3
To Do And Die
"What?" Sora's face was blank, and his eyes wide. "What did you say?"
Roren's looked at him stonily. Compared to Sora's bewildered voice, Roren's tone now sounded bitingly harsh. "Go home," he repeated. "I don't want you here."
Sora stared at him. "What are you talking about?" He wagged his head back and forth, as if it would shake off his confusion. "We're not going anywhere! We're your friends, we want to help you!"
"Maybe I don't want your help," Roren snapped back, and Sora looked suddenly as if he would fall over. "I want you to go home before you cause me any trouble."
Riku scowled. "I thought you were having some pretty big heartless trouble already. You know, we didn't just show up here on your world, we were called here because it's obvious that you can't handle this problem on your own."
"I never said that I didn't need help."
"Then why are you trying to send us away?" Sora demanded. Color was rising in his cheeks, and the indignant look on his face was clear evidence of his distress.
Roren shook his head once. "If you know anything about these heartless, then you would realize how dangerous they are. There are thousands of them, and they don't differentiate between who they want to attack. They'll go after anyone, anytime, anyplace. It's not safe anywhere on this world."
"I'm not scared of some stupid heartless," Sora said. "I've taken down thousands of them by myself."
"You can't defeat them with strength-"
"I'll find some other way to deal with them."
"I don't know if you can defeat them at all."
"It'll be a piece of cake," Sora claimed.
"You're not listening to me!" Roren said, his voice escalating to a shout. Sora was quiet. "I just told you to go home because it's too dangerous for you to be here. I can see that you don't respect me enough to care what I say, but I'll say it as many times as I have to for you to understand. You can't beat these creatures, Sora. I don't want you to risk losing everything because you thought you could fight them."
"We're still going to try," Sora insisted. He edged closer to Roren, his hands held out hesitantly in a gesture of concern. "We have to at least give it a shot."
Roren gazed at him coldly. "No," he said, and his voice was hard as iron. "You need to leave, now."
"We're not going anywhere!" Sora retorted as he swiped his hand through the air. "I won't just leave you here alone."
"I'm telling you to go home because it's important to me that you don't get hurt! Why won't you listen to me if you really care so much?"
"Because I'm your friend, and friends are never supposed to abandon each other!" Roren jerked his gaze away and Sora sighed with frustration. He stretched out his hand to his friend, but Roren flinched back reactively, as if he expected to be hurt. The look on his face an instant later showed his regret for the action, but it was one that he could no longer control.
Sora dropped his arms to his sides with an agitated expression. "What's wrong with you?" he challenged. "Do you want to become a heartless or something? Do you want to lose the only friends you have left to the darkness, 'cus that's what you're going to get if you try to do this by yourself."
"Sora!" King Mickey said. "What are you saying; that's no way to talk to a friend."
"Yeah, they're real friendly," Riku grumbled in mock humor. He watched Sora cross his arms, his posture clearly conveying his anger. He glanced at Roren, who was practically scowling, but just as Riku began to feel defensive he noticed something behind Roren's eyes that helped him to relax.
Roren trained his harsh gaze on Riku and The King, but though he was apparently irritated by Sora's comments, he was also struggling to preserve a strong look of malice. Weariness, or perhaps sadness, was creeping into the edges of his stare.
"Excuse me," Roren growled and grabbed Sora's elbow. "I need to talk with him a moment."
He turned and led Sora away around the back of the weapons shed on the other side of the training grounds. Riku watched their backs as they marched away, but he didn't try to follow them. He and The King knew that whether or not they would fight the heartless of this world was a decision that only Sora and Roren could make.
Sora was about to rip his arm free of Roren's grasp when the soldier's leathery hand slid off his elbow and let him go. Roren continued on alone, but Sora was aware that he was supposed to follow. Walking behind him, Sora noticed his friend's awkward, limping gait for the first time. Roren hobbled forward with a cane in his left hand, an accessory that Sora never realized that he had. He noted uncomfortably how Roren's left leg seemed stiff at the knee, and how it dragged behind him as he walked, a painful deadweight for an already burdened young man.
Farther ahead was a small clearing in the brush where a few logs had been placed for tired fighters to stop to rest. The place was now as abandoned as the rest of the old camp, but Sora still remembered the spot well. The memories he had of sitting on these logs with Roren, Donald and Goofy came back to him, and he felt a sorry pang in his heart when he looked at the overgrown grass and neglected seats. The sight of Roren leading the way to the clearing was familiar also, as Sora had seen it many times before when he had last been to this world. But now, as his old friend limped over the tangled and yellowed grass, the whole scene seemed to change into one that was much more forlorn.
Roren took a seat on one of the logs, but Sora remained at the mouth of the clearing, his face creased with a wounded frown. Roren took time to settle himself, pulling his injured leg out straight in front of him and setting his cane against the log.
Finally he looked up. "Why are you standing there like that?" He said, not unkindly. His voice was softer now than before, and his features were less angry. "I only want to talk. There are some things that I should tell you, now that you've come back."
Sora came over slowly and dropped down next to Roren on the log. He stared at a small bush ahead of him, and neither of them said anything.
"You're different," Sora said at length. "Really different."
Roren sighed. "Probably."
Sora laughed weakly. He remembered that Roren tended to give that one word as an answer to many statements, and somehow it always seemed to fit, in a strange kind of way.
"What happened to you, Roren?" He asked quietly. "I feel like you're…" He stopped. You're not the same person anymore. Halvi's words returned to the front of his mind. "The Roren you meet…he is not the same person you left four years ago," she had said. Now Sora understood what she had meant, and he recognized how right she really was. Too much has changed. Or maybe, Roren has changed too much.
Sora thought about what he had said in response to Halvi's remark, "How could he be anyone besides himself?" He had been so certain, but sitting there he knew that he had really been mistaken. He felt almost as if he were sitting next to a stranger, someone who just happened to look like a very good friend that he had once known; a friend who might now be gone for good.
"What happened?" Roren was saying, and Sora pulled away from his gloomy brooding to listen to him. "Too many things… Some of them were out of my control, but not all of them. I think that it was the things that I could control that ended up hurting me the most, though."
Sora faced him, his eyebrows bent with concern. "What do you mean? What kinds of things?"
Roren's gaze was distant and dark. "Just war, Sora. That's all it was, and that's all it takes. Sometimes, it's like a leech on your very life, and other times it hacks away at your soul like an axe. Either way, you end up with the same miserable result."
"Well, Kari seems to be doing alright. She went though the same stuff, and she still has a smile on. Though, she does look pretty freaky when she's screaming at those kids."
Roren smiled, but it quickly faded. He looked down at his hands and shook his head feebly. "Same war, but different battles. We had the same enemies, but they were enemies for different reasons. We both fought completely different fights, and I guess Kari managed to come out intact, if not stronger. I'm glad for that much, you know."
There it was again, some phrase that Roren always used. "You know." He said it all the time, even when no one really did know. Sora closed his eyes. A thought came to him, and they snapped back open again.
"It's the Noble Heart, isn't it?!" He exclaimed. "You had to break the seal to use it, and that's why you're acting so…sad." He licked his lips uncertainly when Roren didn't react to what was supposed to be a revelation.
"No, I only used The Noble Heart once," Roren said. "Just that time in the square, and never again since then."
Sora dropped his head dejectedly. "Are you sure?" He mumbled doubtfully.
"Sure am." Roren muttered.
Sora thought quietly for a while, and then he raised his head. "Why do you do that if it does this to you?"
"What?"
"Fight. Why do you fight in a war, when it tears you up like this?"
Roren cocked his head. " 'Their's not to reason why. Their's but to do and die.'"
"Where did that come from?" Sora laughed.
"Alfred Lord Tennyson. It's from a poem."
"Who's Alfred Lord Tennis?"
Roren smiled and shrugged. "I don't know. I've never heard of him. I've never heard that quote before either. I don't know if I like it or not."
"But…You just said it, how could you never have heard it before?" Sora looked at his friend curiously.
"Said what?"
Sora opened his mouth, frowning. Then he smiled impishly, thinking that Roren was pulling his leg. "The quote, from that poem by that Tennis guy. 'They are not supposed to wonder why…something something, do or die.'"
" 'Their's not to reason why, their's but to do and die,'" Roren repeated. "From the Charge of The Light Brigade, by Alfred Lord Tennyson."
"There, you did it again!" Sora said. "You said the quote, and the guy who wrote it, and everything!"
"What quote? Which guy?"
Sora shook his head and dropped the line of confusing conversation. After a while Roren spoke again.
"You know, Sora, I did really look forward to when you, Donald and Goofy would come back," he said.
"Really?"
"Of course! I brag about you all the time…but I've talked to just about everyone in the camp, so most of them don't listen anymore."
Sora laughed, and Roren smiled, this time for a bit longer.
"I wanted to run," Roren said after a moment of hesitation. "When I saw you earlier, I wanted to run. Just thinking about what I would have to face when you showed up…made me a little scared."
"You were scared?" Sora wondered. "Of me? What for?"
Roren shrugged. "I was more afraid that…I would have to ask for your help. I mean look at me, I couldn't run if I wanted to. I can't fight like I used to. I need help. But with these heartless, you have to understand, I'm afraid to get you involved."
"You really don't have to worry, Roren," Sora said encouragingly. "Me, Riku and The King, we can take care of this!"
"I will worry," Roren sighed. "I already am worried. And that's why," he stood up and stretched. "That's why I have to keep an eye on you myself!"
Sora's smile twitched hopefully. "You want…you want to come too?"
"Sure."
Sora jumped to his feat and slapped Roren on the back happily. "We won't let you down, Roren, I promise! We'll get rid of these heartless, and you can go back to reading your poems and training real soldiers again! The four of us taking on the greatest heartless ever! This'll be one for Jimminy's journal for sure!"
Roren smirked and regarded Sora thoughtfully. Somewhere in the back of his mind thoughts of regret were already stirring, though he did his best to quell them. Finally he swore to himself that no matter what, he would not let Sora, or any of his friends be taken by the heartless again. He vowed to put his whole life up for it, pitiful as it was to him, and then he felt just a little better.
Roren came into the room with a stack of papers in his arms. Riku, Sora and King Mickey watched as he dropped the pile of letters and reports on his desk; it landed with a dull thud on the wooden desktop.
They were in Roren's office, a small room occupied by a large desk, a few chairs and one cabinet in the corner. All the free wall space was covered with postings that Roren had collected over the years; clippings from newspapers about battles he had been in, articles about his team members' accomplishments, and passages that merely caught his eye, among other things. The wooden floor was scraped and faded from much use; it seemed that Roren got a good many visitors.
"I had all the major towns send me copies of their crime reports that involve the heartless," Roren said as he patted the edges of the paper stack. "I get more every week. The most recent ones are on the top."
Riku picked up one of the sheets and looked it over. His face darkened. "Where is Rosen Town?"
"About thirty miles from here," Roren said. "That's one of the farthest reports I've gotten. Most of them come from within five to ten miles of this camp."
He turned and pointed to a map hanging on the wall behind him. It was stuck with hundreds of little pins with small balls of blue or red wax on the ends. Roren scanned the map, found the place he was looking for, and poked another pin into the parchment. He balled up a piece of red wax and stuck in on the end of the pin.
"I've been charting the places where heartless activity has been reported," Roren explained and gestured at the map. "Blue is for sightings, and red is for attacks."
Riku moved closer. "It looks like the most activity is in this area." He pointed to a section of the map that was clustered with the colorful markers.
"There are less reports the farther away you go," The King observed. "And most of the marks in the outer towns are blue, so there are less attacks out there."
Sora crossed his arms and bowed his head contemplatively. "It's almost like…the heartless get weaker the farther out they go from that one spot."
Roren nodded. "Kari and I were just thinking that there was something about that area that the heartless liked. There are ruins there, so we guessed that maybe they liked the gloominess of the place. But now, your theory that there is one big heartless controlling the rest makes more sense."
"Their boss must be there," Riku concluded. "They hang around the giant heartless, and branch off from where it is. And, they get weaker the farther away they go from it."
Sora stepped forward and peered at the map. "How far is that place? What is it?"
"It seems like they've gathered around The Blue-Footed Mountains," Roren said. "That's not very far from here. Less than a day's march to the west."
"Then we know where to go," Riku said, and everyone nodded in stolid agreement. "And, we know what we need to do."
