The Violet Room

by sarehptar

While working a psychology internship, Myde is given the challenge of analyzing Ienzo, a mysterious patient who spends his days writing on the walls of his hospital room. But when the story of 'Zexion' and 'Demyx' starts to sound familiar...

14. Above The World

Note: Part 1.

» Τ ђ ε – Vίσιετ – Яσσм «

Sarehptar

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Ĉħąρτεŕ V

Ғίηąłε – Ŧŕεмσłσ :

Ǻвσνε – ŧ н ε – Ŵσŕłđ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Whether Myde actually woke up that morning or just went right on sleeping, he couldn't have honestly said. His alarm went off, his eyes opened, but the early morning seemed to flood the room like shifting waters, and his head swam in the pleasant haze of being half way between dreaming and a dream come true. He sat up and pushed back the covers, but it felt more like drifting, content and lazy; his eyes somehow moved a little slower than all the rest of his body, so he felt his motions long before he saw them—every footstep was an echo, a soft-toned after-image. He tripped over the bag he had packed last night, half empty because he still had no idea what he should take, because they still didn't even have a plan.

Myde dressed, somehow, and made it to the bathroom. The steady fall of water in the sink as he washed his face was a low-grade symphony, the first tentative tuning notes of a violin. When he looked up at the mirror, squinting against the glare of the overhead light, he was surprised—for the first time in weeks, his reflection did not look like a stranger. It didn't matter the man in the mirror had eyes a little bluer than Myde remembered ever having in this life, that not long ago at all he'd made fun of the very same hairstyle he was now sporting. It didn't feel odd to look at himself and think Demyx. What did surprise him was the slow-welling smile that had somehow stolen its way on to his face without his knowing and which seemed like it never meant to go away again.

Myde stared at his reflection for a long moment. Did he really feel that hopeful, that thrilled, so content the growing feeling could not be contained in thoughts alone, shyly but irresistibly showing itself in the up-turn of his lips? Here's your proof, Ienzo, that the heart's more than anyone can understand. Maybe hearts weren't things at all, to be found or lost in the first place. Maybe they were just another name for every thought and every tie it took to make a person and to make a person happy.

Sparing one last glance for the mirror before he turned off the light and left, Myde had the otherworldly opportunity to realize that this moment was going to be the start of the best day that he had ever lived, as Myde, as Demyx, as, well, himself—both and neither. When he eased his bedroom door shut behind him, the sound it made seemed familiar and final: the same sound an old, heavy book makes when you close it at last.

It was time to go.

o ― ― ― ― ― » Vίσιετ « ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde reached Rufus Memorial exactly on the clock, a miracle in and of itself, but the trip was a blur except for the wind against his face, which felt unusually cool; Dawn City mornings were almost always bright and temperate, but today the chill left his cheeks burning, and every time he breathed in, the air seemed electric-charged. A low sound was buzzing in the back of his mind like whispers from voices far away.

The cold should have pulled him out of his daze, but instead it made him curl up a little closer, insulated against the world a while longer, and as he drove the route he had long since memorized, his mind wandered on ahead of him. Mostly, now that he remembered it all, Myde wondered about the worlds, all the places he had been sent with the Organization—whether they'd find the residents of Halloweentown perfecting their routines like always, if the pirates of Port Royal would still toss him coin for a tune, if Baymax still gave hugs to anyone who asked, what in the world Atlantica was doing without its beloved Ariel—and that was the strangest part of it all, when he really thought about it. There were so many people here, in Dawn City, who just didn't belong. Kairi, who was born in Radiant Garden, Yuffie, whom the original Myde had grown up with in Traverse Town, Aerith and Leon (how strange they weren't friends in this world—Myde hadn't ever been close to either of them in that life, too many years' difference, but still), the Cheshire Cat, Mulan, and Tigger—what were they all doing here, in a land so completely different from any of theirs?

Was Dawn City a refugee world like Traverse Town, the brighter stopping point between the broken realms? Or was it something more, like the very beginnings of the fabled time before, when all worlds were one—

The rising face of Rufus Memorial Hospital startled him, and Myde forgot his worry for the worlds as he blinked into the familiar golden light of dawn rebounding off the windows. Even here, though, something was slightly different, and when Myde's eyes adjusted, he thought the reflection of the light was somehow distorted, shadowy in places it had never been before. Behind him, dark, material clouds were gathering on the horizon. Those whispers he was hearing weren't voices. They were a storm warning.

Oh well. Not like Myde had ever minded a little bit of rain.

Myde parked the glittering motorcycle in the far lot, around the freight entrance side and as far away from hurried hospital goers and rushing ambulances as he could think of; if he could have gotten away with parking on the sidewalk or the spare scattered patches of grass, he would have. As he walked away, pocketing the keys and shooting anxious glances back over his shoulder, Myde imagined the look of stoic disappointment that would sweep over Cloud's face if he brought the motorcycle back not even a day later with dings in the side or scuffs in the paint. Cloud might regularly ride his bike off the tops of skyscrapers, but Fenrir's paint job glowed as gorgeously untouched today as the day Cloud had ridden it out of the shop, and woe be on the man who let Strife down. Maybe Myde should have asked to borrow his mother's car instead? But then there was no point to own it and not ride it… Anyway, Myde thought, with a decisive shake of his head, he had already determined that today was a day in which no Bad Things™ would happen. Flounder II would be fine. With a final lingering look, he turned the corner around the front of the building and headed toward the hospital's front doors, which opened with a swish; a gust of cold air flooding into the open space chased his heels inside.

Before his eyes had even adjusted, Myde heard a voice calling out to him, and he knew it was a voice he should know, but for a moment the bells didn't ring and he stared across the lobby, trying to get his bearings—then he finally figured it out. It was Belle calling to him behind the front desk, and he hadn't recognized her voice because this was not how their mornings usually went. Myde came in, Myde said hello to the sliver of Belle's forehead he could see above her newest book (was she like this with everyone, or just him? There had to be something special about her that kept her employed at the front desk job for which she seemed uniquely unsuited), and then, as the elevator doors were shutting, he would hear a hurried, "Oh good morning, Myde!"

Today, she stood as he approached and came around the side of the desk. When he was close enough, she pressed a book into his hands delicately, with an obvious edge of reverential care. "I'm sorry to bother you this way, but would you mind taking this back to Ienzo? I borrowed it ages ago and forgot it wasn't mine." Her words were contrite but her smile was unrepentant, the look of someone who had obviously forgotten a few times on purpose. Myde stared down at the cover of the small hardback book in his hands. There was nothing particularly exciting about it; it looked like the type of book that might have had an interesting dust jacket at one point, but all that remained now was the cloth-bound blue cover, the title—Magic Hour—embossed in silver in standard letters along the spine.

"What's it about?" Myde couldn't help but ask.

Belle's eyes did a sort of fairy-tale transformation, a swirling dance through too many feelings for Myde to name, wistfulness and joy and genuine excitement and maybe even sadness to see it go all at once. She took a moment, to think of the best way to summarize the sensations, to put all the ways the work had made her feel into one or two words (An insurmountable task, Ienzo had scolded Myde once, when he'd asked for the Cliffnotes version of so-and-so book Ienzo was reading instead of talking to Myde. Good books defy all laws of logic to spin meaning from things for which there are no explanations in this or any language. How can you ask for a summary? As if the word itself were poison, to which Myde could only pout, rejoinder: Yes, okay, but what it is really about?)

"It's about a man who's changed into a hideous monster," Belle said, a rising thrill to her voice he had never heard before. "He looks like a frightening beast, but the longer you're with him, the more you begin to see—he's lost something dear, and you can't help but want to save him!" The book sounded much more interesting the bubbling way she told it.

But she paused, her brow furrowed a little. She didn't seem satisfied with her own explanation. "It's full of magical transformations and darling servants and daring feats, but maybe… it's really about how much we can change, and how much other people can change us." She met his eyes, her gaze wide and deep, like honey-colored light shining through windows in a long corridor. "It reminded me of you, actually."

"Huh?!" Myde balked. Men and monsters and losing things dear. Did she… know something?

But her smile was gentle. "You've changed a lot since I first met you."

The tendency in these situations was always to say no, not really, not that much, but she was right, he had changed—completely and totally and maybe, depending on who you questioned, into a different person entirely.

"The very first day you came in, you didn't ask, but I could tell," Belle laughed a tiny, well-meaning laugh, "you wanted to know why in the world you were here. Did you ever figure out the answer?" she asked, a last curiosity she couldn't repress.

"Y-Yeah." Myde smiled, couldn't help but smile as he held Ienzo's book tight, safe as he could make it. "I think I did."

"I'm glad," Belle said, with all the grace and heart of a true beauty.

o ― ― ― ― ― » Vίσιετ « ― ― ― ― ― o

The hall of colored doors stretched out before him, dappled sunlight spotting the white tile gold, and Myde poured over his clipboard quite professionally as he stepped off the elevator. Of course, there wasn't anything new on the clipboard which needed reviewing, but Myde liked to at least look like he knew what he was doing when other staff members hurried by. If on this particular morning he was balancing an extra book on his board, well, surely no one would notice if he played the intern's part convincingly enough.

He knocked twice on the nearest door—Ariel's room—before a voice with a dreamy note said it was open. The door actually swung without obstruction for once, and Myde peeked around the door frame. "Good morning!"

"Good morning," Ariel sighed.

The last of the large objects which had cluttered her floor were gone, revealing the old, bleached wood furniture which someone outside the hospital had to have gifted her—Myde recognized the large trunk at the foot of her bed as a sea chest, though no one else in Dawn City would, and the dresser had a gnarled quality to it that he associated with driftwood. He was glad to see that not all her things had been taken; the top of the dresser was still coated with detritus and knick-knacks: tiny porcelain dolls and dry fountain pens, a butterfly made of painted bird feathers, a Rubik's cube missing several stickers, strings of beads and an old leather boot, a pale blue crystal shaped like a trident—and above his head, the silverware wind chime still swung idly, any sharp ends carefully bent away.

Ariel herself sat at the window, like she usually did, staring out toward the distant horizon with an even more distant look in her eye. Myde crept closer, a little afraid to break the spell of silence that hung in the room. Her gaze was clear this morning, and he was quitting his job today, so hell if he'd be the one to remind her she needed to take medication to fix something like that. Her hands in her lap were clenched tight into two thin fists, not like she meant to fight but like she didn't know what to do with her body anymore, like two fists alone might somehow manage to contain the fierce longing that sent her mind out wandering far off stars while the rest of her was trapped here in a cage of glass and brick and good intentions.

"One day," she said, shaking, wistful, "I'll make it there. To the world where I belong."

"I know you will," Myde agreed, because he did, knew with all the certainty that only a whole other lifetime of memories could provide. Ariel belonged in Atlantica, where the sea could sing in her the way it sang in him, tidal changes in the blood even when all she did was live beside it, the endless lapping of the deep water at the foot of the castle on the cliff a siren's lullaby.

She wanted to go where Eric was, he knew that, but because he also knew there were some things no one could leave behind, Myde found himself asking, "Do you miss the ocean sometimes? Giving it up for the land?"

Ariel stiffened and looked over at him, startled. A split second too late Myde remembered that this version of Ariel never told him she was a mermaid, that she had traded her voice for legs; this version of Ariel had never met him wandering the shore, bare of his black coat, toes in the foam, feeling as if he too might dissolve, every thought consumed by the beautiful clarion ringing of the waves ringing in him, all of his body carried out and out to the endless aquamarine horizon—

But something lovely and sharp passed through her gaze, and in the blue room, Ariel looked down at her fists in her lap and let go, unwinding slim white fingers. He thought she might be about to say I remember you. But what she actually said was "I have the sea here with me." She tilted her head a little, lifted one hand to cup at her ear. "No matter how far I go, I hear it."

Myde thought of the hurried, harmonious rush in the back of his mind, the fever pitch of currents that made him itch to move and move forever. "Yeah," he agreed, "I know what that's like." Through the swirl of her bangs, Ariel spared him a smile she formed with her eyes, shards of dew-spotted sea glass in the sun. Maybe it was that image (that memory) which inspired him, Myde wasn't sure, but before he'd even thought the words, he heard himself ask: "Do you wanna see a magic trick?"

She nodded three times in quick succession.

Myde mused for a moment, tapping his bottom lip with one knuckle, and then an idea caught up to his enthusiasm and he set his clipboard and Ienzo's book on the top of the chest at the end of her bed. With due showmanship, Myde snapped his fingers and whistled a few light, frolicking notes. In his upturned hand, a little jewel of water coalesced, whirling and jumping, and with a firm thought he shaped this into a tiny, sparkling fish that darted around his fingers and lazily paddled through the air above his palm. Ariel reached out immediately, could barely stop herself from trying to touch, innocent delight and determined curiosity all in one motion. Myde sent the fish sailing from his hand to her own, and she cupped it like a treasure or a living thing.

"That's amazing!"

Myde shrugged, playing it cooler than he ever felt. "It's no big deal really. I don't know how long it'll even last."

Ariel prodded at the fish to see it kiss the tip of her finger and then flicker away. She watched it the same way very young children might watch an exciting new toy, cataloging every movement and shine. But "Do you miss it?" she asked without warning, looking up at him finally.

Do you miss it?

There was no ocean in Dawn City. In this life, Myde had only ever seen the sea in rediscovered memories, as a landscape for his half-blurred dreams, but when he had finally remembered… What he remembered was this: the sea had a voice inside him, the lull and rise of gentle whispers meant to wake a weary child from the golden edge of sleep (come here, come closer), echoing the ebb and flow of every breath, his body the whorled white shell in which the ghosts of waves were kept. When he thought of the ocean he could feel it on his skin, the waters closing above him like arms closed in embrace, a single flicker dissolving in a thousand filtered sunbeams, and everywhere the strange-familiar voices raised in chorus: sirens and seadogs, stars and serpents and silvery scales, great leviathans singing from farthest below, all in the same soft, bone-shivering shade of longing: come home.

Could he miss a thing that he had never touched? "Yes," he said, "every day," and it was truer than he even knew how to explain—in all his life, in all his lives, he had been listening to the same sad, beguiling call, a single driving force within him in times when nothing else could motivate him to live and breathe. (Myde remembered this: he had been born in a dark town where the huddled refugees of ruined worlds were gathered, a native in a place no one else called home, and in this world, the water ran close beneath the surface, so close he could press his ear to the cobblestones of the third district to hear it telling tales of other, greater bodies, and his mother's voice—almost his mother's voice—saying your father blew in on a mistral wind with a night storm in his eyes. He was not a man of the sea, he was the sea in a man, and you are the sweet foam tickling at my toes. Someday, she said, I will return you. Then: every night the same dream of returning. It was longing that made Nobodies, a hollow inside years before the heart ever went missing.)

Myde came back from his thoughts to find himself fixed under the weight of Ariel's earnest eyes. The crystalline fish peeked out at him from behind the fall of her red hair like an extra drop of conviction. "I'm sure you'll get there too," she said. "The world where you belong."

"You know," Myde shook his head, laughing a little, "I'm not sure where that is anymore."

o ― ― ― ― ― » Vίσιετ « ― ― ― ― ― o

Back in the hall, clutching book and clipboard again, he rapped sharply on the next door, Chester Carroll's purple and plant-painted Lotus Forest. There was no answer, but that wasn't particularly surprising. Whether or not Chester answered for visitors seemed to depend on some arcane alignment of the stars, or on the cat man's whims alone, which changed shapes more often than the moon. Myde knocked again and then pulled open the door, peeking warily around the edge. There was no one in the chair, no one on the bed, and no one on the windowsill. There was no one lurking behind the door, no one on top of the dresser, and no one tucked away in any of the corners of the room. In any other case, Myde would assume that meant no one was home, but this was Chester Carroll, so he waited an extra minute or two, leaning halfway into the room and holding his breath tight.

Still nothing. "Hellooo?" Myde called. "You there, Chester?" There was no answer. Hmm. Maybe Chester really had gone out of his room early for a walk-about. It was not as if the RMH staff could stop him; they'd given up on locking his door long ago because the man was as impossible to pin down as clouds, slick and silent as a street cat. Myde made it into the purple room without being accosted and noted Chester's absence on his records. (These records were mostly useless, of course—half of the time they ended up crossed out ten seconds later: he's here, no, sorry, he's gone). He was technically supposed to phone in and make sure someone was on the lookout for their wandering patient, but the nearest non-emergency phone was in the office one floor down and he wouldn't be here to get in trouble for it later…

Myde scurried out of the purple room and made it halfway to the next when a sonorous, echoing voice sung without warning in his ear, "Long had paled that sunny sky: echoes fade and memories die…" Myde felt every muscle in his body actually contract under his skin as he leapt straight up in the air and whirled around to stare down the hall.

There was no one there, of course. The hallway was empty of everything but sunbeams coming through the windows, the dust inside them swirling idly, completely undisturbed. The book had slipped out of his grip on the clipboard and he inched to pick it up. From behind Myde the voice lilted once more, "Still she haunts me, phantomwise, Alice moving under skies never seen by waking eyes—" Myde whirled around again, but the other end of the hallway was just as empty.

"Chesterrr," he groaned, but the cat man did not materialize, and the hallway (dimmed at all its corners by the bright light of the windows) divulged no secrets. Myde though about being responsible and going back to change the records again, and then, well… he thought better of it. There was something… different in the hallway, suddenly, that he could not name or put a finger on, but all his hair was standing on end at once.

"In a Wonderland they lie, dreaming as the days go by, dreaming as the summers die…"

Had there always been a painting of the moon hanging in this hall? A large frameless painting stood on the farthest wall, just an enormous white crescent moon on a blue-black starless field, all its brush strokes a little fuzzy, seeming half fit to slide off the canvas at any moment. There was something watchful about it, waiting, planning, the cat in the frozen moment before a pounce—then Myde heard a scuffle and a strange click like metal or claws on the tiles behind him and his heart jumped higher than the rest of him did as he whipped around once more.

There was… something. A flicker of something, darker than shadow, gone in an instant. Had he imagined the barest hint of a lamp-like eye? An alarm bell rang in the back of his head. But this world was sealed. How could a Heartless—

The high, bodiless voice breathed out, and Myde felt himself getting dizzy from the number of times he'd spun around in the last half minute. Even so, he wasn't dizzy enough to not notice: the crescent moon in the painting had moved, and Myde would swear on Kingdom Hearts that he wasn't imagining that. The moon no longer stood on its point like it would in the sky but laid on its back, resembling nothing so much as a very familiar grin.

"Ever drifting down the stream—lingering in the golden gleam—" Chester whispered, so close to Myde's ear it felt as if he had to be standing there, invisible. "Life, what is it but a dream?"

Myde might have twitched a little, some uncontrollable combination of disturbed and irritated. "A dream?" he snapped. "Are you saying you made the Heartless up? If you're just trying to trick me, that's a really lame way to do it; I'm not afraid of Heartless!"

There was no answer to that but long, mad laughing.

Myde found he'd somehow backed himself against the green door in the hall, and without tearing his eyes away from where they scoured the hall and the moving painting, he reached back, fumbling with his keycard, and stumbled through.

A garbled voice (or several voices?) screeched at once, and Myde saw a silver and green streak flying at him before the collision knocked him straight off his feet. The clipboard and the book flew in different directions. He shouted, slipped, and banged his head on the door on the way down so he saw sparks of black all over his vision, not unlike miniature Heartless swimming in the air before his eyes. The monster which had assaulted him clung on to Myde's mid-section with tiny feelers, digging in sharp when he tried to blindly flail his way free, eyes clenched shut again from pain.

"Nooo!" he wailed. "You don't want my heart! It's only like half there and it's definitely used goods!"

One green-sparkling sneaker poked Myde warily in the side. "You're weird," Kadaj said, looking down his nose at Myde from where he sat, perched on the intern not unlike a conquering king on a throne.

Myde's sheepish grin was almost as enormous as Chester Carroll's. "Got me there."

"You're not supposed to admit it, stupid."

"Got me again," Myde said, barely resisting the urge to pinch Kadaj's puffed out, pouting cheeks. The kid had really grown on him, and Myde was not just saying that because Kadaj was approximately as clingy as a colony of mold. Of all the patients in RMH, maybe he'd miss these kiddos the most. Sitting up a bit, Myde leaned back against the green door and settled Kadaj into his lap properly, eliminating the worst of the bony elbows and knees. (Okay, he would perhaps not miss these bruises.) Kadaj stared up at him with narrowed cat eyes until Myde deigned to pat his head, smoothing down the silvery side of his hair again. For his efforts, the intern received a long hug that also contained several quick, sharp pinches, which sort of summarized what being near a Jenova boy was like at any given time of the day. There was a quiet scuffle a ways away, and Myde looked up to see Loz shuffling his feet, staring down at his own light-up sneakers with an even poutier expression on his face.

"Oh all right," Myde sighed, throwing his arms out, and Loz's face lit up for a second before he could hide it, "you can have a hug too—"

"No," Yazoo cut in from his plush chair in the corner of the room, staring menacingly over the top of a well-worn comic book spangled in red, white, and blue. "Not without the password."

Kadaj went very still and then tried to slither away from Myde, who was having none of that. (After all, Kadaj usually punished incorrect passwords with a swift shin-kick or two—Myde had become a grandmaster of the self-defense cuddle.) "Is it still Aire Tam Storm?" Myde guessed, tensing to grab any incoming shoes.

"No!" Kadaj declared, hands on hips, looking about ready to start meting out punishment whether Myde let him up or not.

"Today it's 'Ramuh's beard'!"

"LOZ!" Kadaj shouted and Yazoo groaned. "You can't tell him the password; that ruins it!"

"Ehh? It's not my fault—" The middle brother bristled.

"How about this," Myde offered, holding up one hand in oath. "I solemnly swear I am not a monster. Or…um… not a bad one anyway, at least not anymore, although I guess in some contexts, certain people might—"

Kadaj tilted his head to one side and then to the other, considering the picture the disheveled intern made. "Myde's too dumb to be a monster," he concluded with a single, sage nod.

"Erm… thanks, I think?" Myde threw out both hands in a shrug, which was, of course, the moment Loz barreled into him like a pile driver, knocking him back into the door again, head first. Was it any wonder Myde wasn't the shiniest pearl in the oyster bed with all this brain trauma he was subject to? "Hold on, hold on—those are my lungs—ooff!"

Myde got Loz settled under one arm and Kadaj under the other, and he had just about shaken the worst of the dizziness off when Loz teased "No hugs for Yazoo, 'cause he's the least favorite."

Uh-oh. Myde darted his head up to peer at Yazoo (too fast, too fast, the room spun a little) and caught a glimpse of watery eyes and a shaking bottom lip before the oldest brother hid behind his comic again. Myde had never given Yazoo that much thought; Ienzo favored him so much whenever he was around that Myde played things up with Kadaj and Loz to make sure they didn't feel left out. Seems someone had felt left out nonetheless. Yazoo was twelve and tall and already smarter than half the adults Myde knew, but he was still a boy who had lost his mother long before he was ready to be without, a boy with a fragile mental state and even more fragile connections to anyone but his own equally struggling brothers.

"Hey now," Myde murmured. "Don't say that, Loz. I'm saving the best hug for Yazoo!"

"What?" Yazoo balked, dropping his comic in his lap from surprise as he held up his hands to ward Myde off. "There's no way I want to be hugged by the likes of you. Your stupid will rub off on me!"

"Oh, okay then, I guess I'll just leave—"

Yazoo made a strangled little noise and his face was an old war between embarrassment and hope and anger at himself for all those feelings. Yes, Myde sort of remembered what being twelve was like.

Clambering to his feet, the intern threw his arms open wide and smiled his very dopiest. Yazoo looked horrified but also kind of torn. "All right, fair warning," Myde chanted, "the harder you try to escape, the more dumb germs you'll catch!"

"No, Loz is already dumb enough for our whole family!" Yazoo cried, jumping out of his chair and making a break for it, ducking under Myde's arms while his brothers egged the whole thing on with peals of laughter and cheers. Yazoo was good, but not perfect, at hiding the smile that kept trying to steal over his face.

"Ah, gotcha!" Myde crowed when Yazoo felt he had protested enough that a little affection would not wound his burgeoning pride (Myde never would have been able to catch him otherwise; the kid was inhumanly fast). Myde ruffled Yazoo's hair, much to the boy's disgust, and it was only with a deeply begrudging and put-upon look that Yazoo deigned to return the hug.

But the hands that fisted in Myde's scrub shirt were fiercely tight despite their shaking, and when Yazoo finally hid his face into the hug, Myde heard him try and fail to stifle a long breath that sounded like relief. Yazoo didn't let go, so Myde didn't either. He wasn't very good at comforting, didn't even know what hurt he was supposed to be comforting now, but he smoothed down the hair he had ruffled and slowly patted the boy's back, which seemed like reliable things to do.

"Yazoo's scared," Kadaj whispered, although in the dead silent room everyone clearly heard.

"I am not scared," Yazoo's muffled voice insisted in the least convincing way possible.

"Why?" Myde asked, as he felt the other two boys latch on to a pant leg a piece.

"Miss Aerith said we're doing better. Because Mother is dead. So we might not have to be here forever. So we might have to go somewhere else."

Yazoo and Loz both flinched. "I don't want to go somewhere without my brothers," Loz whined, the tail-end of his words wavering.

"That's why I saiddd," Kadaj insisted, nose in the air, "it's stupid to be scared. Big Brother is going to come get us and we'll live with him again!"

Big Brother? Oh, that's right—Cloud. Kadaj saw Cloud as another of his brothers. And then oh boy, Myde thought. Could Cloud even handle something like this, a bunch of excitable kids getting under his boots and making messes and pulling hair and—Myde tried and failed to imagine Cloud as any sort of reasonable authority figure.

But Cloud had said it, hadn't he? That he would make it up to them. Sure, maybe he never bargained on having to make it up so quick, but no one with even a hollow for a heart could leave three little kids out completely in the cold…

Myde crouched down so that he could be closer to the boys' eye levels, causing Yazoo to finally loosen his hold. "Cloud is a good friend of mine. I'll make sure to tell him you need his help, okay?"

Yazoo scoffed, Loz scrubbed at his eyes, and Kadaj nodded once and again as if confirming something he had known all along.

"How do you know Big Brother will want to come help us?" Yazoo sneered. "He hasn't come this whole time."

"I told you," Kadaj stomped one foot, setting off a shower of green sparks in his shoe, "he didn't know!"

"That doesn't mean—"

"Hey," Myde interrupted, waiting to continue until he had three sets of big green eyes staring straight into his. "It's true I don't know if Cloud will be able to come get you, but you don't need to be scared. Nobody here at the hospital is going to separate you. No matter what happens, you won't have to go alone." One by one, each of the boys nodded, slow and solemn as a promise.

Even later, when the green door closed behind him and the strange, bated breath of the hall came rushing back, Myde stared at his clipboard and the slightly battered book now and turned that thought over and over, like a well-worn worry stone for all his and Ienzo's own life-changing problems:

There's no need to be scared. You won't have to go alone.

It was the kind of thing he could talk himself into believing.

o ― ― ― ― ― » Vίσιετ « ― ― ― ― ― o

Myde hurried out of Stanley Yelnats' violently orange room, fanning the smell of onions away with the clipboard in one hand and the book in the other, and he stumbled straight on to the last door in the hall, the plain white frame that hid a treasure so much brighter.

"Good morning," he called, knocking on the door even as he came in.

"Oh, Myde!" Kairi jolted up from where she had been laying on the top of her covers, idling swinging her feet over the side of the bed. "Are you okay?" she demanded.

"Huh? Okay?" Myde asked, taking in the worried furrow of her brow and even her clenched teeth. "Um, I'm fine… I think?"

Kairi let out a long, relieved breath as her shoulders fell. "Good. And everybody else is okay too?"

Curiouser and curiouser. "Did something happen?" He crossed the room to sit in her soft white high-backed chair, sweeping a long look around the painfully pale room like something there might do the explaining for her.

"I felt—" she stopped herself, scuffed the toe of one shoe against the other. "I felt something bad. Here, in the hospital. I think… I've felt this before." One of her hands circled around her other arm, a guarding embrace over her heart.

Something from before. She meant the Darkness. Of course a Princess of Heart would be able to feel even the slightest hint of dark power welling up, let alone the huge gathering of it Ienzo had been messing around with just one floor up. Myde wondered if it had woken her from sleep. How would he have felt, waking up to the churning shrieks of the void and its insatiable desire, from a sweet dream straight into a nightmare?

"That sounds pretty scary, but…" But Ienzo hadn't done anything irreparable, and no one had even really gotten hurt. "I don't think you need to worry about it too much. It's just a bad feeling, not a guarantee anything terrible's gonna happen."

Kairi shook her head, the sleek red of her hair shining in the light. She sat up and then curled both legs in close, burying her chin in her knees. "No, it's worse than that. Something's… here. Something big. And it's hungry."

Myde stood very still, a long, slow shiver making its way down his spine. He felt that same sensation from the hall again—something formless, untouchable, impossible to keep sight of was watching him, right there behind him, breathing down his neck. He felt rooted to the spot; the tiniest motion might give him away—

Memory or imagination? Had he really seen a Heartless in the hall?

It didn't make sense though, how they could have gotten here. It was true that all worlds had some native Heartless (oh my god, Mister Superior, sir, I had no idea I'd actually need your lectures one day; please forgive me for the two million times I ignored you), embodiments of people's cruelty and jealousy and desire, but these Heartless were weak and fading, sometimes little more than the uneasy sensation prickling on the back of your neck as you walked alone at night—a Heartless with enough sentience to think of hiding when spotted was something else entirely.

Even Ienzo's summoning up a flood of dark magic wouldn't do it, not so long as that power had already been lurking here naturally in Dawn City, like the Darkness lurked in every world, waiting to be called. It was always there. But Heartless of any decent strength were never able to invade a world so long as it remained unconnected from—

From any other world, but especially from the realm of Darkness itself, where a hundred thousand dark corridors stretched inimical fingers outward toward the light, heedless of who walked upon them or where their dark doors opened.

So then… When they'd torn open the portals to and from, what else might have slipped through?

Myde felt as if he had suddenly missed a step and gone plummeting over a thousand-foot drop. Had he brought the Heartless, showed them the road right into a world already perched on the edge of night? That was how it always went with him, didn't it? Thoughtless and callous and forever making a mess of things—why couldn't he do anything for the right side?

"Are you sure you're okay?" Kairi was staring him, the indigo tint brighter than ever in her narrowed eyes, so vivid it almost stung, the way pure light felt too big to take in without looking away.

That's right. Kairi was a Princess of Heart. Maybe there was still something he could do.

"Kairi, no matter where in this world, have you ever felt or heard anyone talk about a door that feels different? Like you shouldn't open it no matter what, even though you really, really want to?"

"Oh," she said, smiling a little relieved smile and kicking her heels together, "you mean the black door. It's right at the end of the hall."

Myde came up fast against a brick wall. "Huh? Are you serious?!"

She tilted her head to the side, brilliant red hair flaring out. "You've never seen it before? It's huge and weird and no one ever comes in or out of it."

Myde jolted out his seat and made it half way to the door before he realized Kairi wasn't following him. "Come on," he waved her on, "I need your help with something!"

"Me?" she asked, taking just a hair too long to clamber to her feet for his tastes. Myde nodded, shifting his weight from one side to the other. Kairi caught up with him, but still her steps were cautious, hesitating. "Are you sure we're supposed to be doing this?"

"Do you always do what you're supposed to?"

That, it seemed, was the correct answer, because Kairi grinned enormously. "Nope, not really!" she chimed, and beat him out into the hall with springing steps.

Only there was no black door in the hall. Kairi set off for the dead end as if there were, but Myde swept his eyes from one side to the other and nothing at all seemed different than when he had been there last. There was the blue door, the purple, the green, orange, and Kairi's white—there were the boring, barely watered potted plants, the pale tiles, the dusty windowsills, and there, where Kairi stopped, was the large painting he had seen for the first time this morning, the one of the crescent moon or the cat-smile in a dark, starless sky.

Only… From the very corner of his eye he suddenly caught it, or thought he caught it—there was no crescent moon there now, only a field of black paint so dark it had no dimensions and yet nevertheless seemed to move, seemed fit at any moment to burst out past its canvas, and maybe it was because of that thought, because Myde was lost in imagining, that it took him so long to realize it had—the black paint was moving, dripping in heavy dollops from the canvas toward the floor, until a tall rectangle of the wall was covered in perfect pitch, solidifying in a way he could not quite keep focus on, into the outline of an ornate, ominous doorframe, thin droplets where the cat's smile had once sat rolling away to reveal the stark red outline of a keyhole.

This felt, somehow, familiar. (Had it come when it was needed, or had it always been there, hidden behind this or that clever disguise?)

Kairi stood in front of the door, and she did not look up at him even when he stepped up beside her. She was transfixed, staring at the doorway almost as if she could already see through it. One of her small hands rose to reach toward it; Myde almost panicked and yanked back her hand, just in case, but she stopped, the pale lines of her fingers hovering an inch or two above the impenetrable black surface.

"We can't open it," she warned, her voice the barest whisper.

"I don't want to," he whispered back, unable to raise his voice even if he tried. "I want to make sure it stays shut." Kairi nodded, and he searched the round lines of her face, watching for the barest signs that might tell him everything she felt from the door at that moment. All she did was narrow her eyes, however, and stand stone still. He heard it long before he ever felt it—the slow chiming of a clock, a resonating sound that shook everything inside him made of water and prickled over his skin in vivid goosebumps. He looked up and over, but there was no clock in the hall, nothing to be tolling, and Kairi herself didn't seem to react—it was the type of sound that only he could hear, a movement of molecules, the ebb and flow of frequencies. Eight times and then nine the echo rang inside him, before, in the silence between two ripples, he thought he heard a faint voice:

Do not be afraid.

It was not a voice like he had ever heard before—there was nothing recognizable in it, nothing that even felt human or like an actual voice. The words were there in his mind without a thought ever having formed, without any tongue shaping them. Myde would have wondered who the voice belonged to, but that felt like the wrong question to be asking.

The time has not yet come for the door to open.

"I know," Kairi murmured, and her voice shattered the noise within him like thin, splintered glass. "We don't have the key yet."

The spell keeping him frozen in thrall dissolved around them, just as the door itself seemed to dissolve, a rolling of light across the slick black paint, the swift dissolution of line and shadow until he and Kairi were standing at the end of an utterly normal hall, staring at a blank and unassuming wall.

"It's still closed," she said, unnecessarily. "But—" then she looked up at him, a full-blown scowl on her face, "—it feels like... there's a gap? There's like a big gap under the door."

"Kairi…" He knelt down, reaching out to catch both of her rail thin shoulders in his hands. "Can I ask you a huge favor? A really important one."

"What kinda favor?" She tilted her head back a little, all the wariness of the very young, contemplating.

"Can you guard the door?"

"How?"

"Check on it whenever you can. Make sure the gap doesn't get any bigger."

"Um, how?"

Well hell if he knew; he was a Nobody, not a princess. But this Kairi didn't have any real knowledge of her powers and needed all the help she could get. (What were her powers, actually? Myde didn't have any clue about them other than the fact that Xigbar used to say Roxas was lamest Princess of Heart understudy he'd ever seen, because Roxas was a weirdo who could wield pure light… So she could do something like that if she tried, right?)

He muttered to himself a few seconds, trying to make something useful of his thoughts. "If it seems really weak, like… like someone lost in a dark place, try to call out to it, okay? You're kind of like a bright light that can shine across the darkest sea. If you try to guide someone, they'll always find their way to you."

"Okayyy," she drawled, looking about as unsure as he'd ever seen her look. "I'll try."

"I think if it's you," he said, "things will work out fine."

He took Kairi back to her room and picked up Ienzo's book, but he got a hallway away before he realized he'd forgotten the damn clipboard.

o ― ― ― ― ― » Vίσιετ « ― ― ― ― ― o

And then there was one.

Myde stood in front of the door to the violet room for an agonizing minute, patting down his scrubs, wondering if his hair looked half way decent, then wondering why the hell he was wondering these sorts of things only now when there were far more pressing things he needed to worry about and also what, exactly, you were supposed to say to someone who'd agreed to steal away with you. When the moment stretched on to the point of being too ridiculous, even for him (he did have other things he was supposed to do today), Myde gave his head a fierce shake, swiped his ID card, and flung open the door.

"Good m-morning!" he mostly shouted, reining his voice in a little too late. "I need to tell you something—"

But there was no one in the room. Chair was empty, bed was empty, bathroom door was open—no Ienzo here or there. Had they kept him an extra day in the ICU? No, Myde had called his room last night. An icy cold crept up Myde's throat from his stomach. Had… had Ienzo decided to leave without him, just agreed on the phone to get Myde to hang up, while he had his own plans for escape all along? Was this the most over the top rejection ever?! Panic mode will be engaged in t-minus five seconds and counting—

But then there was an odd sort of noise from the far side of the bed, down near the floor, and Myde heard a familiar huff.

"Ienzo?" he called. "You here?"

A marker-stained hand popped up over the side of the bed, beckoning Myde over. "Here," Ienzo said, his voice a little echo-y. Myde toddled across the room, craning his head to try and figure out what was going on.

He'd made it to the closest end of the bed when Ienzo barked "Stop!" Myde jerked to a dead halt, one of his feet still slightly lifted.

He was about to ask "Why?" when Ienzo beat him to the punch: "There's a book under the bed. Grab it."

Because this was Ienzo and sometimes his demands were a matter of life and death (of course, the other half the time they were just born of laziness, but Myde got that part too), Myde laid down the book he brought with him and kneeled down to feel around under the bed. Nothing except a fine layer of dust there.

"It's farther up," Ienzo said, with all the common frustration of someone just a little too short to reach.

Myde leaned over and tried to reach further under the bed. Still nothing. With a fond sigh, he wriggled down until he was lying on the floor and could actually peer under the bed frame.

Ienzo stared back at him from the other side, the ethereal blue of his eyes evident even in the dim. There was a thin line of color on his face and the barest sheen of wetness to his eyes; Myde wondered how long he'd been trying to fish out this particular book, how many times the dust at the deepest parts had made him sneeze.

"Hi," Myde said. He was smiling. He couldn't help it.

Ienzo puffed out a displeased breath that made a dust bunny skitter away from him. "Hello yourself," he said, even as he stretched again, showing Myde wordlessly to the book, which was indeed in a terrible spot, far up near the head of the bed where the night tables made it impossible to easily attack. Myde wondered if he could even reach it, and he doubted the mattress would move in any way to simplify the process. Myde shuffled higher along the bed, until his face was unpleasantly crammed against the nightstand base, and reached as far as he could. He pawed around blindly for a second, straining to try and see around the nightstand and his own arm, and then he made contact with the very corner of the book, the barest brush of his fingers against the cover.

"Oh, I think I can push it—hang on—" Myde pushed forward heroically and shoved the edge of the book with all his might. It went winging off toward Ienzo's side immediately, and Myde had time to form only the first syllable: "Wa—" of Watch out! before the book smacked straight into Ienzo's peering face, possibly taking out an eye on the way. "Crap!" Myde cursed, leaping up and bounding around the bed to make quick, desperate apologies.

Or he would have made apologies, if, upon rounding the foot of the bed, he had not tripped over an enormous stack of heretofore unseen books and, windmilling, fell like a tree in a logging camp.

If he had only fallen on the floor, it might not have been so bad; unfortunately for Myde, he fell on the books, which—judging from Ienzo's immediate squawk of rage—was tantamount to murder and to tripping down a staircase into hell, hundreds of sharp cover corners finding every soft, unprotected quarter of his flesh: Plutarch in the diaphragm and Pliny in the spleen. Myde banged both his elbows directly onto the tile floor and his knees into hardbacks, a lightning shock of agony screeching up all his limbs at once. Instinct made him curl away and up, the tiniest ball of a person possible, shoving books in all directions, clutching his arms around his knees and rocking back and forth. Beside him, now half buried in books, Ienzo covered one eye with a fist and glared vilely enough to curdle milk with the other.

"You…" Ienzo growled, every second he drew it out a growing promise of bloodshed. An enormous book on the top of the ruined pile slid downward and hit the ground with a heavy thump.

Nervous, bubbling laughter eked out of Myde. "I guess," he winced, "now would be a bad time to say I'm glad to see you?"

Ienzo picked up a book and smacked Myde soundly over the head with it. (But it was a paperback, so Ienzo didn't really want him dead yet, right?)

"Those were alphabetized."

Nope, Myde was a goner.

"I'll just…get right on picking these up!" Myde nabbed a handful of the scattered books and frantically stacked them again, trying and failing to re-alphabetize as he went. Half the spines were blank and others were long faded. The sensation of Ienzo breathing down his neck was both a threat and an odd distraction.

A handful of books, Myde quickly realized, wouldn't make a dent in the staggering number of tomes scattered across the floor—there was definitely more than hundred, in all shapes and sizes, paperbacks and hardbacks now haphazardly intermingled, ancient yellow pages next to vivid picture books, heavy embossed leather covers touching sheaths of paper barely bound, their covers long since torn away. The towering stack he had knocked over had unfortunately toppled into other stacks along the wall, a domino effect that resembled nothing so much as a volcanic eruption, books rolling down and over each other like lava in long flows across the tiled floor.

"Were all of these under the bed this whole time?!" Myde gapped, peering back at the mattress—just in case it had decided to reveal the secrets of warping space and time today.

"Here, there, and everywhere," Ienzo muttered, gesturing vaguely in the direction of the nightstands and the dresser too. "The fruit of my long and nefarious efforts."

Nefarious? What did he—sure enough, when Myde looked closer, he could see that many of the books had RMH library stickers on them, and the book currently in his hands, when he flipped open the cover, had an inscription that read: "To Rapunzel, my dearest daughter whose radiant hair is as charming as this tome. With most genuine affection, Mother Gothell."

"Did you take this from someone here? Rude!" Myde wagged a finger in Ienzo's direction and was met with a painfully obvious eye roll from the side of Ienzo's face not still being guarded by his hand and hair.

"That person isn't here anymore."

"Um, then where'd she go?" Myde stared at the words on the page, the elegant curving script that somehow also felt brittle, or sharp, or just pressed too hard into the paper, saccharine sweetness from a firm, grasping hand.

Ienzo, finally recovering enough to drop his own hand, also looked away. "Sometimes people get better," he said.

Sometimes. Myde wondered how many "sometimes" Ienzo had seen in all his years, a revolving revelry of new faces filling just barely emptied rooms, no guarantee that the person who sat next to him would be there tomorrow to fill the same space. How many years had Ienzo been hoping that his own "sometime" might be "sometime soon"?

There, Myde thought, that's the worst of it, the very worst part of having or coming close to finding your heart: remembering that the past was not a world you could save someone from, that suffering was not a line of letters to erase.

"Then it's good," Myde mused, as Ienzo looked over at him through the tousled fall of his hair, "that you kept their things. Like keeping a record."

Ienzo touched an old heavy volume that had fallen over his knee, the pads of his fingers dust dry as he brushed them along the leather-bound cover, gentle as touching a rare, ethereal creature. "Books are… the perfect proof of one's existence." There was an undercurrent to his voice so tumultuous it felt like the hurtling of galaxies, the circuitous rushing of a thousand thoughts Myde could not hope to name in that moment or after a hundred years of categorizing, the sensation of old secrets trailing each syllable like faded, backward-staring ghosts.

Ienzo murmured: "You can always find a writer's will there in his words, every sadness and satisfaction a constellation to be mapped between pages and lines."

And all around them there were words on the wall, records of sorrows and betrayals and villainy and, throughout everything, longing, Ienzo's lifetimes permanently committed to paint and presence, proof he was here or that he ever was. Their memory might be fickle and fleeting, but now the story was solid, real in that room, in Aerith, in anyone they'd touched, proof of the places they had filled.

"I think," Myde said, not sure whether to smile, "I think I understand what you mean." The air felt tepid and early morning gold, and Myde wondered when this room had started to feel like a secret they kept and tended together.

Still… He stared dubiously at the explosion of volumes around them and couldn't help wondering: "What are you doing with all these books right now?" Myde was not the fastest kelpie at the races but he had a sneaking suspicion and an even sneakier suspicion that his suspicion was correct—

"I'm making a discard pile." Ienzo spat the last words out as if they were a viscous globule of poison that had gathered in the back of his throat, the vilest idea in all the worlds, an utter and irrevocable abomination but nonetheless a necessary evil that he, clad in shining armor, had to gallantly face on the bloodstained field of battle at the final judgment day. "It simply isn't practical to take them all," he continued, a grimace on his face that might have fit better on someone having their limbs amputated sans anesthetic. "The collection you saw fit to decimate was the work of several hours."

"Oh!" Myde flapped an eager hand. "I'm totally not helping and I don't just mean the mess. Belle gave me another one to bring back to you!" Myde fished around until he could reach the blue book and brandished it boldly for Ienzo's inspection. He snatched it with an uncomprehending stare. Myde wondered how long Belle had actually had it. "Anyway," Myde grinned, "what will happen to the ones you leave behind? I bet someone will tear them or stick gum in them or drop them in a toaster—I did those poor books a big favor!"

The sound of Ienzo rifling once, rapidly, through the pages of Magic Hour was such a clear promise of vengeance that Myde scooted a foot to the side in half an eye blink and compulsively sorted all the books in his arm's reach into a neat stack by size. Ienzo looked marginally mollified.

Rearranging the books was rather calming, actually, so Myde kept at it, shuffling to his knees so he could follow the flood of tomes across the floor, making neat rows as he went. Behind him, he heard Ienzo moving about here and there, and when he glanced back, the other was engrossed in re-organizing, kneeling near a tall pile of books, the intensity of his stare white-hot and fiercely focused. He was barely blinking, and the inky blue strands of his hair were falling all out of place over his face, but he didn't seem to notice, barely even remembered to breathe as he flipped through the volumes, weighing their worth by some secret measures: their words or maybe just the comforting way they felt in his hands. Passion smoothed every line of worry from his face, lifted shadows, softened edges, and it was a slow-dawning honey-sweet surprise when Myde realized he'd seen that look before, seen it in a room in the cold, shifting dark, when Ienzo was warm under his hands and close, kiss like a shared ghost between them, whispering as it lingered.

"You're staring."

Myde laughed. "I know." Maybe he was supposed to feel self-conscious about getting caught, but he couldn't find that feeling at the moment.

"Are you going to stop?" Somehow the book in Ienzo's hands was migrating upward, until it hid all of his face except for his furrowed brow. He seemed intensely interested, all of the sudden, in the contents of one particular page.

"If you ask me to," Myde chimed—enjoying, waiting.

But after a long second's pause, Ienzo only huffed, closed his book with a snap, and replaced it on the pile, arranging it very, very resolutely. Myde thought the tip of his ear, just visible behind his hair, might be a shade more pink than normal.

Within a minute or two, however, Ienzo had planned out suitable comeuppance. He carefully scooped up the enormous stack of books and declared, from behind it, "You could help me with these and make yourself useful instead. That may be a novel concept for you, but I have hope."

Myde reeled, grasping his scrubs over his chest. "I am insulted, gravely insulted, good sir! Me? Useful? How dare you spread such slanderous lies!" He couldn't see Ienzo's smile behind the books, but he suspected it was there. To check, Myde was already crossing the room, reaching out to take half the pile of books from Ienzo—only to stumble under the unexpected bulk of them all, the immense tower of tomes teetering one way and the next as Myde wove and wobbled, frantically balancing and trying not to double over under the weight. Myde flung out one leg for balance and then immediately had to hop to the next to keep the leaning tower from collapsing. Ienzo, smiling sure enough, glided away without a single burden, and called back "Put them over here, would you?" as innocent at Myde had ever seen him try to be. Framed against the dark words on the violet wall, his white clothes and practiced compelling stare gave him the air of an angel, otherworldly, evanescent, serene.

"Oh my god," Myde realized, blinking owlishly at him around the mountain of books, frozen under the weight of the tomes and also the weight of his sudden, earth-shaking revelation: "This is the rest of my whole life, isn't it? Following around behind you, carrying your books."

The smirk Ienzo offered back, over one shoulder, was much truer to life, a devil's decadence, a hint of tooth and humor. The bottle blue glass of his half-lidded eyes meeting Myde's, full of promise, made something hot and electric spark under the intern's skin from his nervous, swallowing throat to the tips of his toes, curling in.

"Problem?" Ienzo asked, in that particular tone that meant he already knew the answer.

And "Not really," said Myde, shrugging delicately to avoid disturbing his stack. See, he knew a thing or two about tough fates, and there was nothing particularly onerous about watching the lithe lines of Ienzo's back—literally or figuratively—for however many more years he was granted this time.

Of course Ienzo had already known his answer to that, had to have known Myde wasn't going anywhere without him just from that last phone call alone, but to hear it out loud seemed to strike him a little differently, and the smirk eased into something that might have, on a rare day, been called tender, hidden in an instant as he turned his face away.

"But um, actually," Myde continued, "these are already heavy as hell, I only have two hands, and I don't even know how far we're going on our skip-town adventure, so I'm kind of hoping the 'carrying' part is a lot less literal than what is currently happening…"

"What?" Ienzo scoffed, aiming a deadpan look of disappointment toward Myde. "Are you saying this trivial amount is too much for you?" Here he gestured to the truly staggering number of books, which would have required no less than a small army to comfortably port even a short distance. "Ah cruel world," he droned, "that let me so misplace my faith." He even held a hand to his forehead as if he might faint.

"Well, I guess if we had like fifty boxes, and we took them maybe one at a time… But I can't imagine we'd get a very warm welcome with a library for luggage any place we tried to stay."

And wasn't that a distracting thought: places to stay, places to stay with Ienzo—

"S-So um yeah," Myde shook his head, "maybe you'll have to… do a whole lot of… discarding." That last word was said in a sensitive whisper, as if the concept itself might set the other off into equal fits of despair and apoplectic rage.

Ienzo dropped heavily on to the end of the bed, and for the first time that morning, Myde saw his typical look of stymied frustration, the tightening at the corners of his mouth that meant Ienzo had met with and had no patience for his own limitations.

"This wouldn't be necessary if I could just access Between again."

"Between?"

"Betwixt and Between, the empty gaps between the worlds, which only those who know of them can access. The Lesser Nobodies live there," Ienzo said.

"Oh yeah, that does sound… kind of familiar…"

"It's where the Organization stored all of its items and weapons, so that they could be called upon whenever needed. Haven't you wondered where your sitar is?"

There was a beat and then Myde dropped every single book in his hands when he leapt and flailed wildly all at once. "OH MY GOD! Arpeggiooo! Where are you, baby?! How could I have forgotten! I'm the worst person ever and a shame to musicians everywhere I'llneverbeabletoshowmyfaceagain forgive meeee—" All of this was said in a wailing, breathless rush so quickly that Ienzo gave up on trying to follow it after the first three words; instead, he stared down at the scattered stack of books on the floor again and heaved a weary sigh. Myde himself felt ready to burst into gigantic fat tears as he wracked his mind for any memories about Between—he easily remembered, when he focused on it, the series of wonderful and magical sitars he'd had with the Organization, and the brilliant way they bloomed into being whenever he willed it, the soft popping of watery bubbles mid-air, the music ringing in the instrument and in him, perfectly in time.

He could control the water already, and he'd made a portal hadn't he, so surely if he tried, if he really tried—Myde squeezed his eyes shut and concentrated with all his might, holding a hand up like he remembered and calling as hard as he could.

Nothing at all happened, except that Ienzo quietly snickered at the scrunched up expression on his face. Myde's hand dropped back to his side like a solid stone, and he felt just about as useless. No sitar? This was colossally unfair. He could do everything else, even things he didn't mean to, but not the one thing he really, really wanted? Typical. Just typical.

This did not help him currently, and neither did it change the glaring problem cluttering up almost all of Ienzo's room: if Ienzo couldn't access Between either, there was no way they'd be able to store all these books. A quick, cold shiver crawled down Myde's spine at the thought of even suggesting that to Ienzo, although the glower dark as the pits of hell painting Ienzo's face said he'd reached that conclusion already.

Surely, surely there was a way—

It hit Myde much like a heavy sitar to the skull, and he snapped his fingers even as he shook his head, marveling at just how slow he really was on the up-take. Ienzo wanted to put the books Between.

Where the Dancers lived.

Myde closed his eyes, felt the water vapor in the clinical air of the violet room swirling and slowing around him, everything momentarily easing to a still. He held his breath longer than he thought it should be possible, ten seconds stretching straight into a thousand, and every sound fell away—not only the noise of two living beings near each other, not only the low, perpetual hum of the air conditioner, but all the ambient echoes he only noticed now when they were gone: the crystalline humming of the clouds far above, the deep vibrato of blood, a distant plinking melody from a leaking pipe—

I need you, he sang inside himself, in the deep empty pockets of his body between his soul and bone. Come here. I need you.

And in an instant the answer Lord Demyx! rang back, a revolving revelry of voices from the places in Between. There was no hesitation between call and response, and in the hospital room around Myde and Ienzo, tens of gapping wormholes shuttered open, vacuous displacement of air and space and everything audibly shifting open to make room for writhing, rubbery bodies. Within a half second, Myde was surrounded, a press of silvery flesh and grasping limbs, every one of them trilling, singing, a flock of wheeling birds, jostling and changing direction without warning so they could get closer to his fond, resigned attention. If there were words in their noise today he could not make them out, just a hodge-podge nonsense of chimes and whistle-hum that somehow harmonized without effort. They sounded happy to see him, though he wasn't sure they really were or could be.

"Okay, okay," he plead. "Give a guy a little room to breathe here!"

There was a marginal lightening of the crush, and in the gaps between bodies contorting in ways no bodies ever should, Myde caught sight of Ienzo's shocked face. The look was so completely and totally Ienzo—brows just a tiny bit raised, eyes just a tiny bit wider, no change at all really on anyone else's face but absolute incredulousness when the expression managed to squeak by Ienzo's defenses—that Myde couldn't help but snicker. It didn't quite seem to be processing fast enough for Ienzo, the rupture in logic too rapid to think of plugging yet, and Myde let himself revel in the feeling of being one step ahead for perhaps the first and last time in any life.

"All right!" he crowed, fingers to his mouth to shrilly whistle. "Round up, ladies and gents; we've got a job to do!" Only Myde was watching Ienzo's face, waiting for the exact moment—there, there,it started to sink in and make sense and he figured out what Myde was aiming for from start to finish.

"No! Don't!" Ienzo tried, but his voice was lost immediately in the monster choir's din, and even the hand Ienzo reached out to try and stop them was easily ignored, the Dancers wriggling at oblique angles to move around him, struggling into some semblance of a line in front of their master.

"See all these?" Myde pointed here, there, and everywhere to the books still stacked and strewn around the room. As one, the Lesser Nobodies' heads moved to face each place Myde pointed, although why they bothered when they had no eyes, he really didn't know. Behind their backs, Ienzo was actually anxiously attempting to collect all the nearest tomes, grappling to fit book after book into the protective circle of his arms while he made promises via death glare at anything that so much as twitched—and the Dancers were a twitchy bunch. Thank god Ienzo wasn't Axel, or every living creature within two miles would have just spontaneously combusted. (Myde might have snickered harder.) Fighting to get the words out around his smile, he commanded his army, "I need you to gather all these up—really gently!—and take them to the very safest place you know in Betwixt and Between. Like, the super-duper safest! And don't drop them. Or throw them. Or tear them. Or crease them. Or dog-ear the pages. Or break the spines. Or soak them in water. Or lose them. Definitely do not lose them!"

Ienzo cringed once, twice, and then a few more times for good measure.

With a flick of his wrist like a grand symphony conductor, Myde set the Dancers off in a flurry of alien movement, beanie tails whipping, heels jitter-bugging, hook hands grasping—"Ah, no, no, like this!" Myde made them pause again so he could demonstrate, arms at right angles, palms up, forearms out in front of his body like a tray for balancing. Then they were at it with gusto, scooping up the towering stacks and wobbling badly under the weight. Myde actually saw one put its feet on the floor for a second, and the sight was more eerie than he ever could have imagined. He resolutely did not look at the place where Ienzo stood, a seething stain of darkness on the otherwise bright, ringing room.

"What in any world convinced you that this was appropri—"

Myde sidled up cautiously, all side-eye, reaching out a very brave hand to pat Ienzo on the back. "Hey, it's not like we have any other choice. I think this is kinda genius actually! Otherwise, you'd have to leave pretty much all of them behind, and—"

Ienzo bristled. "At least then some of them would stand a chance. At this rate, I'll never see a single volume again!" This was said, of course, in his most deeply offended tone, as he clutched at least fifteen books to his chest.

"Ah, come on! They've gotta be marginally more reliable than me, at least!"

"Not reassuring."

Myde crossed his arms, huffing out something half sigh and half frustration. It wasn't as if he really, really liked the Dancers, per se, but they'd always tried their best for him and he was sure they wouldn't let Ienzo down (too badly, anyway), so pardon his tiny flicker of defensiveness here. "You'd trust your own Lesser Nobodies!"

And it was at exactly that moment that Myde realized he had absolutely no idea what Zexion's Lesser Nobodies even looked like.

Of course Zexion had them; they all had had them, but what were Zexion's called? What were their powers? When Myde tried to picture Zexion with the Lesser Nobodies, all he drew was a blank. There was a hole in his memory which was conspicuous because of its total emptiness—even if just in passing, Demyx should have seen one or two of his Organization fellow's servants. The Lesser Nobodies weren't rare by any means, and the castle was always bustling with a healthy collection of them, Assassins prodding Ninjas and Gamblers harrying Scholars.

At that moment, there was the particular smug glint in Ienzo's eye that meant he knew exactly what Myde was thinking—and that he had no particular interest in solving any mysteries today.

Maybe Demyx really never saw Zexion's Lesser Nobodies. Or maybe he'd looked right at them a thousand times and never seen, because that was how Zexion worked: a tendril of shadow, a whisper.

"Yes," Ienzo admitted, although whether it was in answer to Myde's last comment or to his very thoughts, there was no telling. Classic.

Myde stepped easily out of the way of a Nobody bustling by with a tower of books tottering in its arms, twisting to avoid the points of its stilettos as they writhed by at knee height. Around them, portals bloomed and closed like flowers, the air warping and splitting and barely any room to move around the manic jittering rush of the Dancers at work. One Nobody bumped into Ienzo (prompting a put-upon sigh), but then it didn't leave: it poked closer and closer as Ienzo leaned precariously away, its hook hands gripping at Ienzo's forearm, sightless face questing—

"Aww," Myde cooed, "it likes you!"

But then its lips strained behind the stitches sealing them closed and Myde waited for a voice in his head that never came. The Dancer was speaking but he could not hear it, and it pressed closer to Ienzo again, the eyeless ridge of its face turned to meet Ienzo's gaze, Ienzo who was… listening?

Myde watched silently—the calm in the storm of hurrying bodies—as any hint of color drained from Ienzo's face, his whole body ramrod straight, every muscle pulling taut. His eyes went wider than Myde thought he had ever seen, and when he shifted the books in his arms to raise a free hand, it shook as it reached out to touch the Dancer, which was still rapidly speaking.

"H-How—" Ienzo stumbled, couldn't even finish the thought. And then he rounded on Myde without warning, a portrait of shock, dropping every book in his arms on to the bed. "There are Heartless in the hospital."

Myde felt frozen to the tiles, a sudden shock from the base of his brain to the soles of his feet lighting up and burning off every nerve. His chest clenched like a vice over his lungs, sealing every channel of air. How could he have forgotten? Why had he let himself get so distracted?

"A-About that—"

"You knew and didn't say anything?!"

"It's not my fault!" Myde wailed. "You—and the books, and you—"

"What could have possibly been more important than an invasion of Heartless?"

Myde was pretty sure he'd answered that question already, thank you; he shuffled his feet in lieu of answering again. Beside him, Ienzo steamed, a tea kettle just before it boiled over, hand to one temple, valiantly attempting to regain a modicum of stoicism. He looked off across the room but not at anything in particular—he'd retreated into his own mind again, making complex calculations or perhaps just hunting for the most specific words to properly curse Myde into next week. The strange Dancer who had spoken to Ienzo instead of its own master cowered behind him as if it knew it was in trouble.

Ienzo finally heaved a long breath, part groan and part snarl. "This will completely change the plan."

An uncomfortable laugh tried to immediately worm its way off Myde's tongue. Forgot about that too. He bit the inside of his cheek to hold it back and managed instead, only slightly uneven: "Did we… have a plan already? 'Cause umm… this is the first I've heard of one."

Ienzo looked up, blinked once. By now all the other Dancers in the room had stopped and turned to watch them, struggling to contain their erratic movements. If anything else breathed in the room they would have heard it. Then Ienzo laughed, dry and self-deprecating, but with a sort of dawning surprise. "That is not my fault."

"Oh really?" Myde tipped his head suspiciously, eyes narrow, and he set his hands on his hips. "And what could possibly have distracted you from sharing your inevitably flawless plan, hmm?"

Ienzo stared straight at him, heavy and pointed. "I wonder," he drawled.

Well, that was… That was… Myde found his Converse suddenly fascinating, and he may or may not have thought longingly about the ottoman pillow perfect for hiding his face in, snug in his mother's house.

"S-So what is the plan then?"

Ienzo raised one hand to his lips in thought. "What I originally had planned won't work if the Heartless have already invaded. Tell me everything."

As the Dancers swung back into action, ferreting away the last of the books (even those Ienzo had originally been so desperate to save) and disappearing, Myde explained as best he could, from the ominous feeling of being watched to seeing the Heartless in the hall, to Kairi's guarding the gap at the door.

"So we don't know how many are here or how strong they might be," Ienzo summarized. He tapped his foot on the floor tiles. "Perhaps we could just… let it be."

Myde wasn't going to pretend he hadn't already thought of that. Heartless were like the common cold. There was no way to cure the worlds of them forever, no matter how hard you fought. And they weren't really the good guys anyway; that sort of thing wasn't in their job description. Once a world was tied to the Darkness, nothing but a Keyblade could seal it, and even then, who knew how long it would last? The dark was always there, in the corner of your eye, natural and endless as the Light. Maybe it really was destiny that all worlds would succumb to the Heartless in the end. But… not this world. At least not right now.

"My mom's here. And Miss Aerith. And everyone else. We can't just leave."

"Neither of us even has a weapon," Ienzo countered. "What could we do to—" The only Dancer left in the room, the one who had talked to Ienzo, was prodding Ienzo in the back with something. "Now isn't the time," Ienzo scolded, turning to it only to be met with prods to the chest instead. Its stubby, awkward arms clumsily clutched the last book left in the room, with which it was resolutely and repeatedly poking Ienzo. Ienzo took the book as it was thrust at him again, mostly to avoid any further bruising.

"What is—" Myde began, but he didn't even need to finish. After another second of looking, he recognized the book easily. It was the Akashic Record, heavy and spotless and as full of mystery as the day he'd plucked from Yen Sid's shelf. Myde wondered if Yen Sid had ever noticed it was missing, or how long it would be before he finally did. Ienzo turned the book over in his hands and glared back at the Nobody, irked but not unkind.

"You know," he told the Dancer, setting the book carefully back on to his bed, "this isn't actually one of my weapons." The Dancer contorted in a wholly inhuman way, moving in directions and at angles Myde did not even know existed before now, alien geometries—alien even to its own kind. The Dancers moved in fluid and frightening ways, but he had never seen one move like that.

"Hey," Myde attempted to address it, to ask it… anything really, just to see if it would answer at all. "What are you doing?"

But Ienzo was still speaking to it. "No, I can't just—" Their voices tangled and the Dancer looked between them once and then again. Ienzo paused, and it hadn't sounded like he'd been paying attention to Myde before but now he was waiting as if for something inevitable, gearing himself up, though Myde couldn't guess why. There was nothing to do but keep on keepin' on:

"If you're a Dancer," he said to the Lesser Nobody, in the middle of the charged silence, "how come I can't hear your voice?"

The Dancer fluttered in place, almost a nervous gesture, heels kicking, head wavering. Its cheeks belled out like it was breathing hard around its stitched closed mouth. Lord Demyx! it rang out, and in any other case, it would have passed without question, blended in with the flock as just another writhing form following along. But now it was alone, and the subject of close scrutiny, and if there was something off in its form and function, that was nothing to the timbre of its voice. It hit the right notes at the right time, the right pitch and intonation, but it was strangely weak, as if it were calling from some measureable distance away or through the wrong medium. It sounded, he realized, almost like a recording. There was nothing wrong with the voice itself, yet it was somehow obvious, when it sang alone, when he listened hard, that its voice was reproduction, filtered and played back. It was a fine imitation, Myde thought, with dawning realization, but still nothing more than imitation.

"You're not a Dancer," he said out loud.

The thing faking at a Dancer shuddered full body, limbs moving in ways they never should have. Ienzo shrugged. "No," he admitted. "It appears to be one of mine." Myde had expected that, but still it was disorienting, disconcerting; how had it hidden within his Dancers and how long? How many times had it pretended to answer his call and why hide your servants in with someone else's anyway? What was there to gain by that?

Ienzo extended his arm, palm up, as if summoning something or making a perch. "Show yourself, Mimic," he declared, and the Dancer went very, very still. At first Myde could not tell what was supposed to be happening, but then he looked closer and felt his stomach lurch. There was something moving under the Dancer's skin, something jerking, twitching, pushing out against the stiffened flesh that contained it. The Dancer's head grotesquely deformed, its sealed mouth bulging, the eyeless line of skin fused to its cap swelling out and then collapsing. It still hung in the air, suspended, but its limbs were dead, empty husks weightlessly flapping, everything inside eaten out—Myde jumped back and very definitely screamed as four jointed limbs burst from the Dancer's chest, kicking and seizing, folding and unfolding in too many places. The limbs quested blindly for contact, feeling at the air. The split Dancer's skin began to peel further back in great shivering heaves, the fly bursting free of the maggot form, the spider shedding its skin—there was a crunching, clicking sound and the Dancer's throat began to crumple and tear. In the shredded hole this made, all Myde could see were teeth, grasping and working.

"What the fu—" Myde didn't get to finish. With a single frenzied spasm the Mimic burst free, the last of the Dancer's shape it had worn tearing to tatters that looked like loose pages of paper, fluttering around and then somehow subsumed by the Mimic's body, parts of itself hacked off and now returning to the main. Pink and cream scraps of flesh snatched themselves from the air to coat the new trembling Nobody's form, bleeding away their false color in favor of a silvery blue that became a faintly luminous indigo at the creature's disturbing number of joints. For a few seconds it skittered wildly in circles on the floor before it seemed to regain the use of its limbs and leapt for Ienzo's outstretched arm, where it gripped on and balanced in the crook of his elbow, gnashing its hideously pointed teeth in Myde's direction.

"Holy crap," was about all he could think to say. Myde was exceptionally glad he had never seen one of Zexion's Lesser Nobodies before, especially not in on the long, perpetually dark alleys of the World That Never Was. The Mimic curled against Ienzo's side was nothing less than the spectre of every normal being's most primal fears: a spider, a leech, a scorpion, the thing whose eyes met yours when you dared to glance beneath the bed in the dark.

Like most of the servant Lesser Nobodies, it had a vaguely humanoid shape, although Myde thought this was pushing humanoid to its utmost limits: a small bulbous head sitting neckless on a rounded, hunched up abdomen, bowed like the back of a snarling cat. Its head was nothing but a gapping, vacuous black hole of a mouth, rimmed with lamprey teeth that seemed unmoored from its jaw, jutting out and grinding back in as it breathed. One spider leg on each side of its chest formed its arms, jointed in four places but bending in ways no firm or human flesh could ever manage. The limb on the monster's right caught and pulled Ienzo's sleeve to its mouth, which immediately began to nibble. Its back legs had no fewer joints but folded differently (at least for the moment), almost like human legs, knees curled up against its body, feet, or what passed them, wrapped around Ienzo's arm. The parts of its skin that had detached to form the false Dancer now decorated its back and limbs like a sheath of exoskeleton scales, each in the familiar triangular point of the Nobody's sigil and in two or three equally familiar shades of grey. Two black empty slits just behind its mouth must have been what passed for its eyes, Myde thought.

It was the size of a small child. It was like the deformed nightmare analogue of a small child, something a lonely, frightened body might bad-dream of one day seeing in a mirror instead of his own face. Myde thought he had read of one once, in passing, in the story from the violet room, when Ienzo catalogued every dark hallucination that slipped out of his mind before he could control them.

Myde could only stare.

"Well," Ienzo harrumphed, reaching out his free hand to pet the Mimic's head, "it's a good thing it doesn't have any feelings for you to hurt."

"Is that supposed to make me any less scared of it?"

Except beneath Ienzo's petting hand, the Mimic was curling and twining like a cat, and in the back of Myde's head a warm, tiny rumbling noise picked up that Myde took forever to realize was the Mimic purring.

Lord Zexion! Found! You! It had an utterly incongruous, high, reedy little voice, practically vibrating with eagerness. Ienzo's sleeve was essentially shredded to nothingness at this point, the Mimic far too keyed up to stop its frantic chewing. It shifted a little to look at Myde (or at least Myde felt like it was staring back now), and then it squeaked: That is Lord Demyx! Also! Found!

"Er, yeah… hi…"

"How did you know to come here now?" Ienzo asked, scrutinizing the Mimic as if he could pull the answers directly from its braincase. At this point, Myde would not have been surprised.

Didn't hear. Your voice. Any voice. Long time! If Myde didn't know better, he would have said it was scolding. Then Freeshooter calls!

Ienzo jerked in shock, and Myde was a second behind but then he also jumped—the Freeshooter, Xigbar? Was he out there somewhere in the universe? Had he also regained his memories? Well, that might not be too bad actually, to meet up with him one day. Xigbar had been pretty chill; Myde had vague recollections of the sniper covering for Demyx's slacking on more than a few occasions, now that he thought about it—

But Ienzo was pale again and then a dark, suspicious expression was stealing over his face. He glanced at the door to the hallway suddenly, but Myde couldn't see why. "Not particularly promising," Ienzo muttered finally, and offered no other explanation. Mm, but he'd never been that fond of Xigbar, had he? Myde couldn't remember seeing the two of them together much in the Organization, and not that long ago, here in Rufus Memorial, what had Ienzo said?

If he waits to kill it later, he might enjoy it more.

Maybe Myde should have asked more about that when he first had the chance.

Master wasn't there! the Mimic was still piping. Then Nocturne calls. First time, nothing. Second time, nothing. It really did sound like it was scolding now; Myde felt sincerely reprimanded. Third time, here! Lord Zexion is here!

"Wait a minute!" Myde interrupted. "The second time I only asked for one Dancer. Are you saying they sent you?"

Wanted to come. Find Master. Why Dancers would ever go alone?

"You stole the purse from those kids near my house! And hey! Hang on—were you the one who took my moped's side mirror too?"

Behhh! the Mimic declared, a brilliant blue-purple tongue lolling out to wag at him.

"Did it just… blow a raspberry at me?!"

Ienzo pet the Lesser Nobody on the head again, and his smug snake smile was nothing short of absolutely insufferable. "They do tend to be a bit eccentric," was the only defense he offered.

"The apple and the tree, for real…"

Ienzo cleared his throat to very indelicately put that one aside. "Now perhaps you see why they're best kept hidden." Myde rather thought Zexion had been hiding them to spare his Organization mates the constant nightmares. "In any case," Ienzo continued, "this doesn't help our situation. The Nobodies can combat weaker Heartless, but they'd cause more panic in a hospital than the Heartless would."

Especially yours! Myde mentally wailed. The Mimic clicked its nasty teeth at him like it had heard.

"If what Kairi says is true, and there is something strong here, they won't be of any real help. We'd be summoning them just to die." The Mimic prodded Ienzo again, balancing precariously to point at the Akashic Record with a back leg.

"That won't help either."

"Well it's literally all we've got at the moment," Myde retorted. The hideous little thing was a total brat but it was making a pretty good point.

"Give me a minute to think and then we'll have a new plan."

Myde knew a cue to shut up if he ever heard one. When it came to Ienzo and scheming, it was best to stay far, far away. Without their voices, the room was very silent, and though he'd never noticed the books before, with all of them gone, the place felt somehow deeply empty, a favorite old shop closing up. Would they repaint the walls once Ienzo was gone, so that no one new would ever know he had existed here? Would the violet room become a place they could only ever visit in memories?

Well, he thought, making unexpected peace, that was the way the worlds worked. Even if time was an endless loop, nothing ever really stayed the same. In this life, Kairi had never been to Destiny Islands. Yuffie and Miss Aerith and Leon lived in a different world on the edge between Darkness and Light now, where the sun rose and rose, instead of endless night. He and Ienzo had been born into the same world for maybe the very first time, which made it possible to be together now, like this.

He wouldn't trade that for any story or any past.

Ienzo was pacing by now, a back and forth well-worn map across the room. The Mimic had given up on the mincemeat sleeve and worked around its master's arm to nibble directly on the body of his shirt, which was rapidly becoming pock-marked by tiny holes. Abruptly Ienzo stopped pacing, directly in front of Myde. His Very Serious face was on.

"So what's the plan?" Myde asked. Ienzo explained. Myde immediately regretted asking. "Okay, no, really, I think we need to have a talk about overly complicated schemes because that not only sounds marginally physically impossible for us, it also sounds really dangerous—"

"The Heartless have gotten involved. Did you expect it to be a walk in the park?"

"There's park-walking and then there's suicidal—"

"You'll be fine."

"So says you! I don't know how to do stage voices! And what am I supposed to do with the fish once I've got it?!" Ienzo explained again.

"That doesn't help."

By this point Ienzo was holding the Mimic like an old TV villain might cradle their evil pet cat, and the human-spider-leech-Nobody hybrid may or may not have just hissed at Myde for doubting its master.

"But why do I have to take my shirt off?" And of course it was exactly the moment he was saying this that the door to the hall flew open and Miss Aerith, Tseng, and the Zack the-goddamn-general-of-their-entire-world's-army Fair walked into the room.

Myde and Ienzo both dove at once to block the Mimic from view, which proved entirely unnecessary, as it—of course—immediately vanished, swallowed up in a tiny portal, leaving Myde and Ienzo to crash uselessly into each other for no apparent reason to their audience at all.

Well, this is a little embarrassing.

"Oh my!" Aerith peeped, and that was the exact second Myde realized that she had not only heard the shirt comment but that he had caught and steadied himself on Ienzo to avoid falling, and his hand was now very firmly clutching the mangled remains of Ienzo's own shirt, while Ienzo's hands, previously holding the Mimic, were trapped between them at about waist height. Myde couldn't even breathe. A desperate, pathetic whimper wormed its way out of his sealed throat. The only movement in the room, Zack scuffling his shoe on the floor, sounded like screaming nails on a chalkboard, and the perhaps three seconds that passed felt like three full eternities stacked on top of one another.

Finally: "Say something!" Myde wailed, giving Ienzo a very reasonable shake which, belatedly, did not help their case at all. Ienzo stepped back and behind Myde, the strategic position in the event that Tseng had a Taser or worse. Miss Aerith gaped for a moment or two before her better senses booted up, and she started reaching for professionalism instead.

From his place of total safety, Ienzo shamelessly called out, "I will neither confirm nor deny your suspicions," and Myde didn't have to turn his head a millimeter because the smirk was right there in Ienzo's voice. But turn Myde did, if only so he could shove Ienzo bodily back into the line of fire first.

"That is the very opposite of helping!" Myde keened.

"Well you have to take responsibility for these things from time to time," Ienzo levelly replied, his face the picture of innocence now that everyone could see him again. "This was my sixth best shirt."

"All your shirts look the same!"

Miss Aerth's and Zack's gazes jumped back and forth between them like spectators at a tennis match. Tseng was already done with this nonsense.

"Really!" Myde begged. "It wasn't what it looked like!"

Zack's head tipped from one side to the other, contemplating. Miss Aerith, who knew Ienzo much better, and who knew just what kind of irritating and troublesome troll games he liked to play, managed to give a bit of the benefit of the doubt—and because she knew Myde rather better, she offered a bit of her own sass too: "When did you two make up?"

And obviously, "Last night," said Ienzo, eyebrows involved, insinuating and perfectly honest all at once. Only, of course Miss Aerith did not know that Myde had called Ienzo's room, so her eyes went saucer-wide again and there went the benefit of the doubt, flying at light speed over their heads.

"Please," Myde sobbed at Ienzo, "stop yourself! If you dig this hole any deeper, we'll be inviting the Huns to lunch!"

"Huns?" Zack was asking Tseng in the background. A then, a little lower, "Aren't you supposed to be security? Should we maybe… do something?" Tseng's eyeroll could have won eyerolling Olympic gold.

"Perhaps if anything had actually happened," he droned. He too knew Ienzo quite well.

"So…" Zack addressed Myde without warning, making the intern jump where he stood. He pointed first at Myde and then at Ienzo. "You tore his shirt for no reason?" He seemed genuinely curious at least, by Myde was starting to think that Zack, much like puppy dogs, was stuck on charmingly nosy as his default setting.

Myde groaned. "It wasn't me!"

"Then…" Zack turned to survey Ienzo instead. "You tore your own shirt for no reason? I know the taste in this place makes ShinRa look like Fashion Week, but that's still a pretty big waste—"

Maybe Ienzo knew exactly how far the envelop could be pushed before it crumpled, or maybe he just couldn't keep his expression straight anymore, in the face of such simple sincerity, but he gestured to the shirt. "It was an accident," he admitted, totally lying and making no effort to make it sound true. "I thought it might look odd, so I asked our intrepid intern to help me hide it when I heard you coming. Clearly, I should have known better. He tries so hard and fails so often." Ienzo had the gall to pat Myde consolingly on the shoulder.

But Myde bit his tongue because he'd finally, finally gotten it, finally figured out why Ienzo was digging them a hole to the Land of Dragons and then shoddily trying to cover it up. It was the plan all over again, different target but the same principle applied: distraction. Give them something to be suspicious of, something serious, but something they couldn't prove, so they would turn that over in their heads all day, looking for any tiny sign—so they would miss all the other signs blinking in warning, left, right, and all around. And what was the worst they could do anyway, if they did chase down Ienzo's trolling hints? Fire Myde? He was about to resign from the whole dang world.

Tseng knew the truth. He probably even knew what Ienzo was thinking by doing it. Miss Aerith knew something was amiss but not what, rattled as she was by the other implications, and Zack didn't know much of anything at all other than some people led very, very strange lives he was quite happy knowing nothing about.

"I suppose I should change," Ienzo added, considering the Mimic's damage for the first time.

"Please do," Tseng said, exceedingly dour, and all their audience turned back for the door, though Miss Aerith hesitated on the threshold.

"Ummm, Myde… Patient privacy?"

Myde didn't know if he was his own worst enemy or the very best advocate for Ienzo's diversion ploy. Because he hadn't moved an inch, even though Ienzo's hands were already at the ragged hem of his sixth best shirt. It was totally, absolutely, beyond any shadow of a doubt unintentional. He'd been hoping to use those seconds without Aerith and her entourage to reject The Plan a little harder.

Instead, Myde bolted for the door so hard he tripped on the threshold and had to be saved by Zack's ridiculous bare arms (which, if you asked Myde, were the only actual indecency on show here). Miss Aerith was just skeptical enough of Ienzo insinuations to still laugh, and Myde thought for a second, honestly, all of one second, that maybe—fish be damned—this might just actually work.

Then Ienzo joined them in the hall, in his fifth best shirt (possibly), and they made it all the way to the elevator, doors sliding closed behind them, before Miss Aerith declared, "Whatever silly tricks you're up to today, you'd better save them for later. It's best behavior time, you two."

"Why?" Myde asked, which didn't make him look any better-behaved at all, did it?

"It's the quarterly All Visitors' Day, and there are going to be plenty of people here."

Behind her back, Ienzo went white as the walls of Castle Never Was, abject horror stealing over his whole face even as it lined Myde's stomach with lead. "What?" Ienzo managed to squeeze out between clenched teeth. "All Visitors' Day is Friday."

Aerith hrmm'd in their direction imperiously. "It was moved up so more of the board members could attend. You would have known if either one of you had been paying one scrap of attention. It was announced at least ten times." Ienzo didn't appreciate that blow one bit, if the nasty snarl of his expression was any indication.

Myde just panicked. The plan had been half impossible with no one else involved. With the hospital bursting with unwitting guests? Was there any way to make it work? Would they have to scrap this one too? Ienzo opened his mouth to speak and then closed it again immediately. There was no way they could discuss or modify The Plan in front of his supervisor, the head of security, and a god's honest general. Ienzo's face was doing some complicated gymnastics as he tried to convey his thoughts directly into Myde's brain, but if he'd ever had that power, he didn't have it now. The angry twitching of his eye could have meant just about anything in Myde's body language dictionary. They'd just have to meet up at some point before The Plan's go-time and sort things out then.

The moment he thought that, of course, he realized the hole they'd intentionally dug wasn't to the Land of Dragons. It was into Deep Space. They both given enough hints—purposefully or just stupidly—that Miss Aerith wasn't going to completely discount the things Ienzo had suggested. Even if she hadn't bought the distraction hook, line, and sinker, she was the consummate professional. She'd act, at the very least, logically, and the most logical thing to do in a situation so full of broken rules was…

The elevator was moving, and there was no longer any chance of escape. Aerith bared her fangs. "Your session with me is first this morning, Ienzo!" she announced, and even the gentle twinkling of her voice did nothing to hide her steely will. "I'm sure we'll have a lot to talk about today."

"I distinctly remember my appointment being 3pm."

"Nope!" Miss Aerith said, and that was all. Until the elevator doors opened again anyway, and she—without meaning to at all, of course—blocked Myde in the elevator until last, so that he had to step out right into the circle of Taser, biceps, and Aerith's saccharine mom voice.

"Myde," she practically sparkled, "why don't you take Zack to the break room and show him the puzzle games to keep him occupied?"

"But I'm supposed to observe you—"

"Ahah," she laughed, and that was a smile but Myde was pretty sure he'd just looked upon the face of a stone cold hellhound. Aerith gave no quarter, but she was sure as hell about to take some prisoners. Maybe they'd broken rules, maybe they hadn't (they super had); Aerith didn't even need to speculate. All she needed to know was what tended to happen when Ienzo was Very Obviously Up To Something, hyperbolic use of capitals totally on point. She wouldn't let them within a fifty foot radius of each other today, if she could help it.

Being separated all day was part of the original plan. Ienzo had actually counted on Miss Aerith sensing something amiss and acting just like this. He'd even planned around it. But the situation had changed, and now Myde was adrift on a raging sea of uncertainty, watching his only lifeline be towed farther and farther away.

Zack was complaining, "Aww, but I could definitely help!" But Myde knew a losing battle when he saw one. He could feel the ship sinking underneath him.

Aerith, hundred foot tall tsunami in a 5'3" body, could not be swayed, full on hands-on-hips mode activated. "You don't actually work here, you know. Just because the army's on furlough doesn't mean all your free time should be spent here instead."

"But it's All Visitors' Day!" Zack whined.

"You don't even have anyone here to visit."

"Yowch, don't write off Tseng like that!" (Tseng just sighed.) But Aerith didn't have any time for this, and she was already leading a very resistant Ienzo away, her hand not quite touching his shoulder but threatening to be there at any second. "Well, come on then I guess," Zack deflated, arms drooping, head down. Even his gravity-defying piece of bangs seemed to sag. But when his calloused hand clapped down on Myde's shoulder, it felt like getting clapped in the stocks (which had only happened to Demyx once, on a very bad night in Port Royal, thank you). Myde thought his collar bone might have folded a little under the pressure of Zack's grip. He might look like a puppy on the outside, but Zack was no fool. He knew exactly what Aerith was up to, and Myde had no chance of getting away from him now.

All he could do was stare dreadfully back down the hall, trying to read even a single piece of advice from Ienzo's frustrated, retreating face.

They were utterly and undeniably screwed.

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Ǻвσνε – ŧ н ε – Ŵσŕłđ : Ғίηίŧσ

o ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― ― o

Final Mix:

1) The rest of the notes, apologies, and thank yous are at the end of the epilogue. Take a nap. Then read more.

2) The poem Chester recites is Lewis Carroll's "A Boat Beneath a Sunny Sky."

3) Like all of the other Organization members', Zexion's Lesser Nobodies are based on a Final Fantasy job class: Mime/Mimic. This particular iteration of them looks like a more humanoid, Nobody-esque version of the Battery Mimics from FFXII. Google them for the nightmare fuels.