Ienzo

Sora Irino, Riku Miyano, Kairi Uchida. Lea. Mickey. He had so much faith in them. Everyone had so much faith in them.

Too bad they were now dead.

Actually, most of the people he knew were dead, Ienzo realized with a sort of distant horror. And it appeared that he was about to join them.

The Keybearers had gone ahead to confront Xehanort, while he (among others) were stationed on the lower plateaus to mow down the infinite waves of Heartless. The reasoning behind it was simple: if no one stopped the Heartless, they would be able to advance to the Keybearers, who were already locked in battle with the newly-reborn Master Xehanort. An attack on both sides would be disastrous.

The keyless had done a surprisingly good job. In fact, the dusty arena was practically empty now. Not that it really made much of a difference in the end, he noted, staring up and into the infinite yellow eyes of the last Orcus in the Keyblade Graveyard. The Pureblood’s sword had been shattered a long time ago, but that didn’t stop it; it simply pulled one of the dead Keyblades from the ground and used that as a replacement weapon. Sure, the Keyblade was nothing but a twisted stick of metal now, but that was more than enough to bludgeon Ienzo to death.

He’d had been soundly beaten down by thousands of Heartless already, and there was nothing he could do to save himself anymore — his magic was depleted, his mind was fraying at the edges, and his body now considered ‘standing’ to be too much of a burden.

He was almost there. Ienzo swore he could see the ending right in front of him. If he’d brought one more potion, found some way to cram it in, maybe he could have won… but he didn’t. ‘This was meant to be,’ he mused, waiting for the Orcus to bring its blade down. ‘I was never much good at fighting off Darkness anyway.’

…Oh. It was time.

Ienzo was taking his impending doom surprisingly well, but that was mostly because he didn’t really have the energy to emote anymore. So he just took one more look at the blade and closed his eyes as the Orcus swung down.

The largest spike of the Keyblade made a little squelching sound as it slammed into his skull, bypassing the cranium and digging into the brain. It definitely made contact, and it hurt like hell — but that was the most surprising part. It hurt. The fact that Ienzo could feel anything was an anomaly; that kind of trauma should have left him dead before he could even register the injury.

Ienzo waited for his body to give out. It didn’t.

In fact, it almost felt better, now that there was a dead Keyblade lodged in his forehead. The splitting agony from a few moments previous shrunk to a dull roar, and as man and Heartless locked eyes in utter amazement, the pains that littered his body slowly began to fade away too. Ienzo wondered if this was just what it felt like to die; his wounds seemed to heal because his soul and heart were no longer tethered to the rest of him. If he tried to move, it wouldn’t work at all, and then he would probably lose consciousness forever. Ienzo wondered how long he could sit here like this, suspended between life and death… but then he figured, hey. Why not.

You only live once. And he’d done his living already.

Ienzo’s arm shot up and gripped the dead blade. Blood was seeping out of the wound, into his eyes. He laughed. He laughed at the expression on the Orcus’ face, because even that mindless creature knew that people were supposed to die when they were killed; he laughed at himself, too, because the alternative to that was screaming, and Ienzo didn’t really feel like screaming right now.

His grip tightened around the shaft of the Keyblade, and he noticed some kind of energy amassing in the palm of his hand. Had his magic come back, too? Hoping for the best, Ienzo simply sat back and let the mysterious power do what it would. He couldn’t see anything anymore, but he could feel the metal shifting in his hand. The spike that was driven into his head came neatly out, and for all he could tell, his brain and skull had repaired themselves. Ienzo felt the texture of the blade change; it wasn’t exactly metal anymore. There was a different feeling to it now, like extremely worn leather. It was much easier to grip…

Grip.

He was holding the grip. Of the Keyblade. The dead Keyblade had shifted itself in space, and given him the grip.

Ienzo wanted to laugh again. He had no idea what in fuck was going on, but he loved it.

The man swung the blade around blindly, feeling its weight. He had no idea where he was, or where the Orcus was, at least until he met resistance. Experimentally, Ienzo hacked at it; there was a sound like a rush of wind, and the resistance was gone. So, he assumed, was the Heartless.

He had a Keyblade. A working Keyblade. In his hand.

Shortly afterward, he dropped it somewhere off to the side, feeling more laughter bubble up his throat. He missed the feeling.

Vision still obscured with red, the man stood up, throwing his arms out to keep balance. He stood there for a moment, letting the desert wind blow across his face, and then collapsed spectacularly.

— — —

The room Ienzo woke up in was very bright indeed. This was the first thing he noticed when he opened his eyes; immediately afterward, he decided that he didn’t want to open them that much anyway, and rolled over in the unfamiliar (and probably white) bed. His memories were hazy at best, but he could feel physical and mental exhaustion, the kind that sticks with a person well after they’ve slept through the night. He knew it well. But unlike most other instances, no one was shaking his shoulders and demanding he wake up for some event or another — so Ienzo decided that he would just keep on dozing for as long as he could. Someone would come eventually.

Maybe, in a different circumstance, he would have been more worried. The logical part of his brain would override everything else. But right now, Ienzo had the distinct impression that the logical side of his brain had short-circuited, and it wouldn’t be returning to normal for a very long time. That was fine with him.

— — —

Eventually, the dreaded time came. Someone woke him. The movement was gentle, so much so that Ienzo didn’t even realize he was being shaken for about thirty seconds. The silver-haired man sat up, rubbing his eyes and yawning; he had apparently been passed out on a couch, but the usual back pain that came with sleeping on one was peculiarly absent. Blinking, Ienzo looked straight ahead, and saw nothing but a still-white wall. He looked to his left; the side of the couch, cushiony and white. He looked to the right, and found a whole room made of nothing but whiteness. For a second, Ienzo thought he was alone; then, he looked down.

“Uh,” he said, intelligently.

The boy was too short to notice at first, but it was immediately obvious who he was; after all, nothing about Ienzo’s appearance really changed much between the ages of nine and twenty-one.

Ienzo, the shorter, stared back at him.

“He… llo,” Ienzo-the-older began. On his best days, he wasn’t really sure about how to act in situations like this.

There was a short pause, and then Ienzo-the-younger said, “hello.”

“Come again?” Ienzo asked.

“hello.”

‘Oh,’ Ienzo thought, feeling an awkward lurch in his stomach that he couldn’t identify. ‘He… I always spoke very quietly at this age.’

“Hello,” Ienzo repeated, unaware that he was repeating himself until it was too late. The boy probably noticed immediately. “I’m sorry, I…” He had to look away, back at one of the white walls; trying to remember anything at this point was hard enough, so he didn’t need to be staring at his younger self as he did it. “…I’m not completely sure what happened, myself. If you were expecting a logical explanation, I’m sorry, I have none. Yet.”

At the last word, Ienzo-the-younger nodded, as if satisfied with the response. He probably wasn’t, Ienzo knew; neither of them were ever truly satisfied without a logical explanation. He could only hope that it was good enough for now.

“…can you…”

Ienzo looked back over at his younger self. “Yes?”

“…can you just… tell me what you know? …we can… figure it out from there…”

The man nodded. “That is a good idea.” Before he acted on it, though, Ienzo turned himself to sit properly on the couch, and then stood up. He stretched, and noticed that his muscles ached in the way that muscles did when they had been dormant for too long — but not in the way muscles did when subjected to the torture that Ienzo had just lived through. He looked around the room once again, more aware this time. It was quite small, with the only piece of furniture being the couch he had just been lying on. The walls were bare except for a single door across the room; it looked normal, if treated to a coat of white paint like everything else.

“Alright,” Ienzo said, sitting back heavily on the couch. “Let me see what I can remember.”

Quietly, Ienzo-the-younger sat down on the opposite end. Right — he didn’t like getting extremely close to people.

Now that Ienzo thought about it, he realized that he would need to figure out some things about Ienzo-the-younger’s frame of reference. Obviously, he could approximate the age, but… many things happened around that time period in very quick succession. Miscalculating could be a disaster.

“Before I begin, I just want to ask a few things of you.”

“…to… gauge what i know, right…?”

“Yes. Exactly.” Suddenly feeling foolish, Ienzo realized that trying to pull one over on his younger self was an exercise in futility. Perhaps more importantly, it would be a betrayal of trust. Ienzo didn’t know where he or his younger self stood, in the grand scheme of space and time, but he refused to make the child an enemy. (If anything, he should be the one being punished.)

“Do you know Xehanort?” he began. “He’s a… young man, with dark skin and long silver hair.”

Ienzo-the-younger nodded. “…he came to the castle… a few days ago…”

For what seemed like the millionth time, Ienzo found himself staring wide-eyed at nothing in particular as he put the pieces together in his head. A few days ago. That meant that Xehanort hadn’t had nearly enough time to get his thoughts into… the younger Ienzo’s head.

“Oh, hearts above,” he said out loud, and immediately wished he hadn’t. Ienzo-the-younger was looking at him.

How was he supposed to explain this?

“…You’re from earlier than I thought,” Ienzo explained, choosing his words slowly and deliberately. “Let me just explain.”

So he did. Ienzo talked about the Keybearers, these kids named Sora and Riku and Kairi (yes, the Kairi who used to live in Radiant Garden, that Kairi), about King Mickey and Lea, about the seven lights and thirteen darknesses. They’d only ever had five of the seven necessary blades, but they ran out of time to find more. He talked about the battle that he never learned the conclusion to, the one with the Keybearers, and he talked about his own war against the swarms upon swarms of Heartless (think Unversed, they’re basically Unversed. Following so far? Yes? Good.) With a heavy sigh, he explained the result of the lower plateau battle, about the one last Heartless that had managed to outlive Ienzo’s magic long enough to plunge a dead Keyblade into his head. …But the Keyblade wasn’t dead, as far as he could tell, for all intents and purposes it was alive and sentient, a being with thoughts and feelings and willpower. (Maybe the Keyblade had a heart, he wondered, but then caught himself before he tangented too far.) He went through that whole baffling process again, leaving out the part about the maniacal laughter, and finally came to the end of the story.

Ienzo-the-younger’s expression was comedy gold.

The man found it in him to smile at that. “I know, I know. I… I wouldn’t believe me, if I were in your position, quite frankly.” He then paused again.

Had he ever been in the young boy’s position?

He couldn’t remember.

But Ienzo-the-younger was speaking again, so he figured he should probably listen.

“…i think… this is a dream,” he said. “for me. …this is a dream.”

“The obvious question, then,” Ienzo reasoned, “is what happens when you wake up.”

Ienzo-the-younger just nodded. He hadn’t much to say on that topic. Neither of them knew what was going to happen when Ienzo-the-younger inevitably regained consciousness inside a bed in Radiant Garden, a bed that Ienzo… couldn’t really recall… hearts above. He’d lived off of nothing but memories for ten years, how could he be this forgetful? —A ball of ice formed in Ienzo’s stomach at that point. Zexion. Just the name was enough to strike him with the force of a freight train. Zexion. Zexion, the heartless being that this child would become. Zexion, the byproduct of years upon years of calculated lies and deceit. Zexion, who tried so hard to hold onto the bonds of the Organization even as he himself sunk deeper into the Darkness.

Ienzo curled his hands into fists. Zexion… this innocent child would be Zexion one day. And even if Ienzo was capable of changing it, would he really want to? Would he want to compromise the timeline like that? What would happen if Ienzo-the-younger actually avoided that fate, if…

“…i… enzo.”

“Yes.” Suddenly, his tone sounded just as blank as the boy’s.

“…what’s wrong?”

The man heaved a sigh and leaned forward on the couch, head in his hands. “…I might as well be frank with you,” he said, just as much to himself as anyone else. For some children, maybe it was best to leave these topics until they were older, but Ienzo had a feeling that he had never been one of those children. “Your life… at least, the life that I’ve seen… terrible things are going to happen at several points down the line.”

Ienzo-the-younger said nothing, but nodded.

“If I tell you anything more, and you wake up, you’ll obviously have advance knowledge. With this knowledge, you can avoid the traps that I fell into, and probably be a lot better off than me, in the end. But— you understand where I’m going with this, don’t you?”

“…if anything changes… there will be… consequences.”

“So many consequences.” There were so many nuances to time travel, the sort that one would have to study extensively to understand. In fact, it’s almost universally acknowledged that unless one is a specialized temporal mage, casting time spells is a recipe for disaster no matter what happens. Ienzo wasn’t a Time mage, plain and simple. He knew a few basic details that he picked up from Luxord, but certainly not enough to navigate the dreamscape of his own young mind.

“…let’s wait.”

“That is one option,” Ienzo conceded. “That… is one option. But surely, you realize… I don’t know what or where I am. I might be dead. This talk with you may be my last moments of coherent thought.”

Both of them were quiet for a while.

“well,” Ienzo-the-younger mumbled after a while. “…you’re… probably dead, anyway…”

Suddenly, Ienzo realized that he may have been romanticizing a little bit. The child was younger… but he knew even less of tact than the current one did. He consoled himself by choosing to interpret it as a compliment on his part, for learning so well from people who weren’t Even.

In some kind of awful way, though, what the boy said was true. A Heartless had just put his head on a stick. No level of Cure could fix that, especially one that came from a Keyblade without a master. He had died; his body was destroyed, and his soul almost certainly went with it, assuming that Ienzo’s demise followed the pattern of literally every other death known to man. So, that made him a…

“Oh, no,” Ienzo said, staring off into the distance again. “Oh, no.”

He knew that Ienzo-the-younger was looking at him expectantly.

“Your heart,” he said. “We’re in your heart.”