Disclaimer: I do not own Kingdom Hearts or anything incorporated with the creation of Kingdom Hearts. I do not own anything apart from my own character Runt. Everything else you may find familiar belongs without question to the game Kingdom Hearts or to the Disney and Square Soft franchise.
Authors Note I: Personally I thought this chapter sounded slightly rushed, but I wanted Runt to gain her blade and history so that I could move onto trying to form a stable plot.
Tredici
To what cost? She had felt the blade slice clean through her chest. She had watched herself fall into darkness through dead eyes. Drowning in the tide as it pulled and clung at her, but to what cost?
To what cost?
She was dead, and yet her eyes flickered open. Absorbing the bright light beaming down from some unseen source above, she was dead, but she was breathing.
The light faded, and she realized it had only seemed bright because she had been in darkness so long. Her body hummed with energy, a strange essence she couldn't name, a strange adrenaline, a hunger, a need to move, to destroy.
She was dead but her body moved. It stood on its own legs, and her eyes took in the sea of strange swords that stretched on in all direction, thousands upon thousands of swords with their tips buried deep within the earth, and their pommels glinting in the dim sun.
Her body was uneven, twitching back and forth, and something was missing. She glanced to the side, and saw herself. Bloodied and broken, her blond hair matted and covered with dirt and blood, her face adorned with crescent punctures from her very nails, and there, standing as testimony to her very thoughts, was the blade, now shaped like a strange key, protruding from the hole in her chest.
Yet she was looking at herself.
"A shadow?" The head that was hers, but not hers spun to identify the source of this new, and yet familiar voice. "How is it, that even when the heart has been taken from your body, your body still remains the same?"
It was another girl, dressed from head to toe in white, with hair as black as obsidian, and eyes . . . eyes . . .
And eyes just like hers.
"How is it, that your body still lives and breaths without a heart!" The girl's voice began to grow louder as she continued to approach, winding her way through the strange swords, though her eyes never left the girl's. The girl had no voice to reply, she could only allow her head to twitch back and forth as her body pitched anxiously with uncontrollable energy from foot to foot.
"That form will not do." Raising her hand, the girl in white, seized the creature the other girl had become and without touching her, threw her in the direction of her own bloody body.
In the blink of an eye, she was staring up at the very same light again.
"Now that I am sure you can speak, how is it your body lives without a heart?"
The girl, Runt, shrugged.
"When I did it, I must have missed the mark . . . "
"No. It seems you have another heart, but this one is not natural. As a child, you were threatened by a disease, a fatal weakness of the heart weren't you?" The blond had no time to reply. "Being in the world you were from. They used science to fix your problem."
"They constructed a heart of steel and mesh, built to do the same job any real heart could do, whenever the time came for your real heart to fail." Pulling the blade from the blond's chest, the girl continued to ramble. "When you stabbed yourself, something happened to your sword, something evil. It stole your heart, tore it from your chest and left nothing but that metal monstrosity to beat beneath your ribs."
With an aggressive wave of her hand, she indicated the area of the organ in question, and the blond felt it suddenly skip a beat in response.
"No matter, you're alive, you have another chance for revenge." The girl in white raised her hand, palm down, and something dark began to consume the key like blade within her hand "Take this, and you will be given the power to defeat the shadowy creatures who killed your family and your friends."
A sword. From the blade that had killed her, this strange girl had fashioned another blade.
Runt took it wearily. Finding it fit perfectly within her hand, the perfect weight, the perfect length.
"It is called Tredici."
The blade itself was black and shaped like the minute hand of a clock.
"The number thirteen is etched into the blade." Runt noted, somehow aware that the strange girl beside her nodded.
"That is how many years you have to live." In horror Runt spun around to stare at the girl. "You real heart is dying, and that metal heart is dying with it."
She scoffed at the flabbergasted expression on the girls pale face. " You never expected to outlive the venom in your veins did you?"
She laughed.
"For every heartless you kill, a certain amount of time shall be subtracted from the grand total." She pointed to the base of the blade, where it slowly grew wider to join the handle. "This clock, will count down for you. See? All thirteen years are represented here."
Runt tried to drop the blade, but the moment it left her fingers it appeared again in a burst of dark light.
"The bigger the baddie, the more time they take, but it all adds up in the end." The small white face of the clock stared up at her ominously, all thirteen roman numerals glittering with their own malicious light as the hands quivered in anticipation to count her down to her very last second.
"Your days are numbered." The black-haired girl said seriously, wiping her hands on her white dress as she backed up into the field of strange blades. "So make them count."
"I can attack the shadows now?" The girl in white nodded.
"You can attack anything your heart desires."
With a cynical laugh she vanished into a dark swirling vortex, and in a similar fashion, so did Runt.
Authors Note II: This chapter may have been rushed, as I mentioned earlier, and I'm sorry if it is. I hope this doesn't make Runt a Mary-Sue that would be something I am trying desperately to avoid. If you have any ideas, or ways to improve this story, send me a comment or an e-mail. I would greatly appreciate constructive criticism.
Thank you Jupiter-lightning, for being a kind and consistent reader. It is for you that I strive to improve, and it is for your entertainment that I continue this story. Thank you for being the only one, out of one-hundred-and-eighty-four hits, to comment.
