Well.
This is extremely unfortunate.
She's not quite sure how it happened, really. How she let it be opened. The box in her heart. She did it up with locks upon locks. Protected it with a legion of demons spawned from her hatred. Hid it away where no one could find it.
But then he did.
Find it.
Tsuruga. His name might as well be a verb. It would carry the meaning of all the little things he had to do to wheedle his way to where the box was. Like fate. Like this was always going to happen.
Like he planned it.
And he may as well have. From the very beginning he did everything right to lead to just exactly this occurrence.
She had hated him, at the beginning. Immediately and with passion. That should have been an early warning sign. That she so easily gave him a piece of her heart, even in anger, should have immediately tipped her off to the fact that the guy was dangerous. But she was comfortable with the hatred and didn't think anything of it. Stupid girl that she was.
So she let it creep up on her. The admiration. The hero-worship. The borderline obsession with pleasing him. It started off with fear, which was comfortable like the hatred. She was afraid of his power and his anger and the things that they could do to her and to her plans of revenge. And then, once she worked her way past that (for her vengeance, of course), she found that she could admire his work ethic. And his ability. Realized she could learn from him. At the time it was like a light going on, that watching and learning from him could possibly lead to something truly brilliant.
Now she wishes that she had stayed away. Wishes that she could have possibly stayed away. Knows that she couldn't have.
Because this was always going to happen. The box was always going to open. There was no way to avoid it, really. Once he started mattering (even in the beginning, he'd mattered. Someone has to matter in order for you to be able to hate them) the ball started rolling, moving toward the box with unerring accuracy.
Moving toward her heart.
Unlocking chains with unexpected moments of sincerity and astonishingly gentle smiles that she would have never thought possible from a man that she had, at one point, hated so much.
It doesn't matter how many times she winds the chains or how many locks she puts around it or how many demons she uses to guard those locks and those chains- with a single look he undoes it all.
And it's terrifying.
She's drowning in it. In the fear of how much it's going to hurt when he leaves. Because he will. Because if there is anything that she has learned it is that she is a plain, boring, stupid woman, with nothing but love on her mind, and no matter how much you love and no matter how much of yourself you pour into another person, no one wants to stick around for that.
For her.
She holds Corn up to the light and watches him flash, her pain momentarily receding with the color change. Then she clutches him to her chest.
And cries.
