A pack of cards, fresh out of the box, contains 54 cards.  Two jokers and the others, which are used for most games.  They are organized neatly and perfectly into their four suits, and then by value.  And most people know, even if they don't consciously think about it, that the cards will never be that neat and ordered again.  Serious card players, they will buy an entirely new deck when the time for a new set of games comes.  When they begin, though the cards will soon be shuffled, they must be perfect, unbent, unmarked, unused. 

            So most people would not pick up each card, painstakingly doing their best to undo each bent corner, and recreate the ever so neat, ordered pile that they were first introduced to.  However, most people are not so innocently amazed by the simplest aspects of human life.  A small pile of thin, marked cardboard is not a treasure to most people.

            But even a deck of cards is precious to the young girl who diligently cleaned the hotel suite while the girls she shared it with slept, for once not wherever they happened to nod off, but in the beds in the adjacent rooms.

            Overturning a card that had fallen under the coffee table revealed it to be the three of spades.  The cardboard was coming apart at the corners of this one, and seeing there was nothing she could do to fix it, Yukina frowned.

            She laid it on the table and patted the corners, refusing to give the card nothing.  Then she fanned out the pile she had already recovered, and slipped the three between the two of spades and the five—the four was still missing.

            Yukina had given into the impulse to keep the deck of cards.  Judging by how the others treated it, she didn't think anyone else wanted it, though she made sure to ask Shizuru if it was alright all the same.  The human women had looked to Yukina very much like she wanted to laugh, though most other humans would have seen no change in the stoic expression.  The ice maiden was absolutely mortified, hoping against hope that she hadn't made some faux pax of which she was unaware.  Botan had quite cheerily cut into the conversation saying that of course it was alright if Yukina wished to keep the cards.  Shizuru reaffirmed this, adding that they were only going to leave the mess to the maid anyway.  The cards were bound for the trash unless anyone wanted them, and apparently, only Yukina did.

            Poker was her first game in the human world.  Yukina wanted to remember it.  The game, and the strange feeling that was being surrounded by kind people, warm people.  She had lived her life up to this point on the glacier with her own people, who were known for being cold, cruel and detached or imprisoned by treacherous humans who hurt not only the birds, but the kind humans as well.  Yukina had never known friendship like this before and now that she had, she wondered if she would be able to live without it.

            Could she return to that life where the only kindness she was met with was from the birds and the rabbits and other animals that lived in the frozen mountains of the glacier?  Could she live lonely again, longing for someone who would look at her as something other than the daughter of a whore?

            True, she refused to give up on the hope that she wouldn't have to, that she would find her brother and be able to make a home with someone who understood her.  Because she was certain that twins, even a pair made up of an ice maiden and a forbidden child, would never be beyond the ability to empathize with each other.  Yukina had always wondered if perhaps it was empathy for her brother that made her emotionally so different from the others on the glacier.  If maybe…she didn't fit in because of him.  Regardless, she loved him—even thought she didn't technically know him—and was sure that kindness from him was far better than fitting into to the most wonderful place.

            Did those on the glacier laugh often with friends?  She didn't think so.  Yukina knew her mother and Rui had been best friends and Rui never spoke of Hina with anything other than sadness…  Even when ice maidens befriended one another, happiness was lost to something else.  Now that Yukina had friends, many friends with whom to laugh and play, she never wanted to lose them or forget the feeling.  Even if she was still alive a thousand years from now and they were all gone, she wanted to be happy when she thought of them. 

            She wanted the cards.

            In their perfect, neat, ordered pile, like the unchanging society of the ice maidens.

            And strewn about the floor, with bend corners and rips, like her wild, warm friends in their human world.

            The cards were collected, 54 in a pile, in precise order, neatly stacked.  Yukina reached for the box that had been unceremoniously torn open only a few days ago.  She began to slip the cards in, but stopped.  With her brows knit and her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth in concentration, Yukina carefully shuffled once, twice and put the cards in the package.

            And clutching the pack to her breast like the treasure it was, she stood, exited the all-purpose room of the suite, turning off the light as she passed the switch, and went to bed.