Exhibits Admitted Into Evidence [264]

[mirrorbrothers]

Title: Exhibits Admitted Into Evidence
Challenge: #264, playing detective
Rating: PG
Word Count: 513
Spoilers: for KH 2
Notes: In which one of Sora's friends turns out to be pretty smart after all.

Comments

[mirrorbrothers]

Oh, geez. You're very kind, and I really appreciate it, and please don't feel bad for asking... but it's really awkward for me, because it's not any kind of good sign for a story if a reader has to ask that.

Okay, first of all, the line after Tidus' last line, if I'd included it, would have been, "Roxas."

It was supposed to go like this: Sora & co.'s friends back home, like Tidus, never got an explanation of where they were all that time. Plus, Tidus notices that Sora's been acting kind of strange sometimes. So he starts looking for clear clues about what's going on, and comes up with three - I called them Exhibits A, B, and C. Exhibit A is a note that seems to be for Sora but it's not at all clear who it's from. Exhibit B is Tidus seeing Sora doing something really out of character for him. And Exhibit C is Tidus trying to explain why everyone forgot who Sora was for a year - which is actually a red herring and leads to Tidus' conclusions not being totally right.

Tidus' reasoning goes like this:

1) Apparently sometimes Sora isn't Sora, he's someone else - someone who has to leave Sora notes, and who doesn't get along so well with Riku.

2) Sora was missing for a long time, but in hindsight, his parents stopped freaking out about finding him awfully fast - as though they knew where he was but weren't saying. (This is where he goes wrong - he has no way to know that Namine just made them forget.)

3) Therefore, Sora wasn't "missing," except right at first. He was locked up in a psych hospital for being multiple.

4) Riku's mom did freak out, so Riku must actually have been missing. Knowing Riku, he probably did something not-too-bright for Sora's sake.

To confirm this, Tidus gets "Sora" alone when he's not acting very Sora-ish, and sneakily checks a few things - this conversation is the main body of the story. First, the "us" in Exhibit A seemed to mean just Sora. ("By yourself?" "Yeah.") Second, the "Sora" he's talking to doesn't really remember the times when he's more friendly with Riku. ("He let you use him as a pillow the next day, right?" "What?") Third, "Sora" confirms Tidus' ideas about why Riku was missing. (... hey, wait. How do you know all that?") So Tidus decides he's right, (in fact he's about half right) and goes and asks "Sora" (that is, Roxas) what his name is. Which is also a way of saying "I know you're two people and I'm cool with it."

I'm starting to see where you might have got a little confused. I can tell you, though, that a reader can totally understand this drabble if he has years of experience in knowing how my brain works, and has spent way too much of his childhood reading the same Encyclopedia Brown books as me. And in related news, I'm starting to think I should get a beta who's not my brother.

[ceylmallyn]

...for what it's worth, to play devil's-advocate a bit, I actually did understand it? I wasn't certain either on my first read-through, but then I went back and read it from the start, at which point something clicked in my brain and went "OH!" fairly early on. So it was a little tricky, but not in a way that was excessive for me. (Though, it probably helps that your take on where Roxas ended up seems to be similar to mine.)

[mirrorbrothers]

Well, that's good to hear. At least I wasn't completely off base. Thanks!

[medomai]

It probably would've helped if I read it through more than once, but this was also my right-before-bedtime-fanfic-reading-time. I was totally thinking Sora-Roxas, I knew Tidus was talking about MPD, I just did NOT put it together. My take on Roxas is also quite different, so that likely didn't help.

Now that you spell it out, it's like, "oh, duh". All I really needed, I guess, was to know was the basic premise, that Tidus is trying to figure out what's going with Sora and Roxas post-KHII. I mean, I don't feel either it was too obscure or that I'm dumb, just that something got lost in translation.

[mirrorbrothers]

Well... the writer's not supposed to let anything get lost, but I'm glad it's not too egregious.

[medomai]

Don't worry. It's awesome.

[kaos_sparrow]

Seconded. It was a bit confusing on the first readthrough, but now that I've reread it the whole thing makes more sense.