This is one of those bizarre instances where I started something out thinking "yeah, this is going to be a great 3k+ word one-shot to pump out in a day!" Three days and 10k+ words later: "This is in no way, shape or form acceptable as a one shot." Welp, three times as long means three times as many chapters (and so on) so here's the first chapter.
At The Core of Being
The warmth of Twilight Town's sunset atmosphere and the rough grit of the pavement faded away along with Xion. The light subsided. She closed her eyes and drifted away with it until there was nothing, no feelings or sensations. They had all dissipated into the air with her on their search for Sora's heart. Then out of the nothingness was a cold, smooth floor beneath her. Xion sighed and smiled. This was it.
A spike of panic speared through her chest when after some time she hadn't disappeared. She was still aware of herself. Her eyes flew open and darted to and fro, trying to take in everything quickly but the surroundings were initially blurry and unrecognisable anyway. She pushed herself up to sitting. Her body hadn't gone. It was the same as she remembered it being for most of the time while she was in the world. All around her were tall shelves sitting cracked, broken and empty. Broken pipes pointed to the sky but went to nowhere now. If they had ever gone anywhere Xion couldn't see it anymore; there was only the shelves, the smooth stone floor and a cliff that dropped into a deep, dark pit.
Xion stood up and walked towards the cliff, cautiously looking over the edge. She couldn't see the bottom of it and yet blinking up from within it were thousands of coloured lights like stars. She backed away, a cold shiver running through her body. There was something down there but investigating could prove hazardous unless she could find a safe way down. Preferably a way that would double as an escape. But with the abyss in front of her stretching to either side as far as she could see there was only one way to go. She turned around to face the shelves twisting away into a maze.
Silence closed in tightly as she walked with the only sounds being of her own footsteps crunching shards of glass, stepping on fallen shelves and occasionally knocking a few mysterious coloured orbs. They littered the path here and there. Some were organised onto the shelves that weren't broken but it was still a sparse collection. Her boot nudged one again with a quiet clink and she looked down. It was one of the purple ones and it hadn't rolled far this time. She crouched down to pick it up, curious as to exactly what these things were. As it came closer to her face a moving image within it became clearer. Her eyes widened. Inside the purple orb was a Darkside, massive and looming as a dark hurricane swirled in the background. She leaned closer, eager to see what would happen to it but the movie just looped over and over with that same image of the Heartless.
"What are these?" she asked herself, her voice getting lost in the labyrinth of shelves. She looked around for another one to investigate. Spotting a green one nearby, she picked it up. In it was a green-tinged movie of a group of children sitting around a table in a large room full of other tables and children. The blond boy was drinking out of a cup when all of a sudden everyone at the table laughed and then a stream of chocolate milk shot out of his nose. Most of it landed right back into the cup but he took another gulp from it anyway. Xion grimaced. "Ew."
She stored the two orbs on one of the unbroken shelves. She might as well be helpful while she was around; everything was such a mess. The shelf beneath was crooked so she righted it and then began to pick up more orbs as she walked. Partly she was just curious to see what they contained and the more she saw the more apparent it became that there was a theme to each of the five colours they came in. The purple ones were all terrifying or unsettling and made her uneasy. The green ones were all disgusting or just in the picture of poor taste. The red ones she encountered were all aggressive and often violent. The blue ones were all sad and the yellow ones were cheery and happy.
Every time she found a new one she watched it for as long as she could stand to and then put it on a shelf. She picked up another one – a blue one that featured a dead baby bird being buried – and then shivered as something smooth and round fell down her leg. It hit the floor and bounced, tinkling like glass as it rolled away. She rushed to pick up the brightly glowing yellow orb and gawked at it. She'd dropped it but she hadn't picked it up and it had a much more brilliant lustre than all of the others she'd seen so far. Wondering about this orb that had seemingly come from nowhere she stared into it closely.
In this orb the subject was a portrait being drawn on a cave wall with a chalky rock. The viewer turned to a person sitting beside them, a little red-haired girl in a white sundress. She was working diligently on her own portrait. The viewer turned back to their drawing and Xion could now see the resemblance… kind of. There was no nose, the hair looked like a bird's nest and the facial features were basic and crooked. The viewer pulled back a little bit, finished with their work. They turned to the girl. She sat back on her heels and put her rock down, then looked at the viewer. She smiled and the movie lingered on that moment just a bit longer than it should have before it looped.
Xion put the blue orb on a shelf next to her and tried to store the beautiful golden memory as well but it was a bit too big to fit. She exhaled sharply and stared perplexed at it. All of the other shelves around her were the same as the one in front of her and all of the shelves she had passed before.
"There must be somewhere for you to go," she said to the orb. She tucked it under her arm. "Don't worry, I'll find your place… and hopefully find out where I am while I'm at it."
She couldn't tell the time here but she must have been travelling for hours and still found no changes in the architecture, nor did she meet anybody. She hadn't found a shelf for the orb she held but she also hadn't encountered another one. Then something hit her in the small of her back and bounced away. She turned around quickly.
"Who did that?" she demanded but there was nothing behind her, not even a shadow or a whisper.
Another large, brightly glowing orb was rolling away from her. It hit a shelf and rolled back, coming to rest in the middle of the aisle. Xion hurried to retrieve it. Unlike the one she held and all of the smaller ones she had tidied up this one wasn't a uniform colour, rather it was in patches of all five colours at once, sometimes moving or changing their size and shape dynamically. She sat cross-legged on the floor and put the golden orb in her lap while she peered into this new one.
When the images appeared they weren't patchy like the orb as a whole but the filter changed as the movie progressed. It began green as the remains of a dying grotesque monster gradually exploded, leaving behind a weakened silver-haired man. Xion gasped. The face of this man looked like Xemnas' but his hair and clothes were unfamiliar. The filter flashed red and green as this man spoke:
"It is futile. The Keyblade alone cannot seal the door to darkness. Kingdom Hearts! Fill me with the power of darkness…"
Not-Xemnas turned and reached towards a floating, ghostly island with a massive, ornate door on its furthermost edge. The red filter took over completely until the door began to slowly open and darkness seeped out through the crack. Purple filtered the movie briefly during that moment.
"Supreme darkness…"
Red flared again. "You're wrong. I know now, without a doubt. Kingdom Hearts… is light!"
The darkness creeping through the door blew away and a bright light filled the orb, brushing away the red with its golden glow. The light engulfed Not-Xemnas and obliterated him, leaving the path clear for the viewer and his two friends to charge at the door standing ajar. Red and yellow battled for dominance over this scene as together the three of them began to push against the heavy doors. However, as they pushed the two companions couldn't help a peek and neither could the viewer. Beyond the door were hordes of Heartless, bulging and ready to swarm. The purple took over and then faded to blue as the viewer almost fell to their knees.
"I can't…"
"Don't give up! Come on, Sora! Together we can do it."
The face of a silver-haired boy appeared from behind the door and the scene brightened to yellow again. Xion's eyes widened so much it felt like they could have fallen out. It was Riku! A younger version but there was no mistaking that face.
"And 'Sora'…" she whispered. The scene continued with its yellow hue as the viewer pushed the door from outside while Riku pulled it from within. "Don't tell me… this is Sora's memory?"
The door began to close but behind Riku the Darksides were beginning to rise. Yellow tried to remain but purple and blue interrupted its dominance. The Darksides were suddenly vanquished and a mysterious mouse silhouette appeared deep within the door. With him, the golden filter returned.
"Now, Sora! Let's close this door for good!"
"Close it, quick!" the duck companion quacked.
"But…" Sora looked between all of his friends and then straight at Riku. The yellow filter blinked out immediately to be replaced with blue. Everything that happened next was under a veil of blue, even as yellow briefly interrupted when they were finally succeeding to close the door.
"Take care of her."
Riku's face looking at him, trying to stay positive despite being on the wrong side of that door made purple and then yellow and then green and then red flash fractionally but the blue drowned them out again as the edge of the door obscured his face. That part happened in slow motion and blurred slightly. Then the door slammed closed and sealed with a final flash of light.
The scene lingered there for a few seconds then reversed back to linger on Riku's disappearing face and replay its tragic ending before it finally conceded to loop. Xion lowered the orb and looked up to the shelves. Were they all Sora's memories? There were so many of them and most were trivial and full of people she didn't know at all. Organisation XIII had made her out of these and yet she'd never been able to recall them; they were so new to her.
New voices echoed along the shelves. Xion gathered up her two orbs and scurried over to a shelf, pressing herself against it and straining her ears to identify where the voices were coming from. They got clearer as they came closer:
"Ugh. Everything's so wrecked."
"Look on the bright side. It's a lot better now than it was before. All of the memory shelves are up—kinda—and they're ready to be sorted. All we have to do is pick up all of these memories and see what we can do to help Naminé recover everything from the Memory Dump that isn't supposed to be there. Then we'll finally be able to rebuild Headquarters and restore the personality islands – oh, it'll be so great!"
Xion bit her lip and looked down in consternation. Naminé was here? Or at the very least she was involved here. After all that had happened Xion still held a deep resentment. She understood it was necessary but she still resented that it had to come at her expense.
"Naminé is the reason we're in this state in the first place," the first voice grumbled.
"I know, I know but she's also the only one who can help us fix this mess. You could say that she's reformed now. She's doing good and it's helping us. We can be grateful for that, right?"
"I guess… but restoring the personality islands will require the core memories and we're running out of time to find those. We don't even know if some of them are here. Naminé said they got lost outside."
"But she also said she'd find them and we should just focus on getting everything ready so that Sora can wake up. Please, Disgust, I know it's hard for you but can you just believe in her? She's doing her best and so should we."
"Ugh! Fine!"
Two women rounded a shelf, also picking up orbs as they went and putting them on shelves but they had a rhyme and reason to what they were doing. They scrutinised memories and shelves to put particular orbs in particular places, discussing their work quietly as they did. They were both smaller than Xion but her work in the Organisation had taught her (somewhat mistrustfully) to be wary of locals. They were walking in the opposite direction and hadn't turned to face her even once. Xion crept backwards, keeping her eye on them but as she was leaving her boot stepped in a pile of shattered glass. The crunch was small enough to have been made by a mouse but it screamed in Xion's ears like the loudest crash.
The women started and turned around, one of them dropping the orb she was holding in the process but it did not smash. They gawped at her and Xion stared back for a long while.
"Oh… my gosh," the green woman with eyelashes longer than her fingers exclaimed. "Who are you and what are you doing?"
"Disgust, I'm sure there's a good explanation for this," the blue-haired yellow woman said. She turned to Xion and walked towards her. "Hi there! No need for alarm, it's all good. Are you a new emotion? I'm Joy and this is Disgust. Who are you?"
Xion didn't reply. Joy turned to Disgust. "Hey, what emotion is black? Or do you think she's from Imagination Land?"
"Joy, are you blind!?" Disgust shouted, running up and shaking her by the arm. She pointed at Xion. "Look what she's got!"
Joy did look. She gasped. "Core memories! We're looking everywhere for those! How did you find them? Do you know where we can find the rest? I mean, those do belong to Sora, right?"
Xion clutched the orbs tighter, turned and ran.
"Is she running off? I can't believe this!"
"Wait!"
Disgust and Joy took off after her. The rows of shelved orbs reminded Xion of her path and she followed it blindly at first but that path only led one way: back to the cliff. She still wasn't eager to find out what was at the bottom of that just yet so she took a random corner. Behind her Joy and Disgust yelled at the top of their lungs. Xion drowned out the words with her own breathing and footfalls but she was beginning to hear different voices joining the calling up ahead of her. She slammed into someone who'd just come around a shelf. They were so much shorter than her that she tumbled over them and dropped the orbs in the process.
"WHAT IS THE BIG IDEA?!" the short person screamed. Xion lifted herself on her hands and looked towards the new voices. A short, blocky man with a flaming head scowled at her from where he was getting up from the floor. Meanwhile a skinny, purple man had jumped into the arms of a plump, blue woman with large glasses.
"What is that?" the purple man squeaked. "Is that an emotion? How'd they get here? Are they from outside?"
"Doesn't matter!" the red man boomed, advancing towards Xion menacingly. "They smashed me so I'm gunna smash them!"
The blue woman gasped and dropped the purple man. She waddled past Xion and the red man as fast as her short legs would go. "Look! Those are core memories."
That distracted the red man enough to look away from Xion and the fire on his head subsided. The purple man sucked in a deep, exaggerated breath and jumped to his feet, following the blue woman to go and catch the orbs before they got too far away. In the meantime, Joy and Disgust caught up. Both of them stumbled onto the scene and stopped to catch their breaths.
"Oh boy…" Joy wheezed. "You're… such a fast… runner. How do you run so fast?"
Disgust straightened up and fixed her hair and clothes as she stomped over to Xion and lifted her up by her coat collar. "What's the big idea, huh?"
Xion just fixed her with a dumbfounded expression. She exchanged confused and frightened looks with all of the strange people around her, including the two who were just returning with the retrieved orbs.
"Yeah," the red man chimed in. "I'd also like to know what the big idea is. And I asked first."
"Can't talk, hm?" Disgust said, leaning closer.
"Easy, guys," Joy interrupted, getting between Xion and Disgust to separate them. "I'm sure that if we give her a little space to calm down we'll get the full story. Won't we?"
She turned to Xion with such a sunny and reassuring expression that all of the tension in Xion began to unravel. Disgust just made another disgruntled noise and flicked her bangs.
"Yeah, tell us the full story of why you were trying to steal two of Sora's core memories."
"STEALING CORE MEMORIES?!" the red man exploded. Literally. Fire burst out of his head in a big blast.
"Stealing?!" the purple man gasped. "I-is that even p-possible? This isn't how it happened before."
"Why would you want to steal core memories?" the blue woman asked, giving Xion a sympathetic yet despondent look.
"I… I don't know what you're talking about," Xion finally answered.
"Oh-ho! She speaks!" the red man said. "So speak up! What were you doing with the core memories?"
"They…" Xion began but then she paused. What was she doing with the orbs? "They just seemed really important, precious even. I wanted to protect them."
"They are precious," Joy told her with a calm smile, "and they should definitely be protected. That's why you should have given them to us; it's our duty to look after core memories."
"Core memories? What are core memories? What is this place? Who are you?" Xion asked.
"Core memories are the most important memories a person can have," Joy explained. "They make them who they are by generating the energy required to run the personality islands. The creation of memories – including the core memories – is overseen by us: the emotions. You've already met me and Disgust but you also need to know Anger, Fear, and, of course, Sadness."
Each of the emotions grumbled, shifted or murmured as they were introduced.
"And this place…" Joy said as she gestured grandly to the space around them with both arms, "is Sora's mind."
"Sora's… mind?" Xion echoed, looking around as if she was seeing it for the first time. Not his heart, his mind. If this was his heart she probably would have understood. She had been made of his memories and she needed to return them to fix his heart. She assumed and had been led to believe that that meant returning to his heart. Had she ended up in the wrong place somehow? "But… aren't memories from the heart?"
"That's probably where they're manufactured, yes," Joy replied. "I think that's where we came from too." She gestured generally to all of the emotions. "I can't think of any other place we could have come from. But memories have to be stored somewhere in order for them to be recalled and that somewhere is here in the mind. And the core memories, oh, they are so important. They are the deepest reflections of the state of the heart and they can never be forgotten. We have to take especially good care of them."
Joy bent down to pick up a yellow orb, gazing into it fondly. "If all of these little ones disappeared that would be regrettable but Sora would be okay. That shouldn't be a huge problem thanks to Naminé. You know, she's been working around the clock trying to restore all of these little orbs and she's doing such a great job. At this rate everything will be back to normal before we know it. But the point is: they're not a big deal. However, if he loses core memories, he'll lose the really important parts of himself. That's why we need to find all of the lost core memories and be ready to reinstate them in the central hub when Headquarters is back up and running."
"But some of the core memories are lost," Sadness piped up. "They're really, really lost. They were taken from Sora's mind…"
"They ended up outside his body!" Disgust jumped in. "Can you imagine that? How do these outside things keep getting in?"
"I don't know but once this is all fixed I propose we put the mind in full lockdown and never go out again," Fear suggested, clutching the yellow orb to his chest tightly.
"I don't think we can do that," Joy said. "As in, I don't think that's a power we actually have."
"Why not?!"
The other emotions began to banter but Sadness kept ambling on in her morose drone. Xion stepped away from the main group and sat beside her, listening. "Once they were outside we had no way of getting them back. Normally I'm the only one who's sad all the time around here but everyone was sad. Managing his emotions also means managing his relationships and his personality and… and we lost all of it. The personality islands crashed into the Memory Dump and Headquarters fell apart. We only saved ourselves by jumping into a recall chute and sending ourselves to Long-term Memory—that's this library." She indicated the shelves around them with her eyes. "But once we got here most things were already in ruins and a lot of the mind workers had gone, we don't know where. We couldn't find any of the core memories. The first ones we found were all cracked from Naminé altering them but she changed her mind since then. She fixed them and she's helping us fix the rest of Sora's mind… but while we were working, some of the core memories got sucked out. Naminé was the only one with a link to the outside so we had to trust her to find them for us."
Sadness hugged the multi-coloured orb, pressing her cheek against it. "This one is especially important; it has a lot of things going on. It was one of the core memories we lost so if it's back then maybe that means that all of the other lost memories are back too. Naminé succeeded. Since you brought them here, does that mean you're a friend of Naminé's?"
"Er… sorry, no," Xion said, opting for honesty. "I know her but I wouldn't call us friends."
"Aw…"
"Friend of Naminé's?" Joy cut in, appearing from behind Xion's shoulder. "I heard 'friend'. We can be friends. We're still missing some of the core memories but since you seem to have a knack for finding them, do you want to help us look? I'll even show you our temporary HQ and a place to put these core memories and others once we find more. They don't fit on the shelves."
Joy lifted Xion off the floor and dragged her along, ignoring protests from Anger and Disgust. They navigated their way expertly through the library of Long-term Memory. All the while Xion puzzled over the concept of being in Sora's mind as well as the mystery of how she had come to find the core memories in the first place.
A/N: Would you give me a review? More to come extremely soon! (Tomorrow. I'll upload chapter 2 tomorrow. My fanficcer's game was strong with this one).