Encoded Hearts
Chapter Four
Shadowed Designs
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Sora had to admit to himself that he had lied, somewhat, after the girl-Lexira- had pointed him. He had, for a brief moment, forgotten everything about the dream and the flower petals. He hadn't spoken a word about the resemblance, and perhaps the correspondance, of the two girls.
Yes, he concluded, I did see her before, but I really don't know her. And for some reason, he wish he had; known her, that is. The young woman seemed to have this flamboyant personality that attracts everyone's attention, and not necessarily in a bad way.
"I had being secluded." Lexira moaned, rolling to her left. He had been injured slightly, bruised and scraped, upon landing in the courtyard. Bandages adorned her arms here and there, as well as her legs.
Lexira had insisted on keeping the white dress, composed of various layers of snowy silken rectangles, not unlike scarves. She said that it really was the only thing she could hold onto to try to make sense of what was happening. The dress, and the Cat, Sunshine, that had tagged along with her.
"You have to understand that the King doesn't really want someone he doesn't know wander around the halls." Sora sighed, after repeating the sentence for what seemed to be the hundreth time that day.
"He doesn't, but you do! Why can,t you do anything, Sora?" Lexira asked, her tone beginning to hold more of a pleading edge to it in the past half hour. "Please? Just the garden, to smell the flowers...! And sunshine's tired of being in this icky white room too, aren't you?"
The was a meowl of agreement, which did nothing to enlighten Sora's mood. It was bad enough he had to be stuck with a girl who insisted on the fact that he knew her, but she had to have a cat along with her to support everythign she stated. As stupid as it may be.
At that moment, there was a knock at the door. Lexira's head rose ever so slowly, staring intently at the tall white doors. Her piercing green eyes seemed to burn two dots into the white wood as the knob turned.
"Sora, it's my shi-"
Before Kairi could even finish her phrase, Lexira had jumped to the door(which had conveniently been locked from the outside) and rather brutally shoved the redhead out of the way, to proceed to running down the halls. Sunshine merrily pranced close behind her, happy to be able to run... More or less freely.
"Don't look back don't look back..." Lexira muttered to herself, closing her eyes and running through the small crowds of broom and buckets that had the aweful luck to get in her way. Water was split everywhere and stray bristles littered the carpeted floor. She would have stopped to apologize, she really would've. But she didn't really have any time to waste.
"The Reign's going to come here soon. I have to get away to save them." She reasoned, and parted the entrace doors, ready to hijack the gummi ship in the hangar and make her great escape.
"Where do you think you're going?"
"...Shit."
-----
Lexira had been intercepted in the main hall, at the doors, by none other than the King himself. Keyblade at the ready, it had appeared as though he had already been busying himself with fighting someone.
Or something.
And as things turned out, Mickey had carefully taken the time to explain to Lexira that they had been keeping her locked up for her own safety, not for the castle's. Yes, he knew she wasn't a threat to anyone. If anything, she would be the one to help them all to save the several worlds.
"But, what were you fighting, out there?" Lexira asked, carefully crossing her legs under the small, round, white table that had been peacefully waiting in the corner of her (rather larger)room. "It didn't really look as though there was anything in the yard..."
"Heartless."
Lexira's heart sank, deeper than she had ever thought imaginable. And the look on the King's face, on of utter defeat and self-deception, wasn't helping her feeling at all. The heartless were supposed to be banned from at least three worlds, and the castle, this castle, was supposed to be one of them. Considering that everyone's hearts were relatively untainted by darkness.
Unless...
"It's not your fault, Lexira, don't worry about it." Mickey sighed, with something resembling a smirk, closing his eyes and shaking his head. "Yes, you come from the dark realm, but that doesn't mean you're a part of it. Why, if I didn't know any better, I'd say you've a pure a heart as Sora!"
"That... Can't be." Lexira whispered, wringing her lands in her lap. "I was almost born and raised in darkness. The first recollections I have date back to when I was first picked up by... Uh, I think it was Marluxia... Or Larxene. I can't just be... Well, like Sora." She tried, mostly a desperate attempt to convince herself that she hadn't spent years in a domain that never should have even greeted her.
"You don't remember anything before they found you?"' the king asked, suddenly very alert and paying a little too much attention to the young woman, for her own liking. "Are you a nobody?"
"No, I am not one of those heartless... Idiots." Lexira sighed, inwardly cursing herself for calling all thirteen of them idiots, of all things. The organization had been the ones who had shielded her from most of the horrible things that went on in the world. They had given her something to wake up for every morning, as well as a roof over her head, clothes on her body and something like a family, as fragmented and on its way to dissapearing as it was.
"But they were the only idiots that were good enough to me as to take me in as one of their own."
The king shrugged, crossing his arms. Not only did everything make no sense at all to him, but at the same time, every piece of the puzzle was starting to come together, one piece at a time.
The Reign wanted this girl, a girl that had been something particular to Organization XIII, and apparently, something of enough value for the greatest heartless to obey any orders. And with what she had told him beforehand, before he had began to explain his own situation, it made everything all the more clearer. She was able to access an other world enitrely, and, it seemed she could twist its realities to suit her own needs.
She was, without a doupt, a precious gem the King had decided it was best to protect. At least until he found out what her true potential was.
"Can you wield a keyblade?"
Lexira laughed; until a few hours ago, she had been certain that there were only two keybearer(and even then, she wasn't all that certain about it). The idea had always been appealing, yes; having that much power in the palm of your hand... But it never crossed her mind to fight with one.
"I'm sorry, sir..." she giggled, covering her mouth. "But that's a question I'm afraid I find completely ridiculous!"
The king chuckled lightly at that remark. He admitted it to himself, it had been a rather stupid and pointless question. But, at least, he had the certainty that this girl wasn't really more than what she seemed. For the moment, at least. He had yet to find out what other intriguing secrets she witheld.
"Although..." Lexira started, her visage sombering into what seemed with deep thought, as though she was trying to grasp a percel of information that just constantly slipped away from her needing grasp. "I had a dreamm, in that world, about that girl... Kairi, right?"
The king's ears twitched, and not very pleasantly. He had this distinct feeling that what this girl, what Lexira was about to tell him, wasn't something he needed to have in his mind at the time.
"I saw her combine a dusk with a heartless warrior. But the heartless was still there afterwards. She only used one of the hearts it had taken from someone. Though she dissapeared, and the usk started to transform into someone. The woman looked like a mix of me, Kairi and Naminé."
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"Eithw, we have to do something about this. She can't just go running around like an idiot."
"There's nothing we can do about her free will, Elleb."
"What about turning her into a heartless?
"Shut up, Enimsaj. That's just make things worse."
"We could get Iriak to put her back together?"
"Come on, you know that'd never work, Leira. Iriak would never comply."
"Would you idiots just shut up?"
The Reign followers instnatly stopped conversing about Lexira's fate, and concentrated on the newly arrived member. Allerednic.
"I'm not pleased with you three." He stated bluntly, vaguely gesturing at Leira, Etihw and Ytuaeb. "You've let be down once again. Our leader won't be pleased, you're aware of that?"
"It's not our fault the bloody wench threw herself of the fricken toweer to-!!" Etihw started, bursting into an other one of her screaming fits, her snow white hair almost snapping around as she jumped up off her chair.
"It's not worth it." Leira shrugged, cutting the furious Ether with a wave of her hand. "We put ourself in this crappy mess and we just have to get out of it."
Ytuaeb kept to his silence, choosing to stay out of the conversations going around as to avoid saying something he may regret.
"Xeiri will not be pleased of your actions. All of you." Ellerednic stated, as if completely ignoring the bickering girl in front of him. "I, for one, have successfully accomplished the simple mission he has given me. Can you, any of you, say the same?"
The room became coated with a thick, hateful silence, everyone in the room cursing someone else for their own failure. Ethers were simply like that. They were unable to live with the burden of failing something of rather great importance. They thusly dumped the responsibility on someone else, regardless of whether or not that person was even there at the moment of failure.
"We need to retrieve that mumbling wench before she gets us more exposure than we already have. Up until this day, the Reign's name has remained in the shadows. I'm afraid that this is the time for us to act and fulfill what has been planned for us since our birth."
"But... We can't just do anything." Elleb spoke up, crossing his arms as he rested his feet on the long table. "Something too harsh will push her away, but if we're too subtle, she'll agree long after we actually need her."
"...You have a valid point, Elleb." Somewhere in the room, someone muttered a faint for once. "But our leader already has a plan for us all to exectue individually. If one fails, the plan can still stand. Though, if three of you should fall or fail, everything we've worked on for all these years will have been for nothing." The imposing ether took a pause, sitting down on his rather luxirious chair, at one end of the long table.
"But I don't exect more than two of you to die during this. Dismissed."
-----
"We can't just sit here, Aller." She growled, sitting in front of the one who had trashed her earlier. "We need to do something now. I don't care about the others, I just want what I was promised."
"You'll have it all in due time, Leira. As soon as Iriak wakes up." Allerednic said passively, his fingers interlaced as his elbows rested on the table. "Once he awakens, we will be able to do a great number of things that we are currently unable to do."
"I don't care about Iriak." Leira growled, louder than before, slamming a fist on the table. "I want to feel those emotions! Not just this... Deep loathing of everything alive! I want to be in love, I was to laugh honestly, honestly, you understand? I hate sorrow and pain, and remorse and hatred. I hate it! Isn't it ironic?"
Allerednic chuckled darkly, his piercing near-white eyes staring at the woman in front of him.
"There really isn't anything we can do until he wakes, Leira. Though, if you feel like dying today, please, be my guest. Just don't hinder our plans more than you already have."
On that, the imposing man stalked off and out the door.
"...I'm sorry I can't hate you as much as you want me too..." the green haired girl whispered, closing her eyes and she cluched her chest painfully.
Yes, being an Ether really was a horrible thing.
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"HEARTLESS?!"
"Donald, that really wasn't necessary."
Lexira massaged her temples gingerly, trying to make the pain of the rabbid duck's something-like-agony-cry go away. But, of course, the stupid chiken wouldn't give her that opertunity.
"But we got rid of them! REALLY!"
"Donald, I believe you, but this is just how things are, and it's not Lexira's fault." Mickey sighed, shaking his head, once more, at the guard's naïveté. Even after trying to explain to him beforehand that he was obliged to fend off enemies from the dark reamls, after describing the heartless perfectly, he couldn't help the duck's rather bashful(and painful) reaction to the name.
"But it is my fault!" Lexira cried, slightly jumping up and down in some exasperated way. "They weren't here before I got here! And I'm from the darkness, the World that Never Was!"
"What's all the noise about?" Sora muttered, apparently just waking from a nap he had taken in the room he had taken to occupying during his stay at the castle. "Something about heartless... Though I'm probably wrong."
The young man searched a pair of eyes to prove him wrong; Lexira's emerald eyes turned to the floor the instant he came out of the room, Doland whistled at stared at the ceiling, while the King had sighed.
"...No way."
