Porthaven was larger than Market Chipping, tougher, and warier. It was also much, much closer to the front lines. The people were sharper, and often unfriendly, honed to a brittle edge by the constant threat of invasion by sea. Riku and Kairi cleaned themselves up and found a hotel in a rundown part of town, to keep away from any prying eyes, and plotted, planned, and most of all…waited. Riku made some quick calculations and came to the conclusion it would take at least two days to get from Market Chipping to Porthaven by airship, more by rail, if they were not delayed.
Kairi tried flirting her way into the Fort with a pack of other girls curious to see the sailors at work, batting eyelashes and twirling skirts with them, but she wasn't exactly well practiced in the arts of seduction, and after an abortive attempt to at least discover the layout of the Fort, was gently but very firmly escorted out. The seaman who caught her made sure to mention that security was not usually so lax, and whoever had left all those doors open was certain to be disciplined. Kairi giggled and tripped over things on the way out, to keep up a screen of obfuscating girlish stupidity, inwardly cursing her lack of foresight in forgetting to relock the doors she had opened with her Keyblade. She'd been hoping to find the cell blocks, and failed.
She had substantially less to report to Riku than she had hoped, but learned something. The sailors were well-drilled, observant, and wary, and their sidearms were in good repair. Prison doors made for barriers as substantial as gossamer for someone armed with a Keyblade, but the men guarding them were another matter. They would doubtless take exception to any escape attempts, and even Riku wasn't sure he could slip Sora out the conventional way without resorting to lethal force, or, indeed, slip him out at all. There were a lot of things Riku and Kairi would be willing to face down with Keyblades in their hands—slavering demons, monsters of legend, even a god or two, but a soldier with a pistol and a clear shot to the head could be more deadly than any of them. The corridors of the fort were small and narrow, with hardly any room to swing and almost none to dodge. Aero worked well enough against more primitive weaponry, but it was a far cry from a bulletproof vest. The Keyblade was a truly amazing weapon, but it was still a blade, and against the unadorned, mundane practicality of many guns in a narrow hallway, its wielder didn't stand much of a chance.
That meant the last-ditch option, one Riku especially was loath to consider: he could open a portal to Darkness inside the fort, grab Sora, and pop back out. It was Kairi's suggestion, and it sounded so simple and so easy, like succumbing to Darkness always was. The major drawback to that plan was that the ripe and beating hearts of two Keyblade Masters might call down more hell than they could handle in enemy territory, and spill Heartless all over unsuspecting innocents. The veils were thinning, wearing through by the rasp of thousands of frightened, angry, mistrustful souls. The Heartless would doubtless be near.
The allotted time of three days came and went, and as the third sun disappeared below the lip of the sea, Kairi and Riku still hadn't agreed. They were sitting on the single sagging bed of their hotel room amidst Kairi's drawing of the Fort. What was left of the notebook was still on her lap. The crumpled balls of discard ideas had overflowed out of the wastebasket onto the floor like a pot of unwatched popcorn. The notes she was taking on Riku's latest variation on the jailbreak plan consisted of a jar of droopy-looking daisies and some wavy squiggles. Riku sidled over to peer over the top of the pad, and he scowled. "Kairi…are you even listening?"
"Yes. Yes I am," she said, looking up at him, and snapping the notebook shut. "And it won't work because neither of us know how to drive an old-fashioned ambulance, provided we could jack one in the first place."
Riku opened his mouth to refute this automatically, but shut it again, because she was right. "I am out of ideas. Cleaned. Out." He pulled the small, slightly squishy gummi ship communicator out of his pocket and set it on the bed. It was as dark and silent as it had been for the past three days.
Kairi tossed the notebook to the floor with a sigh. "Riku…if he was going to call he would have already. We're running out of time…and options."
"I know."
"I'll have your back."
"My back isn't really what I'm worried about," he said darkly.
He was slouched over, folded in on himself, and Kairi could detect tendrils of real fear wrapping themselves tight around the rhythm of his breathing. He wouldn't admit it to her in words, but neither did he try to mask it in his gestures or expression. Kairi shifted a little closer, until she could comfortably slip her arm around his back and rest her head in the hollow below his shoulder. Such an irony, that the strongest and most confident of them all had also been the most fragile. "You control your memories, Riku," she said, quietly and with perfect conviction. "Don't let them control you. I know you suffered so much in there, but you learned so much too, and you can do things Sora and I will never be able to."
"What if I can't hold it back? What if—"
"You'll be able to," she said. "You don't fail the people who depend on you."
Riku exhaled, slowly, forcing the muscles in his chest to relax. He was afraid of the dark—not what he might find in it, but what it might find in him. But it was a healthy kind of fear, and one that kept him from carelessly tipping a bottle of ink into that delicate balance of gray he held in his heart. What had changed since he had his first taste that power was that he could admit that fear to himself and not flinch from the truth, or bury it beneath mounds of self-defeating overconfidence. Dangerous tools required respect, a perpetual and unfaltering respect, but what could be crafted with them was worth every speck of effort. "Midnight, tonight. I'll leave from the room and bring him back the same way, so no one watching will be able to connect us to the escape."
She nodded in approval. "Do you want to try and get some rest before you have to go?"
"Emphasis on try, but okay," he said, forcing himself to smile. Kairi set the alarm clock, as a formality, and proceeded to tangle herself up in Riku's long limbs like a kitten with a ball of string. Neither slept.
Riku slapped the alarm clock a good deal harder than was strictly necessary to silence it when it began to ring. The stars were out in their full glory and the streets were quiet. He tied back his hair, put on his shoes, and collected his gear in the cloaking blue light of the night sky. He fixed his eyes in front of him, on nothing, and pulled, until a thin spear of Darkness punctured the fabric of reality. The air was chilled and stale. "Hurry," Kairi whispered from the bed.
"You don't have to tell me," he said, and stepped through.
-ooo-
He would never forget the smell. It was subtle enough to drive one mad, a hint of death and rotting things whose source was impossible to place, and it burned his nose like a gust of dry wind that was deep below freezing. The cold, too, was infuriating. The air wasn't even cool enough to condense his breath into puffs of steam, but the chill still found its way through his thin shirt, past his skin, and into his chest. The mist whispered in his ears, subtle and persistent and just above the threshold of his hearing. He knew what it had to say, and tried to ignore it and the memories that welled up at its touch and started walking.
It had been easy before, cloaked first in Malificent's power and her sweet words of encouragement, then in Xehanort's body with its steel shell of Darkness. But the grip the Darkness held on him had faded with time and care, the armor rusting away to leave his tender heart exposed to anything that caught its scent.
Finding Sora wasn't difficult; that he'd done many times before. His heart shone through the mist ahead, radiant and welcoming. It looked so close he wanted to run but didn't dare for the sound it might make. He forced himself to be patient, straining to hear anything at all, scanning the horizonless view for any trace of motion. There was nothing.
He walked until he imagined he could reach out and touch the small blue star that was Sora, and pushed this time, until a tiny stream of Darkness spilled through into the holding cell and widened until he could step through it. Sora relaxed against the wall when he recognized the shape that appeared. "About time," he croaked, managing a weak and lopsided smile. In the wavering light of the bare electric bulb that hung from the ceiling, Riku could see the livid bruises on his face and neck and dried blood on his lips. The guards had tied him to the wall with thick rope, wrapping each finger wide to keep him from balling them into a fist. It didn't actually take much to restrain a Keyblade Master, just a little creativity, chloroform, and a sturdy rope. They could open almost any lock, but knots were outside of their jurisdiction.
Riku knelt down next to him, gently lifting his chin with a finger to inspect the damage. The fear of passing though the Darkness melting away beneath a sudden furnace blast of anger. "They hit you?" Riku whispered though half-clenched teeth.
"Only at the end," Sora answered. His voice was slurred oddly from the effort of talking without using his damaged lip. "I think I got upgraded from deserter to spy. The guy in charge got mad when I didn't tell him anything good." He snorted a little, a tiny bitter laugh. "And after I walked out of my cell. They didn't like that either."
"Explains the rope," Riku said. "They learn fast." Rope was tougher for a Keyblade to deal with, but easy for a quick fire spell. Riku stood and began to speak the words to blast the rope free.
"No don't!" Sora hissed.
The warning came too late. The warding on the walls of the cell flared to life, symbols set in silver that had been placed in groups of three at each point of the cube. Riku looked up, and from the ceiling another circle lit up with the same white fire. Something blindingly bright with two arms, two legs, and a head that seemed to be all mouth dropped straight down onto his upturned face. It was like being suffocated by a ray of sunlight—he could feel its heat and the see the orange flashes of its brightness behind his eyelids, but his fingers didn't connect with anything solid as they clawed at this face, and he couldn't pry its grasping hands free. He stumbled backward and hit the bars hard with his shoulder. The unexpected pain made him gasp, and through the primal panic he realized he could breathe. The spellform wasn't trying to suck the air out of his lungs. It was operating on another plane entirely, and the horrible choking sensation was the feeling of it sucking every drop of magical power from his being.
It lasted all of a few seconds, but felt a hundred times longer. It finally release him and floated back up to its mooring in the ceiling, and the room was lit by only the electric bulb once more.
"Sorry, Riku," Sora mumbled. "I tried to warn you. You'd better clear out for a second, cause they're gonna come check on me."
Riku coughed. His mouth and throat stung like he'd downed a cup of scalding coffee, and there was a whole ballroom full of spots dancing in front of his eyes. He stepped back into Darkness, keeping a pinhole portal open so he could hear when it was safe to return. He blinked a few times and waited for his head and vision to clear. He waited a few moments, then a few moments more. The first did, but the second didn't. He heard booted footsteps, then a door opening. Their owner paused briefly to insult Sora's intelligence, then the door closed, and the footsteps retreated. Riku drew the portal open again. "I can't see," he informed Sora, rubbing his eyes. "Everything is all dark and blurry."
"It wears off in a few hours or so," Sora said.
"A lot of fucking good that's going to do. I can't just chill out in your cell until I'm not blind anymore," Riku snapped without thinking, and suddenly regretted it. He couldn't see the look on Sora's face, but he could imagine it. If Riku had been having a bad day, Sora's had undoubtedly been worse. "Sorry…I just…I'll cut the ropes by touch." He summoned his Keyblade and prayed it wouldn't trip another magical sensor. After a few seconds nothing happened, so he took hold of the rope and started sawing at it with the sharp edge of the Keyblade. It was awkward, sweaty business with completely the wrong tool for the job, and before long Riku was seriously regretting his lack of foresight in not bringing a pocketknife. The rope was thick and strong, and every click of booted footsteps in the hallway as he labored through it made him jump. About three-quarters of the way through the first rope he stopped to shake the cramp from his arm—and discovered the next layer of magical safeguards that had been built into the cell.
"The hell!" Sora swore. "What's happening to the rope?"
Riku grabbed the sawn ends in his fist but jerked it back again in disgust. The strands of hemp were wriggling like worms. As Sora watched in horror, one thread found another, and they extended their ragged ends to bridge the gap Riku had cut. The strand rewove and went taut, as if they had never been severed in the first place. Its neighbors were busy doing the same. Within a few seconds the rope was whole again.
"I hate this world," Sora announced.
"Feelings are mutual," Riku groaned. "Now what?"
"Why're you asked me, Mr. Brains-of-this-Outfit? I tried everything I could think of to bust out before you showed up. I'm tapped out."
It took serious effort for Riku to keep his voice low. "I don't know anything about breaking out of jail! This's never exactly come up before!"
"You watched more spy movies than me," Sora said with finality, and leaned his head back against the wall. "You're more qualified to figure it out."
Riku was about to reply with something nasty, but shut his mouth. They were wasting time, and as shallow as it was, maybe Sora had a point. None of those films covered magical prisons, and he owned no laser pens or exploding wristwatches, but he could at least take a page from their methodology. First, he considered the items at his disposal, which were: a Keyblade, a few favorite Keychains clipped to a belt loop, a phial of healing potion, and the receipt from dinner that had been in his pocket. No good. He ran his hands up and down the ropes and the bolts that held them fast, hoping for some flash of genius. Keyblades were impossible to crack, bend, or dull by mundane means, and given enough time he could theoretically saw through the old cast-iron fasteners, but it would take forever. He yanked halfheartedly at the knot, which, as he suspected, was tied too tightly to undo. But when his fingertips brushed the end, they came away smeared with a fine powdery dust. He sniffed it curiously, and immediately sneezed. It was ash.
"Sora?" he asked.
"Yeah?"
"Please, please tell me you still have Bond of Flame."
"Uh-huh, why? They took everything else. Guess they figured it was just weird jewelry."
Riku felt a surge of hope. Even after Sora had found more powerful charms and its usefulness as a Keyblade faded, he had taken to wearing the miniature chakram around his neck beneath the symbol of the Kingdom Key. It was a sort of memorial, a grave marker for a man that never really lived and died in a place that never really existed. And, if Riku had guessed right, Axel was about to save his butt again. The charms had no intrinsic power of their own, nothing that would mark them as anything but bits of miscellaneous junk to the untrained eye. Their true value was the memories they stirred in each Keyblade Master that held them, since it was these that gave each one's weapon its distinctive powers and appearance. Riku knelt down and undid the clasp of the chain around Sora's neck, removed the charm from his own Keyblade, and threaded the links through the empty loop on the pommel. It glowed briefly and reformed into a figure-eight shape. Very carefully, Riku touched the edge to the knots nearest Sora's right hand. The air immediately filled with the smell of burnt fiber.
Sora gasped when the rope gave way and his hand dropped back to his side, half in joy and half in pain as feeling suddenly rushed back into his numb arm. "Worst pins-and-needles ever," he muttered, and then started pulling the knots loose with his teeth and chin while Riku worked on freeing his other hand. Sora allowed himself a few minutes to work some strength back into his cold fingers and stretch the cramps out of his back and neck.
"Ready?" Riku asked, when the rustling of clothes subsided.
Sora summoned his own blade. "Ready."
"I didn't see anything on the way in. Here's to hoping we get that lucky on the way back." Riku opened the portal and strode through, Sora a step behind. Fighting the Heartless on their home ground was always chancy business, even when they were in the best of shape, and right now Sora was sleep-deprived, starving, and sore, and Riku still mostly blind and sucked dry of magic. If they caught the attention of anything nastier than a pack of Shadows, the odds were not in their favor.
Sora transferred his Keyblade to his left hand to take Riku's elbow in his right and started walking. But without any guides, he could have been going in circles and never known it. It was sailing in the open sea on an overcast night, with no compass. After a few minutes, Sora stopped, and his fingers slipped away from Riku's arm to bounce forlornly against his thigh. "It's all gray," he said. "Everything. I think we're lost. How'd you ever find me? There's no landmarks or sun or paths or anything."
"Then don't think. Feel," Riku instructed him. "I figured out early that's how the Heartless find their way around. You can make your own path by reaching out with your heart. Distance doesn't matter here, only how much you want to find a person or a place.
"I don't know if she would look the same to you…I mean, I was never in position to ask anyone else that'd gone after her, and I know it's kind of cheesy, but to me Kairi's heart was always the colors of the bay on a clear day. Try looking for that."
Sora took a deep breath and tried to relax. It didn't take concentration to want Kairi, since right now he craved nothing more than to be able to feel her arms around his chest and a few kisses on the parts of his face that didn't hurt. He wanted to be away from choking claustrophobia of the mist. He paced a slow circle around Riku, wishing and wanting. And then, deep in the unending grayness, he saw a glimmer so faint he wouldn't have know it really existed if he hadn't been looking. He squinted. The glow strengthened. "So…it's mostly aqua, with a sort of green sandy color at the edges?"
Riku smiled. "That'd be it. Keep walking toward it, and if you lose it for a second, find a memory of her. It'll come back."
"Hey Riku?" Sora asked, as they continued on.
"Hmm?"
"What's my heart look like?"
"Blue. Really blue, like the most perfect summer sky in the history of summer skies."
Sora laughed, a little weakly, but it still rang true. "And you once told me I'm a sap."
"Still holds, you cheeseball. Keep walking."
He did. The weariness in Sora's steps faded the brighter the light before them shone, and Riku thought he could see it too, though whether the blindness was lifting a fraction or it was his imagination was impossible to tell. At times the light of Kairi's heart dulled, like a thicker mist had been pulled over it, but Sora kept his memories close to the surface, and he never lost it. Time and space in Darkness was fluid. There was only stillness and the murky light, with no beginning and no end, and trying to measure the distance they'd traveled was as futile as trying to pin down a raindrop. Still, it was undeniable they were getting closer.
The glow had become so warm and so strong Sora did not notice the faint shadow that lurked behind it, belly to the ground and claws unsheathed. Its form was as changeable as the mists it pulled around itself for camouflage, the only certainties being two eyes, four legs, and many, many teeth. It had shown uncharacteristic cunning and patience for a Heartless, lying in wait for them beside the first tear Riku had made. It did so in perfect silence, uncorrupted by a need for breath, or to stir and stretch tired muscles, and in the stillness revealed nothing to its prey until it leaped.
If his reflexes had not been ground to powder by lack of sleep, Sora would have dropped below the range of the tearing claws, spun round on his toes, and thrown his Keyblade at the precise angle required to shear off at least two of the Heartless' legs as it hit the ground. As it was, the best he managed was to shove Riku out of the way and then topple over him in a clumsy heap as the beast clipped his shoulder and robbed him of his balance. He wasted precious moments untangling himself and raised his blade, his shoulders screaming in protest and his fingers refusing his urgent pleas to grip the hilt more tightly. The toothy, boiling smoke paced them, nipping at their meager defenses. Sora did his best to keep his body between the beast and Riku.
"Where is it!?" Riku cried, his voice harsh with the panic of a warrior struck helpless, unable to defend himself. Kairi's heart shone like the sun, and Sora's white shirt was a pale blur beside him, but the rest of his field of vision was muffled in darkness. He didn't see the Heartless when it charged him, but he just barely heard the break in the whispering of its padded feet against the substance of the ground. He swung down, in the direction of the snarl, and although his strike was directed by more luck than skill, it connected.
"That was too close, Riku. Get out of here! I can take it," Sora insisted, unconvincingly.
"That's the Hero talking, stupid. You're almost in worse shape than me," Riku shot back. If he knew anything about Sora, he knew that he would not back down from a fight, and that he wouldn't give up. Riku loved him for it, and owed his life to it, but right now Sora was busily scuffing the fine line between valor and stupid bull-headed stubbornness. As it stood, alone in the Darkness with only the deadly cat for company, they would both be completely and improperly fucked. Thankfully, this was not an either/or situation, and there was another variable waiting patiently for them that had not yet been introduced to the fight. Sora hated putting her in danger, but Riku was less of an old-fashioned romantic, and had far more trust in her capability to deal with whatever the Darkness threw at her. He dismissed his Keyblade, opened a portal, and grabbed Sora by a handful of cotton shirt and pulled him through.
The doorway materialized at the foot of the bed in which Kairi had been sitting, her Keyblade laid across her knees. Riku tried slamming it shut as fast as he could, but it only wavered and would not close; the Heartless had gotten its metaphorical foot in the door. The tiny hotel room was too close for a fight, even for one person to swing, and Riku hoped desperately he had not made a serious mistake.
"Behind us!" he barked hoarsely, as the gateway flared again, pulsing until the midnight thorns brushed the ceiling.
Kairi didn't move. She could feel the wrongness in the air, the perversion and the taint. There was something pushing hard from the other side, something bigger than the usual adversaries Sora and Riku could mow down in their sleep. A face emerged from the portal—a black lion with a mane of smoke. It turned to look at her with its two hungry eyes, languid and deliberate, a predator that knows its prey has been wounded and cornered. Slime from its jaws hissed as it hit the floor. Still, Kairi did not move, as if those enormous green eyes had bespelled her and she couldn't hear Riku and Sora's frantic shouting.
But Kairi was not enchanted—she was waiting. The Heartless padded forward, until its head and shoulders were fully in the room, and it was only then that Kairi acted. The true talent of a Princess of Heart was in sealing and binding, and it came to them as naturally as breathing, their very existence serving to lock the Darkness away. But like any natural inclination, this subconscious force could be focused to pinpoint sharpness, and Kairi had been given more than enough reason to practice that skill.
She threw her essence down over the portal like a guillotine. The white heat of her pure heart cauterized the wound in the world, and the Heartless suddenly found its body in one place and its head in entirely another. The faint look of shock in its eyes evaporated with the rest of its skull. She dismissed her unused Keyblade and pushed herself off the bed to pepper Sora with welcoming kisses. Then she stopped short in front of him. "They hit you?" she hissed, when she got a good look at Sora's battered face.
"That's exactly what I said," Riku supplied. He pushed himself up against the wall and reached out tentatively with his fingertips until they hit something round and soft.
Kairi gasped a little offended gasp and removed his hand. "Riku! This is not the—"
"Didn't mean to do that, actually," he said sheepishly, to the air about a foot from her head. Kairi exhaled curiously and held two fingers up to his face, moving them slowly from side to side. His eyes didn't follow.
"You can't see, can you?" She reached up to stroke his face, which was too warm, compared to his hand—not feverish, but like he'd been terribly sunburned. He flinched from her fingers, confirming her hypothesis. "If it wasn't the middle of the night, I'd say you were sunburned. Your face is probably all red. What happened?" Kairi asked, as she offered a hand up to Sora.
"Magic-sucking face leech," Riku said. "Sora tells me it's not permanent."
"Yeah, um, guys? You mind if…um…bed now?" Sora asked. His voice gone rather unsteady, like it had had a bit too much to drink, stumbled out of the bar, and was about to pass out in the gutter.
"Go ahead," Kairi said, guiding him forward with one hand. "On your back, though, so I can clean up your face."
Sora mumbled something unintelligible and staggered over to the bed. He collapsed backward into it without bothering to take his shoes off first. Usually this was a reprimandable offense, but given the circumstances Kairi let it slide. She loosed the laces for him and set them down beside the bed, then assembled a little pile of gauze and antiseptic on the bedside table and began to very delicately clean Sora's face. He was so exhausted he could barely gather the energy to wince when she hit a particularly tender spot.
"Has Ingary invented automatic ice machines yet?" Riku asked, not sounding hopeful, when she'd finished attending to Sora. "That spell burned my tongue." She sighed a sympathetic, maternal sigh and fetched a waxed paper cup of water, which she iced over with a tiny Blizzard spell and handed to Riku. The freezing water felt heavenly, and once he drained the cup he and Kairi nudged Sora enough to get the blankets out from under him. It was a tight fit on the bed, but they were too relieved and too exhausted to care.