"The Plushie of Power"

Two never let go of the Four plushie.

Not out of love, out of spite.

It was misshapen, cheap, and clearly handmade, like someone had stitched it together in a fit of desperation. One eye hung loose. The stuffing was uneven. But to Two, it was perfect for one thing: abuse practice.

He kicked it across the floor. Threw it into walls. Punched it until its seams popped. It became his daily ritual, a private therapy of vengeance, aimed at someone he could no longer reach.

“Stupid Four,” he muttered, slamming it into the ground. “I hope you feel this.”

Each strike was a memory. A grudge. A reminder that Four had always taken the spotlight, the attention, the control. And Two? Forgotten. Left behind. Reduced to this.

But something changed.

One day, after another round of tearing at the plushie’s neck, the room flickered.

At first, he thought the light was shorting out. But then it pulsed from inside him. Like a heartbeat, but wrong.

He froze, clutching the plush mid-swing.

His hands trembled.

A thin blue line etched itself across his arms, slicing down to his fingertips like cracks in a porcelain doll. His number 2 flickered on his chest, then split into jagged pieces, rearranging into something colder. Sharper.

X.

“No. No, no, no.” he staggered backward, dropping the plushie.

His voice broke into static as his limbs stiffened. His face twisted, then flattened. Color bled from his body. His identity, his memories everything that made him Two began to fold in on itself, collapsing into code, into silence, into nothing.

And then

X opened his eyes.

The air was still.

He stood in the center of the room, unfamiliar and calm, like he’d always been there.

He took one step forward and almost tripped on something soft. He looked down and saw it: the Four plushie, worn and beaten, lying on the ground.

He picked it up gently.

Held it in both hands.

Stared at it for a long time.

There was no anger. No hatred. Just… silence. Curiosity. Something deeper. Something he couldn’t name.

He turned it over, cradling it in the crook of his arm.

For some reason, it made him feel safe.

Comforted.

Whole.

He didn’t know that once, this plush had been the object of someone’s rage. He didn’t know it had been torn apart again and again by hands that once belonged to him.

Because X was not Two.

Not anymore.

And yet, in the plush’s worn seams, the faintest threads of Two’s soul remained. Not the anger. Not the hatred.

Just the lonely, broken part.

And now, X carried it with care.

Not because he remembered.

But because he couldn’t bear to be without it.