Fleeting
A Kingdom Hearts 2 Short Story.
She's sure that all of them have dropped in to have a look at her at least once, but Saïx is the one who comes around most often.
He stares at her through the bars with those frightful yellow eyes, and she feels like cowering in the corner and hiding her face in her arms. She sits up straighter, though, every time, and stares back with defiance even while her hands are shaking in her lap. She'll glare at him, and unexpectedly, he will smile. It's a nasty, hollow smile, and it has an odd glint around the edge.
He is so cold, cold and callous and uncaring. She screamed at him for it, shortly after he brought her here, and he paused and gave her a look that she made her scalp crawl, a look she knows will come back to haunt her in nightmares. When he told her that he had no heart, she believed him.
He rarely talks to her. Sometimes he answers when she asks him something or just speaks aloud when he's in the room. She's learned that she has the most chance of prying words from him when she says something unexpected. That will usually make him regard her in silence and then supply her with some kind of a reply. He never tells her answers to the questions she cares about the most, but if she asks him why he looks so preoccupied, she will get a reaction. The one time he brought her her meal and she asked him if he'd had lunch yet himself, she was rewarded with a blink.
She is glad that she knows his name, at least. That way, she has something to anchor herself with, a firm spot of ground she can use as a landmark to navigate these murky waters. Names are important to her; every time she thinks of her friends, their names are what come to her, rather than their faces. If she hadn't heard one of the others address him by name, she might have had to invent one for him. She calls the others Tall And Imposing, Foul-Mouthed and Smug. Tall And Imposing looks a lot like Ansem, but the other two don't remind her of anyone she knows. Saïx looks like nothing she's ever seen before, so she's glad to have a name to call him by.
Axel gave her his name, but he isn't here. Saïx tells her that he will be dealt with.
When she feels the walls of her prison starting to cave in on her, she draws her knees up to her chin, hugs herself and rocks back so that only her toes will touch the floor. The dog often comes to sit in front of her when she does this. It will look at her with its head cocked to the side, and if she won't react, it'll offer her a paw. That day on the beach was the first time she ever saw the dog, but somehow, she's still sure that it is a friend. These heartless strangers seem to regard it as much of a prisoner as they do her, and in some strange way, this gives her comfort. Although she doesn't wish for anyone to be trapped here for her sake, company is worth a lot in this hollow fortress of glaring lights and deep, impenetrable shadows, even if it's company that can't speak to her... or won't.
She pushes the thought away when he arrives, but it gets harder to do so each time.
Saïx comes and goes unexpectedly. His black coat and blue hair stand out against the washed-out walls, but he still seems wan and pale somehow. If ghosts are the presence of someone without something to show for it, he is like that something without the presence of someone. It is strange, and she knows it should frighten her more than it does. The realisation that it doesn't unnerves her quite enough, though.
She can't tell if he follows some kind of a schedule or not, but every time he brings her the food tray, it feels like a clockwork to her. He walks in, opens a small hatch on the cell's door, shoves the tray through it and stands there until she picks it up and starts eating. Only then he will leave; not before, never before. Sometimes he lingers. Once she threw the tray at him. He didn't say anything. He didn't even twitch. He just wiped the potato mash off his coat and left her with the mess. And that was perhaps the most disheartening result of all. Later the Dusks came to clean up and she wished she hadn't been so short-tempered. The Dusks frighten her more than Saïx or the other men – even more than Tall And Intimidating, who does speak to her when he comes, but doesn't seem to hear a word she says in return – because they remind her so much of Shadows. It doesn't make sense, because she remembers Ansem and knows that these beings with a human shape are much more dangerous than the squirming and slinking creatures they command.
The Dusks, scary as they might be, are simple things. Saïx, on the other hand, isn't – that much she's sure of. She watches him as he moves past her cell, observes every move of his hands, every curve of his back, every dip his eyebrows make and every change in the set of his mouth. There's little to see; Saïx is cold like the space, stoic and unmoving like stone... but sometimes she thinks she has spotted something, like a tiny spark that flickers through the darkness, a small shooting star that draws a brief line across the night sky. It always disappears before she can focus on it, but she is almost certain that it has been there nevertheless.
There isn't really anything to do in her cell, and sometimes the sitting and sighing and waiting, waiting, endlessly waiting for something to happen are almost too much for her. She gets up and paces then, walks back and forth in the small space she is allowed, from side to side, from the bars to the back wall. Sometimes, if she's feeling daring, she walks diagonally.
When she gets tired of the walking, she will sit down and think about things, about anything except her captivity and the place she's trapped in. She thinks a lot about Sora and Riku. She thinks about how much she misses them, them and everyone back on Destiny Islands. She thinks about what Selphie has been doing in class and what her mum and dad thought when she didn't come back home.
He brings her something to drink more often than he brings her food. Sometimes he even brings her a full jug. He seems fond of apple juice. That's what he brings almost every time. She's never particularly liked it, but she learned to drink it all the same. She doesn't dare to ask for something else.
He is also polite enough to make himself scarce when she needs to use the pot that acts as her toilet. She pushes it close to the bars afterwards, where one of the Dusks will take it away and bring back a clean one later on. Once or twice Saïx brought her one himself. He was quiet when he did so.
She wonders if she will ever get out of there. She wonders where Riku is and if he knows about her predicament. She wonders if Sora will come for her this time. She hopes so, fervently, but sometimes, she also wonders what will happen if he does. She wonders if Saïx would fight him and concludes that he probably would. She thinks, fearfully, that Sora might die. Then she thinks that Saïx might die instead.
She thinks of Sora's carefree laughter and Riku's cocky smirk. Then she thinks of yellow eyes, because she can't help it. There is no happiness in those eyes, ever. No emotion. They could be glass for all she knows.
The lights in her prison haven't once gone out, so she never knows whether it's day or night. She's not even sure there are days and nights in this strange place where everything feels skewed and out of place. So when she starts to feel weary, she will curl up in the furthermost corner of her cell and go to sleep. She sleeps fitfully, even when the dog curls up next to her, because she doesn't feel safe.
The first time she woke up to find him watching her nearly scared her out of her wits. It wasn't much better on the second time. But he never does anything but stand there, and in the end, she begins to wish that he would do something, anything, that would make him seem less like a breathing statue and more like a human being.
She finds herself thinking about what he might have been like before. From bits and pieces, she's been able to gather enough information to figure out that her captors weren't always like this, that something happened to them. So she thinks about their hearts... his heart more than those of the others, and wonders how it was that he came to lose it. She wonders whether it was foul and full of darkness, or if there was a glimmer of light in it. She wonders if he threw it away like Tall And Imposing. She wonders if he fought. But whether or not he did his hearts is now missing all the same, and she doesn't know where it's gone.
He's an odd creature, heart or not; he's not quite there and a little too solid at the same time. He seems to linger in peripheral her vision long after he's left the room. It's a bothersome occurrence, but not as unpleasant as she might have expected.
Sometimes she gets angry. He doesn't seem to mind. Oddly enough, he even reacts to her presence more often when she demands his attention rather than asks for it. It doesn't seem like he does so because she insists. Rather, it seems like he does it because she is insists, even after her freedom has been stolen from her, even after she was locked in a stark cell withouth as much as a chair for her to sit on, even after her every attempt to reason or plead with her captors has fallen on deaf ears. There's a touch of respect in the acknowledgement, and with a sense of defeat, she admits that she's finally discovered the language she needs to speak to get through to him.
His footsteps leave faint echoes in their wake, fainter than they should, yet the sound is painfully loud in her ears. And when they fade, the silence is almost more than she can bear.
When he finds her while she's running away with the girl in a white dress, his expression is just as cold as flat as always before. It remains so when the girl beside her takes a stand and she follows her example. His words are mocking, but there is a glimmer of that something in his yellow eyes. Then she looks again, and they are glass again: empty and dead.
She can't help but to wonder what those eyes would look like with feeling in them, any feeling, even fear or hatred. She wonders if there is anyone else she could ask about it, anyone who might remember. She wonders what he would look like with a tired stoop to his shoulders or with grief tightening his jaw. But the thoughts are fleeting and the danger is apparent.
It is not Sora but Riku who comes for her; suddenly he's there, and for the first time since her arrival at this unfamiliar and forbidding place, she feels safe.
Riku's grip on her shoulder is tight. His fingers dig painfully into her flesh, but she doesn't care enough to tell him. She knows that he's afraid. She is afraid as well.
Sora fights with more determination than skill. Saïx is like the tide, like a hurricane, but he keeps slashing and hacking away, and no matter how many times Saïx blasts him away, no matter how many times he falls – no matter how many times Kairi gasps with fright and clings to Riku's sleeve when Saïx lands a hit – he always gets up and charges again.
It is not Sora who wavers first.
The dull clunk of the claymore when it falls to the floor is like the countless footsteps of her imprisonment compressed into one, final sound. He stumbles on his feet, unstable, cluthing at his side. His gaze fixes ahead, but it is not Sora he's looking at.
For the first time, she can see directly what there's only been flickers of before. His eyes – no glass – are full of it. She swallows – it feels painful – and looks away. She can't bear it.
She hears him stumble away from them. Stop. And speak. It is the first question she has ever heard him ask.
Although he never gave her very good answers to any her questions, she wishes that she would have had one for him.
Memories of bad things fade in time and even nightmares lose their stength and begin to wane after they've visited you often enough. At first the change is subtle – a threadbare spot here, a loose yarn there – but it soon accelerates, the pitch-black first becoming sort of a frayed black instead, and from there wearing down to a tired kind of gray that has fluff poking out around the edges. By that time, you might still remember the fear, but it's only a little more than a far-off dream.
They still sit by the bonfire on the beach of their little island sometimes. Riku and Sora spend the fading twilight gathering wood while she looks for kindling. They arrange the materials into a carefully structured pile and then Sora will whip out a matchbox and set fire to the dry leaves and twigs.
They often sit in silence, without saying a word. There is companionship between them, but there is also a need to sink into solitary memories, a need each of them recognises and instinctively allows for.
Sometimes, when she sits by the fire she and Riku and Sora have built, back home on Destiny Islands... sometimes, when she forgets herself in watching the yellow, yellow flames that twirl and dance with so much passion it seems as though they were alive, flames that will flicker out and disappear when the wood that is nurturing them runs out... sometimes, during those moments she doesn't want to share with anyone, she still thinks about his eyes.
fin