Kairi Hearts
By Chronic Guardian
Written for Twelve Shots of Summer: DECK
Week 9: Devil & Tower
09 – Corruption
Arawn, Death-Lord, watched the prisoner silently from outside her cell. A girl, no more than nine, clutching a teddy bear to her chest. With Madame Medusa gone, she stood as his best link to the Relic hiding in the Bayou. Facilier had tried to hunt the artifact with his Heartless, but the Foretellers had engineered their inheritance to avoid falling into such hands. The Relics were forged out of neither Light nor Dark, untraceable to agents of pure instinct like the Heartless.
Inside the cell, the girl shifted and tried to turn away from him. Arawn held her in his gaze without stirring and she paused mid-motion. Don't look away, he whispered into her subconscious, don't trust what it'll do if you take your eyes off it.
And she listened. She kept watching with wide, watery eyes waiting for something to happen.
She had shouted and yelled when they first brought her—nothing helpful, of course, just empty threats about someone coming to rescue her and the rest of them being sorry when whoever it was came. She had tasted hope moments before Mim whisked her away to their fortress; she had heard the battle that should have saved her.
Arawn had not tasted true hope in a long time, and he feasted on it now. Eventually, he would get her to tell him all about the Relic in the Bayou, but that could wait. Before she told him awake, she would still wander there in her sleep when she thought she was alone. Maybe he would still have her tell him just for the satisfaction, but for practical purposes, he would first rely on her dreams.
He had first learned to balance between the Sleeping and Waking Realm as a way to track lost Keyblade wielders. During the age of Fairytales, he had watched Hearts fade into Darkness, watched as it embraced their weakness until it consumed them whole. But in between, before that, it first started gnawing in sleep.
Slowly, he turned away and let the girl go. She gasped quietly. Not much, but it was all in small slips.
He could wait. He had waited an eternity already, watching from the shadows of history and myth for the perfect moment to awaken old things now dead to the world. Besides, the girl wasn't the only thing to hold his attention.
Lately, there was the matter of Fidget.
In general, Arawn had little regard for little things, but that didn't mean he couldn't use them. When time came for his full ascension, he would remember the hench-bat for his faults, if at all. But history also had an annoying habit of hinging on the little things, on the children entrusted with improbable secrets or the creatures skulking under the grand machinery. Such things could undo the legacies of Keyblade Masters. Thus, while Arawn did not like the creature much, he felt it entirely worthy to assign Doctor Facilier to the bat's safe return.
The doors at the far end of the hall, the one leading to the outer docks, clicked and hissed open, allowing Facilier's spindly limbs to slip through, announcing the man's return. He straightened up and smoothed his jacket before approaching Arawn. The witch doctor was a slimy wretch, but he lived for the lie that it wouldn't matter. He could be bargained with to behave, or at least behave enough.
"Well, horned-man, you've got yourself a real piece of work with that one," the Doctor sighed. "Got his head a little scrambled, but coulda been a whole lot worse, all things considered."
"Surprising," Arawn murmured. "I would think him used to the dark by now. We'll have to make the way less trying in the future. The creature holds little enough sense as it is."
"I'm not talkin' about my little courier mission," Facilier protested. "Our friend has been to the other side and back. He's come out of the Sleeping Realm."
"Yes, I am aware his world only recently reawoken. Many worlds did in the wake of—"
Facilier, in a rare show of disrespect to the Death Lord, didn't let him finish. "It didn't awaken, Arawn. That's just it: Little Fidgy is neither refugee nor returnee, he's a fugitive. Little flutter gut's Master man got his goon out of the Sleeping Realm without their world awakening. Now the bat's just hangin' around on a beacon like this one, waitin' for his master's signal from the other side."
"You mean Padrick Rattigan is not in the Realm of Waking."
"Not in it," Facilier tipped his hat, "and not restricted by it, neither."
Arawn lapsed into silence, absorbing the facts Fidget had neglected to mention during their meeting. The bat had given the impression his world was already awakened when he suggested they search it for Relics. It wouldn't be impossible to do so now, but it would be substantially more difficult.
But these inconveniences faded to a greater revelation. The bat was well worn in his service, but also living proof of his master's genius. Weak hearts like his were usually subsumed into the Heartless when their worlds fell. Fidget's master had somehow subverted those rules, preserved Fidget's heart, and sent his servant safely into the Realm of Waking after their world's demise. In a worst case scenario, it meant the rat had access to the lost technology of the Keyblade Masters.
However, Arawn suspected it was something better than that. Fidget was loyal to his master, but he was a jibbering mothbrain in most other respects. To that point, Arawn suspected Fidget had been sent out of necessity. The strange vessel that had borne him wouldn't have been able to accommodate his master, so Fidget was sent in his stead.
True, it meant the technology was inferior to what the Keyblade Masters had used. But it also meant somewhere in the sleeping worlds was a genius bright enough to approach the esoterica of the previous age, a genius who even now could communicate with his minion from beyond the sleeping grave.
"So… guess, we're goin' back to the bayou," Facilier sighed. "Any luck with that Penny girl? Or you want me to take a whack at 'er?"
"As an ancillary concern, certainly," Arawn answered with a modest nod. "But Fidget offers us something even better. I will visit the Sleeping Realms and see this master of his."
Facilier snorted, "Well, won't that be somethin'? Have you been holdin' out on me, Arawn? Or did you forget the whole point of huntin' Relics is finding a way to make up for that Power of Waking you don't have?"
"I don't," Arawn agreed. "But a master of darkness does not require hands of his own to yet grasp a sword."
Leaving Facilier, he returned to his chambers and settled into his throne. He could dip in and out of the Sleeping Realm at will, but the Doctor was right: he could not yet bring anything with him.
Thankfully, that was exactly what his next target had been practicing.
-A-
Naminé entered the Sleeping Realm with light shiver, as if stepping into a pool of water slightly too cold. Ellone was watching over her body in the Realm of Waking and had agreed to pull her out in fifteen minutes. Naminé felt it was an overly cautious stopping point given her previous pursuits, but she also needed Ellone to be comfortable with the maneuver to really pull off her ultimate goal.
If she could safely move through the Sleeping Realm, she could reconnect with Kairi and, with a generous helping of luck, Sora.
However, the first steps were only about finding and waking those Ellone had accidentally left stranded here. And while that theoretically only meant awakening specific individuals, it could very well mean having to wake the whole world to get them out with it. Either way, she needed to feel out her capacity for the Power of Waking, and that meant dipping into the Sleeping Realm.
Stumbling towards that goal, Naminé focused on the amorphous colors around her and forced them to take form. The darkness pulled back around marble stars glowing softly in space and she realized she was floating. Slowly, she reached out and cupped the nearest star in her hands.
Suddenly, she was falling. Downward, then inward, then outward. Out of herself, out into the sky of the marble. Her head spun with the motion until she managed to orient herself and pull towards the ground, asserting gravity and space through affirmed intuition.
She touched down inside a dark chamber that echoed with the methodical clicking of gears. Perhaps it was a clock tower, but it was much larger than any she had seen or heard of. Granted, she hadn't actually been inside the Twilight Town station tower, but the dimly lit walls and enormous cogs seemed they could fill the entire tram common and more. The dim, frosted circles of iron braced clock faces cast gray light from outside. Carefully moving along the giant clock gear she'd found herself on, she moved towards the portal.
"Have you come to awaken this world?"
Naminé twitched and spun around trying to locate the voice, dry and throaty like grinding stones. From the shadows, a pair of burning coal red eyes watched without blinking. She could tell the owner was taller than her, but not much else. Slowly, she took a step backwards.
"Perhaps you can't..." the voice rumbled in mild disappointment. "You're a thing of Nothing, too, aren't you? You can come and go but… the world only flows through you. You're only a ghost, like me."
"If you're trying to goad me into something, you should know it won't work," Naminé said evenly. "We Nothings don't have Hearts to corrupt." Not entirely true, but it was the prevailing scientific sentiment on Nobodies. If nothing else, though, they were more likely to listen to their heads than their emotions.
"Oh, no, certainly not," the voice went on, and she realized that the eyes were not diminishing in distance. The owner was following her. "But we still have curiosities. The Mind wants to know whether or not it has a Heart to master it. There are things that could happen, and that is enough for us to chase them. How fascinating it would be if you could awaken this world, even if you are a Nobody."
"I don't want to awaken this world," Naminé lied. At the back of her mind, she realized she was running out of clockwork to back away on. "I'm not here to—"
"You came to see if you could," the voice said without changing tone. "I felt it in you, you who dare to stand above the laws of the worlds… So why don't you? You don't have a Heart to feel fear; surely one as great as you can deal with any unwanted Darkness after you awaken it."
Could she? The suggestion tickled under her rising anxiety and shallow breaths. If she knew anything about Kairi—and herself by extension—it was her unplumbed depths of potential. Sora, who scraped and crawled his way up for nothing, had saved the worlds three times with at least one honorable mention besides for Castle Oblivion. What could she do as the Nobody of a Princess of Heart? If Kairi could restore a Heartless Sora to light by her untrained power alone, was it really so crazy to think they would eventually do the same for a world?
"I'm here for someone," she said out loud, as much for herself as for the shadowy lurker. Her eyes traced his outline as she began concocting a plan. She flexed her fingers and her sketchpad appeared along with a pencil. "It'll be nice if we can awaken the world, but I know better than to play god."
Before the shadow could retort, she brought her paper in front of her and laid down a series of strokes. The world around them shuddered in response, then whined to a croaking crack as the gear they were standing on split in two. Naminé's half tipped to launch her over her undefined adversary and back the way she came. Before she landed, she drew the basis for another sketch before finishing up as the perspective settled and summoning some barriers between them.
She stood there for a moment, staring into the opaque barrier that now stood between her and whatever it was that had been talking to her. Her breaths were still shallow, but it was a matter of exhilaration more than fear. She hadn't been sure if she really could manipulate the Sleeping Realm like that with her powers, but now that she knew she could…
No, she told herself firmly in her mind. You only came to scout things out, not get into even more trouble. Secure your exit, get out, worry about doing more later.
Begrudgingly giving in to the thought, she bowed her head back to her sketchpad and drew a portal back to the Realm of Waking.
Still, it made her wonder if she was really that limited after all…
-N-
Arawn watched the girl leave the Sleeping Realm of Fidget's world before slowly gathering himself and returning to his business. He still had to find Padrick Rattigan, wherever he was, and learn what secrets the villain had about crossing the realms entirely, but this had been a worthy investment of his time. Even if Rattigan didn't know how to bring Sleeping Worlds back, perhaps the Princess of Heart's Nobody would be doing it for him soon enough.
Part of him wondered if that was letting things get out of hand, but he ignored it easily enough as he descended down into the foggy streets of an industrialized city. By the soft glow of street lamps towering above, he assured himself that girl was primarily gifted in creation.
When the time came for matters of death, the scales would tip much differently.
Chapter Closed
Naminé Obtained the Power of Dreams! Learned Spells "Barrier" and "Flowmotion+"
A/N: Thought this would be over in August… Well, we'll try to finish up this first run over SOSS, how about that?
This shot was another glimpse at Arawn and his slow planning to push pieces into place. In the Disney version of Black Cauldron (Which, while incredibly flawed in just about every way, still has to give some basis for how I approach the character here), the Horned King was a deliberate and assured villain who would use anyone and anything that came into his grasp, including our leading heroes. As a villain bent on dominion over the dead, it made sense to me to give him a background with the Sleeping Realm. He isn't afraid to puff up egos to get what he wants or play in convenient half-truths, but he's also more direct than, say, Maleficent. Both are probably lawful evil on an alignment chart, but Maleficent basks in the hatred of others while Arawn is largely indifferent to it.
This shot also dips into questions about Nobodies that are probably best left untouched, namely how much their Hearts count. While I personally believe it was a mistake to introduce "Nobodies grow a replacement Heart!" when "Nobodies are only imitating emotions" was more compelling and perfectly functional, I am compromise with the rules of canon here and allow for Naminé to have some emotional response, but primarily stay on the intellectually driven track.
Anyway, I hope to have the next one out in two weeks. See you then?
-CG 1/7/2024