Purity (Axel/Roxas, #8)

[libekory]

Title: Purity
Author: libekory
Claim: Axel/Roxas
Prompt: #08  ["holy"]
Warnings: Violence, and distinctly semi-consensual sexuality. Plus, Axel's molesting a priest, so there's all sorts of wrong, isn't there?
Disclaimer: Kingdom Hearts and Kingdom Hearts 2 are not mine. They belong to Square-Enix and Disney. No copyright infringement, no profit, and so on

Comments

[libekory]

Thank you for the kind words; I'm not someone who thinks the Organization was full of fluffy kittens. I've always thought of it this way: Xehanort and his crew were evil even before they became Nobodies. I mean, the experiments they performed to get at the darkness in a human heart were really, really inhumane. So it seems unlikely that they'd be sweethearts now that they, err, don't have hearts.

But, on the continuity part, I~ disagree. It's just an assumption on our parts that Roxas's only job was to kill Heartless, and hardly unreasonable, I think, to instead assume that he did some additional work, too. (And of course I remember what they wanted Sora to kill Heartless for. XD)

Also, we know that the Organization was in the business of, at the very least, making more Heartless out of people. (See: Xaldin in Beast's Castle, trying to make him into a Heartless.) Which requires some world-destruction, as follows:

In order for Heartless to enter a world, according to Ansem and Xehanort-pretending-to-be-Ansem's reports, the heart of the world has to be somehow damaged. Otherwise, there's a sort of protective bubble that keeps the Heartless (and people not using a Gummi Ship or dark corridors) out. There's discussion of this shell at some length in one of the KH1 reports, where it mentions that the gummi blocks that a Gummi Ship is made of are the remnants of the shell of a world that has been destroyed.

I'm sleepy and I don't have the reports right in front of me to double-check, but this is the gist. I've extrapolated a little, true, but you have to extrapolate some, otherwise every Organization member other than Roxas has been sitting on his (or her) tail bone for the past ten years, since the destruction of Hollow Bastion (and the simultaneous Nobodification of Xehanort and the other Original Six members).

My theory (and the invention of "prime hearts", of which Riku, btw, was one, thus helping to explain why his temptation was enough to plunge the whole world into darkness) supposes that it's more efficient to make Heartless out of an entire world at once than it is to do it piecemeal. Attack the heart of the world, make it collapse, and then there are armies of Heartless everywhere as people succumb more and more quickly to the darkness in their hearts. A world's entire population becoming Heartless gives keyblades more fodder and so helps Kingdom Hearts to grow more rapidly.

The Organization members on other worlds are clearly doing something. This, to my mind, makes as much sense as anything. And it is, of course, a theory, but I think it works quite nicely.

[mirrorbrothers]

I find it faster to refer to Xehanort-pretending-to-be-Ansem as Ansem the Dumb. :-)

And I think most of the Organization actually wasn't doing anything all that aggressive before they got Roxas. If they were going around destroying worlds by the dozen, they would have run into Mickey, who's had a keyblade for a while. But you're right that they make Heartless, it's just that Roxas wouldn't leave, after - not until he'd carved up as many as he could. Or I guess... unless they decided it was easier to take them out as they invaded other worlds, like the World That Never Was.

I like prime hearts, though, that makes sense and explains a lot. And I hope you don't take this as hostile or flame-y or anything, it's just that the best part of being a speculator is arguing with other speculators - just friendly debate. And it's a great story either way.

[libekory]

No, no, not as flame-y. XD Although the "continuity error" line jumped out at me, since we're mainly talking about things that are entirely, as you say, speculation. Hard to make an error there! XD But I like these discussions. A theory is never fully formed until you have to explain it to someone else anyway. *purr*

Actually, they wouldn't have run into Mickey; Nomura's Ultimania interview said that Mickey's adventure prior to appearing at the end of KH1 involved traversing the realm of darkness. (In the KH multiverse, there is a realm of light, the one that all the Disney worlds and Destiny Islands and so on exist in, and a realm of darkness; we've never visited a world in the realm of darkness. Twilight Town and The World That Never Was are both in-between worlds, with the former being closer to the realm of light, and the latter closer to the realm of darkness. If you look at TWTNW on the map, you'll notice that it seems to be almost "half submerged" below the plane that Sora's Gummi Ship travels on. FYI, and interesting I thought, the "dark shore" is at the border, between the realm of light and the realm of darkness. I think I remember something about Twilight Town being connected to Never Was, helping to explain why they vacation there apparently without attempting to disturb the peace [in Final Mix, Nobody enemies roam the streets, but not Heartless, not ever], and I can't for the life of me remember what all was said about Castle Oblivion, except that they found it, they didn't create it, and when Namine and Roxas were born, she was found in Castle Oblivion.)

And Mickey didn't have his keyblade when he left, he acquired it at some point after that, although Nomura has said this is one of the stories he still wants to tell, so there's no more concrete information than that.

We also don't have any reason to think that the Organization wasn't carving up worlds by the dozens; by the time Sora gets involved in KH1, many, many worlds have been taken by the Heartless, so many that there was a "meteor shower" in the sky with hundreds of worlds vanishing. It's not unreasonable to think that some (or even all, if you think of Xehanort's Heartless's appearance in the Secret Place as being his first foray into the outside world in a while) of them were destroyed by the Organization.

What they don't do is rush right out to confront a keyblade hero, although of course in the original Final Mix Xemnas does seek out Sora after finding his Nobody in Twilight Town, and a plan is thereafter formed to take control of him through Namine and Castle Oblivion.

How do I explain why the Nobodies were making Heartless before they planned to control Sora? Well, a couple of ways: First, we know that Sora isn't the first keyblade master. (Xigbar's Jiminy memo entry says as much; he's fought [and, I believe, killed] several of them.) A pet theory I've always had is that while people who aren't keyblade masters can "defeat" Heartless, they simply respawn elsewhere, briefly "scattered" by the force of the attack but not truly gone. I like this theory because it neatly explains why people like Leon can beg Sora for help while cutting down Heartless left and right.

What this means is that someone like Axel could take a world and quadruple the number of Heartless around without worrying about accidentally destroying any in the process; eventually, a keyblade master will find them, and their hearts will be sucked up by Kingdom Hearts.

[continued]

[libekory]

[continued from previous, damn you character limit]

In the case of Roxas leaving before the job is "finished", it thusly doesn't really matter; the Heartless aren't going to die in the destruction of the world, not when it's being plunged into darkness. They will do their job, making more Heartless out of other people, while, now that Roxas is there, a small amount are constantly siphoned off, summoned to The World That Never Was, to be killed. There's no real hurry to kill them off until enough of them have been created in the first place, and it has taken a very, very long time to complete Kingdom Hearts.

Of course, this isn't all the Organization has been up to -- they've been studying Castle Oblivion for a while. In fact, I rather think the "destroy worlds" theory was put into place shortly before or shortly after Saix's birth. In the timeline I've worked out with a friend, we imagine Saix being discovered four years after the event at Hollow Bastion, Axel five, and so on. Once they know they can replicate the Nobody process (and they do seem to be doing that deliberately, I seem to remember Xaldin sounding as though he coveted Beast's potential Nobody as well as his Heartless), they will of course be much more interested in making as many Heartless (and so Nobodies) as they can, for an army of their own, more adaptable servants.

Plus, this piece is set very early on in Roxas's indoctrination to the Organization, and Xemnas does have a certain pretense about Roxas's relative normalcy to maintain.

But again; all of it speculation, based on a small collection of facts. X3 Wanna discuss further? Feel free to tackle me in AIM tomorrow; suicidalchime. For now, sleeping. ♥