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Theirs was a world of rules, one perpetually breaking down and building itself back up in new configurations, but never truly changing. Theirs was a world of roles, and no role was as clearly defined as Hero's.

Hero was their savior. Their bent shapes awkwardly slotting into one another often left long vertical gaps which none of them could fill. None, except for Hero. Whenever they began to close in on the ceiling, he would descend angelically to dissolve himself in noble sacrifice, taking five lines of their entwined bodies with him and buying them valuable seconds.

 
Being dissolved like this was the greatest grace someone like Smashboy could hope for. His square body rendered him a natural obstacle. He had no appendages with which to connect to anyone's gaps, which also made it harder to connect with them emotionally. Smashboy was mostly ignored, not out of malice, just because no one knew what to do with him. But he could withstand it all, just as long as he could join them in their reverence of Hero, just as long as he had those few moments before dissolution when he was part of a line, enmeshed with the complete whole, more than that horrid body of his. Those moments when he was part of Hero.

Smashboy had found himself dropped into a desperate situation, at the edge of the kind of cave calling for an adventurer. And yes, Hero's arrival was already prophesied by the Next Piece Window. The other pieces welcomed him with relieved cheers. Here was his foot, then his long slender legs, his torso - all perfectly equal and even, the picture of symmetrical beauty - finally his head with that brave chin and those determined eyes... Smashboy thanked his lucky stars for his frontrow seat and couldn't keep from staring. In the countless rounds they had both witnessed, this exact configuration had occured many times before, but now, one small factor was different, a tiny, seemingly inconsequential adjustment of a variable which would eventually shift the very foundation of their world... Because for the very first time, for just a moment, Hero returned Smashboy's gaze.

And he scoffed.

***

Smashboy spent the next few rounds in a haze. At first he couldn't form a coherent thought or feeling at all. Then came shame, sadness, and, finally, anger. It turned out that he was nothing but a bother this whole time, and he had been too arrogant to notice. Secretly, he had even been harboring fantasies about Hero: that if, somehow, someday... Of course he would have never dared approach him, but- if they ever got to talk propely, surely Hero would be sympathetic to his plight, forgive the misfortune of his birth, accept him as he was... Because wasn't that who Hero was supposed to be? Wasn't that his role?

Yes, their roles. The noble savior and his obstacle. A tale as old as time, reenacted over and over and over again in slightly different arrangements, a struggle with no real consequence into which they had been cast by some higher power for its own entertainment. They had done nothing to deserve either of their fates, but were condemned to it by their bodies and the whims of the player controlling them. It was all a matter of luck. And yet, Hero had the gall to look down on him? Down on him who had done nothing but try to minimize the damage he inadvertantly caused? It was all so supremely unfair, and Hero couldn't even pretend to care.

What a bastard.

Smashboy kept ruminating, stirring the pot of his boiling hot wrath until it was ready for him to eat and eat him in turn. He fed it with every dismissive gesture, with every relieved sigh at the sight of Hero, with every glimpse of the piece himself in his undeserved perfection. There was a horrible, disgusting power in this wrath. He savored it. For once, his life had more purpose than ending as quickly and unobtrusively as possible. He was hellbent on revenge.

The time had come. Once again, he was perched on the edge of a canyon, and once again, the bastard revealed himself, block by block. Smashboy bored his eyes into him, absorbed the whole of him in delighted disgust, and spurned himself to move, move, move, MOVE-
and somehow,
all on his own,
                             he moved one block to the right.

The music turned into a single continous ear-splitting buzz. Everything froze. Hero's foot had just reached the top of Smashboy's head, and he was screaming in abject Horror. Smashboy gulped and began to stutter out the monologue he had imagined himself throwing at Hero many times before.

"H-how does it feel, Hero? T-to be in the way? You're very tall, you know. If.. If there's no hole for you, aren't you just a m-massive waste of space?"

Hero didn't respond. He was simply looking down at Smashboy with wide-open eyes, his scream having morphed into a tiny whimper drowned out by the droning buzz of the dead music. Smashboy had never seen Hero make a face like that. He suddenly looked quite ugly and strange. Smashboy felt dizzy. This was not how it was supposed to feel. Why did he-

"Hrgh!"

Suddenly, Smashboy began to flicker, finding himself alternately at the spot to which he had moved and the one where he was supposed to be. The world unfroze for frames at a time, long enough for Hero to start sinking, but not long enough to pass Smashboy. They overlapped. They were both screaming.

The sensation was indescribable. Smashboy had caught glimpses of it anytime he had been part of a line cleared by Hero, but the intensity with which it hit him now was almost unbearable, yet simultaneously euphoric. It was a feeling that shouldn't exist, a feeling which they hadn't been built to contain or understand, and it split them both wide open. The atonal buzz entered and filled them until they too were nothing but noise, unconscious data, as they had been before human eyes had carved themselves into them. They weren't heros or villains, they were data; everything was data; they were everything, and then everything went dark.