I don't think life is quite that simple
Her eyes filled again with tears, glazed over and stinging. She looked down at her hands shaking her head as if this wasn't happening. I tried to reach over and hold her hand, but she lifted them up to cover her face, to wipe clean the tears that wouldn't stop.
"He was my brother," she said softly, her pale cheeks dripping, her futile wiping unceasing.
"Riku?"
"Yeah."
"How do you know?" I implored, it seemed so far from the truth. She seemed to be in a right state and I thought more than once that she might be losing it.
Yet as she would explain all of the pieces fit together revealing the only possible conclusion.
She was a princess of heart. She was one of seven. She was the princess of Hollow Bastion; her father had been the king there. The king had been Ansem.
Ansem had to be her father.
She could recall just barely that her grandmother would tell her that her son had such a fascination with the darkness in people's hearts.
She could remember in hazy detail a little boy with white hair running through the library with her, sliding down the banisters and laughing like there was no other joy in the world. He looked the spitting image of his father, a tall man with the same shocking mane of long, white hair. His coloring was like his son's, tan even when neither of them had spent much time outside on the castle grounds. Their only difference lay in their eyes. The father had fiery eyes, as if a demon lay in wait just behind them. The son had icy eyes, as if his heart had been locked away.
There was another memory, a woman, tall like her husband with thick red hair and sparkling violet eyes. It seemed only just that Kairi remembered this woman, because this woman was her mother. The people she'd been living with were not her parents, but her aunt and uncle, the sister of her mother and as dear to her as any two people could be. Yet they had lied to her, existed as her parents for so many years that she had never questioned.
She had been sent away, that she could remember. The little boy with the white hair had left first. He'd been sent away with no reason, no sentiment, no goodbye. It was years later that the girl Kairi had been was sent off to a new place with pseudo parents. She was almost too young to remember that they weren't her real parents. She was almost too young to protest.
Those memories had come crashing in upon her as the waves broke on the shore. She lay awake at night trying to piece them together and here it was, a haphazard quilt of logic and memory sewn with an apprentice's skill.
That was why it had been so easy for Ansem to possess Riku's body. They were close enough in blood and mind, body and soul. He could take his son, use him as a tool to fulfill his own needs and desires. Ansem was like that, though she didn't know this because of her own memory.
She carried with her something of her mother. It was the pearl that rested above her heart on a chain of silver. She couldn't remember why, but she felt compelled to put it on every morning, to wear it everyday that she remained on Destiny Islands, away from her true home.
She didn't know that this was her parting gift from the woman she could recall only as if in a dream.
She placed her hand in mine and tried to explain everything. After bashing it out several times it started to become clear, to make sense, to sharpen in focus. The edges were still blurry, but they would always be. Time would sort out all the little details that didn't get filled in. Love would erase all the little things that didn't matter.
It made sense now the way Riku had always treated me. He must have known deep down that Kairi was something more to him than just a friend. All along he was grooming his best friend to be the perfect boyfriend for his baby sister.
I smiled to hold back the grimace, the pain welling up in my ears as white noise. Kairi was still explaining in her patient way, but I couldn't hear her anymore. I could only see her brother gazing over her shoulder, his hand extended, reaching for me and never getting there.