on my own
Lea flicks the match against the box, watching as the small flame bloomed into existence. He yawned, waiting as the fire ate the small twig of fire that inhabited. Seconds before it reached his fingertips, Lea flicked the match into the small tray he kept on his window. It landed with a delicate clatter among its fellows. He'd all ready gone through half a matchbox this morning.
This is what happens, Lea thought tiredly, when I wake up too early.
His mom wasn't even awake yet, and she had to get up really early to go to work. The sun had cracked the darkness of dawn just a half hour or so ago, and now Lea was being a pyro because he was bored.
He groaned quietly and rolled over, letting his hand fall over the edge of the bed and graze the floor. His room was a mess, cluttered with his clothes, books, movies, and games. Tacked to the walls were pictures of him and Isa, depicting everything from them grinning at the camera and each holding an ice-cream, to Lea drawing a mustache on a sleeping-Isa's face. Posters adorned the walls as well, sharing the space with various newspaper clippings. Most of these were about Ansem and his apprentices. Though none of them ever said what the scientists were truly doing.
Lea yawned and considered just screwing it and getting up. But Isa wasn't much of a morning person: he was no fun until at least ten or so. What was he going to do for the next few hours? Moving around the house might wake his mom up, and she barely got enough sleep as it was.
"Soooooo bored." Lea muttered. "This is annoying."
He grabbed a random book off his floor and flipped it open to the middle. It was Ansem the Wise's TheoryOfTheHeart, which both him and Isa had taken a vow to study until they could understand what it all meant. They were desperate to get inside the laboratories and twisting mazes of Ansem's castle, to see what the man was coming up with. What it meant for them, for their world. The section he'd opened up to was a particularly nasty bit that he still hadn't quite figured out:
And what is the Heart but an extension of self, of our deepest desires and darkest secrets? If you are to plumb the recesses of the Heart, then you must be prepared to find the darkness that lurks within us all—to truly unlock the secrets, to understand, then one must first face the idea that we all hold a monster within us. A monster that holds the key to our undoing, and our survival. What if we could see this monster, locate its essence in our own spirits? Would it then be possible to flush it out, to flood the darkest parts of our Hearts with light?
A dear colleague of mine professes often, when we are discussing matters of Heart, that you cannot have light without dark, nor darkness without light. "The blackest darkness will always have a light at the end," he tells me, "and the brightest light, a spot of darkness to help you see your way."
Does this mean that the darkness in our Hearts is meant to be there, carefully guiding our actions and spreading through our light? I do not agree. We have the power to fight this darkness, to become beings of true light. If we could unlock these secrets, find the Key that unlocks the heart, than perhaps we could eradicate this blackness within us…
Isa had scribbled on this page in his herky-jerky handwriting, underlining phrases and circling words. He got this stuff way more than Lea did. At the very bottom of the page he'd written:
The Key of Hearts.
Lea didn't know what meant, or where Isa had gotten it. He'd read the same passage
multiple times and never made the connection. But, still, something about it…seemed to shiver with promise, giving Lea goose bumps. Something within those four words was the answer to everything, all their questions. All they needed to do was figure out what.
He dropped the book again and picked up another one. This one was thinner, more well-worn than Theory Of The Heart. It was an old collection of fairy-tales, of heroes and warriors. His mother had used to read them aloud to Lea, back before his father died and his mom was forced to work constantly.
His old favorite was called The Keyblade Masters. It was about three friends, back before The Keyblade Wars practically eradicated Masters or Bearers. The three friends started out on a small world; surrounded by an ocean that none could pass. They trained every day, each trying to be the best. In the end, one of the friends wanted to leave the world, so he set off on a boat and drowned. The last two friends fell in love, but one was so grieved at the loss of the drowned friend that he lost the ability to fight, and in the loss of his keyblade, faded away to nothingess. The last keyblade bearer, now suffering the loss of their friend and lover, made a journey to the top of the mountain that made up their world. There, the keyblade bearer begged to see their friends one last time. A voice came to them, words shivering in the sky from an unknown source. The voice told them that their friends were not dead, but had passed into a new world—and if the keyblade bearer was brace enough, they could go to the new world as well. The keyblade bearer was not brave enough, though, and did not believe that there were any other worlds out there, and that their friends were dead, not somewhere else. So they stayed on the island, and died years later as a keyblade Master, old and alone.
His mother hated that story. She said it was depressing. Lea loved it. It gave him a reason to be brave, to push the limits of his world until they broke and he found something else at the edge. Something even better. That's what him and Isa wanted to do. The wanted to find something beyond this world that they lived in now.
He thought of that boy who had visited so abruptly, a few months ago. Ven. Funny guy, little too serious. Lea sometimes wondered what had happened to him—if, perhaps, he had gone back to his own world. He'd fought with that stupid wooden keyblade, but sometimes Lea thought that Ven was actually a Bearer. Which meant he actually traveled to other worlds—which was so unfair, so amazing, that it filled Lea with a mix of envy and longing. Something told him that he would meet that boy again, someday.
Me 'n Isa'll go find him, Lea thought happily, someday it'll just be the two of us, and we'll see all the worlds together.
Someday.