000 - Birth Dream
Birth Dream:
All around him, the flames burned bright and hot, licking the walls and casting eerie shadows dancing across the floor. In his gloved hands were a pair of wind-and-fire wheels, also ablaze, though the deadly fire that whorled round his hands did not scald. Dancing amid the fire were figures, eerie and white, tall and spindly, with great gaping mouths and limbs far too long for their bodies. They shimmied and swayed with the rhythm of the flames, flickering in and out of sight as they undulated in circles surrounding him.
So many...there were so many. How could he possibly hope to defeat them all?
A presence at his back made him turn, peering over his shoulder to see a small person behind him, a great steel key in his hands, a mop of wild brown hair atop his head. His face...he couldn't see his face, yet he was certain he knew this boy.
"Feeling a little...regret?" the boy asked, and he scoffed.
"Nah...I can handle these punks," he said confidently, spinning the chakrams in his hands and then gripping them tightly. That was right--he was here for a reason. Here in this room of shifting green and blue space filled with flames and the dancing white figures...he was here to fulfill a purpose. To alleviate those regrets that danced somewhere at the edge of his brain.
Regret...? Why did it feel like such an alien concept to him? Everyone felt regret, didn't they? Everyone...felt, right? So why was it that this heavy sensation of chagrin clung like cold mist around his insides? Why did this feeling of doubt and hesitation echo hollowly within his chest? Why...it was as if he were empty inside and the uncertainty just reverberated off his very bones.
Sea-blue eyes flickered somewhere across his mind, wide and questioning, and a voice, soft and confused, echoed in the back of his brain.
'I can't... just look inside. But I figure... if there is something in there--inside us--then we'd feel it, wouldn't we?'
The figure of a girl, small and slim, with white-blonde hair and a sad sort of weight to her presence was fuzzy in his mind's eye--why couldn't he see the details of her face?
'What if...what if we do have hearts?'
'We don't. Got it memorized?'
Strange...there was almost something like static in his head, whiting out words and blurring out faces. He shook his head, quashing the strange heavy squirmy feeling in his gut, whorling the chakrams around his hands again.
"Watch this!" he shouted to the boy behind him, and dashed forward. Enough with the fragments of distantly vague memories--he was here to destroy these figures in white, to open a path for the boy with brown hair, to help him keep moving forward, so that...
...what? So that he could...what? He couldn't remember. He was sure it was important, but he just couldn't remember what it was.
The dancing figures in white swarmed around him, gyrating like snakes, and he spread his arms, the fiery wheels in his hands now spinning freely at his sides. With a great roar, he focused all of his energy into a massive ball of flame which engulfed the whole room. The air burned, the room dissolved into a twisting arc of red and gold and unbearable heat, and then something snapped somewhere in his head. An image flickered, grainy and half-grey, like bad reception on a television. A dark, husky voice was garbled in his ears.
'Which would you rather suffer the loss of: some make-believe friendship, or a real one? We have to set things right. There is simply too much on the line...Lea.'
With a soft cry, he felt himself falling, and as the flames died around him, the ground rose up to meet him, and he crumpled, rolling onto his back. Suddenly, it was hard to breathe, and the chakrams would no longer return to his hands.
The grainy image in his head hitched and jerked--the signal was fading. With a sharp inhale, he opened his eyes--when had he closed them?--to see the boy with the brown hair hovering over him. He looked so perplexedly concerned, it was almost endearing. Those eyes, there was something so familiar about them. He just couldn't put his finger on it.
"You're...fading away," the boy said. His face was all out of focus, like he was looking at him through frosted glass.
"Well, that's what happens when you put your whole being into an attack," he replied. Ah, true enough. That explained why he couldn't feel his legs anymore. He'd used up all his energy to destroy those figures in white. ...Why? Ah, that was right. "Go, find Kairi." Huh. Even the sound in his ears was fading now. The edges of his vision were growing dark, and his own voice sounded alien to him. "Oh, almost forgot... Sorry for what I did to her."
Was that his regret? Was that why he was here to help this boy?
"You can tell her yourself when we find her," the boy insisted, and he just shook his head, his whole body heavy now.
"Think I'll pass. My heart just wouldn't be in it." He gave a weak laugh. Haven't got one.
The boy's brow furrowed in a way that was oh so nostalgic. "Axel..." There went the sound again; the boy's lips moved, but there was no sound. "What were you trying to do?"
"I wanted to see him," he replied honestly. "He made me feel...like I had a heart after all..." Damn his blurry vision and damn the fading sound! He was sure this was important!
A quick shake of his head. Eugh--okay, enough with this sappy crap. He was dying, for crying out loud, and he still had that regret to take care of. Summoning the last of his dwindling energy, he lifted a hand with some effort, and spread his fingers. A whorl of dark power pulsed amid the roiling greens and blues of the strange and silent room, and a portal shimmered into existence. ...Huh. That was interesting. Could he do that? Guess it was too late to really wonder now.
"Kairi's in the castle dungeon," he said with some effort. "Now go."
The boy with the brown hair crinkled his brow again, and he had to look away. Something about those big blue eyes just...hurt.
'How long do you think you'll last if you make an enemy of the Organization?'
'It's not like anyone would be sad without me.'
'That's not true... I...would be sad.'*
'Let's meet again, kid. In the next life, okay?'
He closed his eyes, a smile on his face as the image of a blond head nodding shot across his mind as the darkness closed in.
And then it all went black.
And then there was goo. ...Lots of goo. And that was about when he decided that nothing really made sense anymore, and maybe it was just better to start from scratch.
'...In the next life, okay?'
'Yeah. I'll...be waiting.'
'Dummy...just because you've got a shot at a next life...'