Disclaimer: I don't own Kingdom Hearts. It belongs to Square Enix and Disney.
Herutsu no Oukoku
Chapter 6: Wonderland
Axel yawned and boredly stared out one of the small round windows on the gummi ship. Sora sat up front pestering Donald and Goofy about when they'd get to the next world. Kairi wasn't sitting too far from Axel and was examining the pink gem that Naminé gave her.
"But we've been traveling for days!" Sora's frustrated yell floated out of the cockpit. "We've got to be getting close to the next world."
"You gotta be patient, Sora." Goofy told him. "The gummi ship is goin' as fast as we can get it to go."
"But-"
"No 'buts'!" Donald interrupted. "We'll be there soon."
"How about you go check on Kairi and Axel." Goofy suggested. "I don't think they get along all that well, so don't leave them alone together for too long."
Sora looked confused. "Really?" He asked. "I didn't notice that. Are you sure?"
"Gawrsh, Sora. I don't know. Maybe it was just me." Goofy said.
Sora smiled and stretched his arms up before resting his hands on the back of his head in his infamous pose. "I'm sure they're fine, but if you really want me to then I'll go check on them." He dropped his hands to hid side and walked back to join Axel and Kairi. Before the door shut behind him he heard Donald mutter something unintelligible and Goofy reprimand him quietly.
Axel and Kairi both looked up when Sora entered the room and it was for the first time that Sora noticed the tension between the two. 'I guess Goofy was right.' He thought.
"Did you find out anything?" Kairi asked as she slid the gem back into her pack.
Sora shook his head. "No, not really." He said, sitting down next to Kairi. "All I got out of Donald was 'soon'." He sighed. "I wish there was a way for us to get there faster. Then I'd have a better chance of finding Riku."
"And I'll be able to find Roxas sooner." Axel said in a soft tone. "And the sooner the better. He shouldn't be left alone for too long. It's not that he's weak or anything, he's just so stubborn that he gets himself into trouble without even trying."
"Axel?" Sora asked. "What's he like? The one you're looking for."
A soft smile spread across Axel's face. "He's my best friend, even if he always denies it. We met when we were little kids; back when he first came to Twilight Town. When he got into middle school he started breaking away from me, especially after I-" He paused for a second. "I started high school." He lamely supplied. He sighed and leaned forward, resting his elbows on his legs. "I don't know what happened to him, but he started getting more and more quiet and snapped at everyone. I was one of the few who could get him to talk, but that was mostly because I was too stubborn to leave him alone. The last time I was him was when I dropped by this one café that he likes to go to."
"We'll find him, Axel." Sora promised. "I just know we will."
Axel chuckled. "You know, you're a lot like him. Being around you right now is almost like having him here with me."
"Strange, he doesn't sound a thing like Sora." Kairi remarked, ignoring the fact that she hasn't known Sora much longer than Axel has.
Axel brushed aside Kairi's coldness. "You'd understand if you knew Roxas."
Silence settled over the trio and remained that way until Goofy shouted back at them that they were nearing the next world. Sora rushed up to the front, hoping to get a glimpse of the world. Axel and Kairi followed, wanting to get a look as well.
Once up in the front, Kairi and Axel had to hold Sora back to keep him from pushing any buttons in his eagerness to get closer to the world. Once they got close enough to teleport off they let him go first and then quickly followed.
They ended up in a hallway unlike any they had ever seen before. Instead of the walls being straight they curved and twisted.
Axel appeared uneasy at the closed in space. His eyes darted around looking for a way out and his breathing became shallow. He started to fidget and move around while the others talked about what to do next. 'Keep cool, Axel.' He told himself. 'You can handle this. It's no big deal.'
"Axel?" Goofy asks, interrupting his thoughts. "You don't look so good. Are you alright?"
"Claustrophobic." Axel muttered. "I'll be fine."
"Lets go this way!" Sora exclaimed as he took off down the hall. "Come on, guys!"
Kairi sighed tiredly and then started jogging after him. Donald and Goofy soon followed, leaving Axel to shuffle along after them. He soon came to the room where the others were waiting and found himself able to breath more easily in the less closed in space.
"Bizarre, isn't it." Kairi remarked. "I wonder if the rest of this world is just as weird." She couldn't help but glance over at Axel and she frowned when she saw how tired he looked. "Are you okay?"
"I'm fine." Axel muttered, hating how his weakness has gotten worse since his world disappeared. "I've always gotten like this in enclosed spaces. It's a wonder I was fine on the gummi ship." He leaned against the wall and ran a hand through his drooping hair. "I'm claustrophobic. Got it memorized?"
A frown tugged at Kairi's lips and she looked away from Axel and walked over to Sora, who was looking around the room in awe.
While the others looked around just to see what's in the room, Axel looked for a way out.
A wave of dizziness slammed into him suddenly and made his knees buckle. He quickly sat down on the bed, only to jump up when the bed moved back a foot or two.
The others turned to look at Axel and he held up his hands defensively. "I didn't mean to!" He exclaimed. "I just sat down and it moved!"
"It looks like there's something' behind it." Goofy commented.
Axel turned around to look and see if he could find what Goofy was talking about. His green eyes landed on a square hole behind the headboard and he swiftly pushed the bed all the way back into the wall.
The others crowded around to look at the hole in the wall.
"Lets go through it!" Sora excitedly said, ready for an adventure.
"It looks kind of small, don'tcha think?" Goofy asked. "Maybe we should look for a different way."
Sora looked disappointed. "But what other way is there? The doorknob's asleep and won't let us though. And maybe this one was hidden because it is the right way."
"Or maybe it's hidden for a different reason." Kairi said, trying to dissuade Sora from crawling through the small tunnel. "Maybe it's dangerous."
"But Kairi," Sora whined. "I want to know where it goes! Don't you?"
"Well, yes." Kairi said hesitantly. "But we still shouldn't go crawling through a tunnel we know nothing about. And besides, I don't think any of us could fit through that. It's too small." She logically said.
"Then maybe we just need to get smaller." Sora suggested, looking around the room once more. "Magic is real, so why can't something that makes you shrink be real?" His eyes landed on two different colored cans on the table and before anyone could stop him he ran over to the table and picked one up. "Maybe this is it!"
Kairi started. "Sora, I don't think--"
Sora took a sip from the can before Kairi could finish her warning and he cried out in surprise when he began to rapidly shrink.
"See, this is what happens when you act without thinking." Kairi chastised.
"Kairi, not so loud!" Sora yelled, his voice sounding high-pitched and squeaky, as well as far away.
"Oh, sorry." Kairi dropped her voice to a whisper. "Do you think we can go through the tunnel if we're all that small?"
"Kairi, I'm six inches tall." Sora said. "I can fit through just about anything."
Kairi regarded the can for a moment and then picked it up and took a sip. She quickly set it down, feeling the affects of it take place.
"I thought we weren't going to drink it." Axel crossly remarked, wanting nothing more than to get out of the suffocating room.
"It's going to help us get through the tunnel!" Kairi yelled, her voice high-pitched and squeaky just like Sora's. "And we haven't sprouted horns or anything, so it should be fine!"
"Axel, it might help if you drink it." Sora said, worried about his other red-haired friend. "Maybe the room won't feel so small then. And that tunnel might lead outside.
Axel considered that for a moment while Goofy and Donald both took a sip of the shrinking solution. Then he gave in and took a sip as well. Together the five walked over to the tunnel and looked for a light at the end. Finding none, they asked Axel for some fire to use as their guiding light. Axel led the way, his hands alight.
"Doesn't that hurt?" Sora asks. At Axel's questioning look he pointed at the fire.
Axel shook his head. "It doesn't hurt at all. Sometime's there's a tingling feeling, but it never hurts."
"Oh."
The five lapsed back into silence. Their footsteps echoed on the hard floor for a while but it soon gave way to grass and they knew they were getting near the end. A dim light appeared at the end of the tunnel but Axel kept the fire burning until they actually got out of the tunnel and into what appeared to be a garden of sorts.
"Hey, it looks like there's someone in a cage up there!" Goofy shouted, pointing ahead through a gap in the bushes.
The others rushed over to see what Goofy was pointing at and Kairi gasped when she saw the young blonde girl trapped in the cage.
"Kairi, is something wrong?" Sora asked.
"I- I know her. I mean, I've never seen her before, but somehow I know her." Kairi said, her voice laced with confusion. "I think her name is Alice."
Sora looked determinedly into the cleared area. "We've got to help her!"
"No!" Donald squawked. "We can't interfere!"
Goofy nodded. "Sorry, Sora. We can't interfere with other worlds unless it deals with Heartless. We've got to protect the world border!"
"That's order!" Donald corrected.
"Unlike you, I can't just sit here and let someone be caged." Sora snapped at Donald.
"Then lets stop talking and act." Axel said. "We should at least find out what's going on. It could have something to do with the Heartless."
Without waiting for the others, Axel marched out into the courtyard. He was quickly followed by Sora and Kairi while Donald and Goofy brought up the rear.
"How dare you intrude in my courtroom!" The Queen shouted from atop her pedestal. "Off with their heads!"
"Wait!" Sora yelled. "We didn't mean to intrude. We were just curious about what's going on."
"Please!" Alice shouted from the cage. "You've got to help me! I'm innocent, I tell you!"
"Be quiet, you!" The Queen roared.
The Rabbit cleared his throat. "The accused has been convicted of attempted theft of the Queen's heart."
Sora and Kairi exchanged glances.
"Sounds like a Heartless to me." Axel murmured. "Sora, request permission to search for clues so we can prove Alice's innocence."
Sora quickly did so and after the Queen yelled for a while longer they were directed to a different opening in the bushes that led to the forest.
"Maybe we should split up." Kairi suggested as they looked around the bizarre forest. "This place looks really big."
"Sora can come with us." Goofy said. "Our King did instruct us to stay with the key."
"But Kairi has a keyblade too." Sora reminded them.
Kairi forced a smile on her face. "That's okay, Sora. I'll be fine with Axel."
Sora looked about ready to protest, but Axel beat him to it.
"Go on with Donald and Goofy." The other redhead said. "Kairi and I will be fine. We've got each other's backs."
Finally convinced, Sora followed Donald and Goofy to one part of the forest while Axel and Kairi took the other half. The two redheads walked in silence for a while, surprised by the lack of noise and the lack of Heartless.
"You know, you could have gone with them." Axel remarked. "I could have handled things on my own."
Kairi snorts. "I doubt that." She says brassily. "No matter how good you think you are, you should always have someone else with you when facing Heartless. Besides," She scowls. "Those two don't respect me as a keyblade wielder. At least you do."
Before the two went around a bend, Axel stopped in his tracks and threw out an arm to stop Kairi, accidentally hitting her in the chest. He whispered a hurried 'sorry' before pointing ahead to a familiar black shape.
"A Heartless!" Kairi whispered. Already she felt the familiar tingle in her right hand that always came right before her keyblade was summoned.
"Know any magic yet?" Axel asked her.
Kairi shook her head. "None offensive. I can do a minor shield charm, a weak water spell, and a few low-level healing spells though. I'm still working on my Light Flare spell."
"Perfect." Axel grumbled sarcastically. "Maybe you should just let me handle this."
"No way!" Kairi hissed angrily. "I can fight just as well as you can. Don't you dare try to leave me out of this!"
"Fine." Axel hissed back before walking out into the clearing.
Immediately the attention of the Heartless' went from wandering around to charging in for an attack. Axel quickly summoned his Chakrams in a blaze of fire and took out the ones nearest him. Kairi quickly summoned her keyblade and charged in, slicing away at the Heartless. While Axel didn't pay any great attention to them, Kairi watched carefully as the swarm fluctuated in size with each blow she and Axel dealt to them.
"There's got to be a way to stop them from coming!" Axel shouted. "What does that Light Flare thing you're working on do?"
"It wards them off." Kairi said. "But I told you, I'm not able to do that yet! It takes a lot of energy and it could completely backfire!"
"You've got to try sometime!" Axel roared as his lit one Chakram on fire and threw it into a crowd of Heartless. Like a boomerang, it returned to his hand, cutting through more Heartless on its return path. "I'll watch your back!"
"Fine!" Kairi yelled. "But if we die here, I swear I'll follow you around in the afterlife and make you miserable!"
"Just use the damn spell!" Axel yelled, blasting fire at a pair of Heartless.
Kairi hissed something under her breath as she knocked a few Heartless away from herself. Then she spun her keyblade around in a circle, gathering all her energy for the spell. "LIGHT FLARE!" She shouted. The flowers on her keyblade began to glow, dimly at first, and then blazed brightly with a pure white light.
The Heartless reacted to the light by quickly fleeing the area.
Slowly the light dimmed back to a dull glow and Kairi sank to her knees, exhausted. Axel let his Chakrams ignite and fade away before he rushed over to Kairi to help her up.
"See." He said. "You tried and it worked."
Kairi looks up at Axel with confusion lurking in her violet eyes. "I don't understand. I haven't been all that nice to you and yet you still help me. Why?" She asked.
Axel raised an eyebrow. "Why?" He repeated. "I think it's me who should be asking that. You never even trusted me from the beginning and I haven't even done anything to you."
"You also haven't done anything to gain my trust." Kairi said defensively. She pulled away from Axel to stand on her own.
"And Sora has?" Axel argued. "You haven't known him much longer than you've known me and yet you seem to trust him completely."
Kairi found herself lost for words and looked away from Axel. She gripped her keyblade tightly and for a moment the glow increased.
Axel easily masked his face to betray nothing of what he thought or felt. With a barely concealed sigh of displeasure, he walked past Kairi back in the direction they came from.
"There's nothing down here. Lets go meet up with the others." He said.
Still looking at the ground, Kairi released her keyblade, letting it fade away to wherever it is that keyblades went when not in use. She looked up as she was turning around to follow Axel, but stopped when she saw something on the ground. She ran over to it and carefully picked it up, somewhat surprised to find that it was two sheets of paper.
"Axel…!" Kairi called as she turned around. She fell silent when she didn't see her fellow redhead anywhere nearby. She frowned and looked down at the papers. The first appeared to be a part of a story and she assumed it was from the book at Merlin's. The second paper was heavily coded and she couldn't make heads or tails of it.
She put both papers in her bag and then ran in the direction Axel went, hoping that she wouldn't run into any Heartless along the way.
"Burn baby! Burn!" Axel cackled as he mercilessly sent plumes of fire at the card sentries that the Queen sent out to attack them. The others may have been having a rough time with the cards, but he was having a field day. Chakrams and fire were perfect tools for fighting cards.
"Watera!" Kairi shouted, sending a spray of water at one of the cards that Axel was getting ready to torch.
"Kairi, I can't burn the damn cards when you soak them!" Axel yelled in frustration.
"And nobody can get close enough to the flaming cards that keep walking!" Kairi yelled as she ripped her keyblade through one of the cards like it was, well, paper.
"Kairi!" Sora yelled. "Get Alice down!"
Kairi took down one final card before she ran over to the covered cage Alice was being kept in and pulled back on the level so the cage would lower to the ground. Once it reached the ground she jerked back the sheet and gasped when she found Alice gone.
"Guys! She's gone!" She yelled after turning around.
"WHAT!!!" The Queen roared angrily. "Guards! Find the prisoner! I WANT HER HEAD!"
Kairi quickly rejoined Donald, Goofy, Sora, and Axel in case the cards would try to go after her. Instead the card sentries rushed past all of them and into the forest in search of Alice.
"Maybe we should leave." Sora suggested.
"Good idea." Donald said.
They quickly fled back into the tunnel before the Queen remembered that they were there. Once back in the Bizarre Room they climbed up onto the table and drank from the other bottle to get back to their normal size.
"Now what?" Kairi asked.
Sora shrugged. "I guess we go on to the next world."
"But what about Alice? We've got to help her!" Kairi exclaimed. "We can't just leave!"
"Something tells me that she isn't here anymore." Sora said quietly.
"We haven to find the King!" Donald said, stowing away his wand. "We don't have time to go back traipsing through the world. And we have to preserve--"
"The world order, we know." Axel interrupted, sounding bored. "Lets just go already."
They began walking toward the exit, but something made Sora stop. That something was his keyblade developing a mind of its own and summoning himself.
Sora took it by the handle as it directed itself toward the snoozing doorknob. The world seemed to fade away to Sora and he found himself in a world of smoky pastel colors. A beam of light collected on the tip of his keyblade and a breeze kicked up, ruffling his spiky hair. He could feel the energy building around him and within him as a crown of light traced itself beneath his feet. Instinctively, he jumped back and twirled the keyblade around before realigning it with the doorknob and releasing the built-up energy in a single beam of light. He heard a click before the real-world appeared around him once again.
Sora turned around to face his companions. "What was that?" He asked.
"What was what?" Axel asked. "All I saw was you acting all weird and pointing your keyblade at the stupid doorknob."
Sora looked, if possible, even more confused. "What? But there was this light and a clicking noise… are you sure you didn't hear it?"
"Maybe you should get some sleep, Sora." Goofy suggested. "You've been so excited that you haven't gotten much."
"No." Kairi shook her head. "I heard it. And I think I caught a glimpse of what you're talking about, Sora. It's like you locked a door with your keyblade or something."
"Exactly!" Sora exclaimed, relieved that someone heard it.
"Okay, so you're both crazy." Axel said. "Can we get out of here?"
Sora nodded. "Yeah. And maybe we'll find Riku or Roxas or the King in the next world."
"Here's to hoping." Axel said.
End Chapter
Well, with It Must Be Destiny finished I finally have time to work on this. Unfortunently, it will be put on hold in November thanks to NaNoWriMo. If you have no idea what that is then you can easily look it up. Just type in NaNoWriMo into a search bar (like google).
I think my favorite thing about this chapter is the arguments between Axel and Kairi. The arguments are almost as much fun to write as AkuRoku arguments! (Note I said almost)
And somehow Axel tends to end up being claustrophobic in my stories. If anyone is wondering why, then it's because my thinking goes something like this: Axel is a fire user. Fire doesn't like closed in spaces. Fire dies without enough oxygen. Therefore, put Axel in a small space or take away too much oxygen and he's not at all happy. Same goes for wet or underground places.
The next chapter should be more fun.
NEXT: Chapter 7: Olympus Coliseum