-Shadow-
Chapter 2 - Retreat
"Hayner! Olette!" Roxas threw open the door so fast he almost tore it from its hinges. Pence had already moved past him, shining his flashlight around the foyer, searching for their missing friends. "Where are you guys?" he shouted.
Olette's frightened voice came somewhere off to the lower left. "Watch out! It's headed your way!"
"What is?" Roxas asked, but he had already seen the answer.
"It" was a pair of glowing yellow eyes connected to a solid black body, a body that stayed black even as Pence shone his flashlight on it. But it hissed, scrambling out of the light before Roxas could get a closer look at it. It ran across the floor on all fours until it disappeared down a hallway across the room. Then the thing was gone, and all was quiet again.
Roxas blinked, his mind still struggling to process what he'd just witnessed. It had been a Heartless! They were lucky they weren't dead already. They had to get out of here! Now! Grabbing Pence by the collar, he dragged him back into the white room to get their stuff and hightail it the hell out of there.
Almost ripping his backpack open to get his walkie-talkie, Roxas radioed the others. "Hayner! Olette! Where are you?"
For one moment, there was bone chilling silence, then-
"We're somewhere downstairs, I don't know where!"
Olette sounded close to tears, and Roxas couldn't blame her.
Roxas swallowed hard, quelling the urge to panic. "Just stay where you are! Pence and I are coming to get you!"
"Roxas, hurry! Hayner's hurt! We've got to get him out of here!"
"Just stay calm!" he said frantically, more to calm himself than Olette. "We're coming, just hang on!"
He bolted from the room and down the stairs, Pence right behind him. Keeping an eye on the passage where the thing disappeared, they made their way into the hallway it had come out of, him in the lead with Pence watching their rear. It was just as dark and spooky as the rest of the house, but Roxas had other things to worry about. He was sure he'd heard Olette's yell come somewhere around down here.
After several tense minutes of fruitless searching, he was just about to radio again when he saw a flash of light up ahead. It was them! Calling out, Roxas sprinted around the next corner to find this two friends kneeling off to the side. Olette's face was pure white and Hayner's left side was covered in blood. Roxas swore. This was seriously not good. "Can you stand?" he asked Hayner.
"Yeah," the blond said gruffly, and Roxas could tell he was fighting off shock. He turned to the three of them. "Pence, give your flashlight to Olette and help carry Hayner. Hayner, you pass out from blood loss before we're good and out of here and I'll punch you. Olette, you lead the way back to the front door. I'll take the rear."
The others obeyed him without question. Hayner may have been the leader most of the time, but when the shit really hit the fan, Roxas was in charge, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. Mercifully, their progress through the mansion was quick. Pence was helping Olette to navigate their way back to the foyer and Hayner wasn't as out of it as Roxas expected, though he was putting most of his weight on Pence.
Roxas didn't blink or breathe until they'd exited the house and shut the front door firmly behind them. When they were out of the courtyard, Pence turned to Roxas. "What now?"
He was sweating heavily, from both fear and the effort of supporting Hayner, who was a lot taller than he was. Roxas bit his lip.
"My house. It's closest."
-oOo-
Five past three in the morning found the four of them sitting in Roxas' kitchen with all the lights on.
Roxas fought back a wince as Olette applied peroxide to the slashes on Hayner's freshly cleaned arm. The first thing she'd done upon their arrival at his place was to demand first aid supplies. The second was that Hayner sit down, shut up, and let her see his wound.
Nobody argued, and nobody had spoken since.
Eventually though, Pence broke the silence. "So, what happened?" he asked, eyeing the still glistening lacerations on Hayner's arm, grimacing.
Hayner and Olette glanced at each other, their eyes debating who would speak. Olette bit her lip. "Well, I'm not really sure," she said at length. "I mean, we were just trying to find our way back to the front hall when we turned down this hallway and this huge black thing just attacked us. Hayner pushed me out of the way, but…."
It was clear she was still very much upset.
"We saw it, too," Roxas told her, motioning to Pence and himself.
"So the seventh wonder really was a Heartless…" Pence mused.
"You really think so?" Olette asked.
"What else is completely black with glowing yellow eyes?"
"True…."
Olette finished wrapping bandages around Hayner's wounds. The blond grimaced a little as the gauze pressed against still tender flesh. "'S got nasty claws, whatever it is," he muttered.
"I'm not so sure, guys. It might not be what we think it is."
The other three turned to Roxas, who had spoken.
"What, you mean, not a Heartless? It has to be!" Pence said loudly.
"Shh! Pence, not so loud!"
Roxas shook his head. "My parents are out of town for some wedding this week, don't worry about it. And anyway, it just doesn't add up."
And it didn't. Roxas had been thinking about it since they'd gotten back to his house, and there were just too many differences between what he knew of the Heartless and what he'd seen tonight. Great, blaring discrepancies that the logic side of him simply could not ignore, despite what he'd initially thought. Yeah, it had the glowing eyes and the dark body and yeah, it looked a helluva lot like a Heartless but it certainly didn't act like one. Heartless are ruled by their lust for stealing living hearts and procreating by doing so. They were like robots; they did what they were programmed to and nothing else. And once Heartless smelled prey, nothing deterred them and only their own destruction could stop them. Yet the thing in the mansion not only didn't attack them for over two hours, it fled after running into Hayner and Olette. Secondly, if a person was lucky enough to survive an encounter with one, any flesh wounds caused by the Heartless' claws or teeth were black, which Hayner's weren't. Thirdly, the thing was one of the "seven wonders" which meant not only had other people seen it, but also that it had been around for a while, but there hadn't been an outbreak.
Roxas also couldn't shake the feeling from somewhere deep down in his gut that the thing was not what it appeared to be.
When he'd finished sharing his thoughts, his friends looked at each other. On one hand, in their minds, the thing couldn't be anything but a Heartless. On the other hand, Roxas' hunches had the uncanny habit of being right on the mark 95 of the time, and the remaining 5 of the time, they weren't far off.
Hayner fought back a sigh of sheer exasperation. "So, basically what you're saying is that we have no idea what it is."
"Pretty much, yeah."
"Peachy."
"So, what are we going to do about it?"
"What can we do about it?"
"Well, we have to do something. That thing's way dangerous!"
"Couldn't we just leave it alone? If Roxas is right and it has been there for a while, it hasn't bothered anybody, so why not just let it be?"
"Leave it alone!? Olette, that thing almost clawed my arm off!"
"We did trespass on its' 'territory'."
"Oh, so now this is all my fault?"
"Yes, it is! You knew we weren't supposed to be there."
"Hey, you came too!"
"To keep an eye on you guys! You can be such boneheads when you get all competitive like that and I for one didn't want to see you get hurt! And you were the one who dared Roxas to spend the night in there in the first place, so yeah, it is your fault!"
Roxas glanced at the clock. It was three thirty and waaay to early/late to put up with others' arguing (well, Hayner and Olette, really. Pence had wisely withdrawn from the conversation). He put two fingers in his mouth and whistled. Loudly.
"Ow!" Olette clapped her hands over her ears.
"Don't do that!"
"Then don't deserve it. Listen, we're all really tired and cranky so everybody just shut up and get to bed. We still have that paper to write today-"
"Today?"
Roxas pointed at the clock. "Today. And we'd better get it done 'cause there's no way in hell I'm doing homework on the last day of summer and the festival, so get. Now."
He must have looked a lot more menacing than he meant to because the others got up and went their separate ways without another word. Olette retreated to Roxas' sister's room (she was away at college, so it was empty for now), Roxas took his parents' bed for the night because Hayner had taken his and he didn't feel like sleeping on the couch downstairs. Pence had camped out down there anyway after snagging an extra pillow from somewhere. And then there was quiet.
Exhausted as he was, it wasn't long before Roxas succumbed to his body's demands for sleep. Just as he gave in completely, one last image floated across his mind's eye – the face of the dark haired boy from the pictures in the mansion, his smile wide and bright, without a care in the world.
