kingdom hearts -- dichotomy
title: dichotomy
wordcount: 1753
rating: PG
warnings: spoilers for birth by sleep, 358/2 days.
summary: Over the course of your so-called second existence, you have learnt several things; amongst them, though, you learnt how to injure a heart.
You wonder why you continue to pursue such idle fantasies.
You ask yourself why you continue to live under the delusion that you can seize back your heart, when the reality that stares you in the face dictates otherwise. All your carefully-laid plans have gone awry, and the one person you trusted as an ally has turned on you, leaving you to face the fire.
So be it, you decide.
Both of you have come a long way since the day when you arrived in the Dark City as a pair of frightened lost boys, pitifully aware of your own weaknesses and shortcomings; your respective childhoods and naivety have since been stripped away, and before you know it, you are forced to grow up, to move on with your newfound second life without a backwards glance. As soon as you arrive in this new world, you tell yourself that nothing has changed, despite that gnawing emptiness in your chest where your heart should be, and vow to regain what you have lost, in order to be able to live completely again.
It is only once you lose your heart that you realise just how much you have lost. The ache of your physical wounds is painful, doubtless - those accursed gouges on your face, from where that hungry Heartless attacked you, stings every time you scowl or narrow your eyes - but the dull pang of loss which you cannot quite put your finger on goes deeper, to the very core of your being. Your best friend keeps on forcing determinedly cheerful smiles and cracking jokes, as though light-hearted idiosyncrasies will detract from the hollowness the both of you feel, but inside, he knows as well as you do that it is the beginning of the end.
Before you are found by the two black-cloaked men, you promise to stick together through thick or thin; once you are in the stronghold of this enigmatic Organisation, you tell yourself that you will not forget the vow you made, that someday, you will become whole. The whole story of what the familiar strangers tell you jars your nerves, but you force yourself to remain calm, to keep track of your emotions - or lack thereof - and remember the pact of two blood brothers, forged in a time of uncertainty and desperation.
Even after you are forced to abandon your old name - you are no longer Isa, but Saïx, and the sibilant hiss of the word catches in your throat every time you say it - you insist that you will not lose sight of yourself. The first time you are sent out on a mission and very nearly killed, Lea-not-Lea - or Axel, as he is now called - warns you not to break your promises, and so you push yourself harder, mastering whatever fate and circumstance throws at you.
As you prove yourself and your strength, you move up the ranks. Conversely, Axel is satisfied to remain in place, and whilst he does not speak of the pact you made, it lingers at the back of your mind, the memory of two forlorn, rain-drenched boys solemnly formulating their feeble little plan in the shadow of a storm.
As you grow older, you grow further apart.
People don’t change, they evolve; or so Zexion has told you. If that is the case, then who are you now? It has seemed like forever since you shucked away your identity as Isa, and now you have settled firmly into your role as Saïx, second-in-command of the Organisation. You are no longer a boy, but a man now, and the foolishness of your past oaths resounds flatly at the back of your mind.
Foolish fallacies, for foolish neophytes, green with inexperience, and brimming with false bravado and ridiculous ideals.
When he betrays you…no, when he betrays the Organisation, you are vaguely surprised to find that you no longer care. It seems as though Axel-who-was-once-Lea has forgotten your former friendship, and you are not at all taken aback to find him preferring the company of the faceless puppet and the rebellious Nobody of the Keyblade master; Isa would have denounced such changes in loyalty, but Saïx no longer cares - cannot care. There is no room for regrets or remorse, only resolve and resilience.
You forget about your promise - to regain your hearts - in the face of his treachery, and push it out of his mind when he starts acting recklessly, doing whatever it takes to get his pathetic little friend back. The part of you that is still Isa reminds you that you would have done the same thing for him, but the part that is Saïx only sneers, and says that having friends is a waste of time. In the face of furthering your goals - what goals? - you are determined to ignore Axel’s insubordination, until news comes of his demise.
You stare blankly at the Dusk, with slender limbs wriggling like river-weeds in its agitation. It trembles before your scrutiny and parrots its message - the Eighth Master is no more; the Keybearer is close - before making to depart, until, in an unbridled surge of rage, you lash out at it with your weapon, scouring its existence from the face of the earth.
Weak, you snarl to yourself as you prepare to intercept the Keybearer. Axel was weak, and he paid the price for his weakness.
When you meet the boy, you see a sliver of what Axel saw in him; you see a shadow of your former friend, hot-headed, daring, and so alive, and the part of Isa that remains in you falters, until you remember who you are. You remember that Isa’s last ties have been severed with the death of Axel, and your plans are rendered obsolete.
You see no chance to regain your heart now. The emptiness of your promises returns to mock you, and to take your mind off it, you throw yourself into the mêlée with unbridled viciousness, even though you know you fight a losing battle. You let a berserker’s ferocity broil beneath your skin and surround yourself with the protective fire of rage, and fight as though you still have something to anchor yourself to this reality with.
This mindless apoplexy, you realise with stark amusement, has become like a well-loved companion to you, and is the only thing which serves to pinion you to this plane of existence. When you struggle to search your mind for the light of friendship and goodness which Sora babbles nonsensically about, you find you cannot quite remember.
You remember being a boy, sitting on the steps of that shop you used to work at, sneaking after-hours sea-salt ice-cream with your best friend. You remember the grotesquely comical faces you pull at one another, of varying discomfort, and the taste at the back of your tongue, salty, yet sweet.
You remember watching the sky and mapping the constellations, fancying that you can divine meaning from the seemingly erratic patterns of star trails. You remember nights spent cooped up in an observation tower whilst your best friend messes with your callipers and compasses, rearranging painstakingly-sorted piles of research notes with sheer, immature whimsy.
You remember the Heartless attack, like a wave of black sweeping across the land, and losing against it, having the mark of your shame carved upon your face, a reminder of your own shortcomings. You remember the shock of finding yourself in the dreary, storm-ridden city, waking up to pain, to agony, to the tattoo of raindrops against your upturned face; you remember Lea sacrificing his jacket to help bind your wounds, ignoring your blows and tersely-snapped curses every time he presses a little too hard on your injuries.
You remember sparring with one another, both with complaints and insults, and then later, with actual weapons, once you are initiated into the Organisation and put to the test. You remember taking him by surprise when you knock his oddly-shaped, spiked rings from his grip and hold your equally curious-looking claymore to his throat, before helping him up, all tension forgotten.
You remember a time when you could still laugh and smile and joke, without having to use it to manipulate a person to suit your own ends. You remember what it was like to have your heart hurt - though you never showed it - and, in return, learnt how to injure and toy with one yourself. You remember being teased for your unruly duck’s-rear-end hair, and in turn ribbing your best friend for his wild crimson spikes, and snidely wondering how many barrels of hair gel he goes through a day, an hour, a minute, a nanosecond.
You remember a time when you could feel more than just cold contempt, or crazed anger. You remember sadness and joy, disappointment and uncertainty, anticipation and nervousness, though your recollections of them are tenuous, at best. You assumed that once you gained mastery over your emotions, you would be able to find your true strength, but all that is far from the truth.
You remember what it was like to have a heart, and remember the strength of character which comes from it.
Perhaps this is why the loss does not rankle as much, when even your own weapon is turned against you, when the forces of momentum and inertia are used against your movements and the great claymore pinwheels out of your grasp; you take solace in this tiny shred of consolation, even as the moon rescinds her power and protection when the boy brings you forcefully back to earth, wrenching you away from your blind rage. When, at last, you concede defeat, you realise, belatedly, that you lost your reasons for living long before you lost yourself, and the thought alone is sufficient to bring you to your knees.
Lea, it seemed, wasn’t the only one to change. You both did, and in doing so, were cast adrift in separate directions in the void of nothingness; however, this time, he wins, as he managed to reclaim some small portion of the light back for himself, whilst you are forced to sink back into the Darkness, left with nothing but your own bitterness, your own regrets.
Why? Where is my heart? You ask yourself the question, over and over; you implore the unfeeling, distant heart-shaped moon for an answer, but it remains as far-away as ever, casting its cold, unsympathetic radiance upon the remnants of your being.
In the end, you realise, Axel wasn’t the one who was weak. It was you.
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