I watched Inside Out last night and I'm already writing fanfiction about it today. It is such a great movie - dear god it moved me. And because it's Disney affiliated I immediately made a connection to Kingdom Hearts and one of my favourite characters in it.
This is also going up on AO3 where it's more fandom friendly.
Fair warning now: This story has a bit of a downer ending to it, so have a discussion with yourself about how many feels you are prepared to have today before you get started. Also please review. I would like that because I wanna know if I'm getting the feels right.
Transition Phases
Zexion, still fresh from the separation of Ienzo's heart and body, reported to the door of the Superior's personal quarters in their new Castle That Never Was. Xemnas' numeral was emblazoned across the door more ornately than necessary, indicating his status in the new organisation more than anything else. The man had decided it and that was how it would be as far as Zexion was concerned.
He knocked on the door. It swung open by itself and Xemnas' deep voice spoke from within: "Come in."
Zexion walked in without a thought, paying no mind to any decoration or detail. Xemnas was seated at a small table on the balcony all the way on the other side of the room with a spare chair across from him. Logically, that was designated to Zexion. The child went right up to it and sat down, looking up at the man before him. Xemnas smirked.
"I didn't even need to order you to sit. Though you were the first to fall you were the last we found. How do you feel?"
Zexion knew this question. He'd heard it so many times before and he had always known what to respond with (whether or not he actually did respond was a different matter). However, the response wasn't there this time. His mind was blank and completely stumped. He stared at Xemnas. "I don't."
The Superior nodded. "Yes, that is correct. None of us do. In the name of good science, however, it is still useful to know: 'how do you feel?' A follow up of our current emotional states will help to better understand exactly what has become of us. I find it has proven a little bit difficult to get a straight response from the others – they're so verbose and confident in their eloquence, spoiled by the complexities they used to feel. But children feel emotions in their purest form and understand them at the basest levels. So, child, tell me just what is going on inside your head."
Inside Zexion's head chaos reigned at Headquarters.
"Why isn't the control board responding?!" Anger screamed, beating his hands against the buttons and levers of the blackened panel to no avail.
"Out of the way!" Fear exclaimed, running up to the board with a large hammer. He smashed it on the controls. The head of the hammer broke off but the control board remained unaffected, not even a dent or a scratch.
"Oh no, not another one," Sadness moaned over by the short-term memories as she and Disgust watched another memory orb roll in. The gears turned smoothly and the orb had a healthy shine; by all accounts the mind was working just fine. But the memories came in with no colour where they had normally been tinted with one of the five colours of the emotions.
"Just what is going on?" Disgust growled.
She stomped to the back of the room and around the corner into the alcove where the manuals were shelved. The floor was littered with half-open and discarded manuals as Joy frantically searched through the pages.
"Do you mind giving us a hand up front, Joy?" Disgust snapped.
"I'm trying!" Joy replied, poring over one of the manuals she'd already discarded previously.
"Reading the manuals obsessively is not helping!"
"I'm sure that I must have read something that would help in this situation," Joy insisted, getting up and running to the shelves. She climbed one to reach the topmost shelf and picked a manual from the corner. Most of them were already on the floor. "I think maybe it could have been in Abstract Thought volume III? Or was it actually in Trauma volume IV, chapter 17 section 3.3.1, the chapter on PTSD?"
She launched off the shelf manual in hand and landed right in front of a manual already open on the floor, opting to flip through its pages again.
"Joy!"
"I know! You think I'm not helping!" Joy exclaimed, standing up and leaving all of the manuals where they lay on the floor. "But what else am I supposed to do? I'm not good with the control board like you guys are. I mean, I was here first but more of you came along and the board kept getting updated and Ienzo needed you guys more than me… I didn't really have anything to do for most of his life except read the manuals. And if this is the only thing I'm good for in this mind then I'll do my best. I know we've never faced something like this before but that's what the manuals are for, right? They tell us how the mind works and all the rules and how to deal with things that affect it so surely there's got to be at least some mention of what's happening."
"Joy, you must have read those manuals at least three times each," Fear interjected. He and Anger had already given up trying to make the control board work. "If you can't remember anything that helps us deal with this then there's probably nothing."
"No, there has to be!"
"Volumes get delivered as they're required if we get new information," Anger pointed out. "Remember Trauma? Those volumes weren't initially on the shelves until they were relevant. Maybe we just don't know anything about it yet." The mere idea of this made his scalp run hot. Ienzo's mind seemed healthy yet his emotions couldn't work and there was nothing any of them could do about it.
"But other volumes were also totally useful to new volumes and new volumes sometimes cast interesting perspectives on old information. I annotated them." Joy picked up the most recently retrieved volume and let the pages fall open, showing the joyful and colourful notes she'd added to the margins. "There has got to be some clues-"
"There are no clues," Sadness piped up. The other emotions turned to her. Even though she was the most soft-spoken they respected her the most. She'd helped Ienzo greatly through his life and generally had things under control most of the time. Joy dropped the manual. The emotions gravitated to where Sadness stood in front of the short-term memories and joined her in watching hopelessly as another colourless one rolled in. "He lost his heart. The heart powers the control panel and gives colour to the memories before they arrive here. Without that…"
That hung in the air. Headquarters became gloomy as all of the other emotions conceded to Sadness' point. Another shiny but colourless orb rolled in. The core memories had lost their colour but not their lustre. The library of long-term was still beautifully colourful but how long would it be before the colourless memories outnumbered them?
"I can't believe we can't do anything," Joy sobbed, reaching out to stroke one of the day's memory orbs.
Under her touch a golden yellow hue spread. The emotions gasped as the once colourless orb now shone within a filter of happiness. Joy jumped excitedly and clapped her hands.
"Oh my gosh! It's happy now! It's happy!" she squealed, turning around and gesturing to it with both hands. "Maybe that's it! Maybe we just have to manually assign emotions to the memories retroactively from now on. This can work, right?"
The elated look fell from her face when it became apparent that the others were not getting excited. In fact, they were downright dispirited.
"No," Sadness droned. "It's not going to work."
"But…" Joy turned back to the orb. The colour was fading and was almost already gone. She touched it again and the bright hue came back but once her hand was gone it began to fade.
The viewport closed, darkening the room a bit. The lights went out gradually, leaving only guide lights and the few backlights that were still operational under the keys on the console. Outside the bright sky darkened as well.
"He's gone to sleep," Fear whispered redundantly.
Joy sighed. Her shoulders slumped. "Okay…"
"Let's get these down to long-term and call it a day," Sadness suggested. "Joy, you're on dream duty tonight."
Joy nodded. Disgust pulled the lever that sent the new memories down the pipes and then they dragged their feet off to their dorms to hibernate until Zexion awoke. Joy trudged to the console and sat down, resting her head on her hands over the console. As the brain entered R.E.M. the viewport's screen had a movie projected upon it from Dream Productions but everything that had been produced in the past few days had been bland and boring. This sudden change must have somehow affected the mind workers too. Zexion's dreams all happened in black and white and were usually of facts, figures and dry information.
Joy moaned despairingly and got up from her seat. "I know I'm not supposed to do this but I can't take it."
Of the few controls that still worked on the console recall was one of the operations still fully active. She shut off the dream movie and fired up the recollection projector. She hadn't been able to have a hand in many of Ienzo's memories but to her that just made the ones she did make all that more special. A yellow memory orb flew up the recall chute and shone its saved scene on the viewport. Joy sat down and gazed up at it, smiling longingly. That had been quite a day. The others had been perplexed – except perhaps for Fear who had scuttled around anxiously and smacked the control board every now and then – but for the most part Joy had been able to hog the console for hours, longer than she ever had before and longer than she would ever get to at this rate.
A blond, aging man smiled down at Ienzo warmly and lifted him onto his hip like a father would a son. Ienzo's eyes panned the surroundings, focussing on the faces and silhouettes of four other men, all young and promising in their uniform white coats and ascots. They were also the picture of happiness in various forms on the morning of the day Ansem the Wise had adopted Ienzo.
On the outside, even though a heart no longer coloured his memories with feelings, Zexion smiled in his sleep that night.