My first fanfiction. I hope you like it. Or at least that it doesn't completely suck. Thank you so much to the wonderful people who encouraged me and beta-read me: x-Avarice-x and SLB.
Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts. Please with the not suing in my face.
He woke up with rain pounding on the glass of the window. What had it been? A flash of lightning, the bark of thunder. The window was open a hand's breadth, and a draft stirred the curtains, the motion catching his attention. The window was right above his bed, wasn't it? Why did it seem so far away?
He stared at the window, unable to focus on it, still drifting in the last hypnogogic arms of sleep. Wrapped in that murky afterglow it seemed to him as if the curtains were saying something in their own private sign language. He couldn't quite make out what it was that they were trying to say. After a moment - long or short he couldn't say - the cold draft froze off the remainder of sleep.
He was awake.
The storm pattered against the window, the curtains billowed in their strange secret language, and the cold crept into the room. The brown haired boy sat up, his blue eyes wide and alert. There was little light; the moon and stars cowered behind the dense thicket of stormclouds. The stormclouds themselves hoarded their reserves of quick lightening, holding it back but to illuminate their fulminous undersides with the spare but artistic flash. Inside the house, a weak beam of light clawed for purchase under the door of his room from where it originated in a single nightlight in the outer hall.
This paucity of light reflected on the rain accumulating on the windowsill, and the boy was motivated from his position on the bed by that fact. He stepped over to the window and closed it. As he did so, the thunderclouds chose that moment to let loose a volley of jagged lightning, and in that instant the town outside his window leading down to the bay was outlined in stark relief, the light reflecting off the surprised buildings which seemed to recoil in the sudden brightness like fugitive lovers caught in the spotlights of their pursuers.
And then the lightening flash faded and the boy saw his own reflection in the glass of his bedroom window as his eyes refocused back into his own space. He blinked. The reflection blinked but did not fade with the last of the light, but stayed hanging in the glass like a phantom.
A new feeling crawled into his body, starting at the tips of his toes and the sensitive bit of skin at his heel, clambering up his calves and shins, his knees; he shuddered as if caught by a sudden cold draft until the sensation had washed through his entire body to the ends of his spiky hair which drooped on his head, the last piece of him to wake up.
The boy tilted his head and looked at his unfading reflection in the window glass. The reflected him also tilted its head, and it looked back. Even so, he got the strange sensation that it was not him looking back at himself, but somebody else.
He thought he was fully awake, but the odd sensation would not leave him. It tingled at his fingers tips and seeped into his brain. Something was wrong, something just beyond his grasp.
He stepped away from the window reflection, not turning his back to it but keeping his wide blue eyes locked onto his doppleganger in the window, who was being just as cautious as he was. And that's when he realized what it was. The something that was wrong with his reflection in the window. The boy in the window had blond hair, too many shades lighter to be imagined as his own.
The shock of this realization staggered the boy, and he stumbled backward into his desk chair. He put his hand out, steadying himself. He glanced back at the window, but his reflection had disappeared, and the frame was reduced to nothing more than a black rectangle of glass suffering under the assault of the rain.
The boy turned, shocked down to his core, and his hands fumbled at the door handle to his room. It opened on the second try, and he stumbled through. The bathroom was at the end of the short hallway, and it felt to him like the darkness was clutching at him as he walked that short yet interminable distance.
If he had hoped that the bathroom light would dispel the strange feeling that had overcome him, that strange image of a boy that was him with the wrong-color hair, he didn't show any signs of it as it clicked on. He trembled. He turned on the faucet, splashed water on his face; his hands grasping the sides of the basin, he fought to control his breathing, to find his center and calm himself down from the unsettling dream. Yes that's what it had been, it had to have been a dream.
He looked up into the bathroom mirror, attempting to lock eyes on his own reflection, the comforting sky-blue of his irises. But he staggered back, gasping in shock. The figure in the mirror also recoiled, and the image – the hood of the black robe falling down, revealing the elfin face of the dark-haired girl within – matched his own frown, his own retreat. He blinked; he wanted to scream, he moved his lips but no sound would come out. If he spoke, what would the girl in the mirror say? Could he bear to hear it? As the girl in the mirror moved her lips, attempting to say something of her own, her image was superimposed on top of his reflection, superimposed on top of the boy with the blond hair. They all opened their lips as if to say something. They all said nothing.
"Sora! Dinner!"
Sora woke up to his mother's call from downstairs. He rolled over in his bed, groaning. The smell of dinner and the clink of plates and cutlery being set on the table from downstairs pulled him fully out of the dream, and he slid off of his bed, glancing at his window - now in its correct position with respect to his bed - but there was nothing there, no phantom with blond hair, no elfin-faced girl.
There was a knock on the front door during dinner, and Sora did not stop the business of devouring the rest of his delicious cake dessert as his mother went and collected a package from the delivery man.
"Sora! Package for you!" she announced, placing it down in front of him.
"I wonder what it is?" Sora said out loud, pushing his plate away from him and picking up the package in its plain brown wrapping. It was a little heavier than it looked.
"Aren't you expecting a package?" his mother asked him, refilling his glass of milk without needing to be asked. Sora shoved the last forkful of cake into his mouth, making a sound in his throat to indicate that he was not.
"Why don't you open it then?"
Sora looked at the address on the label. The package was addressed to him, there was no mistaking it. That was his name; that was his home address. But there was no return address, no marks on the package indicating who or where it was from.
He smiled. Mysterious packages, eh? He ripped into the brown paper wrapping eager to discover what surprise was concealed here. When the packaging was scattered all over the kitchen table and tumbling down onto the floor next to his chair, he puzzled over the object in his hands. It was a strange egg-shaped thing painted by hand to look as if it were wearing clothes. He recognized the oversized yellow shoes, the red skorts and the shirt with the blue belt and jacket. The head of the egg had a shock of brown hair and blue eyes painted on it. The effect was both cannily similar to Sora's own usual dress and appearance, and also disturbingly different; the painted doll Sora was round and fat, and Sora could feel something inside of it shift as he turned it around in his hands.
"Oh, it's a matryoshka doll!" his mother exclaimed. "I wonder who would send you that?"
Sora's face scrunched together. "A... what?"
"It has other dolls nested inside of it. Go ahead, open it up!"
"It opens up..." Sora's hands slid up and down the egg until he had found the seam in the center of the bigger portion. Taking care not to break the heavy but fragile ceramic, he twisted the two sections apart until the egg-like thing opened up. He put the top section down on the tabletop. Inside, there was another painted egg, similar in shape only smaller, nested completely inside. This first inner nested doll was painted to appear as if it were wearing a black robe with a silver zipper and silver drawstrings around the neck, where the egg pinched together before bulging out again in a smaller sphere - the head, painted like a hood.
Sora stared at the face of the doll as if he could see past the painted black shadow of the hood. And he could! He could see, just faintly, blue eyes staring back at him.
Sora could feel that there was another doll nested inside this second one, and his hands repeated the process of opening up the doll and removing the smaller one from inside. This third doll was carved from one solid piece of wood - so the last then, no more nested inside of it - but it was painted identically to the second doll, only smaller again. Subtle clues in the painting of the wood indicated however that this was a representation of a girl wearing the same black cloak, whereas the first nested doll must be a boy.
The blond boy reassembled the first two matryoshka and lined all three dolls up in order by size on the table in front of him. The three eggs – one a funhouse mirror of himself, the other two mysterious and black-cloaked – gazed back at him, and he remembered his dream, the three faces overlapped on the bathroom mirror.
He shuddered. A feeling of loss and separation overwhelmed him. He hastily reassembled the dolls back into their original nested position and shoved it back into its wrapping . He thrust the disheveled package into the surprised arms of his mother.
"What's the matter, Sora?" she asked him, "Don't you want it?"
Sora shook his head, his throat tight, unable to speak, and he ran back upstairs into his room. He didn't want to be multiple people.
He didn't want to be a matryoshka doll.
Sora woke up to the sound thunder across the bay. The nested dreams were too confusing to stay with him for long. "Oh no, the raft!" he exclaimed, sitting up in bed. He had to go protect the raft. For Kairi. He opened the window and vaulted through it, racing through the streets to the island. He did not hear his mother call him to dinner.