"Just…Just a little further…"
Reina had dragged the unresponsive man out of the Bizarre Room, away from the Tea Party Garden, and back into Lotus Woods. Although she knew the forest was full of Heartless hiding in the shadows, her goal was just to get him as far away from where they met the Drainer as possible. She wasn't sure why it left when it did, or why her Fire magic had such a strong effect on the creature, but she was grateful it had fled the scene, nonetheless. There was no telling how many more times she would have been able to cast Fire on it before running out of stamina, so it was a good thing it ran away when it did, even if that meant the First Key of Radiance was still out of her reach.
She had taken them as far as she could until her legs gave out in exhaustion, her knees crashing into the dirt below her. Xigbar was slumped over her, pinning her to her seat on the ground, until she finally gave up and gently nudged him off of her until he was sprawled out on his back beside her. Tall grass surrounded the pair as they occupied the center of the forest path, and even though she would have preferred to find a place more sheltered and secure, this was as good of a place as any for her to catch her breath and check on her partner.
Now that she could get a good look at him, she could see that Xigbar was still unconscious, barely breathing. The mere sight of him made her chest tighten, and a cold sweat dripped down her spine from the base of her neck. This was her fault. He was in this state because she refused to leave when he told her to. Her pridefulness had led to this tragic outcome, and if she had just retreated when he opened a portal for them then he wouldn't have gotten hurt.
"Xigbar…Please. Please wake up." Reina leaned over his still form as she reached out a cautious hand to touch his scarred cheek. Although his skin was warm to the touch, he was dreadfully pale. The good sign was that his lips were parted just enough to let air drift in and out of his lungs, his chest rising up and down with his shallow breaths, but Reina was afraid of getting her hopes up. There was no way of knowing when he would wake up. If he would wake up.
Oh, god, was he going to die? He didn't have any visible injuries, but he had warned her that the Drainer could literally suck the life out of its victims, and she had even seen it happen with her own eyes to one of the three mystifying creatures Xigbar had summoned from the darkness to help him fight in battle. Maybe when the tail hit him, it had sapped all of his energy away, all of his vitality, and left him as nothing but an empty, lifeless shell.
"I'm so sorry. You're only like this because of me. I did this to you."
A strand of silver hair had slipped out from his ponytail, falling in front of his eyes so Reina pushed it out of the way and smoothed it back against his head. Even as he remained motionless, his expression was far from peaceful. His brows were knitted forward, and she could see that the lines of his face were tight and tense. He was still holding onto life, still determined to live, but Reina was at a loss as to what she could do to help him revitalize.
"Xigbar, are you conscious at all? Can you hear me? Please, just open your eyes…Or, uh, just the one, I guess…"
This wasn't the time to joke, but she hoped he could at least hear her talking. She tapped his cheek lightly with her palm, but he still didn't stir. Shaking his shoulder didn't do any good either. Running out of ideas, Reina could do nothing but sit there on the ground for a few minutes and wait for something to happen. It was getting darker and darker outside by the minute, but the forest was quiet, no signs of Heartless anywhere. At least that was something she should feel grateful about. She wasn't sure if she'd have it in her to focus on a fight right now, and she needed to conserve all of her magic power in case the Drainer showed back up to finish the fight.
Reina didn't get to rest her body for long before she noticed that something was wrong. Xigbar's breathing was growing uneven, his breaths coming out in low, strained gasps.
"…Xigbar?"
There was one more choked breath before his chest stopped rising up and down. The tight muscles of his face even started relaxing, and Reina could feel her own panic settling in.
"N-No! You have to keep breathing! I won't let you die here! Please, Xigbar, don't quit on me!" Two fingers pressed up against his throat, searching for a pulse. It was still there, but weak. Wasn't there anything she could do for him?!
She didn't have a lot of medical experience. In fact, she didn't have any. Merlin had never taught her healing spells, and she felt just as useless now as she had back when she spent every afternoon watching her mother wither away in her hospital bed. She hadn't been able to help her mother then, and she wasn't able to help her new friend now, either.
Why…Why did she have to be so useless?!
"No, I won't let you die. Come on, Xigbar. Wake up!" She gritted her teeth before pulling down the zipper of his black coat, exposing his bare chest. He wasn't wearing anything underneath his jacket so she placed a hand on his muscular chest, searching for signs of a heartbeat, but her stomach sank when she couldn't feel anything. There was no thumping, no pounding, no rhythm.
Having no heartbeat could only mean one thing. She was losing him!
Continuing to kneel over him, Reina began to act on impulse. CPR was the extent of her medical knowledge, something she had learned as a precautionary measure for when she was taking care of her mother, and the first step was chest compressions. With her hands in the proper position, Reina began to pump against on his chest, her own pulse speeding up as she feared for the worst.
"Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty…" She had counted each compression before tilting the man's chin back to open up his airway. Hovering her mouth over his lips, she inhaled two breaths into his lungs before drawing back to resume chest compressions. His lips were still warm, but she didn't have any time to pay attention to all the small details; getting him to breathe normally again was the most important thing right now.
"Please, don't give up! Please, Xigbar! Don't leave me alone out here!" She begged the motionless man as she desperately tried to jumpstart his heart. She continued on with her chest compressions before applying a few more deep breaths into his lungs, and she kept this up for five more cycles.
Xigbar was still not responding. It didn't look like he was breathing at all on his own, either.
Tears stung at the corner of her eyes as she kept pushing on his chest. Her partner was dying and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She fought against the hysteria that threatened to consume her, focusing all of her attention on the chest compressions, as she kept trying to call out to him.
"You have to wake up! You can't leave me! Not again, Braig! I'm not going to let you go! Braig! Say something! Please! Please just don't go, Braig!"
By this point, she wasn't even paying attention to the words that were tumbling out of her mouth as she grew deeper into a frenzy. The tears were clouding her vision until a consistent stream of drops slid down her chin and onto the man's face below her. She was trying her best to revive him, trying her best to get him to open that stunningly vibrant golden eye of his, until an idea popped into her head.
There were machines that the doctors had once used on her mother after she had fallen unconscious one afternoon at their shop in Traverse Town. As soon as the emergency responders arrived on the scene, they had sent a jolt of electricity into her mother's chest, and the shock had been enough to make her heart start beating normally again. Her mother had lived at least another year following that incident, but Reina wouldn't have had those last three hundred or so days with her mom had the emergency health care responders not acted so quickly.
While she didn't have a machine, she had something else. It was probably a stupid idea, but it was the only idea she had. Her Keyblade was quickly summoned as she held it in her right hand. There was no time for her to really think this through and she had run completely out of options by this point. As long she could try to control the strength of the spell and only dispense a little bit of magical force, maybe it could be enough to get his heart pumping again.
"Please, let this work…Thunder!"
A small bolt of lightning burst from her Keyblade, sending surges of electricity through Xigbar's entire body. For the second time that day, Xigbar was getting his insides deep fried with electrical currents. His whole body jerked and twitched in response, and his left eye finally fluttered open as he inhaled a sharp breath of air. With his fingers digging into the dirt, he tried to ground himself until the burning sparks inside his body settled down.
For the first time since the Drainer touched him, the man was able to finally form a complete sentence.
"FOR FUCK'S SAKE!"
At the sound of his booming voice, Reina screamed in surprise, tumbling backwards as she watched him bolt upwards into a sitting position. Her spell had worked?! At first, she was too stunned to speak, unable to believe her eyes. Xigbar was alive! He was alive, and breathing, and blinking, and cussing, too!
"X-Xigbar?!" She gasped, watching as the rattled man whipped his head in her direction.
His whole body continued to jerk and twitch with involuntary muscle spasms, and his gaze was sharper than a blade as he shot her an accusatory glare. "What the hell was that?! Were you trying to kill me?!" He hissed through gritted teeth, panting heavily as if he had just run a marathon.
With her eyes red and puffy, Reina sniffled a few times. He was okay. He wasn't dead. Her shoulders were trembling as tears kept streaming down her cheeks, and all she could manage to do was weakly look back at him through misty eyes as relief crashed down upon her like a tidal wave.
"Y-You…You're alive…"
The expression on her face was something he hadn't expected to see after she just blasted him with a Thunder spell. He had been awake the entire time, listening to her frantic pleas and feeling the crushing weight of her hands pressing down on his chest as she naively tried to perform CPR on him. The Drainer's touch hadn't killed him, not by a long shot, but it had paralyzed him beyond his own control. He hadn't been able to speak or even move a single muscle, so there was no way for him to communicate to the girl that he wasn't dead. He had no choice but to wait for the effects of the numbness to die down, but it looked like all he needed was a good burst of adrenaline to kick his body into gear again. The electrical sparks had hurt like a bitch, but at least he could move again. That was smart thinking on her part, he had to admit.
Shoving aside his anger, he let his facial muscles soften. It was impossible to stay pissed at her when she sat there bawling her eyes out like a small child. "Yeah, I'm alive, Princess. Surprised?" He gave her a crooked grin. She was still processing everything, it seemed. She looked like a nervous wreck, and while he had heard the strain of her voice as she cried out to him over and over, he never expected to see her so disgruntled over his well-being. All this time he didn't think she liked him enough to care one way or another about him, but he had been mistaken. You couldn't fake that kind of distress, and it was almost flattering to see that she had gotten herself so worked up over the thought of him leaving her.
Reina kept staring at him if he was a zombie, still astonished that her spell really had done the trick, but it was taking all of her restraint to keep herself from flinging her arms around his neck and embracing him. Just a minute ago she thought she'd never hear him call her 'Princess' again or give her one of his annoyingly charming smirks. "I…I thought you were dead."
"Heh, I can see that," he pushed himself off the ground to a standing position. His whole body still felt stiff, but he luckily had the strength to stand and even walk by now. "I was actually awake the whole time, but the bastard had completely paralyzed me. I couldn't even open my eye like you asked me to. I hate that you wasted so many tears on me. Honestly, Princess, I had no idea you cared so much. It's so touching; you made me want to cry." He was being sarcastic, hoping to lighten the mood with a joke or two, and it looked like it was just enough to make her finally realize that everything was okay. That he was okay.
She must have looked like a blubbering fool sobbing over him like that, but she couldn't help it. She quickly wiped at her eyes, but the tears were still falling. Anytime she wiped one away, another would take its place. She had been so sure he was going to die, and it was still hard to believe everything was fine even as he stood up and tried to shake off the tightness of his limbs.
"Y-You heard me calling out to you?" Her voice cracked, throat parched from all her crying.
Xigbar nodded. "Yep. Every single word. You really made a huge fuss over little ole' me. Who'd have guessed Little Miss Firecracker would cry an actual river over some creep she met in the woods that day?" He extended out a hand to the young woman to help her get up and out of the dirt.
Before she took his hand, there was still one more thing she needed to ask. "So…So you felt me give you CPR?"
His grin widened. "I'm surprised you didn't break any of my bones with how hard you were pushing down on my chest. I gotta' admit, though. I liked the part where you kissed me. Feel free to do that anytime you want. I think I can still taste your lipgloss on my mouth. Is it strawberry flavored?"
Watching him glide his tongue over his bottom lip was enough to make Reina finally step out of her stupefied state. He was back to his usual cocky self, eager to see what reaction he could draw out of her this time with his flirty behavior, and Reina could feel herself getting ready to snap. A crimson blush rose its way up her neck and to her cheeks, and her whole face burned with embarrassment.
"W-What?! You sick pervert!"
Refusing the hand held out to her, Reina climbed to her feet on her own before she worked on dusting all the dirt off her legs. There were no more tears, save for the ones that had already stained her cheeks with their dampness. With one final sniffle, Reina reached out and punched his shoulder. It wasn't a rough gesture, Xigbar barely even felt this one, but he understood the meaning behind the gesture.
"I thought you were dying, Xig," Reina mumbled before turning away from him. "You weren't moving at all. And it looked like you had stopped breathing. I also didn't feel a heartbeat at all, so I guess my first thought was to perform CPR to get it pumping again. When that didn't work, I thought maybe I could give you a shock to the heart to make it work again. I'm glad my Thunder spell worked."
Xigbar tried to stifle a laugh but failed. "You were trying to find a heartbeat? So that's why you unzipped my coat. This whole time I just thought you were trying to feel me up, knowing I couldn't defend myself." His snorting made her both bewildered and angry as she wondered how he could find it in him to laugh at a time like this.
"It's not funny!" She snapped back. "I was seriously terrified that you were dead!"
She was right. It wasn't funny. It was downright hysterical. Nobodies didn't have hearts; therefore, it would be impossible for him to have a heartbeat. It was simple-no heart, no heartbeat. She had made quite a ruckus over something so trivial, but he knew she didn't have the slightest clue what a Nobody was; it was only natural for her to panic if she thought his non-existent heart had given out on him. Knowing that, he really shouldn't have been laughing, but it was just so damn funny that his lack of a heartbeat is what made her fret the most. The irony of it all—it was just priceless.
He threw up his hands in defense. Even though his laughter subsided, he still wore a snarky grin, unable to shake it off. "You're right, you're right. I'm sorry, I shouldn't laugh. It's just that—ah, forget it."
He didn't finish his sentence knowing that maybe now wasn't the right time to fill her in on the reasoning behind his lack of a heartbeat. Even if he did explain it to her, he had a feeling she still wouldn't find the whole ordeal to be all that humorous.
"You're such a jerk," she insulted him again. "You put yourself in harm's way to protect me. If you had died, it would have been my fault. I couldn't live with myself if you never woke up…"
She was no longer crying, but he could see the relief on her face that he was able to cut up and joke around like normal despite being at death's door just a few moments ago. She had seriously been distraught over the thought of losing him, her heart wracked with guilt and grief. He had heard the pain in her voice as she grew overcome by raw emotion, but that wasn't the only thing he had heard during it all.
He had heard her say his name. His real name.
Braig.
At first, he hadn't been certain she had even said it. He initially assumed that maybe his mind was playing tricks on him, or maybe his senses were dulled by the effects of the Drainer's touch, but he had heard each syllable out of her mouth so perfectly clear up to that moment. He knew it hadn't been his imagination. She had called out to him using his former name.
"Reina." Xigbar took a step closer to her, all signs of jesting gone from his face. "Earlier, you called me something. You called me something other than Xigbar."
The girl nodded as she worked on fixing her appearance. She didn't need a mirror to know that she was a complete mess. Her hair was thick with tangles so she started combing through her hazelnut locks with her fingers to tame the frizz. "Yeah, I called you a jerk just now. Wouldn't be the first time."
He sighed. "No, I don't mean that. You called me something else while you were giving me CPR…Do you remember?"
With her fingers still tangled up in her unkempt hair, she looked at him with tired eyes. "I don't know what you mean. Maybe I called you another insult in a fit of anxiety?"
"You really don't remember?"
"Remember what? I'm confused."
If she had indeed called out another name besides Xigbar, she hadn't realized it.
He searched Reina's face for any signs of lying, but she didn't blink four times like she always did whenever she told a tale. Her expression was neutral as she finally yanked her fingers through one particularly stubborn tangle until her long hair was smooth and free of any pesky knots. She had fully recovered from her crying fit as she finished drying away the last remnants of tears from her cheeks onto the sleeve of her lilac cardigan, and Xigbar didn't take his eye off of her for a second.
Reina caught his gaze as she straightened herself up. "You okay, Xigbar? You still look a little pale. Maybe you should sit down…And, um, maybe zip up your coat while you're at it."
She called me by my former name without even realizing it. It was like my name was a natural response for her even though it's clear she doesn't have any of her memories from back then. Xigbar could feel every bone in his body begin to tense. She wasn't ever supposed to remember the name Braig, but he had already known that there were some memories and habits that were bound to rise to the surface the more the two of them were together. Still, he hadn't expected her to utter that name so soon after reuniting after all these years.
One thing was for certain: she didn't remember him. There wasn't a sliver of doubt in her mind that today was the first day she had met the man standing before her. There was no sense of familiarity to her. No déjà vu. He was a perfect stranger, someone she truly believed she had only just met, and he intended to keep it that way.
He couldn't let her remember Braig or recall the atrocious sins he committed against her and her family. He memories from her life in Radiant Garden were distorted at best, that much he had gathered, and as long as she didn't try to question herself or try to line the pieces up of her shattered past, everything would go according to plan.
"Xigbar? Hey… You don't look so good."
A gentle hand against his cheek brought Xigbar back to the present time as a pair of jade eyes were staring right at him, burning with concern. Trapped in his thoughts, he hadn't realized he had spaced out standing there. He didn't mean to keep worrying her. He felt fine, after all. Well, as fine as he could be with all things considered. A normal human might have perished from coming directly in contact with the Drainer, but he was far from human; his Nobody self was tougher than the average dude.
"Yeah, I'm fine, sweetheart," he said as he reached up to clasp the hand against his cheek before pulling her palm away from his face. "You should be more worried about yourself. You look awful. After I lost my ability to move, did anything happen to you? What even happened to the Heartless? I remember hearing a loud roar and then—"
"It just vanished," she explained with a shrug of her shoulders before letting her arm drop back down to her side. "I have no idea what happened or why, but after I used another Fire spell, it just started freaking out and then it was just…gone."
That was unusual, but a good thing regardless. Who knows what would have happened if the Drainer had kept trying to attack them while he was immobilized?
Xigbar started to zip his coat back up as he looked up at past the trees that towered over them. The sun had already set, and the sky was now a deep shade of indigo. He didn't think even the moon or stars would be bright enough to light up their path through the woods, and although his eyesight was normally sharp in the dark, he couldn't count on his body working properly now that he had his power zapped out of him. He'd be sure to give the Drainer a good beating next time he encountered it as thanks for screwing things up for him.
"We should get moving. If any Heartless show up, I won't be able to fight," he told her. "I'll be even more useless than you are."
"Huh? What do you mean?" She was just about to withdraw her Keyblade, but the way his voice suddenly dropped made her reconsider.
It looked like this was something he'd have to spell out for her. "When the Drainer touched me, it drained my power and absorbed it. It didn't kill me, thank-fucking-god, but I'm just an ordinary old dude right now. I can't even summon my guns, and I bet I can't create any portals, either."
To demonstrate, he held out his hand the way he normally would when materializing his Sharpshooter, but the Arrowguns never appeared. Nothing but air was in his grasp, and for the first time in years, he actually felt human.
Reina sucked in a breath as their situation dawned on her. "I…I see… So what do we now?"
"We find a place to camp out for the night. We're like sitting ducks out here; I'm surprised no Heartless has tried to attack us so far," Xigbar shrugged, scratching the back of his head. "Once the sun rises, I'm taking you back to your ship so you can get out of here. I'll hang back in Wonderland and wait for my reinforcements to arrive."
Reina nodded. "Yeah, that sounds like a good plan—wait. What? You want to take me back to my Gummi Ship?!"
He should have known something like this was going to set her off. "You heard me, little lady. You're not going to stay in Wonderland while I wait for back-up. You're going back home to Traverse Town."
With one hand propped on her hip in a sassy manner, Reina stood in place while Xigbar started to walk back down the path. "Excuse me, mister! But you don't get to decide what I'm going to do from here on out. I'm not leaving."
"Are you deaf or something, Princess? I already told you I can't protect you. If you were to get attacked, you'd be good as dead."
Reina raised her Keyblade upwards before waving it in the air. "Uh, hello? Aren't you forgetting something? I can still cast spells and thwart any Shadows!"
"Don't make me laugh," he antagonized her. "I saw the way you let those Large Bodies kick you around like a punching bag. If I hadn't have saved you, you'd have gotten squashed like a pancake. You only managed to get away from the Drainer by dumb luck."
She wasn't going to let him talk down to her like that, not after she dragged his paralyzed ass out of the Bizarre Room in the middle of a battle. "You can't tell me what to do, Xig," she sneered. "If I want to stay in Wonderland with you while you wait for your other teammates, then that's what I'm going to do. I'm not going back to Traverse Town and leave you out here."
"I have a better chance of surviving alone out here without you slowing me down," he grumbled, keeping his back turned to her. "You'd be doing me a real solid if you just skipped on back home for a few days while I wait for someone else from the Organization to show up. They're bound to notice that I'm gone—I'm the second highest ranked member, after all—so I'm sure they'll send out a search party sooner or later. We're supposed report in every night so I wouldn't be surprised if Saix sent someone to look for me in Wonderland as early as tomorrow morning."
Reina had zeroed her thoughts in on the first thing he said while the rest of his words were drowned out by the pang of guilt she felt building inside. After everything that happened, it made perfect sense that he would want her to go away. She was solely responsible for his lack of powers and had become a hindrance to his mission. Ever since they met, she had been nothing but a burden to him, just a dumb damsel in distress he felt obligated to help for some reason. He had gained nothing from becoming her partner, and she could hardly blame him for wanting her out of his hair. She'd want that, too, if she was him.
"But…But what about the key…" Reina mumbled, dropping all signs of rebellion as she withdrew her Keyblade, turning it back into her golden necklace.
"Forget about the damn key for now," he scoffed. "Come back in a few days once my teammates kill the Drainer. Once the Drainer is dead, I can only assume my powers will return. I'll leave the key somewhere easy for you to find it so you can come back for it later when it's safer here."
That made her feel even worse. With her head hanging low, Reina remained quiet, not finding it in herself to argue with him.
When she didn't reply to him, he glanced at her over his shoulder. "You can relax—I'm not going to run off with it or anything. I don't give a rat's ass about some stupid necklace a Heartless was guarding. It may be important to you, but it's worthless to a guy like me. Jeez, I can't believe you still think of me as a crook or somethin'."
"I…I wasn't going to assume you were going to steal it," she whispered. "I know now that you're not like that." If his goal from the start had been to nab the First Key of Radiance, he wouldn't have bothered trying to protect her earlier. He wouldn't have pushed her out of the way when the Drainer tried to strike her down, wouldn't have gotten himself hurt and drained of his powers, if the key was what he was after. She may have been suspicious of him and his intentions in the beginning, but not anymore.
Xigbar was a good guy. Not a creep, not a stalker, not a villain. He didn't need to do anything else to prove that to her since his heroic actions spoke for themselves.
He wasn't the problem anymore. She was. She was useless, defiant, and a hindrance to him. It was so painfully clear he didn't want her around anymore, and it killed her to know that she had caused him so many problems after her selflessly tried to save her.
Reina was so caught up in her pity party, drowning herself with insecure thoughts, and hadn't realized Xigbar had turned back around to stand beside her.
"Come on, Princess. Enough standing around. I don't know about you, but I'm pretty beat so let's just call it a night." He urged her to look up at him as he reached for her hand, amazed that she was allowing him to touch her. Her hand was a lot smaller than his but it fit perfectly inside of his palm, and he almost wished he wasn't wearing gloves so he could feel just how smooth her skin was. He waited to see if she would protest against holding his hand, and when Reina didn't try to jerk her arm away to avoid the physical contact, he began to tug her along behind him as he guided her through the thick, dark woods of Lotus Forest.