Friends With Benefits | Chishiya x Reader

Chapter Fifteen

☆ In which you wish that certain people would use their eyes properly. ☆

"Game: Masquerade. Seven of Hearts.

"The time limit for the game will be 1 hour. There is one among you who bleeds white blood, masquerading as a player. If you find them within the time limit, it will be game clear. 

"The game will begin now."

Smooth orchestral music begins to flow from unseen speakers, violins rolling over the tension that has just descended upon the room. You sigh. 

How very anticlimactic. 

The solution to the game is very simple, really, and you are confident you could clear it without needing the allotted one hour. The game has no business being a Seven. It seems like Chishiya knows it too, leaned against the wall in a show of boredom. 

You are sure that the instructions, presented as half-riddle-half-directions, are only phrased that way to confuse the masses. No one will bleed white blood. You are not even sure if it's medically possible for a person to bleed white blood. But if you really had to look at it in a metaphorical sense, you could say white blood means the outlier. Someone who is different to the rest, who bleeds white instead of red.

Even without the ambiguous interpretation of that first line, the rest of the instructions literally tells you there is one person hiding amongst the players, meant to try and prevent the game from being cleared. So the aim of the game is to find the Dealer, or whatever the people employed by the Game Master are called. A master always has subordinates, no? So all you need to do is to identify the Dealer. 

A simple game of observe and conclude.

While everyone shoots shifty glances at each other, you take this opportunity to survey the players. There are about ten people in the room; four from the Beach - you, Chishiya, the scarred Spades player, and a Clubs girl you'd never seen before today - and six strangers. So there are six players left to suspect - a girl who looks about the age of a high schooler, a woman with a bandaged upper arm, and a man whose head holds an uncanny resemblance to a small melon. Your eyes glaze over the last three other people, for they are insignificant both feature-wise and reasons-to-be-skeptical wise.

"White blood?" the high schooler girl across from you whispers. You tilt your head in her direction. Feigning innocence is usually an easy task for young killers because it comes with the baby face, but the girl looks genuinely spooked. She wears the remnants of peach eye-makeup, smudged from days in the Borderland, and when you glance down at her hands she has rabbits on her chipped nails. The rabbits disappear and reappear as she twists her fingers around the hem of her sleeve, and you are briefly reminded of Setsuko. 

You look away.

The Irrelevant Three are carrying out varied displays of nerves, shuffling their feet awkwardly and looking at each other helplessly. Perhaps they are comrades of sorts. The Melon Man is eyeing the Spades player with unbridled suspicion, and the Spades player is openly staring at you. The Clubs girl shrinks in on herself. The bandaged woman is busy throwing exaggerated glances around the room, eyes widened in the guise of someone looking for clues. 

A smile tugs at the corner of your mouth. The woman's bandage is shoddily wound, and for a second the drooping gauze reveals there is no wound underneath before she hurriedly pulls the bandage up. She looks far too clean - and you can't see anything on her that might identify her as a part of a group like the Beach. She catches you studying her, and you respond with an expression of wide-eyed confusion. This game could've been fun if it weren't so painfully easy.