner of your eye, now that she's not a blob. She's gracious enough to not run the fuck away like you would, and continues eating, but if she doesn't feel your haphazard attempts at subtlety as you take her in, then she's not a bounty hunter, because you sure as hell can feel the sideways glances and something in between discomfort and curiosity. A few feet away from another person and the energy is like the two of you are under each other's skin.

It'd feel utterly discomforting were it not for the empathy factor.

Hopefully that's why she hasn't left either.

You forget whatever insipid conversation you meant to have and instead finish eating. It's so quiet that you can hear the electricity buzzing out of the lights, but you're so trained in the small details that you make nothing of it. Once you finish, you look over to see if she's done. She's not, so you do the gentlemanly thing and wait. You notice with a speck of hope that she hasn't hurried even though you know she's seen your empty plate.

Somewhere along the line, you stop thinking, and you let the moment ride.

When you get up to leave, you chance a look back, even though you should know better. She's gathering her dirty dishes- opting not to leave them for disgruntled busboys- and stops for a moment to meet your gaze. You're not far enough away to only see a haze, but you can't tell if she's smiling or not.

You are, though.

You're still smiling the next evening when she picks a seat next to you.

~MoD~

Two months used to go by as fast as the Blue Falcon on a straightaway, but what two months used to be feels like two minutes in the span of the days that go by. You've never made sense to most people who can't separate the character and the actor, the most notorious of those being yourself, but even this doesn't add up to you. For all you crave a few moments on the edge of the earth being alone, you haven't put two and two together as to why you're so eager to surround yourself with a crowd.

Then you have dinner with her and you feel as close to the edge as you've ever gotten. By the time you leave, jumping isn't a bad idea, because somehow those minutes feel like the split second the tournaments used to zoom by like.

Meanwhile, by day you're checking the tournament results and are baffled you're barely edging towards the final eight, like poison slowly leaving the bloodstream. You're out of the tournament. They can't keep you forcibly, because it's not like the world doesn't know you ate shit to Sheik just like half of the other tournament goers. You're having to face that you're staying there for a reason, and it's a ridiculous one at that.

It doesn't feel so ridiculous together. Sure, anyone else wouldn't give you grief. She has a reputation of being untouchable- the object of a million fantasies and the woman of no one's realities. You wouldn't bother if you were thinking with your other head, so it's deeper than that. It's how you feel her analyze the situation in the way that's a mystery to anyone but you, a fellow hunter. It's the measurement of every move. The mutually agreed upon silence. The way the distance decreases by a few inches every day, split between both sides, and yet both of you are so coy and unaccustomed to being even this close that you look like dating Freshmen who don't know if your parents would see you holding hands.

The fact that you two are so similar kind of scares the shit out of you, but it makes things make a little more sense. Neither of you really intend to be in this situation, but if it's gotta be anyone, this is a good place to start.

The night before the Final Eight is decided, she gives a quick farewell on her way out, and you smile back, tired enough to believe it was a dream. Then you wake up, and on a tack outside your wooden door are two pieces of printer paper- one, the flyer to a local bar you've unsurprisingly never heard of until now, and the other a very specific online printout of the city map, with carefully highlighted directions with an admirable appreciation for detail.

The same highlight notches in a definitive time you're too aware with: 12:00am.

Things are more real than ever, but you're still smiling.

~MoD~

You've thought this through too much. You're certainly not going to arrive late, but you'd be worse off arriving early. Don't wanna look as desperate as you feel. Though if you were really paying attention to detail, you'd have picked something a little different than a red sweater, your one good pair of jeans, and a newsboy cap to cover up that disastrous, unkempt brown hair you never do anything with anyways. Still, you're getting damn near close to finished justifying yourself to yourself, so at 11:57 in the evening, you're in the bar.

She's there waiting for you, and immediately you feel underdressed enough to be wearing a wife-beater and beer-stained bermuda shorts, even as comfortable casual as you look. She's got a smooth shirt as blue as her suit draped off of her shoulders where her hair rests free of a ponytail, and a tight, fine pair of black jeans, though if she's ever worn anything aside from her Varia and Zero suits you haven't seen it- until now. Your helmets are at home- now it's time to actually get to know each other.

Even though separately both of you order drinks, the first few minutes are ever the same, only you both have a shitty late night host on the overhead TV to pretend to be interested in. You reach for your drink about fifteen about the hour and take the last drink too quickly, belching a little back up. Before you even have a picosecond to reserve for shame, she slaps you in the shoulder, shirt, floating around her, and lets out a short laugh- not the response you remotely expected, or from the looks of it, she remotely expected to give.

She apologizes and you shake your head, wiping your mouth with amusement. Whatever you had before, it was never formal, but it was never quite this close. Either way, the taste of whiskey is bold enough to make you hungry for anything fried and dead enough to cleanse your palette, so you order the first advertiser of the night, plans to split it in mind.

Words finally become a little more routine as she snaps an onion ring from the tray, briefly thanking you with a small tilt of the head that knocks her hair a little unkempt. When she absentmindedly wipes a hand on her jeans, you don't say anything, because you've probably done it a few times already.

Finally, she admits that she got the outfit from Rosalina, as if that were anything to be embarrassed about to the point where it's worth withholding. A little self-effacing humor about your own mediocre self-styling, and she fires back that of all people, you shouldn't worry about self-stylizing. She's smirking, but her eyes are sincere, and it's because she knows she's right.

It's not a new thought, but despite the performances and the helmet and the pyrotechnics and all of the glitz and glamor you bring to your performances, you've never felt more far removed from it all. From the speed, from the adrenaline, from the character. It's pleasant.

Suddenly, the two of you can't talk fast enough. You talk about your clothes, the tournament, the television, the food- any and everything except yourselves. Maybe it's because that's the one part that made sense all along.

You don't check the clock- or the drink count- until somehow the two of you have said everything that doesn't matter, and are edging towards the door. You feel bleary and tired, but content in just how messy that feels. The night air slaps you in the face, but it's comforting, to the point where you don't notice the hand reaching towards the back of your shoulders until she's touched her.

You look at her- face to face, for possibly the first really worthwhile time- and she smiles. It's a good look on her. You figure you should try it yourself more often.

She's the one to reach up for the kiss, but you're the one who kisses her like you thought she'd never ask. Whatever few feet separated you before certainly aren't there now, nor are the inches, and you don't even think to count the moments. You kiss her like she's on her way to evaporating, even though this is as real as things have felt in awhile. It's messy and desperate, but it's really the only way either of you know how.

You never think once that you've scored the untouchable. You just feel nice having been worth it for someone else.

She lets you go sometime later, though for all you know the sun might be rising soon, and suddenly things are a lot calmer. She's still smiling, and she's as red as your sweater, but she's regained the composition you knew her for. She waves goodbye as quietly as the two of you entered. You read it as charming, as a nice farewell, because somehow your body hasn't braced you for the idea that things didn't mean to her that they did for you.

~MoD~

You suddenly exist again in the first Final Eight fight, an hour long spectacle with three four-stock matches where she faces off against Fox McCloud, who's a pretty standup man in general. In some reality where you weren't you, you'd give the entire tournament payout to end up as Fox before anyone else.

You've never rooted harder against anyone in your life. Those sixty-four minutes and three seconds have a near heart attack in every third minute. When she finally lands the last hit on him, you leap out of your seat and cheer, surprising a few of your peers in the box with you. Damn that from final eight on, there's a small retention bracket giving someone a second chance- this may as well have been the end of a goddamn war.

At one moment after your spectacle, both light and dark Pit exchange a look, the Dark one reeling off an impressed expletive in your honor. You never quite pieced together the idea of you two being visible, but you take a little pride in it.

You don't bother waiting for her in the nesting room- somehow you doubt she'd show up, and you certainly doubt she missed your presence. You decide to wait until midnight to finally tell her, this time sincerely meaning it, that she fought an excellent fight.

She never shows.

It's baffling to you, and the entire time you spend stealing glances at the door and slowly nibbling away at your food, but eventually you drink both beers and leave. Of all nights to not show up, you'd buy this one, so you don't think much of it.

The next night, however, is far more worrying in its solitude.

The excuses pour from your brain to whispers under your breath when the anxiety starts making your gut clench up, that feeling of danger you're too attuned to. You try not to think about it, like she could read your desperation from three halls away, even though you never see her. Sometimes you feel a set of eyes on you, feel the mood in a room change, like guns are about to be drawn. You swerve to see if it's her, but no one's there.

You try once setting a note with the same tack she left offering a little bit of fighting practice down in the training room. You never see that tack again, and wait in the room for hours kicking the shit out of sandbags that don't matter anymore. The next you hear from or about her is when you hear the news that Sheik knocked her into the retention bracket in two matches out of the given three, and your heart sinks. You don't know what to say anymore, or if you even should. You can barely stand to broach the subject.

That night, she is there when you show, but you know it isn't what you'd hoped. It isn't melancholy, it isn't hopeful, it isn't even hostile. It's a situation you've only known in the worst of times but you sense it so strongly from her- panic. A situation where all that matters is a way out.

Before you've even been in there for ten seconds, she's dashed to the door, leaving whatever food she was eating there- from the looks of it, a protein shake. You might have heard an apology in the air, but you assume you made it up. You suddenly don't have much of a stomach anymore either, so you leave too, and you never try again.

~MoD~

You re-examine everything you did in all of your vacant moments during the next day or two, trying to figure out where the panic came from. It doesn't take much to assume anything- you changed into something you're not sure you really were until you set curious eyes onto her. Someone close. Someone open. Someone intense. Someone dangerous. Every sweet moment, every inch crossed, every moment of that one and only kiss, plays over and over in your head like you'd expect, only now you can hear the horror strings behind it. Now you've assumed her fear.

Tournament stuff happens, and you start eating in the afternoons instead. You pretend you care what others have to say, but you never really care. Just like you didn't a short few weeks ago, you resume that distance. The quiet was a lot more comforting anyways, and all you hear from other people is white noise. It's as close as you've gotten to the edge of the Earth since you've gotten here, and at this point you'll never hear the end if you storm out now, so you hibernate.

One afternoon, you see a more tolerable face walk in- Rosalina. She says nothing to you, nothing to anyone really. She looks exhausted, and for once, close to her impressive age. Her steps are slow, defeated, cautious against herself, like they've already failed her. These are things you're used to from yourself on a bad day, but never from Rosalina, who has been an untouchable, regal mother hen to all since she set foot into her first tournament. Today, she's wearing what she leant Samus, which on Rosalina are easily comfort clothes.

More compelled than you should be, you stand up. Others notice your movement, including Mario. Hat loosely hanging from a sweat-drenched head, he explains that the final four's already wrapped up and the final two has been decided, with the retention bracket ending today as well. He explains that Rosalina had made the final round, over Mario's own head (you don't miss the twinge of pride in his voice as he mentions his defeat to his friend).

You ask if she made it out, and very matter-of-factly, as if you really should have known this already, he mentions that Samus demolished her in the final retention round and she's in the final two now. Suddenly, Samus' clothes look like rags of mourning on someone you knew was her friend.

You wince on Rosa's behalf, but Mario says not to worry about it, apparently still convinced you and Samus became an item. You ask if you can help Rosalina in any way, but Mario insists that his friend shouldn't become your concern. He bids you farewell before you can respond, which is probably for the best. You sit back down with your whatever-it-doesn't-matter-now, and watch him walk to Rosalina. He's talkative at first, but she doesn't bite. Instead, as she absently browses through the available baked goods, he watches her, always supportive for such a grand star. Only occasionally do you see conversation between them, and every time, the room feels a touch lighter, like a curtain being drawn up a pull at a time.

You don't know why that makes you feel better, but it does.

~MoD~

The day of the last match feels the same as the days going in. You don't think of her that often at all, possibly out of aversion from whatever feelings that might evoke. Instead, you decide that since you're probably leaving for home that day, back into the crowds you spent your time here avoiding clumsily, you may as well eat breakfast in the cafeteria anyways. Absently, a little sadly, you notice she isn't here either, even though Sheik- full getup and everything- is fielding conversations with more than a few people, most of which seem not even tangentially related to her.

She's got every reason to be confident; being the only finalist not eliminated from the tournament, she's the odds on favorite. Still, it's more than that- she might be the happiest to be there out of anyone. Not just to play, but to talk with others, to be there. You assume that even if she ended up axed early, she'd still be here.

She's crazy, but she's good.

You grab the local newspaper; go figure everything's about the tournament you're already too involved with given that the final Sheik/Samus match, the tournament decider, is today. You try to read past every instance of Samus' name, instead getting used to the Sheik victory you feel is impending through her elegant interviews and social grace you can only dream of.

She won't be a half-bad queen of the hill at all.

Eventually, the news about Samus is all that's left, so you settle on her interview, expecting a passable read that, like probably most things in her life here, has nothing to do with you. Still, it's tempting to read everything with a double meaning that could attain to you, if you even made that much of an impression on her.

A few lines deep into the interview, she's asked how she gets ready for an important fight. She says her life is all about getting ready. She gives her all for all every fight, not just those important to her. It's all she thinks about, and everything else gets too volatile if it isn't related to the mission. Her terminology isn't that of a game, it's a hunt. It's a mission she's involved with despite herself, where failure may as well be death. She describes it with the shell-shock that not even the most dire moments of hunting gives you.

She hunts nothing like you do, and when you realize that she isn't as much like you as you assumed from the first moments you interacted, everything makes sense.

~MoD~

You're in the box for the final fight. When Sheik gets the last kill, you don't react with the visceral reaction of the Fox fight. You shake your head with disappointment, rooting for the underdog as much as the fastest racer alive can despite the newspapers and interactions and the life you've fallen into here. Everyone else cheers around you, and you can already see people rushing to file out, making a visible beeline towards the hallway leading to Sheik's nesting room. You get up, resigned to joining them, though you hope no one brought celebratory alcohol or Sheik probably won't be drinking any- if she even touches mortal drink.

Still, you're passed up by many of the fallen fighters passing by you, either to leave the premises altogether or worm into the winner's celebration. Even Rosalina passes by to the left, with Mario just behind. You watch the room empty out, hand on your hip, wry amused smile on your face.

Something tells you you've found as much about Sheik out as you really need to.

You take a deep breath, embarrassed at yourself, and take the hallway to the right, towards Samus' perennially empty nesting room.

The words on your mind are infinite, and this time they matter. They're words you don't dare to say yet, if at all, but the ones that come easy to you are the same times that come easy every time. This time, they matter too.

She's slumped against a black leather couch in exhaustion. She doesn't look emotional, just drained, like someone who failed a job they worked for months on. Her zero suit makes her look more gaunt than you'd ever noticed, and her plasma whip is in her hand, like she's still waiting for someone to tell her to get up. It feels like death, and it knocks your heart into your throat, but thankfully none of the stupider words leak out.

She meets your gaze, and you force a smile. Suddenly, it's a small touch brighter. You have no clue what's to follow, or why now is a good time to speak, but you do it anyways, because you've put yourself through too much not to try, not to hit the beginning or conclusion you laid out for yourself. Anything real is something to trust.

Regardless, after all the exhaustion she put herself through, she deserves someone else's faith in her second.

For the first time since you met, you tell her good game.