-o- CHAPTER TWO–o-


irreversible


My mind was in another place completely. The bright island colors and the seabird songs overhead were muted as all of my senses focused entirely on the movements of Riku's body and the small patch of sand between us. My calves and quads throbbed with burning hurt as I shuffled my feet, struggling to angle my body to prevent the blows from Riku's wooden sword.

"Block! Parry!" he shouted, swinging his heavy weapon towards me furiously. I was always surprised when my body reacted in time. In the heat of a fight, there was never enough time for thoughts to move from my head to the rest of my body. It simply had to be instinctual, primal. I had to let it consume me completely.

"Kairi! Kaiiiiii-riiiiiii!"

Her high pitched squeal barely registered in my mind as it carried over the empty beach. I could only hear my thundering lungs as I panted desperately for breath, dodging Riku's blows and swinging the wooden blade in my hand with as much control as I could muster. Sprays of sand scattered around our feet as we shuffled violently across the shore.

"Kairi, hey! Hey Kairi!"

It only took a split second. A split second for my mind to leave the fight, and take notice of Selphie, waving spastically as she yelled for my attention, and then it was over. Riku's sword slammed against my shoulder as I failed to block his slash. A second later he had struck me hard at the ankles and knocked me onto my butt. My head spun wildly as I lay sprawled in the sand, covered in sweat, stinging with the ache of defeat.

I sighed as I sat up. Riku was laughing, and Selphie smacked his shoulder.

"That's not funny!" she scolded, her lips pursed in disapproval. "You can't go around beating up girls, Riku! No wonder you don't have a girlfriend, sheesh." She turned to me with a gaze of equal reproach. "Kairi, are you crazy? I don't see how this can possibly be any fun…"

She reached out her delicate hand and helped me to my feet. I rubbed my shoulder, which was certain to be bruised by the next morning. I would have to wear something long-sleeved to cover it; no sense in having Sora get overly concerned over a few silly scratches.

"It was fun when I was winning," I grumbled, brushing the sand off my pink cotton shorts. I was furious at how quickly Riku had gained an advantage. You couldn't be distracted for a single moment. There were just so many things to think of at once… I wasn't sure I'd ever be able to keep it up.

Riku gave me a jarring pat on the back. "Don't kid yourself, Kiki. Even when you were winning, you weren't really winning. I'm still taking it easy on you."

Selphie simultaneously rolled her eyes and shuddered. The idea of me and boys and fighting was something she clearly did not care to think about.

"Well if the two of you are quite finished," she said with a motherly air of impatience, "Kairi and I are supposed to be working on our homework assignment."

Reluctantly, I shook hands with Riku and bid him farewell for the night, rather displeased with ending my training all for the sake of something as mundane as a school project.

-o-o-o-

An hour later, a cloud of steam and floral scented shampoo wafted out of my bathroom door as I rejoined Selphie in my bedroom. It had been at her insistence that I showered before we started our homework. You smell like a boy, she had explained, her nose wrinkled.

Which didn't make sense, really. I thought we were supposed to like the way boys smelled.

I pretzeled my legs into a comfy position on my bedroom floor, yanking pages of notes and sketches from my binder and displaying them across the carpet for Selphie.

"This is what I have so far," I said, indicating the extensive assortment of complicated notes.

Selphie pouted as she plopped down on the floor beside me. "I thought we picked fairy tales for our topic because they were easy," she drawled. She sighed as she examined one of my drawings. "And romantic. Why do you have to go all over-achiever on me and make it complicated?"

I grinned slightly at the charming dismay in Selphie's baby-doll eyes. "It's not that complicated," I said simply, though my friend was clearly not convinced. "I was just trying to remember all the old stories we used to tell each other and act out on the island, and then I started making lists of common themes. There's almost always a boy and a girl and evil force of some kind. Usually a woman; a mystic or a witch or something. The major conflict always comes when the boy and the girl can't get together because of some epic obstacle, which is usually a magic spell." I pointed to one of my pages, indicating a diagram I had drawn. "The spells always have a deadline, which of course is the literary device used to create suspense, and it's always resolved through some kind of self-sacrifice."

"Or a kiss," Selphie said.

My next sentence stopped short at my lips as I paused in confusion, looking up from the notes and diagrams in which I was so involved. "A… what?" I was sure that I was blushing.

"A kiss," she insisted again, as if I were missing something incredibly obvious. "You know, 'true love's kiss.' It was in all of our favorites. The spell is broken when the prince kisses the princess. But it has to be the kiss of true love." She smiled dreamily. "Soooo romantic."

My cheeks continued to glow scarlet. "Um, right. True love's kiss. That's a good one, Selphie, I hadn't even thought of it." I reached for my pen and scribbled true love's kiss at the bottom of my list. "So you see, all those old fairy tales we loved when we were kids are actually really similar. I think we could write our essay on the common themes and devices that fairy tales use, and explain why they're there."

Selphie's brow crumpled in exasperation. "Why they're there? What does that even mean?"

"It can't be just a coincidence that all these fairy tales use the same themes and clichés over and over again," I said emphatically, articulating my point by smacking my diagrams with my pen. "Fairy tales are for children. They teach children the basic values of a community."

"…so?"

"So, Selphie, in our essay we should look at how these fairy tales impact our understanding of the adult world. Like, what are these fairy tales teaching us to expect out of life? Why is every freaking fairy tale about some helpless princess waiting on a prince charming to save her? I mean, Sleeping Beauty? She's asleep for half the story!"

Selphie frowned. "But I love Sleeping Beauty. It's one of my favorites. It used to be our favorite, remember?"

The look of disappointment on her face just then was brutal; it was something I'd never really seen before. Selphie and I had grown up loving all the same things, finishing each other's sentences. But a gap between us was growing, and it hurt. Selphie continued, cautiously. "I think maybe you're over-thinking all this. They're just fairy tales, after all. You're being kind of weird about everything lately, you know?"

I could only bite my tongue and stare at my scattered notes, avoiding Selphie's eyes. She wasn't the only one to tell me I'd been acting weird. Moody, some said. Distant. Different. But how could I act any other way? Everything was different now. So completely, so overwhelmingly different that I couldn't even put it into words. I could only feel it. Between me and Selphie, between me and Sora, between me and everything I thought I knew about this island… things were changing. Life on Destiny Islands had been so consistent my entire childhood, and I had loved the comfort of that consistency. I had loved my island.

But somehow… nothing looked or felt the same any more. Every day, another unanswered question would start burning inside me and change the way I saw things. Every day, I felt like I was waking up with a new pair of eyes.

And even that wasn't the worst of it. There was much more looming over me than just my teenage angst. There were worlds and worlds of mysteries out there, torturing me with devastating possibilities. How could I explain to Selphie that Sleeping Beauty wasn't just a fairy tale? That she was a real princess, with a real story, and that actually I was a real princess, with a history I knew practically nothing about? And somehow, somewhere in that vast universe of worlds that Selphie knew nothing about, where my story and Aurora's and countless others intersected, the fate of all worlds was at stake?

I sighed and started gathering up the notes, shoving them back inside my binder.

"You're right, Selphie," I said. I'd never been so dishonest with her before. I'd never felt like I had to hide my true feelings. But these days, my feelings were too much, even for me. "I guess I got carried away. Why don't we call it a night for now, and we can start brainstorming different ideas tomorrow after school?"

Selphie pouted. "But… we just started. We barely got anything done."

I rubbed my temples. "I know, I'm sorry. I'm just… I'm really tired, you know? I think I'd just like to go to bed early tonight."

-o-o-o-

For what felt like hours, I laid with my damp hair against the pillow, staring endlessly at the moonlight pouring through the window. I was exhausted, every muscle in my body burning from the day's sparring with Riku, but I couldn't sleep. I only had about fifteen million thoughts spinning in my brain, after all.

I was unsettled that Selphie was upset with me, and that I couldn't explain to her why I was acting this way. And I was still nervous about Sora and how he felt about me. He hadn't tried to kiss me since I had started my lessons with Riku, which made me ten times as nervous as before. Had he given up? Was I supposed to kiss him now? Because I didn't think all the training in the world would make me brave enough to make moves on my own…

On top of that, I sort of felt like Sora was mad at me, too. He seemed to want me back to normal as much as Selphie did, but it was impossible for me to understand how Sora could ever fathom a "normal" life again. After all he had seen, how could he slip so easily into the routine of a carefree teenager? Sora was thrilled to be home again. He never wanted to talk about Darkness or Light or Other Worlds again, while those were the exact things on my mind 24-7. Couldn't he feel it, too? That nagging pain in the bottom of his stomach? Didn't the memory of Roxas haunt him the way Naminé's parting words still haunted me?

Maybe part of the difference between us was that I didn't really feel like I'd come home again. I had loved Destiny Islands without question my entire childhood. Sora and Riku were the ones who liked to romanticize running away, but I had always been truly content. Maybe that's why the Darkness had taken my heart away on our first journey. Maybe, back then, I wasn't ready to leave my home.

But after everything… home would never feel the same. I can pinpoint the exact moment, even, when an irreversible change came over my heart.

I was standing on the beach, watching yet another setting sun, surrounded by the golds and purples of yet another day I felt I had wasted. The feeling came first in my toes, a strange tingle, and then it crept slowly along my calves and into my stomach. I remember a sharp pain in my chest, but also a slight wave of euphoria. It felt sort of warm. I knew it was coming. I could feel the Darkness before I could see it.

"Maybe waiting isn't good enough…" I had spoken aloud to no one, never dreaming that anyone would ever answer my lonely thoughts on the beach.

And then Axel appeared, his dull cackle echoing over the ocean.

"My thoughts exactly. If you have a dream, don't wait. Act."

He was a towering figure, at least a foot taller than me. His dark cloak draped around his rigid body and carelessly dragged along the sand. I remembered his sharp green eyes, those coy black diamonds hanging beneath them, as he examined me with a devious smile. His flaming red mane framed his confident face and honestly, he terrified me. I had never seen that kind of boy before. A man, almost. His tortured eyes tore right through me.

My heart was pounding, and the very moment that I wished for an escape from this scary boy, that dark portal appeared right beside me. As if I had asked, and someone had answered. Like it listens to me, I remember thinking.

I had no way of knowing what was on the other side, but somehow, I wasn't afraid. As I leapt into the Darkness, I could feel warm strings of Light guiding me along. I could feel Naminé's strange magic reaching out to me even then.

After walking through the Darkness, I was changed. Suddenly, there were questions. Suddenly, Destiny Islands wasn't enough. Suddenly, there was so much more I wanted to know, and I didn't know how to make that wanting go away.