[09] Immersed

"Miss, would you like to come with me?"

I looked up from where I sat, sheltered under a shop's awning from the sudden shower of rain and growing storm. The umbrella he held was dipped low enough so that I couldn't quite see his face as he extended a gloved hand to me.

"I'm trying to go home," I stated, my voice feeling smaller than it should have been, and it was then I noticed how badly I was shaking. I had discarded my coat a few streets back, and already, my thin clothes once beneath it were soaked.

"In this deserted place? Unless you were planning on going back." He was vague, but I knew what he meant. I glanced behind him to the behemoth structure still casting its shadow over me. Though it housed familiar faces, that place was the furthest thing from home one could get. I shook my head, and I thought I heard him laugh, but it was drowned out by the rain. "Come with me," he offered gently with his hand held out for me once again, leaning down closer to my crouched figure.

And this time, I grasped his hand tightly and was pulled to my feet.

"I am DiZ," he introduced himself while he draped what felt like a heavy blanket over my head and shoulders. I flinched at the unexpected contact. For someone without a heart or feelings, I had strangely been on edge ever since stepping out of the castle. "It's protection, to help you through the dark corridor, since you don't seem to have your coat." Again, he chuckled to himself.

"Thank you, and my name...is Axken." The final word rolled off my tongue like bile, but I had nothing else to be called. I finally looked up from under the cloak, first noticing the blood red bandages wrapped around DiZ's head, only parted enough to show a single gold eye and a toothy grin. I wasn't sure what I was expecting, another black-coat maybe, and now looking at him in full, I wasn't picturing such heavily adorned and layered clothing.

"Pleasure to make your acquaintance, Axken. But we must hurry now, it seems your friends have sent out a search party already."

And so, we left, and I never turned back to look at the giant still looming over me.

x x x

DiZ lived, or took refuge in, an abandoned mansion on a lonely little world surrounded by water. I was free to roam, as no one apart from DiZ could apparently see me. Yet I didn't have the desire to. The buildings were cramped together and everything was washed in the same sandy color. Trains and trams criss-crossed across the town yet many still walked by foot between the leveled districts. And occasionally, out of the corner of my eye, I swore I saw a flash of black clothing or the disappearing tendrils of a Dusk.

The only relief from the paranoia and suffocating feeling of the enclosed structures was the beach only accessible by train, and the forest which the mansion lay within. Since my creation, and even before that, I never would have thought I'd find comfort in sun-dappled trails and towering canopies or sandy beaches and endless waves.

The days I didn't spend wandering the forest were usually spent in the mansion, where each fractured mirror or broken class case showed me a face I no longer recognized. Since being in the mansion, I had started to fade. I became nearly translucent, and my once-blonde hair turned a light shade of blue to match my eyes. I was still Axken, but my outward appearance was one of someone else.I didn't see much of DiZ, nor did I dare follow him down the staircase hidden in the library. The room beneath held the same air the Castle did, and it only made my stomach turn thinking of that place.

After a while of just a fading me and a DiZ I rarely interacted with, there appeared a girl named Namine, who spoke more through her drawings than with her voice. DiZ called her a witch, but she didn't seem like any witch I had pictured. She had an aura about her similar to mine, a Nobody's. My fictional heart twinged at the thought, that one so young had their heart removed in order to create her. Her drawings were a bit abstract, yet the meaning behind spoke volumes. I recognized depictions of other Nobodies, and most of the pictures, I couldn't place a name to, yet they were still familiar.

"They're His memories," she once told me, pointing to another drawing, one of a boy floating in a lotus-shaped pod.

"Who is he?" I asked, because like many of her pictures, this one held a reminiscent feeling yet no name appeared in my mind. She shook her head solemnly in response, and I couldn't tell if it was because even she didn't know, or because it wasn't for me to know.

Soon after that, my own voice faded. I felt like I had been reduced to nothing more than a shadow. DiZ had no answer, but he was too preoccupied with restoring the memories of the boy in the basement than to worry about me disappearing. I wondered why he even picked me up if he was just going to discard me so easily.

Namine began adding more figures to her collection of drawings, and I recognized the scenery she used as that of Twilight Town. There was one figure with short red hair, one with slightly longer silver hair, and a third with long black hair. I think I had seen them before, but I had seen many people in the town so it was hard to tell since I wasn't able to interact with any of them.

"DiZ says they're important," Namine reiterated when I would curiously peer across the long white table at her, never saying more on the matter. I became fascinated with her drawings of Twilight Town. Besides the new trio, the most recurring imagery was that of three figures in black coats, one with a blaze of red hair that made it easily recognizable, and reignited my false sense of fear every time she drew a new picture of them.

And it stayed this way for a while, me silently watching Namine draw away what seemed like many people's precious memories.