Disclaimer: Nintendo won't give you copyrights because you don't own Nintendo, Nintendo owns you. Same goes for the song, 'My Life' by JJ.

Characters: This is a drabble circulating around Blue, the 'pesky' girl from the manga (Oh Green you love her quit being in denial .) Also, Silver from the manga, not the games, is featured.

Summary: As said above, this is a drabble about Blue. She's a young girl here, still under the control of the Mask of Ice. And I think…I think I sprinkled some unintentional Blue X Silver in here as well. Oh, well.

Clockwork

~I'm grindin' until I'm tired

They say you ain't grindin' until you die

So I'm grindin' with my eyes wide

Lookin' to find a way through the day

A life of the night~

Blue's earliest memory is of her mother's music box, and the tiny clockwork ballerina that it had housed.

It had been a beautiful little thing, with copious brown hair framing a face with no expression and arms raised high above its head. One white-clad foot had been lifted, and around and around it would twirl, the happy melody that accompanied it acting as its dance partner.

Blue is that ballerina now.

"Dance," Pryce rasps. He leans forward in his wheelchair, eyes alive with terrible anticipation. "Dance for me."

Blue stands on the makeshift stage, dressed in a Lolita dress that hugs her body too tightly. Her straight brown hair frames a face that tries to have no expression, and even as Karen snickers she raises her arms low above her head.

"Dance," Silver says in a whisper that her metal ears can't hear, begging her for both their sakes.

So she dances.

She closes her eyes against the haunting melody, and lifts one black-clad foot. Dip and sway, bend and twirl; dip and sway, bend and twirl. She's a puppet on an icy string, jerky and lifeless. Dip and sway, bend and twirl; dip and sway, bend and twirl.

Pryce is nodding his head. "You can take her to the market, and make her perform," he says to Karen. "While the audience is distracted you can get the boy to pickpocket for some extra cash."

Dip and sway, bend and twirl. She feels like she's a robot, only able to move when she's plugged into the wall socket of commands.

"And what if someone tries to steal her away?" Karen asks with a smile.

"Let them," is Pryce's reply. "She's too young to be any use to me yet, and is easily replaced."

Blue opens her eyes in time to see Silver flinch and shake his head at the statement. He is a doll not managed by the puppetmaster, Blue reflects; he is one that yanks back on the strings, but can't find the willpower to tie them into knots.

Dip and sway, bend and twirl. If it wasn't for Silver she would be a doll with no batteries. He had programmed her to be bad instead of evil; he makes her function, makes the clockwork heart she hides within keep tick-tick-ticking even though rubber-gloved hands keep pestering her to let them take it apart.

He is who she dances for.

"You can stop now," Pryce finally tells Blue, even as the melody continues to try and waltz with her. She wants to keep dancing with the music, to keep moving on her own accord if only for a few more seconds. She wants to sing along to that flesh-and-bone song as she dances; she wants to pull Silver up to dance with her, to rip off the mask that conceals his face and see him smile a smile that melts off the layer of plastic that she's wrapped herself in.

She dips and sways, bends and twirls. She lifts her chin high. She opens her mouth to defy, to scream at Pryce and Karen and every other member of the Mask of Ice, and-

And then she drops down in a bow, and the tiny clockwork ballerina waits for someone to wind her back up again.

~Dear Lord it took so many of my people

I'm just wondering why you haven't taken my life

What the hell am I doin' right?

What the hell am I doin' right?~