Song list: The Buggles: "Video Killed the Radio Star"
Sarah chuckled softly; now there was an interesting conundrum. Tell the truth, and not only really confuse the other girl, but also risk prompting some kind of an existential crisis depending on how mentally resilient Kairi was. Or, deflect her interest onto some other topic, and spare the both of them having to open that particular can of worms. And, as always when I hit these little speedbumps, I choose… the hidden third option. In this case, a rather interesting mix of the previous two.
"If you're going to start asking me things like that, you might want to start thinking about how I even knew your name in the first place." Kairi's lips parted, and Sarah paused for a moment to see if the other girl would say anything. When she didn't, Sarah pressed on. "Or, how I'm coping so well with all of this in the first place," she said, swinging around so that she and Kairi could still face each other as they continued walking.
"What do you mean by that, Sarah?"
"You know I'm a girl, right?" she asked, raising one of "her" eyebrows as the two of them continued on their way.
"Yeah," Kairi nodded, and then she smiled. "I saw you while you were singing; you're pretty, Sarah."
"Thanks," she said. Complements, even those about things that weren't – strictly speaking – important, were gifts that people chose to give to you. And a polite person always acknowledged a gift when it was given. "Still, that's not what I was getting at."
"What were you getting at, then?"
"You know how people have memories of where they've been and what they've done?" It was almost a rhetorical question on her part, considering what a fair few of these characters dealt with in the next game, but it always helped to make sure the person you were talking to actually knew what you were talking about.
"Yeah, but what does that have to do with anything?"
Looking back over "her" left shoulder, just to make absolutely sure that she wasn't about to walk into anything, Sarah turned her attention back to the other girl. "What some people don't know, is that there's a deeper level of memories than just your conscious ones."
"What do you mean by that, Sarah?" Kairi asked, pulling out her notebook and pen as they continued to walk.
Sarah smiled softly; now was the perfect time and place for another object lesson, and the other girl had inadvertently given her the means to impart it to her. "Well, look at what we're doing right now."
"Sarah, we're just walking," Kairi said, looking confused.
"Is that something you have to think about? Do you have to think about each step, before you take it?"
"Well, no," Kairi said, looking down at her feet and then back up, the expression on her face gradually becoming less confused and more interested.
"That's what the people who study those kinds of things call procedural memory. It's also been called muscle-memory, but that's not technically correct."
"Our muscles can remember things?" the other girl asked, looking intrigued about what was obviously a new idea to her.
She laughed. "No, that's just what some people call them. It just refers to how, if you do something often enough – like walking, talking, eating, or for some people, fighting – it becomes ingrained at a far more fundamental level in your memory, and you won't have to consciously think about it anymore."
"Wow," Kairi said, her pen practically flowing across the pages of her notebook as she continued to write. Looking down at her right hand, Kairi laughed. "I guess I've been using it all this time without knowing I had."
"Well, writing's also something you can learn to do well enough that you only have to think about what you're writing, instead of how," she said, as she felt something gently bumping into "her" left shoulder, Sarah turned to see that it was, in fact, the ladder that lead up to what might have been called – if one were charitable – the second level of the island.
"Wow," Kairi repeated, both of her eyebrows raised in clear interest. "I never knew about that." She grinned. "The people of your world sure study a lot of things."
She chuckled softly. "We have a lot of scientists."
Turning around, Sarah made her way up the ladder and across the plank-bridge that lead to the hollowed-out space that had been used to hold the cloth for the first game's initial fetch-quest. She hadn't paid much attention to it, either in-game or out, but now that she was getting a much more in-depth second look, Sarah found that the place was a hell of a lot more comfortable than the game had lead her to believe. There was even a table, though a fairly low one, placed carefully out of the way of the entrance.
Looking back as Kairi came in, Sarah watched as the other girl went over to the table and picked up the lantern set almost perfectly in the center of it. Sarah had a couple of seconds to wonder just what kind of lantern it was, before Kairi turned the thing on and filled the small space with a warm, buttery incandescence. Watching as Kairi hung the thing from a hook that also probably hadn't existed in the PS2-rendered version of this world; if the ceiling of this room had even been rendered at all.
Which wasn't something she'd ever thought to check; then again, it wasn't like she'd ever been given a reason to, either.
"Sarah?" Kairi called softly, bringing her attention back from where it had so clearly wandered. "Is there really something interesting about the ceiling?" the other girl sounded like she was trying to be serious, but couldn't quite make it past the inherent silliness of the question.
"No," she smiled back. "I was just thinking."
"About being back on your world," the other girl said, with a certainty that Sarah hadn't often heard from her in-game. "Don't worry, Sarah," Kairi said, reaching over the table to clasp Sora's hands. "We'll both do everything we can to help you get back to your world." The solemn expression on the other girl's face changed to one of excitement after she'd finished saying that. "And the, maybe you could show us around your world, after we meet up with Sora!"
She would have asked just why and how Kairi had expected Sora to have made it to Earth in the first place, but it was clear that the other girl had made up her mind already. Not like it really mattered, anyway; considering what was coming. Blinking as she realized that Kairi had leaned around the table and was hugging "her", Sarah raised an eyebrow as the other girl pulled back slightly.
"You don't have to worry so much all the time, Sarah," Kairi said, smiling warmly. "Riku and I are going to do everything we can to help you get back home."
Why does that not fill me with confidence? She mused, biting back a small, cynical smirk.
Kairi looked so earnest, clearly completely believing what she was saying; and just as clearly thinking the best of Riku, but that was only natural considering that she was his friend. Idly, Sarah wondered what she thought of him during KH2, but then he did have a ready-made excuse for how he'd acted during this whole debacle: just blame the Darkness. Simple, easy, and no one had to confront any uncomfortable truths about themselves.
Riku seemed like the type to do that as things stood, but who knew; maybe he'd actually matured in the time between now and KH2.
She wouldn't know; she hadn't even gotten through his story in Re: Chain of Memories.
"Sarah?"
"Hmm?" she turned her full attention back to Kairi, tilting "her" head slightly to show that she was listening.
"This might sound like kind of a strange thing for me to ask," Kairi said, looking like she at least thought it was strange. "But, do you think you could sing for me again?"
And she think's that's a strange request, Sarah mused, swallowing chuckles; Kairi probably wouldn't understand what she found so amusing, and she didn't want the other girl to think she was laughing at her. "Any particular reason?"
"I'd just like to see you again, that's all," the other girl said, smiling.
She raised an eyebrow; now that did sound fairly odd. "Beg pardon?"
"When you and I were singing together, Sarah," the other girl said, looking cheerfully excited at the prospect; whether or not she had actually seen something remained to be determined, but it was clear that Kairi believed it, all the same. "I could see what you really looked like; I could see you," she laughed softly. "But you still sounded like Sora."
Turning that over in her mind, Sarah decided that there was only one thing that she, in particular, could say in the face of a revelation like that. "You know, on my world we have a saying: extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof," she said, folding "her" arms and settling back in her seat. "You've just made a pretty extraordinary claim, but the real question is, can you back it up?"
"How do you think I should do that, Sarah?" the other girl asked, after she'd finished jotting down a few more notes in the book she had brought with her.
"Well, for something like that, it's fairly simple; when you think about it," she said, smiling as she settled "herself" more comfortably on the cushion. "Just, tell me what I look like."
Kairi laughed, though she sounded a bit sheepish. "I guess that is pretty simple," the other girl said, smiling as she opened up her notebook again; Sarah waited until the other girl had finished making notes, before she raised an eyebrow in subtle prompting. "Well, you have long hair, and it's a lot longer," Kairi paused for a few, long moments, clearly thinking back on what she'd been saying. "Well, maybe a bit longer than Sora's," she said at last, her head still a bit tilted in thought. Then she chuckled softly. "Yours is nowhere near as spiky, though."
"Yes," she said, reaching up to run "her" left hand through said spiky mass. "I rather think this would be hard to top, for sheer volume if nothing else." Resting "her" chin on the hand that she'd run through Sora's hair and tilting "her" head slightly. "So, do you know how it stays up like this? Because, given everything I know from taking care of my own hair, this kind of thing just doesn't work."
Well, okay it could be made to work – she knew that much after styling all those cosplay wigs – but she hadn't seen any evidence of the kind of hair-styling products that she'd needed to use on those wigs. Besides, if that had been how Sora had been maintaining his hair, it wouldn't have held through her morning shower in the first place. It was hardly the strangest thing that she was being forced to deal with, but the fact that – for all intents and purposes – she was Sora and she still couldn't figure this kind of thing out was irritating. Like an itch that she couldn't quite manage to scratch.
Kairi giggled, closing her eyes briefly with the force of her mirth. "You're so strange, Sarah."
"What?" she asked, smirking at Kairi when the other girl had opened her eyes again. "It's a perfectly legitimate question. Still, if even you don't know, then I guess I'm just plain out of luck."
Kairi had doubled over by the time Sarah had finished speaking, her nigh-hysterical and wildly amused laughter filling the small room where the two of them were sitting.
"I thought I heard you two up here somewhere," Riku's voice dew Sarah's attention back to the entrance of the treehouse-in-all-but-name that she and Kairi had made their way up to. "What's so funny?"
"It was," Kairi trailed off, clearly struggling to regain her composure. "It was just something Sora said; you really had to be here."
"I missed out on a good joke?" the silver-haired boy asked, looking from her to Kairi and then back again as he came to sit down at the table with them.
Sarah, meanwhile, couldn't help but notice just how close Kairi had come to pronouncing her name instead of Sora's. Completely inadvertently, she was sure, but nonetheless it was probably time for another object lesson. "Yeah, I just got done telling Kairi about how I'm really the disembodied consciousness of a girl from another world, who latched onto Sora and is currently possessing him until I can manage to find a way back home."
It only took about half a minute for Riku to crack up laughing, and while he was doubled over the table from laughter, Sarah took the opportunity to make a "there, see?" gesture at Kairi while his attention was elsewhere.
"Oh man, that was a good one, Sora," Riku said, breathing deeply even as Kairi chewed her lower lip in thought. "Maybe you should write that down for when we get to another world," he said, grinning at the two of them in turn. "Then we could publish it and all be rich and famous."
"You mean, you really haven't noticed?" Kairi asked, looking genuinely curious and a bit concerned besides.
"Noticed what, Kairi?" Riku asked, his attention now squarely focused on the other girl.
"You haven't noticed that Sora's been acting different than he usually does?"
Riku laughed again, but this one was more like an incredulous grunt than anything else. "Kairi, Sora's always been weird."
Oblivious, or dumb as a post? You be the judge, she mused, amused by the proceedings.
Kairi looked like she was about to say something, if only she could figure out what that was. Then the expression on her face smoothed out and became one of determination.
"Well, I guess there's really only one way to prove this," the other girl said, giving Riku a long, subtly reproving look. "Sora?" she said, again sounding like she might have been trying to subtly pronounce a different name altogether. "Do you think you could sing for us again?"
She raised one of Sora's eyebrows at the other girl for that, but in the end it was Riku who had the more dramatic reaction.
"What in the heck is that supposed to prove, Kairi?" Riku asked, looking from "her" to the other girl and then back again. "Sora's always liked to sing. He's probably just doing it a bit more now because we're going to be leaving tomorrow morning, and he's excited about that."
Kairi's expression quickly became one of annoyance, while Sarah herself chuckled inwardly; that was human nature for you. It was likely why Occam 's razor had become so widely used: the times that it didn't apply were few and far-between enough that they could safely be counted as flukes.
"C'mon, you two. I like a good story as much as the next guy, but I think you're both taking this a bit too far."
Kairi looked like she still didn't quite know how to react to Riku's complete dismissal of the facts of their current situation. But, when "the facts of their current situation" sounded so completely insane, sometimes the only possible response was to laugh at them. At least until one was presented with irrefutable proof, which the two of them were kind of short on at the moment.
"So, you guys want me to help you with this story of yours?" Riku asked, tilting his head slightly as he grinned.
"I'm going to go stretch my legs a bit," Sarah said, rising from her seat before she herself could give into the urge to laugh. "I've been sitting a bit too long for my taste."
"What, you mean you're just going to leave me alone here with Kairi?" Riku asked, his tone gently teasing, but with an undertone of smugness that she was sure Sora would have been annoyed by.
But, like she'd already established: she wasn't Sora.
"You just don't have too much fun without me, okay?" She'd been more than a little tempted to say "you kids", if only to see how Riku would have reacted to that, but in the end she'd decided to leave things be.
He would learn well enough during Zero Hour, just how different from Sora she really was.
Making her way back out of the treehouse – doorless as it was in the end – and back down to ground-level again, Sarah stretched just as she'd been planning to do when she'd left in the first place. Sure, having a place to sit down was nice, but it got fairly boring after long enough spent on one's ass.
Making her way out from under the shadows of the walkways that lead to the various upper-storey structures on this particular island, Sarah found her attention drawn to a particular patch within the otherwise innocuous masses of foliage. A certain conspicuously bare patch. Considering that she had already packed food for her trip – something that Kairi and Riku both thought they would be sharing in – she wouldn't have any real reason to visit that particular cave under normal circumstances.
Still, that wasn't to say that she couldn't do just that, simply to satisfy her own curiosity in this case.
Her mind made up, Sarah made her way over to the empty patch. For a few moments, as even Sora's comparatively smaller bulk blocked out the light spilling into the relatively small cavern, she wondered if he was even there at all. But still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Shimmying down the hole and into the tunnel, she made her way down and into the cavern. She paused for a long moment, standing perfectly still and fixing her gaze on the darkest part of the cavern she could pick out, Sarah waited for a few moments more for "her" eyes to adjust to the relative darkness within the cavern. Once she had regained her night-vision after a day spent in the bright sunlight, she began to explore the small cavern that she now found herself in.
The place was about as dark as she'd been expecting, considering what she'd seen in-game, making the rock-art carved into the walls all the more difficult to see. Which went a long way toward explaining the quality of said carvings. Even if they had brought in extra sources of light, which she honestly suspected they had, there was only so much one could do with rock carving if one didn't have the proper tools. And it was clear from the cutscenes she'd seen, both in the game and in the Hellfire Commentaries playthrough that she watched when she was in the mood for a laugh, that none of them did.
It wasn't much of a surprise; one did not buy rock carving tools for someone their age unless they had demonstrated particularly intense dedication to the art.
The rich, earthy smell of the cavern that she now stood in was the first non-visual sense that registered; Sarah was just grateful that it didn't actually smell like shit, since mushrooms grew in this cavern, and anyone who'd heard that old saying knew what mushrooms grew out of.
Speaking of mushrooms, she mused, carefully making her way over to where a small patch of them were growing. She'd long since learned what kind of wild mushrooms were safe to eat, and a general rule of thumb was that dull-colored mushrooms and those that grew underground were both the best to look for. These mushrooms, having both of those qualities, were thus the most likely to be perfectly safe. Combined with the fact that game!Kairi had been perfectly comfortable with eating them, Sarah was rather curious to know what they tasted like, herself.
Of course, she also remembered that, in-game, the other girl had been perfectly amenable to the idea of eating fish and eggs completely raw, so there was a chance that these mushrooms wouldn't be particularly appetizing in their current state.
Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained.
Breaking one of the smaller mushrooms free from its stalk as close to the ground as she cared to, Sarah took the time to brush it clean of the remaining bits of soil that stubbornly clung to it. In this case, she didn't need whatever nourishment she could manage as fast as she could gather it, so she could afford to take her time. Biting into the freshly-cleaned mushroom, Sarah chewed thoughtfully.
It tasted a lot like a button mushroom, but with a smoother and slightly more buttery aftertaste; she could see why Kairi would have been so willing to eat these.
The raw fish and the seagull egg were still something of a mystery, though she had to admit that that particular mystery was one she was perfectly happy to leave unsolved.
"You do not belong here," a very deep, powerful, and above all familiar voice echoed from the back of the small cavern where she'd stood alone among the mushrooms.
"Well," she said, smirking as she turned to face the tall, hooded figure at the back of the cavern. "That makes two of us." She took another bite of the mushroom she was holding, carefully, deliberately casual. "Let me guess; you've come to see the door to this world."
The last part was said in a rather better imitation of "Ansem's" voice than she had ever been able to manage before; she supposed that her current possession of male vocal chords might have had something to do with that.
"How did you know that?"
She lowered "her" eyelids to a deliberate, mocking half-mast. "I'm psychic." Smirking at the confusion in "Ansem's" stance – there wasn't much point in trying to read the expressions on a guy's face when he didn't actually have one, but body-language was always a factor when you knew how to read it – Sarah decided to see just how this game of theirs would play out when he knew that she was holding more of the cards than he'd been counting on.
"Let me guess," she pressed two fingers to "her" right temple, making it very easy for one to assume that she was calling upon heretofore-unknown powers of clairvoyance. "You would be… Ansem, seeker of Darkness, right?"
"Psychic indeed," he said, tilting what passed for his head as he peered more closely at her. "The door to this world must have called to you, as well," the vaguely-humanoid form of "Ansem" moved closer, raising one of its handless sleeve/arms as if he – it was clear that "Ansem" thought of himself as male even in spite of his current lack of a body, and under the circumstances she wasn't going to be so rude as to ignore a person's preferred pronouns – was about to clap her on the right shoulder or touch the side of her face or something.
When she shifted slightly, just enough so that he would have to move if he wanted to do either of those things, "Ansem" drew back and raised himself to his full height with a subtle dip of what passed for his head. "Come, if the Darkness has indeed lead you this far, then with all your power you must know what's coming." He offered her the empty sleeve that passed for his right hand. "Step into Darkness with me; cast off the shackles of this world, and embrace a greater destiny."
Gently pushing his empty right sleeve away with the back of "her" right hand, Sarah locked her gaze firmly on the empty hood that passed for "Ansem's" head. "Thanks, but I'm afraid I'm going to have to decline your generous offer."
"What possible reason could you have?" "Ansem" asked, drawing himself back up to his full height.
"Call it misplaced sentiment, but I find that I'm rather fond of this world," she said, leaning back with "her" right foot against the wall of the cavern for when she would need to kick off quickly.
"For what reason?"
She gave a small, cheerfully mocking smile. "It's where I keep all of my stuff." "Ansem" tilted what passed for his head again, clearly not sure of how to respond to such a blunt statement. She laughed briefly. "Oh, I wish I could have seen your face when I said that." She blew out the last of the breath she'd drawn in, becoming serious again as befitted the situation. "Still, there are other considerations I find more important for the time being."
"Such as?"
"This world is collapsing; I can almost feel it, and I'm nearly certain that the tipping-point is going to come some time tomorrow. What I want from you is to know if there's any way to prevent what I can see coming."
"Your powers haven't shown you that?" he asked, sounding pleased and intrigued both at once.
"There are too many variables; all of my actions open up entirely new paths that the future might take. All I'd like from you is a little certainty."
"Ansem" chuckled deeply in whatever passed for his throat. "That is something I think a great many of us would prefer to have more of than we do," he tilted his empty hood once more, and Sarah got the impression of deep scrutiny. "I could easily offer it to you."
She smiled thinly. "Sorry; I'm not buying what you're selling, Ansem."
"Then I suppose we have nothing further to discus, strange girl," he said, his tone carrying the hint of a rather pleased smile. "I will enjoy seeing you again, once this world has fallen into Darkness."
With that last – cryptic as all fuck – statement, the faceless disembodied form of "Ansem", or whatever the fuck that convoluted name that she couldn't quite recall at the moment was, stepped backwards and vanished into the aether from wherever the fuck he'd come from in the first place.
I guess that makes two, now, she mused, finishing the mushroom that she'd picked before her little confab with "Ansem". It was kind of strange to think about, that there were now two people here who'd spotted her "under the skin" so to speak. Of course, "Ansem's" whole being disembodied deal might have given him something of an unfair advantage as far as seeing beyond the surface of things, but that wouldn't do a thing to explain Kairi. There was also the fact that Kairi had seemed to require special circumstances to see her as she was, whereas "Ansem" had seemed to spot her right away.
There were too many things to consider, and no way to even know where to start narrowing them down.
It was annoying, but then finding out just what was going on with those two wasn't really a pertinent point right now; all she had to do was survive what was coming. Pushing off of the wall she'd been leaning against, Sarah got back to "her" feet and made her way back out of the cavern she'd been standing in.
When she made it back out, standing for a few, long moments under the gathering dusk, Sarah turned to see Kairi making her way over. The expression on the other girl's face was one of concerned curiosity, and for a moment Sarah wondered what her first question would be. She wasn't given long for such musings, however.
"Sarah, is what's going on here really that unbelievable?"
"Honest question? Yes; it really is."
"Why?"
She shrugged. "Well, think about it: if you hadn't discovered my situation for yourself, would you have believed someone if they told you about it?"
Kairi looked away, a sheepish expression on her face. "I'd like to say the answer to that was yes, but…"
"You don't really know that, do you?" she asked, picking up where Kairi had trailed off.
"No, I guess I don't," the other girl said, turning back with a sort of self-depreciating smile on her face. "Sorry for putting you on the spot like that, Sarah."
"It's all right," she said, shrugging easily to let the other girl know that there were no hard feelings. "You seemed pretty excited about the whole thing."
Kairi laughed softly. "I guess, being from another world, all of this must seem pretty normal to you."
She laughed outright. "Actually, you'd be surprised just how rare this kind of thing is. In fact," she said, debating for a moment about whether or not to try explaining the concept of television shows before deciding what the hell. "There's only one guy I know of who does things like this, and I've never personally met him. His name's Sam Beckett."
Or, if you want to be pedantic about things, Scott Bakula, she mused, wondering again just what kind of popular culture these people had. She was hardly a cultural anthropologist, though, and on top of that she was only going to have one more morning on this planet before everything went to hell in a handbasket. Hardly enough time to get her things in order, much less start any kind of study.
"What are you thinking about, Sarah?" Kairi asked, firmly derailing her train of thought.
She smiled; no point in dragging the other girl down with thoughts of something that seemed all but inevitable at this point. "The future."
"It's nice to think about the future sometimes, Sarah," the other girl said, wrapping both of her arms around Sora's right. "But there's a whole world, right here and now, that you'll miss out on if you spend too much time only thinking about the future."
She laughed softly. "You're right."
Kairi smiled up at her, and then tilted her head slightly, as if she wanted to ask something but wasn't quite sure how to phrase it. Then she closed her eyes briefly, laughing soundlessly at herself. "Sarah, do you think you'd mind singing a bit more? Just for me?"
She shrugged; it wasn't like Riku could be hiding out in any of the sparse foliage around the path they were taking, especially not in those garish colors he was wearing. "I don't see why not."
"Could you sing another song from your world?" Kairi asked eagerly.
She laughed again. "Well, considering that I don't know any songs from around here, I pretty much have to."
Kairi looked down, smiling sheepishly, at that pronouncement. "Yeah. I guess I keep forgetting that you're from somewhere else."
"I guess that's a pretty easy thing to do, what with this face looking back at you and all," she said, offering what comfort she could, while part of her mind turned over the question of just what song she was going to sing.
The first melody that came to mind prompted a bark of amused laughter; that one was hardly something you got into with a person who didn't know the lyrics.
"What's so funny, Sarah?"
"Just had an idea, but I don't think it's going to work out," she said, still rather amused by the whole thing.
"What do you mean?" Kairi asked, sounding genuinely curious.
"Well, almost all of the songs I sang, even though they did have bands backing them up, had one lead singer and that was it. The one I just thought of now, though, has three lead singers, each with their own part of the song. It just feels kind of weird to me, singing along to the parts of three different people, when they're all having a sort of conversation with each other."
Kairi smiled brightly at her after she'd finished saying that. "Why don't I sing one of the other parts, then? And then we can both sing the third part together?"
She laughed. "Well, that would be great, Kairi, except for the part where you don't know any of my songs any more than I know any of yours."
Kairi grinned, clearly undaunted by something so simple as logic. "Well, no I don't, but I'm sure I could follow along with the music just as well as you do."
She smiled. "Well, if there was any music playing in those instances, I'm sure you could."
Kairi's pleased expression slipped, becoming one of confusion. "You mean, you couldn't hear it?"
She raised an eyebrow, folding "her" arms and tilting "her" head slightly. "Hear what, Kairi? There was nothing else to hear, aside from my singing."
Kairi chewed her lower lip for a long moment, seeming to consider just what it was that she was going to say next. "I guess you really couldn't hear any of them; any of those drums, or the men who were singing the songs. Or that nice-sounding lady who sang the traveling song, either."
She chewed the inside of Sora's left cheek, considering the implications of what Kairi had just revealed to her, and what it might mean given what she already knew about the other girl. "I've heard those songs before," she said at last, deciding to lay a few more of her cards on the table. "In fact, I've played them so many times by now that I've practically memorized not only the lyrics, but the rhythm and the beat, too. I know those songs pretty much by heart, as we say on my planet."
Kairi smiled, even laughing softly. "You know them by heart," she muttered, reaching out to press her right hand against the center of Sora's chest. "Maybe that's why I can hear them, too." She looked back up, still with that gentle expression. "Will you sing it, please? I'd like to hear it, even if I can't see anything this time."
"Sure," she said, more than a bit curious herself by this time. "I heard you on the wireless back in '52, lying awake intently tuning in on you; if I was young, it didn't stop you comin' through."
"Oh-oh," Kairi sang in counterpoint.
Sarah allowed herself a small smile. "They took the credit for your second symphony, rewritten by machine on new technology; and now I understand the problems you could see." She felt Kairi's hands gripping "hers" a bit more tightly; it seemed like the other girl really could hear the music that accompanied the songs Sarah sang.
It probably would have seemed stranger, if she hadn't known what Kairi actually was.
"Oh-oh," Kairi sang cheerfully in counterpoint, already starting to move with the music that only she could truly hear.
"I met your children."
"Oh-oh."
"What did you tell them?"
"Oh-oh," Kairi pulled her a bit closer, swinging the both of them around in a dance step that reminded her a fair bit of the Mysterious Figure and everything that had happened before.
"Video killed the radio star; video killed the radio star."
"Pictures came, and broke your heart," she sang in counterpoint, as the two of them separated as far as their still-clasped left and right hands would allow them to, both still dancing to the music's rhythm.
"Oh oh-oh-oh-oh."
"And now we meet in an abandoned studio, we hear the playback and it seems so long ago; and you remember, the jingles used to go."
"Oh-oh."
"You were the first one." She pulled Kairi in close, and the two of them grinned at each other.
"Oh-oh."
"You were the last one." The two of them separated again, step-dancing all the way.
"Video killed the radio star; video killed the radio star."
"In my mind, and in my car; we can't rewind, we've gone too far."
"Oh oh-oh-oh-oh. Oh oh-oh-oh-oh."
As the drums picked up, she and Kairi swung around each other more enthusiastically, moving with the increasing tempo of the song.
"Video killed the radio star; video killed the radio star."
"In my mind, and in my car; we can't rewind, we've gone too far. Pictures came, and broke your heart; put the blame on VCR."
The two of them continued step-dancing, both grinning widely now. "You are, a radio. You are, a radio star."
"Video killed the radio star," Kairi sang back at her, and then burst out laughing. "That was really fun, Sarah," the other girl said.
"I'm glad you liked it," she said, smiling back.
She didn't say anything stupidly obvious about having proof of what Kairi was saying now or anything, because both of them could see that that was the case now, and it would have been an insult to their respective intelligences if she had.
"Do you know any more songs like that?" Kairi asked, her eyes still shining with excitement and a wide smile on her face.
"I know a few," she allowed, as the two of them continued making their way back down to the dock. "But it's getting late, and I'm fairly sure your parents would want to throttle me if I kept you out after dark."
Kairi laughed. "You're so weird, Sarah." Looking back at "her", the other girl's expression changed, becoming one of calm, gentle happiness. "You know, Sarah," the other girl said, wrapping her arms around Sora's torso and squeezing lightly. "If I had a big sister, I'd want her to be just like you."
"That's a nice sentiment," she said, wrapping "her" arms around Kairi in turn.
It was a bit one-sided, of course; there were a lot of things about her that Kairi didn't know, and probably wouldn't approve of, given her personality. But the sentiment was nice, all the same.
When Kairi laughed softly, turning a gently amused grin on her, Sarah raised an eyebrow at the other girl. "You really do have a lot of music in your heart." She leaned against Sora's chest for a long moment. "We'll sing some more tomorrow."
"Yeah, tomorrow then," she said, clamping down on every last scrap of uneasiness she felt, so that she wouldn't display them with "her" face or "her" stance.
For this world, tomorrow wouldn't come; damn Riku and his short-sighted stupidity. And damn "Ansem", too. Idiots, the pair of them.
As she and Kairi made it back to the dock at last, both launching their respective boats and climbing inside as they began to row, Sarah wondered for a moment just what song Kairi had heard. She hadn't really been thinking of any in particular, not like those times she'd been singing, and she had to admit to being a bit curious about the whole thing. But she honestly had more pressing matters on her mind; Zero Hour was coming fast, and it seemed it wasn't going to be diverted by anything she did here and now.
So she needed to make time for her final preparations, not allow herself to be distracted by every stray thought that came her way.
The two of them landed their boats, pulling them up onto the shore before climbing out.
"I'll see you tomorrow, Sarah," the other girl said, giving "her" a quick hug and a peck on the right cheek.
"Bye, Kairi," she said, waving as the other girl left the docks behind; she smiled up until Kairi had left her field of view. "Good luck," she muttered, once the other girl was just out of sight.