The Strongest Card...Is Friendship?!
It was just an old deck of playing cards, the kind Susie carried around whenever she was bored or hungry. She hadn’t even known she’d brought it to the Dark World. But here it was, packed into a tattered-looking tuck box on the ground that Lancer eagerly picked up.
“Is this pocky? I like pocky! But I can’t have any before dinner.” He poked at the box opening, giggling. “Can I have one?”
Fandom: Deltarune
Characters: Susie, Lancer, Ralsei
Rating: G
Word Count: 2568
Mirror Link: AO3
Notes: Happy to finally share my fic I wrote for the Color Cafe Deltarune zine arranged by @scarletscarveszines! Thank you again for letting me participate alongside so many other great artists and writers. I've also included an extra scene in here that I originally couldn't fit into zine, so think of it as some extra flavor for it.
On one of her birthdays, Susie was given a set of playing cards.
They were the kind with the numbers on both the top and bottom, with weird shapes she didn’t learn the names of yet. They hadn’t even been new, the box they were in frayed from the card flap opening.
“Is this even for kids?” she had asked.
“You just break everything you touch,” someone said. She didn’t know who. Didn’t matter anyway. “Even you can handle these.”
Years later, during recess, once she did learn the stupid names of those symbols or whatever, she’d try her hand at them. Leaning against the brick wall in a shadowy corner (it just happened to look that way), she’d pull them from jean pocket. Her claws would scrape against the surface, sometimes obliterating an entire number, or drawing a jagged line through a heart.
Just cut the cards, shuffle them, maybe play a little Go Fish by herself – which was all kinds of stupid to begin with. When that didn’t work, she tried guessing what would come next when she’d pull a card from the top of the deck, and would always get it wrong. Not like there was any reason to get it right anyway, but it still kind of pissed her off.
She guessed 4 of clubs, she got 8 of spades instead. She guessed 7 of hearts, she got the joker card. Didn’t she pull that out of the deck??