out of the frying pan and into the —

Battler Ushiromiya is from a world where the truth is a weapon. You can run someone through with it like a sword. Like a spear.

So when he comes to standing at his podium at the Death Game Tour studio, he's not sure what aches more - the echoes of Lust clawing into him, as if her spears had splintered off inside him, or the weight of every memory he lost flooding him at once, and the terrible realization that comes with them.

When he lost his family as an entry fee, Gretel's barbs went from teasing to sincere, her irritation from fond to scathing. She stopped caring about him.

When Battler looks at Lust, his chest twists in pain, like he can feel the sinew separating to make room for a blade. But it's not just the ghost of his injury. It's something more.

Lust saw her sibling die. Her sibling who was in the Reaper's Game for her sake, who had been allowed to know about the larger gameboard when no other piece in Zaun had.

Except for Gretel.

It's so obvious now, Battler wants to grab himself by the shoulders and scream in red and blue and any color that would make him listen. The odd familiarity in her face (Kyrie's intense eyes, Rudolf's bastard smirk), the fact that she was permitted to wear the one-winged Eagle, the pink baubles in her hair.

He gave her those. It's a hazy memory, he can't remember when or why or how he got them, but he remembers that much, because he remembers her face as she accepted them, so much younger and brighter then.

It's with another stabbing pang that he realizes that was the face he wore when he saw Beato in the tunnels under Zaun. The short stature, the red pigtails, the simple dress -

He's going to be sick. Because if Lust became Envy, who unraveled like an orange peel in front of them, and if Viktor become Jayce, who laid dead and bleeding on a filthy bathroom floor, and he became Ange—

Ange is going to die. Gruesomely.

She'd managed to survive the Rokkenjima massacre, only to be dragged into the Host's instead.