A/N: Yo, it's me again! No, I'm not quite done with the KH fics; I've just moved on to the next game. XD Hopefully, this fic, which isn't actually for CoM, but instead taking place in Reverse/Rebirth, won't drone on and on and on like the KH1 fics. There were only supposed to be three of those, and how many did I do? Too many, that's for sure! And I'm going to try a different format for breaks in the chapter, like between author's notes and POVs, instead of the dull, boring, severely-lacking-in-personality Horizontal Line that our gracious hosts give you. And before you can ask, I have beaten KH1, KH:CoM, and KH2, but not Reverse/Rebirth. Those key cards for the doors annoy the pee out of me, they really do. I got stuck in Twilight Town, for Pete's sake! Anyway, I hope you enjoy this fic, and I'll try my hardest to tone down Mizu's Mary Sue-ness, just to make certain parties less (how do I put this nicely?) titchy. Rejoice, as "titchy" is now a word!
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Riku groaned and opened his eyes, pushing himself up into a kneeling position.
"Where," he asked, hoping Mickey would hear him and be able to answer, but his voice was weak, so he tried again, struggling to his feet as well. "Where am I?"
"Sleep," answered a voice, but it held no familiarity for Riku. He was suddenly completelly awake, and a surge of adrenaline hit him as his hand immediatelly twitched towards his Soul Eater sword.
"Who's there?" he barked, muscles tensed, eyes darting around at the featureless, grey-ish mist surrounding him, looking for a sign of the owner of the voice.
"Sleep," the voice repeated. "Here, between light and dark."
"Between. . . What?" Riku asked. His mind immediatelly assessed his situation, and he realised something that chilled him to the bone.
"The king!" he yelped, sounding more worried than he had wanted to. "Where's the king? Together we closed the door to darkness, and after that. . ." Riku had to pause, feeling that something was desperatelly wrong here. He needed to know what was happening, where Mickey had gotten himself off to, and more importantly. . .
"Why can't I remember?" he demanded of himself with a growl. He was beginning to know how Mizu had felt for most of the past year or so, when she had had amnesia. But at least Riku could remember most of his past, if not what happened immediatelly after closing the door.
"Your king is far away," the voice answered, somehow seeming both sympathetic and indifferent. "Sleep," it insisted again, "and leave the war with darkness in his hands. The thorny light of awakening can only bring anguish to one in you state. Turn from the light. Shut your eyes."
Mizu would kill me if I did, Riku thought absently. Instead of saying this out loud, however, he crossed his arms and glared off into the twilight mist, hoping his body language would announce most of his message.
"You talk like I'm some kind of demon of the dark," he said calmly, knowing that the voice would hear him no matter how quietly he spoke.
"Can you face the truth?" the voice asked, not--quite--mockingly. (A/N: Just as an asside, and because I currently have a dictionary in my lap, did you know that the word "quite" originates from the Latin word "quietus," meaning "freed of"? Yes, I read the dictionary for fun.) Riku nearly jumped out of his skin when a globe of black energy--there really was no other way to describe it--descended right in front of him and began to orbit his head.
"Here, blanketed by the darkness, sleep is safety," the voice continued, somehow managing to be heard over the annoying whirring of the orb even though it's volume and inflection was still the same monotone it had been. "Sleep is eternal."
"Is this," Riku asked, completelly stunned, not to mention confused, "a card?"
"It is a door to the truth," the voice corrected. "Take it, and your sleep ends. Take it, and take the first step towards the truth. But know this: The truth will bring you pain. Will you still go? There can be no returning to the sweet security of sleep."
Riku reached out and took the card from the orb, which vanished after completing it's duty.
"Yeah, well," Riku said with a contemptuous, slightly-superior grin. "Seems like a boring place to take a nap anyway."
"Well said, Riku," the voice congratulated, a faint note of amusement tinting it slightly. There was a flash of light, and Riku found himself within a cold, blueish-white marble hallway. He looked down at the card in his hands, taking note of the almost perfect replica of Hollow Bastion on the cards front.
"A door to the truth, huh. . ."
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A/N: I like writing prose from a script. It's fun, and you get to add your own "take" on how the characters are supposed to react, or their internal feelings or thoughts that you don't get from playing the game, or subtle things that you don't notice in the sprites on the GBA, like Riku tensing, instinctively reaching for his weapon, and things like that. Seriously, if you haven't tried it before, you really should, I'm totally not kidding you! I don't know why no one else has tried taking the scripts and writing them in prose, because there is no way I could possibly be the first one to come up with that. Maybe that should be a project for fan-authors, this way we can see how each other interprets the games and whatnot, and we have a better idea of the motivation or intuited personality behind the actions in the more serious fanfics that aren't actually based in the game. Think we should try it?