My little commentary (through Sora's eyes anyway) about something in the game that always bugged me.
Disclaimers: Kingdom Hearts and as such, Sora, is not mine. He belongs to Nomura and I only borrow him for my own purposes, only to put him back safe and sound when I'm done.
Nightmares
Do you want to know what the scariest part was?
Well, part of it comes from the fact that no one believes you. I can sit in my classroom all day, learn about math and language and stuff, but no one will believe me. I'm a Keyblade Master. I've saved the world. I know magic, I'm strong enough to throw around any islander that gets it in their head to try to bully me. I'm definitely not the same kid that disappeared a few years ago. No way. But no one believes me if I try to explain where I got these powers.
I summon my Keyblade. It's a neat trick, sure, but who believes me when I say that this weapon can destroy evil? Exactly no one except for my best friends, Riku and Kairi. They know because they have them too.
In the end, I just sit here in this classroom and learn about math. It's not going to do me any good, though; I'm a hero. An unsung hero, sure, but a hero nonetheless. I can promise you that I never once used the Pythagorean Theorem in the middle of battle to calculate what one of my enemies was doing. I usually just throw about fifty fireballs at it, whack it to either Donald or Goofy, we destroy it together, and then call it a night.
But… for some reason… that's still not why I have nightmares at night.
Not the math, of course. Though math tests suck. It's… something else. Something that only I've ever really thought about. Kairi was stuck on the island or frozen with the Princesses. Riku was trapped in the Dark World with the King. Me, I was asleep for a year with Donald and Goofy.
That's something I can't really forgive her for. The witch that trapped me there, I mean. She took my memories. Something important to me happened in that time period and she took it away. Without asking me! … Well, she probably did ask but… it's still not fair… I forgot everything about her. That… I've never wanted to forget a friend…
No, that's not what scares me. What scares me… that's… what scares me…
Is the Heartless.
The Heartless.
That's it.
The Heartless is what scares me.
They were people once. They were people just like me, just like my friends. My family. They were people who were taken over by the Darkness and warped into creatures that could do nothing but convert even more people into what they were. Hollow. Empty. Evil. Everyone calls them evil. They put on this label to make themselves forget what they're fighting.
That Shadow? It could be someone's baby. Someone's little girl or boy that wandered into trouble and just… got taken.
That Soldier? Someone's lover. Someone's dad. Someone's mom. There's someone out there, maybe, that keeps waiting for that person to come home. And maybe, just maybe, they miss them. Or they stay up at night like me wondering where they went, how they went missing.
The Heartless are someone's lovers, children, husband, wife, best friend, brother, sister, aunt, uncle, neighbor, mother, father.
And I'm the one who kills them.
I'm the one with the weapons that sends them away. Do they die? Do they feel pain when they're like that? If they feel pain, do they feel their own Hearts inside of them being eaten away? Do they remember what it was like to be human? I did. I did. I did.
I remembered.
And that's what gives me nightmares.
Because I'm supposed to be the hero but I still kill people to save the others.
They were human once.
They were almost all human once, the Emblem Heartless. They were people once. They were people just like me, just like my friends. But I didn't save them.