'Twas Between Us
Chapter 2
What Never Was Can Still Be Lost
There was a mission to be done. A grey, circular room of impossibly tall thrones stretched into a blinding, blank space where the ceiling would be. Xemnas, whose black coat made him appear as a black void in the empty room, sat atop a throne. He overlooked rows of Dusks, whose pale bodies shifted and swayed. The lowest form of Nobody obediently cast up their eyeless gazes to Xemnas. His deep toll of a voice filled the room, "Organization XIII…Kingdom Hearts…it cannot be fulfilled without the Key. You must relocate our lost member."
Understood, Superior.
The Dusks' response was the ghost of a unified call that did not strike the walls to validate its existence and yet took up the air regardless. The Dusks then disappeared in a flash of empty color with twisted tendrils of black, grey and white.
Their searching led them to Twilight Town. More specifically, to what seemed to be a second Twilight Town, accessible through a computer beneath the regular Twilight Town. It appeared as a town with normal residents and a regularly setting sun. However, the hearts within those humans, upon closer inspection, were false. Empty numbers. It was strange and confusing, as if being thrown into a world of highly accurate masks. Their target sat somewhere among them.
The vapid Dusk dripped down from a sloping rooftop and landed among a swaying cluster of other Dusks. For a moment, it appeared to the vapid Dusk that the crowd surrounded Master Roxas, the lost thirteenth member. But there was something wrong with him. Was their master unwell? As it drew closer, the Dusk glimpsed past the numbers and realized that they were only holding a photo with their master's face on it.
This is not our master.
Many of the Dusks were agitated and confused, just as the vapid Dusk was. But they could not give up, the Superior would never allow it and they must complete the ultimate goal. The Dusks continued their search, slithering through the air like jagged eels. Their group split up in threes, and each party found Master Roxas in separate places. Once they regrouped, they realized that they once again only had photos of their master. This world was bizarre. One Dusk went as far as dipping into the ones and zeroes that constituted this world, and it ended up retrieving the numbers that stood for the word, "photo." They hoped that perhaps this would prevent further confusion.
It did not. They were duped by another two photos.
The group of Dusks once again fanned out, slithering in and around the various buildings bathed in near perpetual twilight. Wordless reports passed among them that something other than numbers stirred within this world. They hoped it to be their master, but it did not seem to be the presence of a superior Nobody. Something darker lurked in these pseudo-streets.
Alone, the vapid Dusk twirled and twisted atop a roof, overlooking a small set of woods towards the outskirts of town. A Dusk's mind generally only contained the ghost of thoughts and ticked away as a clock that didn't realize it was broken—methodical and hopeless, moving forward with only the grey shade of desire. For the vapid Dusk, the plateau of its thoughts was thrown off kilter. The silent exchanges about stirring darkness had caused faint ripples in its imagination. The Dusk stared at the shadowy forest, searching for the creeping bodies of Heartless to bubble from the ground. It was reasonable to assume that nearby Heartless may have gotten confused by the life-like humans, mistaking them for true hearts. What was unusually excitable about the vapid Dusk was the way in which it quietly searched these shadows for a certain snippet of darkness.
The bell toll marked the beginning of twilight. The vapid Dusk, despite its orders, despite its nature, headed for the forest, without the primary intention of finding his master.
It dipped from the rooftop and climbed to the ground, stretching from one step to the other. It then bound its limbs to its side and drilled its head forward, allowing it to fly jerkily with its body wildly flapping behind. The vapid Dusk skated through the forest, purposefully avoiding the pinpricks of light that tried pushing through the leaves above. It swam to where the shadows grew heavier, until clumping into a knot of inky blackness. The vapid Dusk watched this ball of shadow. It twitched. It shifted again, until bulbous yellow eyes bobbed into view, and a stocky-footed Shadow Heartless jerked forward. The Nobody also leaned forward, gently reaching out its bound-fingertips. The Heartless jerked sharply. The Dusk stiffened. Wait, no. The Heartless hissed and lunged.
The vapid Dusk flipped back out of reach, realizing this Heartless was not the one it hoped for. The Nobody skated back and heard dozens of sputtering hisses erupt behind it. A faceless glance over its shoulder revealed a tangle of more Shadows, with their jagged, crooked limbs knocking against each other and towards the Nobody while their antenna twitched as thirsty roaches. Their venomous yellow eyes burned against their bobbing, dark heads. The Heartless blocked the way the vapid Dusk came into the forest, so it swerved around and swam through the air the opposite direction. The Heartless untangled and spilled after the Nobody.
The vapid Dusk drilled out into a clearing, where the forest ended and a great, orange-stone mansion stood. The Nobody's flapping body veered around upon reaching the tall black gate and it flailed in the air. Something invisible prevented the Dusk from flying over the gates, and this kept it too close to the grass, where the bubbling cluster of Shadows rushed towards it. A Shadow hissed wetly and broke from the ground, its claws pointed at the Dusk.
There was a thin flash of silver, and Shadow fell into cleanly cut halves, breaking apart into inky dust. Another Dusk had bound its legs together into a sharp but fleshy blade of twitching silver. Even more Dusks twisted into the clearing, corralling the Heartless by striking them with their elastic yet solid heads before stabbing them to pieces using their hands bound into finely-pointed needles.
The shadows were shredded and the clearing emptied, at least of anything other than the lifeforms not meant to exist. It left the clearing in a kind of hollow hush.
Still no sign…of the master? The vapid Dusk asked in a wavering inquiry. If there was one thing Nobodies exceeded at, it was their ability to hope. This Dusk hoped that it could hide the fact that it veered so far off course, pretending that it was only searching for their master. Nobodies were very good at pretending after all. The other Dusks did not appear suspicious and shook their heads emptily. No sign of the master at all.
An overwhelming presence washed over them. It was familiar, very recognizable and powerful. The Dusks swayed with an electrified energy, like seaweed being disturbed underwater.
Master? Questions and hopefulness bubbled noiselessly among them. Realization suck in as the presence bore down weightily and something much grimmer and grander came over them. They collectively reasoned instead, Superior. The Superior is here among us.
The gates to the mansion swung open with a rattling creak. A dark-cloaked, broad-shouldered figure stepped down the mansion path, approaching the Dusks. Half of the Dusks begun to stoop down respectfully. Then all the Dusks froze in shock, like jagged statues at odd angles. Something was wrong and they realized it. That was not the Superior of Organization XIII.
The hooded figure rose his gloved hand. Swirling darkness then materialized a black-and-red sword, which looked as though a dragon's wing was ripped off to create it. A Keyblade, tinged with darkness. He darted forward, barreling into the tangle of Dusks. The idea of fighting the man was cast off immediately. It didn't matter that they outnumbered him, as his speed and strength cut through their bodies as a burning knife through balloon skin. The Dusks still needed to find their master, but the hooded man refused to let them return to town through the forest.
The vapid Dusk found itself very unwilling to be destroyed, even for its mission. It fled towards the manor. The other Dusks followed its lead. They seemed to agree that the mission was no longer viable, not without reinforcements. The hooded man relentlessly chased them.
The decrepit interior, though not as sterile as the Castle That Never Was, had a similar kind of emptiness. The overwhelming silence that could have been was drowned by the violent chaos as the man hunted the Dusks. They snake along the ground and walls, even the ceiling, where they assumed that the man's sword wouldn't be able to reach. This was a false hope. The hooded man was able to leap into the air, kicking off the walls and easily reach the ceiling, where he could slice the Dusks in writhing halves.
Their numbers thinning, the Dusks fled into a dusty library, which should have been a dead-end. But the Dusks dove into the carpet, squeezing themselves like liquid metal through fissures in the floor. There was a secret passageway beneath the library and they slid themselves through the cracks. The hooded man opened the passageway to follow them, exposing the stairs that led beneath the mansion. This freed up the Dusks to flee even faster. They rapidly slithered into the cold, metal laboratory below, past the wrapping pipes, into a computer room and through the circular, digital teleporter that they used to slip inside in the first place.
It teleported them into an identical computer room, under an identical manor within an identical town. The real Twilight Town. The vapid Dusk dove across the computer room just behind another Dusk. The other Dusk was suddenly struck by a red laser, and the vapid Dusk stopped abruptly to avoid the laser. It saw the other Dusk break apart into cubic, blinding pieces, as if being unraveled by its molecules.
By the computer, there was a different man completely wrapped in red bandages, belts and a concealing cloak. He stood by the computer panel, where he controlled some kind of laser emitter that extended from the wall. Only one eye was visible beneath his wrappings, and it burned as a fire. The man deep voice rumbled, "Wretched Nobodies."
The vapid Dusk dripped away in the air, slithering beneath the winding computer cords in the hopes of not getting caught by that strange blast. As the Dusk slipped towards the exit, it could hear more of the lasers being fired and the sounds of other Dusks still being cut in half by the dark Keyblade who also re-emerged from the digital world. By the time the vapid Dusk escaped out of the mansion, only two other Dusks managed to escape as well. They slithered through the air until they no longer sensed the dark Keyblade pursuing them. The trio of creatures found themselves far from the mansion, tucked away in the outskirts of the real Twilight Town.
There was a kind of tension within the vapid Dusk. It did not want to attempt to return to the fake Twilight Town, even to search for the lost Organization Member. It did not express this, the same way it did not express anything else. The Dusks looked between each other without eyes to justify their gazes. Finally, one of the other Dusks stated without words, We must report to the Superior. We must regroup.
The Dusks steadily flittered away from the town like scraps of paper caught in the wind. The vapid Dusk paused, caught a glimpse of a shadow that moved between shadows in an alleyway. It was a Shadow Heartless. Just the same as any other. The vapid Dusk stared, as if to verify there was nothing special about it before also departing back to the Castle That Never Was.
CatCrescent: I thought the implication that the Dusks kept mixing photos up for Roxas was kind of funny, and I wondered how the Dusks managed to steal the word 'photo' as well. This seemed like a fun headcannon for it. I've got 6 chapters planned total, and from this point on, I'll be posting on a daily basis. I hope you enjoy and I look forward to hearing your thoughts! Thank you for reading!