Hmm... I didn't like the last chapter.
I don't think it flowed right.
Disclaimers: Kingdom Hearts is not mine and neither is Final Fantasy or Disney.
Alright, enough of Sora's emotional breakdown, we're going back to the mystery!
Hikari Household: Eight Thirty-Two AM
As Riku knocks on the door of the small house, Haru lingering at his side nervously, he waits patiently for his old friend, the only one who could help him right now. "Just a minute! Nami, you have to be good now, okay? Please, for me? Daddy'll take care of you, I promise nothing bad will happen to you. I promise." Kairi Hikaru's voice says. Riku immediately smiles at hearing the soothing voice, instantly feeling better like he always did. "I don't... Yes, Naminé, I promise to be careful. … yes, that probably is Riku at the door. Hey, maybe he brought Haru today! You wanted to talk to him, didn't you?" Kairi continues to say to her younger sister. Riku grimaces; from the way that Kairi was babying her younger twin, Naminé had had a relapse.
"Kairi, come on! We've got to head to school sometime this week you know!" Haru demands angrily, rapping his own knuckles against the wooden door impatiently. "I said just a minute!" Kairi snaps and a sudden slamming motion rocks the door, forcing Haru away from it. Riku grins in amusement; Kairi had come a long way from being the helpless little princess that she had been when she was a child. Haru mutters something irritably to himself, scowling at the door.
A few moments later, the door opens up a crack and a teenage girl waves at them, motioning them inside. "Well, you guys can come in. I think she'll be okay now." Kairi says calmly, tucking a wayward lock of auburn hair back behind her ear. She smiles brightly at Riku and Haru as they walk in. Riku could hear faint sobbing and Mister Hikaru's voice saying something incoherently in the distance.
"Nice kick there, Kairi. Been takin' lessons from Riku again?" Haru comments sarcastically, giving the older girl a glare. She only chuckled and nodded. "So you've noticed." She chuckles, shaking her head sheepishly. Kairi smiles again at Riku before turning around and shouting to her father: "Dad, I'm going to school now! Take care of Naminé for me!"
At the mention of her name, Kairi's younger sister walks into the hallway. Riku flinches at the sight of the girl as he always did; he could never really forget a certain image he had of her, an image of utter helplessness and of fear. It always made him slightly wary of her... she reminded him too much of bad memories. The younger girl smiles vaguely at him before bowing her head, her pale blond hair disguising her face further. "Did you guys... come to play with Kairi?" She asks in a soft but high-pitched voice that made her sound about ten years younger than she really was. Naminé quivers and clenches her arms tightly around herself, driving her long fingernails into her skin.
Haru, her friend and closest companion (beside her own family, of course), chuckles.
"We're going to school, silly. You comin'? You're still in your jammies!" He says in an abnormally bright voice for the usually sullen boy. He walks forward and gently pulls Naminé's hands away from her arms, tucking them neatly onto her hips. She blinks and shakes her head, tugging her short white nightgown down her legs as if worried about the length.
"Daddy and Kairi said I can't go. I have to stay home," She murmurs mournfully, shaking her head slowly. Tears begin dripping down her cheeks as she asks softly: "Can you ask Roxas and Xion to come see me later? Axel was here and he said he wants to talk to them. He was sad. He was crying," Naminé says blankly, looking very confused. "Why is he crying? I don't understand... why is Axel crying?" She begins to cry harder but didn't seem to notice that she was doing it. She wobbles to a chair lying on its side in the hallway and sits down on it. She begins to tremble even harder and began to rasp softly to herself. Whatever she was saying was pure nonsense, nothing but harsh hissing and vicious growls. Almost unconsciously, Naminé began to clench at herself again. This time, blood began to trickle down her arms from how deep her nails had been driven into her flesh.
"Kairi, Riku, Haru, please go to school now. I'll take it from here." Mister Hikaru says calmly as he puts his hands on Naminé's shoulders. Riku blinks in surprise and looks up, startled by the sudden appearance of the Hikaru patriarch. Haru gives him a suspicious glare before relinquishing his spot beside Naminé to him. As their adoptive father and their loving guardian, he was more than qualified to take care of the girl. Riku nods and bows respectfully to the mayor of their small town, praying silently that Naminé would feel better soon.
"See you later, Daddy. Nami, you be good for him, okay?" Kairi asks softly as she pulls on her dark brown school loafers and walks out the door, black book bag in hand. The two boys murmur similar words to the now silent blond girl before running out after Kairi. Riku places his hand on her shoulder when she begins to cry. "I thought she was better. And now Sora's worse, too." She says softly, closing her eyes and allowing herself to be pulled into Riku's side.
"I know, Kai. I know." He says soothingly, patting her shoulder gently. She sniffles for a moment before smiling vaguely, looking like a mirror-image of her sister; it gave Riku shivers just to think of his cheerful best friend in that state. Kairi, who wasn't someone to let her sadness show for very long, quickly smiles and pulls away from Riku. She sniffles for a moment before adjusting her white buttondown, looking up towards the sky. "It's really bright today..." She says idly, more to make conversation than a real comment on the weather. Riku mumbles an agreement before asking softly: "Kairi... where did you hear about Black Box XIII?"
Kairi freezes and stares at him, startled. It takes her several moments before she can answer. "... Axel came over. He said we had to watch something. He showed it to Sora before he came. … Was that... real?" She asks softly, her eyes darkening with the pain she hid. He nods. "Yeah. I cleaned up the scene a few hours later. … They really are dead, Kairi." Riku says quietly, trying to be calm and nonchalant about it. His voice however, cracks horribly, betraying his true emotions. Kairi gently pats his shoulder.
"Hey, enough of the sob fest. Let's get our asses to school." Haru says irritably, no doubt unhinged by the brief visit with Naminé. Riku couldn't help but rolls his eyes at that; his younger brother had always been protective of Naminé and this feeling had only been reinforced by... No, Riku would not think about that time. He clenches his hand into a fist, shaking his head.
"You're right. Let's go to school." He says in a gruff voice, pulling Kairi and Haru along by their wrists, refusing to let go of them as he walked along. As he walked, without realizing it, Riku begins to hum a bizarrely familiar soft, lullaby-like song.
Destiny Island High School: Nine Forty-Five AM
Riku sits idly in his first class, Worlds History, and he stares at the front of the room in boredom. All around him, his classmates were whispering in low, excited voices while their teacher, Mister Leonhart, wrote on the blackboard. He kept pausing and glancing over his shoulder at the restless students. The scarred teacher's icy look would shut all the talkers up for a few minutes until he turned back around. Then the talk would resume.
All the gossip was the same: "Did you see the video?" "No way is that Black Box XIII junk real, you know. Must be CGI." "What kinda fucking psycho kills someone and posts it on the internet?" They were all talking about Black Box XIII and the video of Roxas's and Xion's murders. The police department, according to a text that Dante sent him a few minutes after he had reached school, had forced *Hidden, the only member of the site with any real power over it, to pull the video from the site and block any more communication from the one who had posted it.
Riku shook his head in disgust, rereading the text under his desk. Predictably, Dante had gone on to say that despite their removal of the video, hundreds more people had gone on to watch it. He knew exactly why, too: If someone, especially someone in authority, made something forbidden or censored it, more and more people would be tempted to watch it. Especially teenagers.
"I heard it was cause they pissed off some major government official. Knew something that they shouldn't have." One girl in his class says in a conspiratorial voice to her friends. Riku glances over at the girl and shakes his head. Selphie would be the one to think that it was because of the government. At the younger girl's words, nearly every pair of eyes in the classroom turned to the pair of empty desks at the very front of the room besides Mister Leonhart's desk. Riku's however, turns to the empty desk on his right side. He looks at Kairi, who was sitting on his left side, and she was gently patting the empty desk in front of hers. Haru was glaring at the same two desks, no doubt wondering what the hell both Sora and Naminé were up to. All three of them were worried.
"Alright, turn it down to a dull roar," Mister Leonhart says suddenly, turning around. He puts down the piece of chalk he had been writing with and looks sternly at his class. They all quiet down immediately, staring at him in anticipation. He coughs and then shakes his head. He motions towards the two empty desks in front of him. "As you can see, two of our classmates have left the class for good. Roxas and Xion have been..." He stops for a moment, attempting to figure out what exactly to say without getting in trouble from the school-board, no doubt.
Selphie raises her hand and without letting the teacher call on her, says: "They were murdered, weren't they, sir? I think nearly everyone in the class saw it." Everyone nods in agreement; Riku notes that more than a few people were shivering, no doubt remembering the horrific details of the gruesome video.
Mister Leonhart coughs and nods. "Right now, the Destiny Island Police Department is trying to figure out if the video is a hoax or not and whether or not Xion and Roxas have been... murdered. As of now, nothing's been given to us, meaning there may still be hope for them," He says calmly, shaking his head slowly. Although his words were meant to be encouraging, nearly everyone's eyes flicker towards Riku, Haru, and Kairi. Riku ignores the looks and simply adjusts his black jacket, pulling the hood up on his head, hiding himself from view. Mister Leonheart wasn't fooling anyone; they all knew they were dead.
"So on that happy note, let's go back to learning about the Keyblade Wars in the Keyblade Graveyard. Now, Tidus, what was the cause of the first war and how did the Wielders begin to fight?" Mister Leonhart asks, making the sleeping boy flinch and stare at him in confusion. As Tidus began to stumble over the answers, Riku glances around the room, bored out of his mind.
Kairi, like the good students she was, begins to scribble down detailed notes in a small notebook. Haru was fast asleep, not even bothering to pay attention to the lecture. Riku sighs, shaking his head, his mind preoccupied with other matters. He shivers, remembering the stench of the crime scene. He could almost feel the smoke trickling down his throat, suffocating him. He loosens his collar and unzips his jacket a few centimeters. Riku had to remember as many details as he could about the video; although Dante and the Commander were probably doing the exact same thing, he wanted his own version of reliable notes. He begins to scribble down the time of day, the methods used by the perpetrator, and the victims' names when something black suddenly flashed in the corner of his eye. It looked like... a person.
He blinks in surprise before looking up; he was right next to the window and they were on the fourth floor of the Oathkeeper Building, where all the History and Elective Classes were held. There was no way he could see someone in black up here. He looks out the window and his blood seems to turn to ice in his veins. He stands up, shaking violently.
The loud scraping noise that his chair made makes everyone in the room to look up at him, startled. Mister Leonhart closes his textbook. "Takamura, sit down." He says calmly though he looked very surprised. "Call an ambulance." Riku retorts, his gaze fixated on what he was watching. He begins to move slowly towards the emergency fire exit, his limbs feeling as if they were filled with lead. 'You can't move right but you have to move now!', his mind screamed at him. "What the hell are you talking about?" Mister Leonhart asks in confusion, beginning to walk towards the frozen teenager. At this point, Riku snapped, his mind finally overcoming his body's fear. "If you're smart, sir, you'll call a motherfucking ambulance!" He snarls angrily, already beginning to move.
In an instant, Riku was next to the emergency fire exit and he slams the window upwards, shattering it in hundreds of tiny pieces. The entire class jumps in surprise as he slips through the door. He had to hurry. Riku, with a speed that even he didn't know that he possessed, scampers down the rusted old fire escape, both running and rapidly climbing his way down. The instant that he was on the ground, he took off at a full-out run towards the Oblivion Gymnasium, which was normally abandoned at this early time of day.
Riku kept watching as the two small figures in black fought viciously on the roof of the much smaller building. One of them, a girl about his age, was shaking violently but she continued to fight. But the other kid, the one covered up completely in his black cloak, was easily overpowering the weakened teenager. He could only watch as the figure removes what looked like two six inch knives from a pouch on his hip. The bizarre knives almost seemed to... spark in the sunlight and he watches as the kid scrapes them together and what looked like a blue light arches between the points of the two knives.
Electricity. He was carrying electric knives.
The girl screams something – at Riku or at the figure, he couldn't tell – and the hidden teenager laughs mechanically. In a matter of seconds, he had the older girl cornered on the edge of the roof. Riku continues to run.
The teenager laughs again and gently curls his left hand in a slow deliberate wave. He stabs the metal knives into the girl's chest and she began to spasm uncontrollably. The girl screams as she loses her balance and tumbles over the edge of the building. The girl hits the edge of a roof-like structure just above the first floor and her screams suddenly die off. She bounces off of the canopy and slams into the ground, remaining still.
Riku runs faster; he knew that the human body could survive falling from about two stories (which was the height of the gym) but the same fall could rupture internal organs. He couldn't tell how she had landed but her fall had been stopped when she smacked into the canopy. Which meant there was a bigger chance that she had landed on her back, meaning that her spine could have shattered. He skids besides the girl and places his middle and index fingers on the side of her throat.
He feels a very faint throbbing beneath his fingers and he lets out a soft sigh of relief. The girl was still alive but was bleeding very badly from dozens of small cuts all over her face and torso. He pulls off her black jacket and had begun tearing it into makeshift bandages before he took a real good look at it. His body goes cold as he stares at the Organization XIII jacket in his hands. He looks at the girl's face and he drops the jacket.
Larxene Obinata coughs violently, her bloody hand clasping Riku's arm tightly. Her dark blue eyes remain staring upward, up at the sky. Her lips are coated in the same crimson fluid that covered her torso. Her eyes flutter sporadically and her breathing was shallow. Riku clenches her hand in his, immediately understanding. She was going into shock from the knives. If he was right... the knives that the kid was using were somehow conducting a current and from the blackened marks all over Larxene's visible skin, it was one hell of a strong one. She had been cut and electrocuted at the same time.
"Don't worry, we're going to get you to a hospital, Larxene. You're going to be okay," Riku hears himself saying. He barely knew this girl and yet he was comforting her. In fact, he only knew her from Castle Oblivion... Larxene looks at him in confusion and her eyes were moving quickly, as if she was trying to see who was talking. She squints and she coughs again, spraying a new layer of blood on her lips. "R... R... Riku... Is that... ?" She asks softly before coughing again. Her eyes close and she suddenly starts shaking violently. Her breathing becomes much louder, as if she was struggling to fill her lungs with air. Riku grabs her and pins her to the ground as she continues to have her seizure. "Larxene! Come on, don't close your eyes!" He yells but she couldn't hear him and she continued to spasm.
Riku hears a nearly inaudible sound behind him and then the scraping of metal against leather. Before he could even move, the cloaked figure wraps his chain around Riku's throat, dragging him away from the convulsing girl. Riku screams and scrambles violently at the metal links but the figure was stronger; he drags Riku to the wall of the building and pins him there, tying him up with the thick chain. He then turns back and stoops beside Larxene , placing the tip of the metal dagger just above the middle of her chest. He then squeezes the knife's handle and a spark of blue electricity arches straight into Larxene's heart.
Larxene lets out a wild howl of pain and begins to spasm even faster, her entire body convulsing violently. Riku could only watch as she suddenly stops moving, her chest smoking slightly. From the look of it, Larxene had gone through cardiac arrest, had an heart attack and died. He could feel the bile rising in his throat as the figure chuckles softly. He moves the dagger up to Larxene's throat and stabs it right through, sending a fresh wave of blood dribbling down the corpse's neck. He lets out a maniac laugh before turning back to Riku.
When the figure lifts his head up, he cocks his own head to the side, as if studying the boy. Riku trembles violently, seeing red. He had just seen a girl murdered in front of him. This was the person who had killed Xion and Roxas. This was the person who made Sora and Naminé so damn miserable and had sent them spiraling back into depression and misery. This was the fucker who destroyed his friends. And for the first time in his life, Riku understood why people killed each other.
The cloaked figure remains silent, looking at him from beneath a porcelain mask. Riku notes that it was shaped in the exact mold of the boy's face and that there was a pair of small nicks just beneath where his eyes should have been. Instead, a shield of colored plastic protected him from Riku's eyes and from him learning of his identity. He chuckles softly before reaching for his hip pouch again.
The figure slowly undoes the clasp of the pouch, unhooking it from his pant-leg. Riku begins to breathe more slowly, ready to roll out of the way the moment that he yanked a knife out of it.
What he did next surprised Riku.
The figure quietly drops the black pouch on the ground, spilling several clear and a single metal dagger to the ground. The clear knives let out a pleasant chiming noise as they scraped against each other. He glances towards Riku and grabs his bound hands, loosening the chain. The chain retracts back onto the boy's sleeve and Riku drops to the ground, getting a mouthful of grit. As he scrambles to get up, the figure presses one of the clear daggers into his hand and let out a soft low laugh that cut off suddenly.
Riku gets up as quickly as he could and sees Larxene's corpse was the only thing in sight. His sprint to try and save her and the short fight between him and the figure had only taken a few minutes. And in those few minutes, the kid had managed to disappear without a trace.
He glances down at the glass knife in his right hand. ... Then again, the kid had left one little clue behind.
Well, I feel like a psycho.
Either way, next chapter is the video of Larxene's death (more detail for you guys!) and the mystery shall continue...
Just for some fun: why do you guys think that the Mysterious Figure, as I have now dubbed him, spared Riku?
Why do you think he's going after the Organization?
I love conspiracies so if you liked this, why not leave a review for me?
See you next time!