Warning: Sometimes, if you really, really try, you can unearth something beneath the ambiguity—and find spoilers. Sometimes.

A Stormy Mountainside
By Zaryenna

Sometimes you can mask it.

Smile, smile, laugh, smile, tease, joke, smile, smile, smile, laugh, run.

The rhythm would come unnaturally, but out of habit, and it wouldn't go away. It couldn't go away. If it did, that meant a whole other cascade of emotions looming at the top of a stormy mountainside. An avalanche that would come plummeting over their heads.

Run, run, run, fear, hide, cry, hate, run, run, run, sad.

The heart, the mask, the two-sided sword—the sword that could kill a girl and a heart all in one.

In the past, I would hide, and it would work, and it would work. Then two crimson eyes sought that something dark, and deep, and hideous. He worked day and night to find something he thought would be beautiful, when it was anything but beautiful. It was ugly.

I hated it.

He would hate it.

He should have hated me—but I feared the day he would. I feared the day he would find all there was to me, and I would have no shelter to hide behind, no smile to lie, no false truths, no excuses nor conveniences. He would strip me down to that cold, icy nothingness underneath, and he would leave me there, broken.

And I was scared.

Even though it should have happened.

He should have hated me, but I wanted to freeze, lying naked on the ground.

Say the truth with a smile.

And in the barren land, in the land, in the land of nothing, where things went so horribly wrong and broke beyond repair, I realized how little I had given this man credit for. I had hid and hid, thinking it would serve a purpose, and he, though touching the surface, would never see beneath.

And if he had, I would know, because he would have ran away, and hated me. And his growing care illuminated the darkness with every passing day. He couldn't have seen—

But he did.

He saw much more than I intended, he saw behind the mask, he left me lying on the ground, broken, but I still had my skin, and my clothes, and I still could hide, but he had seen that there was more.

Jarred back to reality.

Broken.

He should have hated me—but he didn't. I shouldn't have cared for him—but I did. One of us needed reason or else the truth would kill us all. So I hated him. He wasn't fooled. I could tell him I hated him, I could tell myself I hated him, but I didn't hate him—and hatred was impossible—inevitable, but impossible. And when something's impossible, it doesn't matter what fate says.

It's just impossible.

Ohayo, Kurogane.

To die, to escape—no, he threw those notions away. And I was left, broken and bloodied on the stormy mountainside, with nothing except the steely chain attaching my soul to his. And he would never let me break it.

And I would live upon others' pain.

With a smile, and no one else.

I smiled—

But it was empty—

I teased—

But never at Kurogane—

I was happy—

But in the end always lonely—

I was lonely—

But definitely had myself to blame—

They opened up to me. They saw my plight towards fire that would melt the ice. And I clung to a rope for dear life, just floating above that fiery chasm, waiting for the frayed part to snap. And they sat at the bottom, just waiting to catch me.

And I refused to let go, because they would see everything.

And they would not want to catch me anymore.

How do you melt ice encasing a heart—and save it—when the heart inside is already in pieces? How do you save all those pieces without burning the heart itself?

How do you put the pieces back together again?

Kurogane knew.

Sakura knew, Syaoran knew.

But I didn't—and I did not want to ask for help, because I was a curse. A guilty curse, missing another half to me. I was the other half, but I wasn't.

How do you put a puzzle back together, when you can't find half the pieces?

That's what I was, a broken heart. Maybe it wasn't the crimson-eyed man that had broken me. Maybe I had already been broken, and he had simply found me lying there. And I had seen through his eyes a reflection of myself, and thought—I hadn't been like this before.

But I had.

Maybe I never really alerted myself to Kurogane's blood seeping through my throat, or the way the Princess was falling down into an abyss that resembled mine terrifyingly so. Maybe I couldn't see that Syaoran felt unwanted, like a daughter to a father whose wife had just died.

Maybe I didn't care.

Selfishly.

Maybe no one could save me.

No one else will hear it.

But Kurogane did.

Kurogane hated smiles.

Kurogane hated my smiles.

Kurogane did not hate me.

Empty words.

No more.

I had been found, I had been saved. Rebuild a heart from scratch. That was how.

Sometimes you can mask the truth—say it with a smile, and no one else will hear.

Sometimes.