Aqua's eyes open for the first time in hours. It's a mockery of sleep, she doesn't need sleep here, she doesn't need anything, but it passes the time. She looks out at the ocean, this darkened beach, reduced from colour to a select few shades, and wonders not for the first time how much longer she'll be here. It's cold, and it's dark, and after so many years she knows she can feel it all weighing down on her like a second skin, seeping quietly into her blood and bones and heart, like a slow-acting poison. It's weakening her, she can feel it, it's weakening her light. She knows she'll never quite go out – not when she looks at her wayfinder and knows she must find a way – but it hurts. It hurts. It hurts so much.
She trusts in Sora and in the friends she knows he must have, the allies rallying by his side, and even the enemies that will drive him to fight and to survive – but it's so easy to catch the despair here. The unease, the creeping dismay, a sense of restlessness and anxiety that never goes away. There are fewer unversed, fewer heartless, few monsters here at this beach somehow, but stragglers do find their way to her. They follow the light, faint as it may be, and then she fights again.
I must be strong. I must be unbreakable. I must not die here, not without seeing Ven and Terra one last time.
She repeats those words like a mantra, sometimes aloud, always on rotation in her head, like a prayer she's desperate for anyone to hear.
No one ever does.
She knows this because the dark realm is occupied by herself and shadows, and the shadows don't care very much for the desperate or the hopeless. They just want to snuff out her light, steal it from her beating heart, but she can't allow that. Not yet. If she has failed, if she can't save Terra and can't wake Ven, then perhaps...
No.
She stands. The sand is gritty and sharp where she brushes it from her legs and hands, but she doesn't mind. Sometimes the pain is a welcome distraction from her dismal thoughts, but she must keep going. She can't dwell on those thoughts or they will eat her, erase her, just as quickly as the shadows would, given half the chance.
She's not fighting the monsters here anymore, she's fighting herself. A battle that started on day one when the light came to save her just once, and hasn't ceased since. She doesn't think it ever will, not even when she gets out of here, not until she knows without a shadow of a doubt that her best friends will live on. Maybe not even then. The darkness here is sticky, and it may even cling to her when she reaches the light again. It is a disease of permanence that can't be shaken off by simply walking away. It will follow. It will haunt her, hunt her, dog her every step because this is the path she chose, and this is her retribution.
Aqua tightens her grip on the blue wayfinder, holding it to her forehead reverently and whispering, praying, pleading for strength. She can hear the shadows gathering behind her, more stragglers that followed her from the darker places, nothing she can't kill with the Master Keeper, and so she stands that way for a moment longer, her body bent in penance. This is her fault, this is all her fault, she could have saved them, they wouldn't have had to suffer-
With faintly trembling hands, Aqua summons the last token of Master Eraqus' good will, his love and pride as their mentor, and faces the shadows.
This is her duty. This is her fate. This is her destiny.
She must live on.