Disclaimer:
I do not, nor will I ever, own Zexion or anything copyrighted to SquareEnix.
Wendy, Araceli and Jane are, however, my beloved brainchildren
A/N: I hope you all hate me. This was, in my defense, my first ever fic. The plot was questionable and the characters were flat (in my own opinion). When I first posted this fic three years ago (yikes!), I thought I was a pretty good writer. I knew my stuff from a few years of accelerated English classes. When I went back to re-read this and try to pick it back up, I died a little inside. I revamped the first chapter, but I lost interest yet again, so I'm taking the whole thing down and starting over. Some of the characters are different and the plot changed as well. I hope all you kind souls who so kindly gave me feedback will return to review. Poke me (hard) if I don't update.
Chapter One: Araceli
Zexion stirred faintly, agitated into consciousness by the sensation of loose cotton billowing beneath his cheek. He blinked lethargically and slowly stretched his muscles, listening to each twinge of pain the methodical movements produced as he calculated the damage the Riku Replica left him to contend with. Content that he was more stiff than seriously wounded, Zexion raised his head and observed his surroundings.
The first thing he laid eyes on was his book. The Nobody symbol peeled back pathetically to reveal the book's plain tan binding and the formerly pristine paint flaked off in random sections. His prize possession now resembled nothing so much as garbage-bound dictionary. Flinching slightly, he reached out to caress the cover. The movement, while miniscule, created a startling effect. The ground beneath him rolled slightly in the direction of his momentum and he froze, looking, for the first time, at his odd surroundings.
He sat, for lack of a more accurate term, atop what appeared to be a thick, particularly viscous cloud that stretched on for miles off into the horizon and, despite what logic told him to expect from such an anomaly, fully supported his weight.
Snatching his book up, Zexion clambered to his feet and stumbled across the expanse of never ending Nimbus, fearful that each step would send him plummeting to his death- provided he wasn't already dead. While he failed to drop through the roiling mass beneath him, it twisted and bucked like a water bed disturbed by a particularly restless sleeper.
Zexion decided he must be dead. The Cloaked Schemer grasped gratefully at this explanation - after all, anything had to be preferable to slogging along in painful ignorance.
He was dead. That had to be it. There was simply no other explanation as to why he was here, fighting his way through a bog complied entirely from what appeared to be Mother Nature's rejected nimbus cloud experiments.
Unfortunately, in this upside down, inside out world, his certain was merely a wild guess.
Zexion carried on for what felt to him to be hours, but could just as easily have spanned mere minutes, cursing his inability to tell time the entire way. At some point amid his battles with the cloud-stuff, a storm built above his head. The clouds gathering appeared exactly the same as those beneath his feet and he observed them without concern, but rather a growing curiosity. It wasn't until they began to solidify that he first had misgivings. Then, as the clouds beneath his feet faltered, Zexion paused. Looking to the far horizon he had been pursuing all day, he found a roiling mass of cloud withdrawing rapidly inwards, leaving nothing but empty space in its wake. In a matter of heartbeats he would have nothing left upon which to stand.
Acting on a desperate impulse, he hurled himself skyward, intending to grip onto whatever flimsy support the other path offered.
With alarming speed, Zexion's reality shifted abruptly downward, much to his displeasure, and he found himself lying facedown in yet another pouf of cloud-stuff, feet thrown up and over his head and book laying a stone's throw away and looking as miffed as a book may look after such blatant mistreatment.
Uncurling himself from his thoroughly contorted position, Zexion placed his hands beneath his chest to lever himself up and came face to face with an ancient, battered pair of black booted toes and the jean covered legs above them. Tilting his head back slowly, Zexion surveyed the woman who came into view with an astounded kind of caution generally reserved for wild animals.
In addition to boots and jeans she wore a faded black t-shirt that read Glamorie, in an embellished font. He calculated her age to be perhaps in her late forties or early fifties, although her flat, no-nonsense mouth, small nose and hard blue eyes made her look somehow ageless. Short blond hair shot through with gray gathered around her small face in a collection of curls that sprung randomly off into whatever direction struck their fancy and popped out cheerfully from beneath a slate colored baseball cap and somehow failed to make her seem any more endearing.
Zexion shot to his feet, hands clamoring for his tome, which he abruptly remembered sat not two feet away, yet absolutely out of reach.
"Oh, leave well enough alone!" the woman snapped in an ethereal voice reminiscent of ice filled fog rolling off chill waters. "I won't hurt you until you tell me what exactly you're doing in my ether plane. Even then you may not need your pretty little book."
"Etherplane?" Zexion repeated, tense and miserably confused.
"Two words. Ether. Plane. In my more fanciful moments, I call it Araceli."
Zexion, still rigid, caught his tongue before a thousand questions hurtled out of his brain and into his mouth. Instead, he contented himself with asking the obvious. "And Araceli is?"
Could it be that this was just another of their worlds, somewhere he sent himself in the climax of his battle with Riku?
"Araceli," the woman replied, "is my ether plane. It means altar of the sky in Castilian and I don't know why you landed here instead of in the Ether itself, but I mean to find out and get you gone as soon as possible." She glared at him as though and sane person would have had the decency not to bother her, so this was his fault. Somehow.
He had no sooner opened his mouth to speak when she cut him off with a flick of her wrist in his general direction.
"Your name?"
"What's yours," he shot back, cantankerous.
She shot him a slow, assessing gaze and then replied lazily, "It's Wendy. It's also impolite to respond to a question with another question."
"Zexion," he replied shortly, after a moment's hesitation.
"Well, that's not unusual at all," she drawled, stretching the syllables out with a roll of her eyes. "I usually get a Dave or a Bruce, even a Rupert on rare occasions, but Zexion? That's a first."
"Why do you get anyone here? I thought it belonged to you," Zexion prodded, suddenly deeply uncomfortable with her candid interest.
"It does. I'm a witch. A resurrection witch to be exact. I do trinket work on the side, but my job is to bring people out of comas. To do that, I have to bring them here first. Sometimes, they bring themselves. Any other questions?"
Oh, he had questions alright. "What am I doing here?"
"I'm assuming you either died or came damn close. If not, I don't know and I very much want you to get out."
"Nobodies can't die," Zexion stated flatly, willfully ignoring the second half of her reply. He knew, without a shadow of a doubt, that Nobodies could not die simply because Nobodies didn't really, truly exist. Without a heart you were doomed to be reborn time and again without ever finding true peace.
"In that case, I believe people in my line of work have a name for people like you."
"And that would be?" Zexion carefully probed, fighting an sudden and unusual sensation in his stomach.
"Fated," Wendy replied with a slow smile. Her grin faltered a moment later as she marked his grimace.
"Feeling alright?" she inquired, sounding as though worry were as foreign an emotion to her as any.
"No," he snapped. "I'm not. I feel like there's a knot in my gut every time you tell me something new."
She tilted her head, obviously confused and started towards him. With a startled flinch, Zexion backed out of her reach and curled his arms around his stomach.
"There," he said, eyes narrowed. "It did it again when you reached for me. It feels like – like I'm falling. But, in little, jerky drops."
"Like surprise?" Wendy inquired, eyebrows nearly losing themselves in her hairline.
"Impossible," he corrected testily. "I'm a Nobody. We don't have hearts, and we don't feel surprised."
Wendy blinked and simply stared for a long moment, opening and closing her mouth a few times before finally speaking. "Explain."
"Find me somewhere I can sit down," Zexion demanded, desperately fighting for control of the situation. He hoped that a walk to some destination with chairs would provide him with a reprieve to organize his thoughts.
True to form, Wendy proceeded immediately to decimate his hopes, conjuring two insubstantial looking chairs from the billowing nothingness around them.
Gingerly, he sat down and faced the witch across from him, steeling himself for whatever future surprises she had in store.
To her credit, Wendy heard him out without comments, listening, head cocked, while he explained Heartless, Nobodies and Ansem the Wise's research. He felt uncannily as though she suspected him of leaving out some of the more sordid details, but the witch never pressed him and for that, if anything, he was grateful.
She sat in still silence for a time after he finished speaking, fingering the loose, threadbare fringe of the bottom of her T-shirt, considering this influx of information.
"Well," she said at long last, "you've certainly come a long ways from Kansas, dearie. We've nothing like any of that here, although he have a fair number of strange occurrences in my world as well.
The best I can advise is that, as a resurrection witch, I know for a fact that a soul can only progress into the Ether as a whole unit. The essence of a person must be complete. Therefore, I would assume that since your hearts have – presumably - already progressed into this Kingdom Hearts of yours, they were simply awaiting your crossing over."
"And that means?" Zexion inquired, still on edge and irritated by the uncomfortably acute tenseness still weighing his stomach down.
"It means that you could be brought back," Wendy finished, looking at him for the first time with something like kindness.
The knot plummeted ground ward, dragging Zexion's stomach with it and making room for the cold, weightless sensation that stole over him, creeping into the crevices of his soul like fog studded with shards of ice.
"What," he began through numb lips that struggled to form the words, "if I don't want to go back?"
"Then I suppose you could loiter here until something happens, but that could take an eternity," she replied easily, baiting him.
"What if I don't deserve to come back," he murmured softly, mulishly refusing to meet her eyes.
"Everyone deserves a second chance," Wendy responded, voice pitched to match his.
"If you knew even half of the things I've done," he began.
"Then I wouldn't know half as much about you as I need to," she finished for him, accepting his look of sharp surprise with a crisp nod of her head.
"I – I need to think about this," Zexion stammered, vaulting to his feet and stepping cautiously away from her.
"Of course," Wendy replied. "I don't have forever, but I'll find you before I need to-"
A sudden cacophony of wind screamed past the pair of them, cutting her off and knocking Zexion back to his knees with the sheer force of the gale winds.
"Oh, bollocks," Wendy swore, struggling to her feet in the dying wake of the winds and surveying the creature before them that brought the brief storm about.
"We have a problem," it announced in a tone at once pompous and alarmed. "Oh, yes, we have a problem!"
"Zexion," Wendy began through clenched teeth and a smile that could have been carved from plastic, "Meet the Observant. Observant, Zexion."
Zexion inched around the witch to get his first good look at the miniscule creature called the Observant. Roughly level with his shoulder and entirely green, the Observant stared back at him with its lone eyes peering owlishly out from behind the high collar of its empirical coat.
"Zexion, eh?" it inquired sourly. "That's all well and good, Wendy, but Clockwork's sent me down with some terrible news."
It puffed itself up, obviously waiting for a reaction to its Very Important News. Wendy crossed her arms and shot it a look that could have frozen it to the spot. The green creature shifted slightly in obvious discomfort, shrinking beneath the witch's gaze.
"Go on," she prompted after a disproportionate pause, awkward and dragging. "Say it."
"Someone's stolen Phantom," the Observant reported in hushed tones, lone eyes refusing to look directly at the woman. Instead it drifted to Zexion, as though staring at the Nobody could somehow protect it from the sheer force of the witch's temper.
The storm it awaited never came, however. Instead, she calmly asked, after shooting an unreadable glance Zexion's way, "Did Clockwork not prepare for such an occurrence?"
The Observant's pompous manner faded entirely with the question. "He's gone after Danny," it replied, sideling away from the pair of them. "Phantom that is, not Clockwork. He said you would have an idea. You do have an idea," it continued, plaintive and suddenly childlike in its fear, "don't you?"
"Of course," Wendy replied smoothly, still utterly unreadable. "Tell Clockwork I'll set the gears in motion and then come to visit him. Now shoo." She swept her hands impatiently towards the Observant and it obligingly scuttled away to parts unknown. Zexion watched it go, torn between relief that it had left and alarm at being left alone with Wendy once more.
"Well," Wendy began, startling him out of his reverie, "I know I promised you time to think, but we need to move along now, if anything is to be done."
"To be done with what?" he asked her sharply, suspicious of her crisp, emotionlessly businesslike tone.
"You, I suppose. I need a favor, and it seems to me that you feel the inexplicable need to atone for whatever you've left behind you."
"What kind of favor?" he inquired.
"I need you to masquerade as the boy I discussed with the Observant just a moment ago. Danny. He's a charming kid, really," she reassured him, doubtless seeing his imminent refusal in his posture and repulsed expression. "Don't you ever wonder what it could have been like, if you had lived out your childhood as something other than a child prodigy?"
"No," he replied candidly. "I have not."
"I could give you your heart back," she offered, suddenly sly.
Zexion felt the gaping maw in his chest where the very unity they discussed once sat echo the words into a cacophonous, ringing force at the prospect. All reluctance aside, he had spent countless years striving for just such a prize. Certainly masquerading as a teenage boy for several days would be a paltry price to pay indeed.
Outwardly, he contrived an expression of unconcern. "Anything else?"
Wendy's eyebrows rose incrementally and she relaxed her posture slightly, inclining her head to the left and smiling a crooked grin. "You drive a hard bargain, boy. Alright, my best offer. You help me distract a township while I find this boy, I return your heart and help you put your Organization friends back together again. Just the first six, mind."
"Interesting," he conceded. "And what's in it for a mere resurrection witch? Glory? Or – and correct me if I go astray - could it be that you're something…more?"
Their wordplay lent him a confidence that emboldened him to inquire more specifically about his host, but his natural caution warned him suddenly as her shoulders tightened instantaneously and her eyebrows drew together in consternation, that perhaps he had overstepped his bounds.
Scarcely had he opened his mouth to relent, but she nodded curtly and acquiesced. "I am a resurrection witch," she assured him, "and whether or not I am more does not concern you right now. You've heard my terms. Take it or leave it."
"Take it," he responded, slate eyes flashing with resolve.
Wendy nodded, looking once again serenely unconcerned with the world. She stepped across the cloudbank until the stood toe to toe.
"Don't move," she warned, tucking his book, retrieved on her short trip over to him, safely between his hands. "and hang on tight to that. You'll need it."
Suddenly, she leaned in so close he thought for a moment she meant to kiss him. Instead, she stopped a hair's breadth away from his face, so close he felt her breath on his face and made a conscious effort not to flinch.
"You'll be disoriented when you wake, but just roll with the punches until I get ahold of you," she warned, boring into his eyes with her gray ones, hard as shards of flint.
He felt the absence of air as she inhaled deeply and the sudden influx of magic as she exhaled.
This breath hung silver and opaque between them, a cocoon of smoke wrapped around a living breath. Slowly, the magic within the breath began to pulse, slowing to match her own physical heartbeat and pulsing in his head, a steady, even rhythm. The beat became a hum, low and resonant, as a hollow developed at the center of the breath.
Zexion never noticed when Wendy released his hands and reached behind him, nor felt the ripple of space as it contracted and expanded again, leaving a glittering shard behind, sharp and bright in her hands. He vaguely noticed when she slid the shard into the silver mist and his lips parted in a gasp of surprise as the breath became as delicately pink and powerfully magical as any heart released by the Keyblade.
The breath, awaiting just this opportunity, slid between his parted lips and kicked down his throat and into his chest, spreading from there to the rest of his body. He jerked out of her grasp and fell to his knees, then sank lower, until he lay on the ground, body moving disjointedly, like a rag doll possessed by the wind.
"By the by," Wendy added with a scheming grin. "When you wake up, you'll feel like a bull moose kicked you in the chest."
Zexion, rapidly sliding into a haze of nothing, serenaded by the pounding of his heart, barely registered the words before he drifted into the soothing darkness of a deep sleep.
A/N: That's right; Wendy's taking Rhyme's place. She's a crossover from a Danny Phantom fic I may or may not write and Zexion will figure out her actual role later, if at all. She won't be terribly important after we meet clockwork.
Okay people, I owe you all and apology. Here it be: I, ThreeBlackRoses, am a slacker of epic and ridiculous proportions. Despite dedicated crit and love from reviewers, I have not updated in over a year. Thus, I am re-doing the entire fic. That's right, straight up re-posting. New name, fresh start, the whole shebang. So please, out of the goodness of your hearts, re-read and review.
I hope that those of you who remember Rhyme understand why I replaced her. She had to large a part in the story and too small a character value. I also hope you can forgive my intrusion onto your better sensibilities with my OC Wendy here. Overall, I find her character stronger and her Mary Sue-ness drastically less, but she's still too much OC for my tastes. Bear with me, and her worth may well be proven.