AN: Yes, I've been extremely slow. Feel free to flog me with a wet noodle. But as I've said before, this story WILL get finished. I have a lot more story ideas I want to write, but I wouldn't feel right starting them without finishing this first. Hang in there, dear readers!
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~*The Art of Working Backwards*~
Part 9 – Elucidation
"And when I looked back, she was just...gone," Riku finished, the hands resting in his lap closing on air. Seated between Sora and Kairi on bits of rubble, Riku could feel the questioning eyes of the reunited group upon him. After the two ships had made contact, they'd quickly identified a relatively open, heartless-free area where they could converse and plan more easily. They now sat or stood in a loose circle between the protective bulks of the ships.
"When you say 'gone'..." Kairi began tentatively.
"He means gone," Leon put in, drawing attention away from Riku. "We made a thorough pass over the entire area within a mile radius. We even used the new infrared scanner Cid installed. Nothing."
"You sure there's not just somethin' wrong with yer noggin'?" Cid drawled around his most recent cigarette, leaning casually back against the Highwind.
Riku snapped a glare his way. "Why do people keep asking me that? Leon even made me do a stupid concussion test!"
"It's not that we don't believe you," Kairi soothed. "But it's not exactly normal for people to just appear and disappear like that."
"Yeah, because fighting heartless and flying around in ships made of gummi blocks is just so normal," Riku grumbled sarcastically.
Kairi laughed. "Point taken."
"So, if Namine's the one who messed up our memories, does that mean she's going to fix them?" Sora asked hopefully. For him the worst part was the guilt over having forgotten a friend, regardless of whether or not it was his fault. Having known him so long, it was strange for Riku to realize anew how very seriously Sora took his friendships.
"I...think so. She was pretty vague," Riku admitted, wishing he had more information to offer. "We'll find out sooner or later anyway."
"In the meantime, we've got bigger problems," Leon said, shifting the subject back to the matter at hand. "Maleficent was the one who originally set the heartless loose in our world. If they're back, then there's a chance that she is, too."
"But we defeated her!" Sora protested. "We all took her out before we came back to Traverse Town."
Leon shrugged. "I guess she found a way to come back. Either that, or someone else came along and decided to shatter the barrier between this world and the realm of darkness. Either way, things just got a lot more dangerous. We're going to need a new base of operations, something defensible."
"It's not that easy when the heartless can just pop out of the ground," Riku mused with a frown. "And with the way they climb, you'll need more than just some good walls."
His mind flashed back to his all-too-recent encounter with the monsters, bringing back the raw sensation of fear and cold hands clawing at his limbs. Normally he loved fighting, but not when he was so badly outnumbered that he had to run. Injured pride pained him more than mere physical injury ever could.
"Say, how did you fellers keep those heartless out of the First District in Traverse Town?" Goofy asked.
"For some reason, the heartless have a harder time appearing in places that aren't already saturated with darkness," Leon explained. "By keeping that one area free of heartless, we made it harder for new ones to come in. Any that did were quickly taken care of."
"I always thought of it like weeding," Aerith added. "The more weeds in your garden, the faster they'll spread. If you get rid of most of them, you'll have fewer new ones."
"Weeds. Great." Riku grumbled. "Now all we need is some herbicide and we're set."
"Well, now," Cid drawled thoughtfully. "That, we might be able to do."
Leon turned towards the pilot, his interest piqued. "What did you have in mind?"
"You remember Merlin's old place? The old kook managed to keep holed up there for a good long while, in spite of those hordes of heartless. Asked him 'bout it once and it seems he had some pretty good protective spells set in the foundations of that old shack. Wasn't quite enough to keep him safe when the world got swamped, but in our case, it'd prolly do just fine. If the old spells still work, that is."
"It's better than nothing," Leon said, straightening up. "It's almost daytime now. As close as this place gets to daytime, at least. We're moving out. Everybody to the ships. Cid, you lead the way. We'll land as close as we can, fight our way through, and dig in. We'll iron out details once we get the lay of the land. Let's move!"
"Alright!" Sora jumped up enthusiastically. "Come on, Riku! This is going to be great."
"Just try to keep up," Riku baited, listening to his friend's indignant sputtering with plain amusement. As they headed up the ramp into the gummi ship, Riku kept up the casual banter and teasing. He kept his right hand out of sight in his pocket, tracing the familiar lines of the star charm.
~*~
"What's this?" Roxas moved the beam of his hastily-retrieved flashlight to overlap Axel's, duly illuminating the recently-fled monster's dropped bag. Glancing warily from side to side, as if expecting the creature to return, Roxas stepped forward and knelt to lift the forgotten article.
"Hey, Rox?" Axel prompted. "This would be the part where we grab our stuff and get the hell out of here before that thing comes back." He didn't know what that freaky girl-thing was, but he didn't see any reason why they should stick around and find out. Axel was all for risk-taking as long as they were known risks. Drive too fast? Sure. Play with fire? Of course! Mess around with weird, supernatural, voodoo stuff? No, thank you!
"And go where?" Roxas countered, walking back over with the bagged sketchbook tucked under his arm. "We'd have to walk through the woods – which we got lost in twice just coming here, might I add – just to get back to town."
"Um, hello? That thing almost ate you!" Axel waved his arms in emphasis, causing his flashlight's beam to dance wildly. "I'd rather be lost than monster food."
Roxas sighed shakily, letting Axel tug him closer. "Hey, you think I'm not freaked out, too? That was like something right out of The Exorcist. I'd just rather be scared and know where I am than scared and lost and cold in the middle of the night."
"Fine, fine," Axel conceded, wrapping his arms around the smaller boy. He could feel a slight suppressed tremor in Roxas's form, but knew better than to mention it. "We'll stay in the haunted house of freakiness and scary things."
"Besides, if anymore monsters show up, you can always just chuck your cell phone at them," Roxas teased. "That thing's better than garlic on vampires!"
Axel chuckled and lightly kissed his boyfriend's forehead. "Alright, already! I'm convinced. Man, I can't believe this place is really haunted. Your friends are going to freak when we tell them. If they even believe us!"
"Well, it's not like our 'visitor' didn't leave evidence," Roxas commented, stepping back from the circle of Axel's arms and pulling the sketchbook free of its protective bag.
"What's a monster doing with a spiral notebook?" Axel raised an eyebrow, shining his light down on the pages as Roxas flipped open the cover. The blond's eyebrows rose incredulously.
"Drawing pretty flowers, apparently." On the first page in bright colored pencil were a myriad of sketches of tropical birds and flowers. A palm tree stood to one side with the bark only half-textured in.
"That's..." Axel groped for the right word. "...unexpected."
"No kidding." Roxas flipped to the next page. Axel leaned over his shoulder to get a better look. The images ranged from pretty and pleasant to horrifying and surreal. All were carefully and skillfully rendered in colored pencil. As Roxas turned more and more pages, however, the colors grew fewer, as if the artist were running out of colored lead. Eventually, everything went to grayscale.
"Does this seem weirdly symbolic to you?" Roxas asked, referring to the loss of color.
Axel shrugged. "Like I'd know. Symbolism isn't exactly my thing."
"Which is why you completely bombed your last English essay."
"Yeah, yeah," Axel grumbled. He blinked as Roxas turned the page. "Damn, check out that scary lady with the horns. Who do you think she is?"
"How should I know?" Roxas asked, continuing his perusal. "She sure pops up a lot."
"She's the reason I'm like this now."
Axel and Roxas yelped simultaneously. The sketchbook flapped to the floor, and two flashlights focused their beams on the petite intruder.
"C-could you please shine those a little bit lower?" Namine asked, wincing at the light shining in her sensitive eyes.
"How do you keep appearing and disappearing like that?" Axel demanded, pulling Roxas back by his shoulder. "And what the hell are you?!"
Namine flinched at the sharp tone. "I w-was human not t-too long ago." In the face of such harsh confrontation, a nervous stutter crept back into her speech. "I... I'm not really sure what I am now. I'm very, very sorry for a-attacking you. I really didn't mean to. I-it's just that everything's changing s-so quickly that I'm having a hard time c-controlling-"
"Whoa, whoa! Okay! Just stop crying!" Axel urged frantically, one hand raised in supplication while the other lowered the accusing flashlight beam. He had no problem putting himself between Roxas and mortal danger, but crying girls were not his area of expertise.
"I'm n-not c-crying," Namine protested, relieved to have the light out of her eyes. "I j-just stutter when I g-get nervous."
"Well, it looks like you also leak saltwater from your eyes when you're nervous," Roxas observed. Namine raised a hand to her cheek and found warm, wet tears clinging to her skin.
"Oh! S-sorry!" Namine rubbed the moisture briskly away. She hadn't even realized she was feeling enough to cry. Her connection to her heart must have grown frail, indeed.
"So, wait a minute." Axel juggled the flashlight around and retrieved the sketchbook. "You're saying that this freaky old lady right here is the one that made you all..." He fished for a word that wouldn't make the tears start up again.
"Like this," Roxas saved him, indicating Namine's shadow-laced arms with his flashlight.
Namine nodded, looking down at the floor, folding her arms in close to her body self-consciously. "She's the one who forced me to do this, although the final decision was my own."
Axel and Roxas exchanged a glance. Now that she was no longer moving oddly or trying to eat anybody, this not-human girl wasn't exactly intimidating. Sympathy came reflexively, a gut-level response to a small, scared girl trying valiantly to remain composed.
"Maybe you should try explaining things from the beginning," Roxas suggested, taking the sketchbook from Axel and handing it back to Namine.
The three sat on the floor with Namine across from the two boys and the flashlights propped up on crumpled jackets between them to provide some ambient light. For a moment, Namine stalled by flipping nervously through her sketchbook. She wasn't used to being the center of attention and her nerves left her uncertain where to start. Well, she did have the story in her hands...
"When I was very young, I washed up on the shore of Destiny Islands," she began tentatively, holding the sketchbook open to an early image of a beach with assorted colorful birds and flowers sketched around the edges, the one Roxas had first opened to. "I couldn't remember anything about who I was or where I came from – nothing but my name – but the people there were kind enough to take me in. And these are my best friends-" She flipped to the next page where two boys were sketched sitting on a dock. "-Sora and Riku. It was a wonderful place. But then..."
The next page revealed a full-page drawing of the night sky playing host to a ball of orange and purple flame, the ground below riven and cracked with yellow-eyed monsters reaching out of the crevices. Namine had to admit that not all of the details were in place, but she'd captured the feeling of the event quite well.
"...the heartless came."
"Heartless?" Roxas prompted.
"Creatures from the darkness," Namine explained, "that devour peoples' hearts. Have you ever seen them before?"
"No, I'd say we've been pretty lucky in that department," Axel said with a grimace. "So, uh... what did they do? Besides, you know, the whole 'eating peoples' hearts' thing."
"I'm not entirely sure," Namine admitted. "I was sucked into the darkness before the islands were totally overwhelmed. No one really knows what happens to worlds that are taken by the heartless, but as of now, there is no such place as Destiny Islands. That world is simply... gone. Faded into nothing."
"The whole world?" Axel asked incredulously. "You mean the whole thing just went..." He waved a hand in the air. "Poof?"
"Something like that." A few more pages flipped by, images of architecture styled in an unreal mixture of medieval and futuristic motifs, yellow-eyed shadow monsters, and green fire. "I woke up in a place called Hollow Bastion." She stopped on an image of the horned, robed woman standing before a mirror. The entire image was ringed by sketches of heartless in various shapes and forms.
"That's where I met Maleficent, a sorceress. She was powerful enough that even the heartless obeyed her. She told me that if I helped her she'd help me find my friends."
"And you believed her?" Axel raised an eyebrow. "That hag has 'evil supervillain' written all over her."
"I didn't really have much of a choice." Namine confessed. "Or at least, it didn't feel like I did. I was stuck there, and I wasn't strong enough to even think of upsetting her."
"So, did she help you find them?" Roxas asked.
"In a way…" Namine's fingers toyed uncertainly with the pages. "The next time I saw Riku and Sora, they'd come to defeat Maleficent. She'd been doing some pretty bad things, and had even kidnapped one of their new friends. That's when I found out why Maleficent had bothered keeping me around in the first place." Namine turned to one of the last pages in her sketchbook: a door in the shape of a heartless crest surrounded by seven stars. "Maleficent wanted to open a door to a place called Kingdom Hearts. I don't know much about it, but supposedly, doing so would have allowed her to acquire even greater powers over darkness. The spell to open the door required the hearts of seven specific maidens to be present. Mine was one of them."
"So, she cut your heart out?" Axel's expression combined disgust and fascination as only a teenage boy could.
"Actually, I did," Namine corrected, unconsciously averting her gaze. "When I found out what she was doing, I tried to stop it. Maleficent needed all seven hearts to be present for the ritual to work. So, I forced my own heart out." Namine paused, tensing briefly, trying not to remember the unnatural shattering sensation. "I'm not sure how I did it, and I'm not sure how I survived. I do know that my heart still exists, as does Maleficent."
Axel and Roxas shared a glance. This was all so out of their element that it was hard to know how to respond. Before this night, monsters and sorceresses and other worlds had been the stuff of fantasy. They'd gone to spend the night in a haunted mansion and had wound up in an alternate reality.
"Soo…" Axel trailed off, doing his best to follow. "Did you have the wicked tattoos before you did the whole heart-ripping thing?"
"They aren't tattoos," Namine corrected, self-consciously tucking her limbs in closer. "It's the darkness." She flipped to the last page of her sketchbook. "Spreading."
For the first time, Namine herself was the central figure, thoroughly sketched out from head to toe. In the margins around her were images from the beginning of the book: flowers and birds and the two boys. She was wearing a simple dress and sandals, and her eyes were closed. It was the last picture she'd drawn before she'd started working on restoring her friends' memories.
Throughout her ordeal, drawing had been therapy of a sort – a way for her to safely express her fears and longings and everything else she had to keep under control to stay alive under Maleficent's gaze. While working on this last drawing, Namine had been in something resembling shock. Drawing had been her way of dealing with the traumatic events, of reminding herself it was all real.
In the middle of the Namine-sketch's chest, a black circle had been drawn in with pencil strokes so heavy that the paper had begun to tear.
~*~
AN: Phew! Small victories. I got hung up on the chapter for quite a while. I expect I'll be much more efficient on the next one. I know how this is going to end, but I feel like there are a lot of loose ends to tie up. Well, nothing to do but press on!