Title: My Pure Heart For you
Author: The Random Monkey
Date: 9-8-07
Author's notes:
Holy crap? Am I still alive? I must be, because here I am, posting a new fic guaranteed to quickly degenerate into worthless romantic fluff. With a title ripped off from End of Evangelion, a plot inspired by a year's (!) worth of roleplays with my BFF 4 EVA NeoNaoNeo, and a style nicked off some English bugger (Terry something, sounds like a poof), here's my newest work, a story of love and humanity where you'd least expect it: among Heartless.
Please note that I haven't read a single Kingdom Hearts fanfic yet, because I still haven't finished KH2, and given my current schedule and motivation, probably won't until just after I die. Also, Neo gets some pretty crazy theories about how things work in KH, and likes to drag me along for the ride. I'll try to explain it as I go.
Enough talk, here's the fic!
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Late at night, in the darkness of an alley between two buildings, hiding behind some garbage cans, a cello lay in wait.
It wasn't a typical cello. Most cellos don't have big, round, glowing yellow eyes. Most cellos don't have long, skinny, wiry arms and legs, ending in even skinnier fingers and toes, like a child's drawing of chicken feet. Most cellos don't have strange, stylized hearts carved into them between and just a bit lower than their f-holes. And if they do, they probably look like stencils, with the center pieces connected to the outside by a bit of wood, not floating in the middle with nothing to hold them up.
Most cellos wait quietly for a human to come along and run a bow across the strings, and play a sonata or concerto. This one didn't play at all. This one sang.
This one's language was music, and it spoke it with the fluency of a creature whose first word had been middle C. This one could sing about any place or person or idea or emotion or experience, and describe it as well as any poet or painter.
Most cellos have excellent hearing, but very few ever use it.
Most cellos don't lay in wait for unwary humans to wander by.
This one was called Cellicore by other creatures, and so that's what it called itself. It hummed gently, trying to meld into the music of this world, made up of whooshes and chirps and sighs and laughs and rapping and footsteps and words, the beautiful words humans sang at each other. The music was the reason the Cellicore stayed on this world, even after the strange human with the stranger weapon and even stranger companions had come to slaughter its brother creatures, and even after it had been called home by its Gods, after its world's heart had been resealed and its world restored. It had stayed on this world of hand-made caves and strange metal cylinders full of mushy things to listen to the music.
It was standing between the caves and behind the cylinders waiting for a heart. The one problem with this planet, the one huge problem, was the emptiness the Cellicore felt in it. It was a deep, clawing emptiness, a hollow darkness, deep inside. It had no heart, and this planet didn't loan its heart to its people as the Cellicore's did, and it left a deep, aching void inside of it.
It suddenly stopped humming, distracted by one certain part of the music. If the music had been a human symphony, this sound would have been a deep bass roll from the timpani followed by a sinister melody carried by tubas and trombones. In actuality, it was footsteps, but they had the same effect on the Cellicore's mind.
It watched the human slink closer through the alley. It was exactly the kind of person a human would have expected to slink down an alley late at night: dirty and greasy and unkempt, wearing ratty clothes and a menacing glare. He smelled of sweat and copper, though the Cellicore, having no nose, didn't know this.
He moved like an eel through the thick, oily river of darkness. In his chest, twinkling ever so faintly, lay his heart.
The Cellicore began to sing again, louder this time. It was a song that spoke of cloudless, star-filled nights, of fluffy nests of grass next to softly burbling streams, of stretching and relaxing and drifting into a dream.
The human stretched, relaxed, and drifted into a dream. It wasn't the kind of dream any mentally healthy human would have wanted.
It waited until it was certain the human was asleep, then toddled over on its wiry legs, and reached into the human's chest with a wiry hand. It pulled out a softly glowing ball of light in the same way a crane game picks up a prize, though unlike a crane game, it managed not to immediately drop its prize.
It held up the heart to the darkness. As food went, it was about like a ballpark hotdog that had been dropped into the dust, stepped on by several hundred people, then left in the sun before the janitor got a chance to put it in the trash. It was awful, filthy, disgusting, and the Cellicore devoured it greedily. It would have agreed with the human saying that beggars can't be choosers.
It toddled back behind the trash cans, but peeked around them to see what happened to the body. Usually, after the body had stopped breathing, it dissolved away into nothing; very rarely, it changed into another creature of darkness and scurried off into the night. Once, though the Cellicore still had trouble believing its eyes, it had seen a human sit up, shake its head in confusion, then stand and walk away.
This one just dissolved. The Cellicore supposed that was for the better.
It felt guilty, though, an emotion it had never had a need to feel before coming here. It was not naturally a predator; it didn't naturally eat at all, and it was only because it was so far from home that it had to prey on humans and the occasional tiny furry or feathered creature. It didn't have the predator's natural ability to rationalize its hunting as Survival of the Fittest, or the Circle of Life. or Kill or Be Killed. It didn't really want to hurt anyone, it just wanted to stay and listen and sing.
It might have made the Cellicore feel better to know that the human it had just taken had been on his way home from a crime scene that the police had only recently arrived at, and where they had just started the grim task of counting how many arms and legs and fingers were around in order to get an idea of the number of victims. Maybe. Cellos aren't naturally given to vengeance.
Pushing its guilt aside, it sat back down on the ground and leaned its scroll against the building behind it. Slightly satisfied, enough that it could sleep, it sang its song to itself, and stretched, and relaxed, and drifted into a dream.