Disclaimer: Like I really own Kingdom Hearts, bitches. Puh-lease.
notes1: Okay, so, Namine's my POV center. Because, um, I can't really get male's perspectives right. But pairings are probably going to be Axel/Roxas, Namine/RikuReplica (because my friend is flailing and hooked), Sora/Riku, and maybe Larxene/Marluxia and Demyx/Zexion. It depends on how far I get into this before it all falls to hell.
notes2: Feedback would be awesome, especially since I have fucked with the characters personalities just a tiny, tiny bit. Because, um, Namine has the potential to kick ass, Roxas is much too fun as a delinquent and Axel is, well.. He's my humor bitch. OHYES. But other than that enjoy, I guess. I've having fun writing this so far. XD
The wind curled through her hair, hot and dry on her bare neck. The sun stared the world down, its glare radiating off the sidewalk and baking the world in empty heat, and even though it was only mid-May the temperature was insanely hot. But she lived in a desert town in Nevada, Midas to be exact, so she was used to it; winters were the worst, it was always impossibly cold so far north.
Namine sighed, slouching down into one of the playground swings. Her blonde hair curled despondently over her shoulders, her lips puckered in an unnecessary frown while her supposedly ocean blue eyes were distant and disturbed. Her entire form radiated gloom, much like the desert storms that wracked the area during the rainy seasons, if they were lucky. Her feet, clad in the Pink Converse High-tops Roxas had gotten her for her birthday this year, dragged around in the dirt as her body leaned heavily against the swing's shiny steel chains.
Today had been her last official day of high school. She was eighteen and one of the top girls in her year, all A's and college courses, always getting good notes sent home from teachers. Her last exam had ended two hours ago, her teacher smiling all teary eyed and wishing her the best out of her college days. The entire class around her had been thrilled, jumping on each other and cheering loudly, the underclassmen glaring jealously for they still had several years and two weeks to go until they reached their senior year. Everything was perfect and yet…
She wasn't happy. She wasn't thrilled and jumping or pleased beyond words and it was completely pathetic. Even Roxas was overjoyed to be 'getting out of this fucking hellhole' as he put it, although that was more likely because he was a delinquent and 90% of the teachers hated him. But, still, why couldn't she be just as happy as everyone else?
"Because I'm a worry-wart," She answered herself, kicking the swing into motion angrily. "Because I'm stupid and ridiculous and weird and I have no damn idea what I want to do or where I want to go for college!" Her voice echoed dully around the playground, dust and dirt stirring in the wind that carried her voice away. With each point against herself she got more and more vicious with her pumping until she almost upended the swing.
Sighing through gritted teeth she straightened her legs, righted herself, and then continued pumping at a much more sedated pace. The world around her faded out, leaving her alone with her thoughts. She hardly noticed how the wind picked up, tearing at her bare legs save for the washed out jean shorts and her pink baby doll tee that read 'Fuck you, I'm an artist' in block black letters.
College was the most urgent thought swirling around her troubled mind, causing her to abuse her dry lips with her teeth. She could go into art, Roxas kept insisting whenever she pulled up the topic; she loved art and was extremely good at it. Or she could go into sciences, like her mother wanted, or even business, like her father wanted. Art was her passion, science and technology always came easily to her, and business was just numbers and people skills and appearances; all were serious options and damn important ones too. And she still couldn't choose between them.
She closed her eyes resolutely against the vertigo swing sets always made her feel, ever since she was thirteen. Choices bounced around behind her eyelids, bright flashes of light, tangles of multisided paths, but all in shades of grey. And that was the real problem, she noted silently; not the choices and choosing between them but the fact that they all bored her.
College sounded exciting enough, boys and parties, classes you actually wanted to take, dorms and adult freedom, but what about after that? You got four to eight years of fun and dorms and parties and classes and then where do you go? A desk job? Pizza place, flower shop, art store? All sounded dull with a definite been there, done that tone that echoed in her ears that was two shades shy of being in key.
The problem with being me, Namine mentally groaned, is that I want the life you always see in adventure books.
She wanted pirates and sword fights, knights and dragons, good and evil in a battle so horrible she couldn't get away. She wanted spies and car chases, gang battles and gun fights, cow boys and horse rides through the great open landscape. She was an adrenaline junkie with a dangerously romantic mind, head stuck in the pillow-like clouds as she dreamed her life away. Desk jobs and flower shops didn't sound exciting or romantic or even tolerable after reading and watching so many action books and movies.
A sound shattered the eerie stillness, shrilling from her pocket, some opening song or another from a Japanese anime she and Roxas adored. Startled she jerked, nearly sending the swing into the metal pole it hung from, and snaked a hand into her pocket. From that she drew her tiny white phone, a simple thing without all the new internet surfing gadgets and such, whose cover was marked with yellow squiggles and swirls. The screen was alit with an envelope icon, the universal signal for text messages, and she frowned harder.
'Where are you, Nam? Are you okay?'
From Roxas, she thought, legs still pumping slowly, and the boy's image sprung to her mind clearly. 5' 7" with honey blonde hair that always was spiked in a fuck-you-bed-hair kind of way and brilliant crystalline dark blue eyes. His lips were always quirked in a smirk or a frown, torn up jeans and a beat-up band tee his life staple since the age of twelve, grey Converse High-tops with black-and-white checkered laces, also a staple. He had a single piercing in his right ear, usually a silver hoop but on occasions he'd change it out for something black or white. He'd be slouching, just a tad bit, and the hand that didn't have his ever-present checkered wristband and white and black rings would be stuffed into his front pocket. Right now he'd be frowning at her, worriedly, head tilted so his bangs covered the majority of his eyes.
He was her best friend since pre-school, her muse for a good number of paintings and pictures, and a die-hard troublemaker. He was scraped, bruised, and scarred from years of skateboarding, muscles pretty ripped from playing soccer, baseball, and Struggle since he was eight. He was one of the most reckless and dangerous people she had ever met; he rode dirt bikes through the surrounding desert land of the town and raced cars with the other boys in the town out of the unused roads of the old highways. He had the spare key to her car and used it whenever he wanted but preferred to bum around on his skateboard or walk everywhere instead. He was also, to her everlasting amusement, incredibly weak to a well placed pout or a deviously used puppy-dog look.
A soft, loving smile graced her lips as she thought about Roxas and she gripped her phone tighter. Wrapping her phone-holding arm around the chain of the swing she started to pump harder and harder. When she and Roxas had been much, much younger they had always had contests to see who could jump the farthest and highest, but she hadn't jumped off a swing in several years.
Feeling reckless, contained, and nearly torn apart by the sudden energy in her chest she pumped right up to the peak of the swing. Clamming her eyes closed and gritting her teeth she jumped.
A dangerous, lightning bright crack later and the little white and yellow swirl covered phone fell to the ground with a crackling thud. Its screen was still lit with Roxas' message, reply not yet having been made and sent, when it hit the ground, face up. When Namine tumbled to the ground, nauseous and off balance, body still throbbing with the strange, reckless energy, it wasn't next to her phone.
No, she tumbled down in a field full of armor wearing men and women, grass slightly damp beneath her fingers and the scent strong in her nose, trees in the distance. Forest trees, oaks grand and tall from what she could see. Behind her there were no swings.
I'm dreaming, her mind reasoned, blurrily as the fighting around her ceased and everyone turned to stare. I hit my head and blacked out and this is all a dream…
The man closest to her stepped forward, an important looking fat brute with jet black armor, very possibly a uniform of some sort. His lips and eyes were all she could see thanks to the strange hood like helmet he wore and the look he raked over her body made her stomach curl. She started to scramble away as he came closer and closer, his expression widening the grin on his lips, until he was close enough for her to smell his breath. His eyes were greedy and arrogant, a frightening shade of greasy yellow, and he eyed her as if she was a piece of meat. The sight of him so close to her made her skin crawl as if there were bugs just under the flesh.
"Well, well, well, baby…" He said, voice drifting and creepy, just loud enough for all to hear. "What have we here? Do my eyes deceive me or did this little chick just drop right out of our wormhole, boys?" There were murmured answers from the other men in black armor, but she couldn't make out any words, her mind was spinning too much.
"Wormhole," She muttered, confused and startled. Something in the back of her head was screaming at her to run far, far away from these men in their sinister armor and greasy voices but she stayed where she was. This is only a dream, she reminded herself, and nothing can hurt me.
She started to rethink this theory, however, when an arrow flew out of nowhere and landed between her and the greasy yellow-eyed man. The man jerked back, glowering at the arrow, and then turned his head to face the direction it came from, the forest.
Standing there were many men and women, all decked out in leather armor, mostly in the color brown but a few with white or black, all armed to the teeth with different weapons and bits of steel. In front of them were a man and a woman, the woman the one holding the bow, the man wielding two steel circles with spikes painted red. The woman was a tall blonde with slicked back short hair and two antenna-like spikes going back, her eyes narrowed in a mocking glare, but Namine was too far to tell their color, but her armor's color was a deep, dark brown. The man next to her was extremely tall, much taller than the woman or the man in front of Namine, and had terribly spiky bright red hair that shot back from his head and two line-like tattoos under his eyes, which from this distance might have been green. The man was smirking wildly, fingering the tips of his weird weapons, and decked out in deep brown armor as well.
When the man spoke his voice was like a sweet poison, sharp and brash. He leveled one of his weapons at the man in front of her and tossed out a reckless grin she had often seen on Roxas' face just before a brawl behind the school gym. "Get your fucking creepy self away from the girl, Oogie, she's coming with us. Unless of course Larxene needs to put the next arrow through your chest…"
Next to him the girl fitted another arrow into the bow and leveled it at the large man in front of Namine that he had called 'Oogie'. In response Oogie laughed and sneered, voice dripping anger.
"Axel, you right damn dog. Why don't you take your filthy traitors and go back where you came from, yeah."
The man called Axel, the bright red head with the tattoos, made a big show of sighing and shaking his head. He twirled one of his circle weapons in his hand ideally but the black armored men and women around Namine stiffened in sudden fear, hands clenching their weapons. "Oogie, Oogie, Oogie, you should know better than that, old man. Guess we'll just have to teach him a lesson, huh Larx?"
The blonde woman, Larxene if Namine had heard right, let go of the arrow and all hell broke loose. Someone grabbed Namine's arm and dragged her off the ground, screaming erupted all over, war shouts and shrieks of pain. There were several loud whoosh noises that were probably arrows and clangs of steel meeting steal everywhere. A voice above her ear suddenly cursed loudly and she dropped to the ground roughly, scrambling up the next second to avoid being trampled by two men fighting with long, shiny, deadly-looking swords.
Namine weaved in between the fighting mass frantically, eyes wide and startled. Several times the men and women in black had tried to grab her but the people in brown always intercepted them and the black uniformed soldiers were forced to unhand her and engage in battle. There were obviously more black uniformed soldiers than brown but the brown seemed to have surprise on their side since most of the black armored ones had been lounging around without weapons earlier. It's just a dream, it's just a dream, it's just a dream rattled through her head as she stumbled forward towards the side of the field.
Without warning a large hand clamped around her bicep, jerking her back into a firm chest just in time for a sword to slice the area where her neck would have been. Roughly whoever had their grip on her forced her to change direction and shoved her forward towards the woods and then the telltale sound of metal meeting metal sounded directly behind her. She only had time to glance back and catch a glimpse of silver before another hand clamped around her wrist, this time from in front of her.
"Hi, I'm Sora and you need to come with me before we both get sliced up in itty bitty pieces," Chimed a voice, light and airy, practically in her ear. Bright blue eyes swam before her eyes and a shock of brown spiky hair and then she was stumbling forward once again, bring dragged behind this man-boy. Terrified, she kicked out and tried to wrestle away managing to slip out of his grip for a second and turn around. "Wait, NO," His voice behind her screamed and she felt his hand try and find purchase on the back of her shirt.
Without warning, Namine was stuck in the forehead with the blunt side of the sword and the world around her swam. There was a flash of startled, worried blue, something bright red darting out in front of her, the feeling of blazing heat on her skin and then nothing. Her eyes slid close and the noises outside her ears drifted away, her consciousness slipped through her fingers like water.
Back at the playground Namine's phone rang, that same sudden and bright Japanese tune, and the screen lit up. Roxas calling the screen read, but there was no one there to answer it and the tune soon was swallowed whole by the dusty stillness.