Don't Look Down

FUTURE

Down is a place.

Down may appear to be only an artifice of gravity, something that happens when you establish the world, the earth and the sky and the sea, the light and the dark, the sun and the stars, and set a planet in a course around the sun, making an order for things—one way is up, and that is towards the sky.

Another way is down, and that is towards the earth.

Down only does make sense in a certain context. Immersed in darkness, with nothing but the air and the dark as far as you can see or perceive, there isn’t such a thing as down, up, left, or right. But in the context of an established world, where there are mountains above and valleys below, a sun here and shadows there, a right thing to do and a wrong thing to do, down is a place. It’s a place absolutely no one wants to go. Down is darker, like in the ocean, or a cave, down is hell. Down is where you go when you’ve done wrong and nobody wants to look you in the eye on the street anymore.

Luckily, no one sees him on the street anymore. And he does not see them.

Down is a place. If you can go down, you can stay down. Down, however, remains subjective—one man’s descent into villainy can be another’s rising through the ranks to a position as CEO. The south pole of down can be anywhere—on the street in an old sleeping bag, locked in someone’s basement, a certain seat in the back of a car, a place at a table, a ditch by the road, or between the third and fourth rib in the left side of his ribcage. Just a little bit down past his skin and down below his throat, where the darkness sits.

He wouldn’t be so trite about his imagery if he couldn’t actually feel the darkness in his heart. It felt cold. It sucked away the heat of his body, it made him slow, it kept him quiet, arms wrapped around his chest, trying to hold in warmth.

It was heavy too. After all, he was keeping another person in there. It was heavy as if he had collapsed there. It was heavy as if it pumped too much blood. As if his blood was crude oil instead, and got stuck trying to push through his veins, got cold, got stagnant like sewage, like his flesh is the icy tundra and his veins are the frozen rivers that can’t quite pass through it.

And his heart is down. This is how people feel when they refer to the pits, when you’re stuck alone in a hole, and the outside world exists, at best, as ambient noise. The pits is in his chest.

The person inside him is an entire way down. Riku feels like he’s been crawling out of the pit, and there are arms all over him, pulling him back, covering his eyes. Like Orpheus, only blind trust leads him on, the hope that somewhere, once he’s bled himself white, there’s a life that…. feels better than this.

Like Orpheus, he can’t look back.

He absolutely cannot look back.

He hears a voice inside him sometimes. He doesn’t think he’s going crazy, because he knows whose voice it is, after all. Crazy is a moot point. Crazy isn’t a fear to him any longer, it would just be another problem. So not crazy says sometimes: “Why do you run from your fears?”

Riku doesn’t want to dignify that with an answer. But he does. He shouldn’t, but he does. “Why would a person scared of death run away from it? Because it wouldn’t exactly help him to face it.”

“It won’t kill you. You know that, at least. I don’t like it when you play at being stupid.”

The computer hummed steadily, still working, after weeks of being online. The screens had been turned off, because the light was starting to hurt Riku’s eyes. The only sign that the computer was still working and Twilight Down hadn’t died in some horrible viral cataclysm was a steady beeping accompanied by a little blue LED light, disturbingly like a heart monitor, flickering on and off.

Of course, Riku couldn’t really see the light, he could only hear the beeping, because he had covered his eyes.

DiZ was out. So was Namine. He was down here, alone, looking after Twilight Town, the little blue world humming inside of a computer.

Alone, except for with Xehanort.

He had not turned the lights on when night fell. He had simply let darkness take over the basement, bringing silence with it, silence, except for the sound of beeping.

And Xehanort.

“Are you going to answer me, boy?” Xehanort asked him.

His voice… wasn’t heard, so much as felt, as if his voice were little points of pressure in Riku’s skull, pressing on where the understanding of words was in his brain. When he said darkness, Riku saw darkness. When he said fear, Riku saw the things he feared. When he said boy, Riku saw a poor little boy cowered in the darkness, in a basement, far away from everyone he once loved, curled up and listening to the sound of beeping.

“I won’t go back to the darkness. It made me do horrible things. You made me do horrible things. I would have to be stupid to listen to you.”

“Oh, Riku,” sighed Xehanort. “At least you realize some things. For such a promising boy, you have an incredible aptitude for stupid decisions.”

Well.

Can’t argue with that.

“Such as your choice to suffer so needlessly. What pains had you when you worked alongside me? What doubts and moods needled you then? Did you suffer from this self-hatred and pity? Did you find yourself immobile and helpless, unable to protect the ones you love? Did you have to endlessly question and doubt yourself before taking action? You did not.”

Sensations of contentment and peace, of nostalgia and resentment, coupled with memories of power were drawn in his mind, wafting through his awareness like smoke in the air, sudden as moments and silent as moth wings, making his feel dizzy, disoriented, unbalanced. Riku shook his head. “You won’t tempt me with power, Xehanort. I’ll never take it again.”

“You let fear rule you,” said Xehanort contemptuously, pushing just a few buttons and making Riku’s mind feel like a cage, bars pressing on his skull. Riku’s breathing intensified. He tried to focus on the beeping, the sound that meant Twilight Town was alive and well.

“You had the power to protect and preserve those who were important to you once,” Xehanort pressed, calling up images of his friends, his family, those who had already helped him so much; “and you gave it up, why? For what reason? The terror of the unknown? A few little doubts?”

“I gave it up because you literally took over my body and tried to kill my best friend!” Riku shouted, slamming his palm against the keyboard without meaning to. The screen flashed on, but all that happened was a little video of things that were happening in Twilight Town blinked into view.

Roxas was fast asleep.

Ashamed, Riku quickly turned the screen back off. “They can protect themselves,” he finally said. “I was stupid to think I had, or ever would have, the power to save someone.”

Xehanort was silent for a minute. Riku could feel his annoyance, a pressure in the back of his mind, like a gathering storm cloud, disturbing the electrons in the air.

Xehanort was down, it was as simple as that. Xehanort was the downhill slope, and Xehanort was the place at the bottom of the hill. Riku had been there. He had felt what it was like to have every muscle pulled from your control and manipulated from an outside force, as surely as strings twined around the little limbs of a puppet. And Xehanort was still there, in the back, as if standing in the room behind him, waiting.

All Riku had to do… was not look down.

Easier said than done.

“You are lying,” said Xehanort. “You’ve worked hard to suppress your dreams and your desires. You try very, very hard to pretend that all you want to do is help. That’s not true. You want the glory. You want it badly.”

Don’t look down.

Look down, and you might fall down.

“What I want.” said Riku. “What I want isn’t important.” He swallowed. “That’s the truth I have to face. What I want isn’t important. Because it’s not what I have to do.”

“Letting DiZ control your actions, putting yourself in a cage, resining yourself to be the watchman in a watchtower, hoping someone else jumps in to save the day when you know you could fix all of this easily…” Xehanort scoffed at him, and pulled the haunting images out of his mind suddenly. Riku bit his lip and suppressed the feeling. “If only I could choose another host,” Xehanort finally said. “Nothing is so vile as ruined potential.”

Once again, Riku thought to himself, knees curled up to his chin, senses trained to the faint beeping, unmoved, and unaffected to the outward eye, all but for mumbling to himself and slightly shaking, once again, can’t argue with that.

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PRESENT

“Why is it you look so downcast, Riku?”

Riku was slumped as if he had been cut down against a white wall, legs fallen diagonally before him, blurry in his half-lidded vision.

“Other than being exhausted?” he asked. “I keep going down and down and I don’t get anywhere.”

Riku’s head was buzzing with fatigue. It made Xehanort’s voice… the pictures he made… all strange. Would it be TOO stupid to fall asleep? Sure, the castle was crawling with people thirsting for his blood, but…

“Really, Riku,” Xehanort admonished him. Riku heard fingers tapping impatiently from nearby. “You go on so often about how weak you feel—how exhausted, how hurt, and how taxed—when you know and I know that the solution is right before you. After all, do I slacken when tired? Do I falter when hurt? Do I fray and unravel when taxed? I do not. I have power that sustains me.”

When dark clouds crowd Riku’s vision, called up from nowhere, like ink into water, Riku doesn’t try to dispel them. They’re not an unpleasant picture. He watches them explore the far corners and vaulted ceiling of the white room, spreading more quickly than mold but just as destroying, licking at the solid surfaces like searching flames, driving away their brightness. When Riku tries to lift a hand to wave it all away, his arm feels heavy, won’t lift, won’t do quite as he says… it drops again, abruptly.

“Boy,” says Xehanort, stooping down behind him, or, creating a feeling as if he were bending down behind Riku, presence looming, cold, soft hand being placed on his shoulder, “Do not think I don’t have any of your interests at heart. You don’t take care of yourself. You fall completely apart when alone.”

Riku’s eyes slid closed, because his eyelids felt heavy, because they kept trying to close on their own anyway, because sometimes, it was better to not see what Xehanort made pictures of. Though, did he usually see the pictures in front of him, or feel soft hands on his shoulder? He couldn’t remember. “So what if I do?” asked Riku. “So what if I fall apart a little? What do I have to keep together?”

“I am vexed to hear you say that,” sighed Xehanort. His voice had such a gravelly quality to it. How had Riku never noticed that before? “Am I not always telling you about what promise you have and what power you contain? When you run from it, you deprive yourself of your best qualities—your control, your certainty, your drive, and your charm—and that leaves you weak and scattered. You’re only using the remnants of your own soul.”

Riku felt like he was being split, like rays of light are split by a prism, and one sort of Riku was sitting almost on top of another sort of Riku, one warm, one cool. “Go fuck off, Xehanort,” he mumbled, raising a hand to his face, rubbing his eyes, trying to wake up. All he felt was that unreality in his limbs, as if he were moving a body far away and detached.

Either Xehanort didn’t care about being told to crudely vacate the premises or Riku hadn’t actually said it out loud, since the man seemed unfazed. He knelt down smoothly at Riku’s side. “I’m upset to see you so downcast, Riku. Truly I am. We both know you are so much more.”

Riku’s eyes weren’t opening. His hands froze over his face just because he didn’t much want to move them. “You’re trying to trick me…”

His eyes were closed, but he could see himself, picking up the sleeping Kairi as effortlessly as you will, holding her against his chest, driving away the heartless in his path with nothing but cold magic cast with one hand. He could remember that. Maybe he was just seeing a memory. Had he fallen asleep?

“That was you, once. And I am  ashamed to see such talent go to waste.” As if soothingly, Xehanort rubbed Riku’s shoulder, calming him. “You were in the position to do great things, and you gave it up when you were needed most. How quickly would this castle be conquered and your friends rescued from its clutches if only you were fighting at your full strength? How soon would these fools learn that they made a mistake in challenging you for what you hold dear?”

Far away, as if hauntingly, Riku could see Kairi, on the edge of a cliff, with the ocean below her, and above, the stars of the sky in a dizzying, whirling dance, some turning, some falling, dwarfing her tiny body. Riku tried to reach out to her, but he couldn’t move.

“Denying yourself does not only hurt you,” said Xehanort, whose presence was radiant beside Riku, as solid as the wall, “It harms them.” In his vision, and blurrily as Kairi had appeared, so did Sora, being pulled away from him, hand outstretched, surrounded by a pack of yellow eyes in pairs, a storm lashing the beach. “Surely you’re aware of how quickly you could aid them if only you didn’t have such damning weaknesses as you have now? Surely you remember how quickly foes once fell to you when you were at you greatest?”

Xehanort’s voice dipped on the final word, low, suddenly, emotional, and he gripped Riku’s shoulder tightly, shaking his limp body. Before him, pale as the moon, rising out of the darkness, Riku saw the image of himself, clad in black, his sword in one hand, and the other outstretched. His smile was confident, his pose was strong—he stood in the darkness without being harmed, and not a bit afraid.

It was no distortion. It was his past.

“You do an injustice in holding yourself back, Riku. If you’re determined to sacrifice yourself, then sacrifice yourself into darkness, and become the power we need in order to save the helpless and smite the wicked.”

The buzzing in his head, the feeling of sleep overtaking him, was louder. His thoughts shifted and turned like a wave on the shore. He couldn’t grasp any of them. “It isn’t right…”

Xehanort chuckled fondly. “I do like your determination to do the right thing. But you have been confused. What’s wrong is what I see here, Riku. A boy crumped up like a fallen doll, unable to even move, when his friends desperately need him. Will you be so negligent?”

His past smiled almost teasingly, holding out his hand to him, tapping his foot impatiently. Riku could almost hear his own calling voice— what, giving up already?

“Don’t take it all so seriously, Riku,” Xehanort whispered suddenly. His voice was more quiet and calm than Riku had ever heard it, like the eye of a hurricane. “It isn’t far to fall. You perceive darkness as such a terrible thing, but you know it is comforting and soft, malleable and agreeing, protecting and shrouding. It isn’t the great crime you think it is. It isn’t even very far from you. It’s only a single step.”

Several things happened in one instant, more than should have happened at once. Xehanort breathed a heated breath that Riku felt all over his face, though his face felt numb. Riku finally fell asleep, dropping his clinging consciousness into the pit of slumber. And Riku lifted his eyes up to the vision of himself from the past, drawing in a single, pained and pleading breath.

When Riku let out that breath again, the air in his lungs had turned into foul smoke, as dark as tar, and almost as thick, rolling across the floor.

Riku smiled a soft smile, and dragged his heavy arms up to his chest, so that his hands could clutch at either side of his heart. Everything was very, very quiet.

“Finally,” he whispered, almost in rapture, and rose to his feet in an instant, as if he had never been tired at all. “Now, finally, nothing is stopping me. I have to thank you for setting my head straight, Xehanort.”

He brought the darkness out the door with him and down the stairs like a beast prowling for its prey.

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PAST

If you asked someone from the Destiny Islands from whence the Islands got their unusual name, they would either shrug and tell you the old-timers knew that, or, if they were an old-timer, they would bring you out of the town and onto the beach, where tall, tropical trees grow in little patches, and they will tell you that the islands were named for their trees. There, the Paupu trees grow a fruit that, when consumed by two lovers, binds them together for all lives to come. Because here on the islands grows the means to contort destiny, so they are called Destiny Islands.

What no one knows, not even the old-timers, is that the trees are the scrabbling leftovers of an older, buried power. On every island in the chain, there are caves and tunnels, hills and rifts, testaments to their volcanic creation. There is a cave on each island, and in that cave, a door, placed there in ancient times, now locked, and presumably unable to be opened. 

If someone were to open the doors, however, what happened to them would hardly be their fault.

-

Over one hundred years ago, of a generation no one should be alive to remember, a man named Xehanort was born on a small town in the Destiny Islands. The nearest school was several islands away: he didn’t go there. The Island he was born on belonged entirely to his family, nuclear and extended, and wasn’t large: essentially, he knew no one else until he grew old enough to start sailing on his own, from island to island, to buy or to sell. And one thing his family grew was Paupu, and so Paupu he sold, often to wedding parties, sometimes to the eloping, sometimes to the poor who gave them to their children, since the most naturally occurring fruit on the island were the cheapest.

People could have climbed the trees to pick them their selves, possibly, but the trees were harsh, hard, and covered with the natural defenses of plants-- little spikes, sap and slime, burrowing insects—people would rather leave this sort of thing to the farmers. So Xehanort was bred to climb the trees, steal the star-shaped fruit, sail across empty ocean to islands on the horizon, and sell them to newer families.

Newer families, of course, were visible by sight, they had not the pale, silvery hair of the original inhabitants, nor were they so dark-skinned from millennia of sunlight. When two cultures had blended, or perhaps developed on the Destiny Islands, no one could say. That was lost to memory. All they knew for sure was that Xehanort’s type was the elder, because they knew things. They knew the caves. They knew the trees. They were dangerously close to the heart of something, heart of its heart.

Xehanort was solitary, not through his own efforts, not entirely. He had grown up alone, was he to suddenly transform into something different? Alone, though a state, is also a place, a personality, a type—so he always was. Odd, for the picker of the Paupu, but weren’t the elder ones odd anyway? He would get in his little boat, painted black with tar against the water, rigged with white sails, and sail in the night, when the water was empty and the shoreline was lit only by fireflies and stars, in the time which felt best to him, and find the forgotten islands. The Destiny Islands were many, and stretched out over a long area, so that the little ones, with only some trees and hills, were often forgotten, even after people had lived there, leaving houses and ranches behind. He would find herds of sheep gone wild, temples falling over, graveyards with names no one remembered, and sometimes, islands to small and too rocky to have ever been inhabited—but none of that was what he searched for.

He searched for the doors.

He had already figured out that no one could sail away from the Destiny Islands. And he had developed a theory that the only ways out were above and below. He had no way to leave from above, but below, below he could go. He would walk into the caves, and try the doors. The doors had been locked long ago, and supposedly, no one could open them.

Perhaps it was because Xehanort was a full-blooded islander, perhaps because he was serious, solemn, and smart, and fit the role of the one who hunted for knowledge. Perhaps it was because someone down below liked him.

Perhaps it was Destiny.

-

Riku found out everything when he learned, from what Sora had heard in the realms of sleep, that Xehanort came from the self-same islands they had. After all, shouldn’t they have been able to see that? He was a tanned island man. He had chosen the Destiny Islands as his arena to face them when they were first fighting his heartless. And when he had become consumed by the darkness and chose to unleash the heartless upon another world, he had chosen the Destiny Islands, out of all the places he could have chosen. And he chose their island. The play island.

And he chose Riku.

-

The door that opened for Xehanort was in a relatively small cave in a relatively small island. Some wild Paupu grew; the interior of the island denser with trees that most were. A smaller island, only sand, floated just above the water by its side. A door lead into the cave, and a door in the cave, filled with damp mushrooms, dark and uncommonly silent, led into the heart of the island.

-

“Defend yourself.”

Riku’s voice was clipped and harsh. He spoke out of nowhere, and, seemingly, to no one. He was alone in his room, to the sound of air conditioning humming and the chatter of birds outside, where Sora and Kairi continued sparring after Riku felt a turn. He blamed it on the insomnia, and Kairi insisted he take a nap.

Really, Riku had just been thinking, and his thoughts had given him his turn. True, he was tired from his insomniac fits as well, but that was the sort of thing he was used to.

What he wasn’t used to was this doubt that had turned up. This knowledge, this apple-of-eden grade knowledge.

“From you? Are we taking up arms again?”

There Xehanort was. Floating in the back of his mind like a ship far away on the water.

“I mean,” said Riku, “Explain yourself. How could you justify using your own flesh and blood as your puppet?”

And there was the truth.

It wasn’t really true until he said it. And then he knew. He would have known even if he hadn’t felt the mirth and joy that seeped out of Xehanort’s presence, darkly pleased.

“I should have known long ago,” Riku muttered to himself.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Xehanort laughed. “You’re half-breed, after all. You probably don’t consider yourself an old islander, little pale-as-death. You have our hair, you are tall like us, stocky and serious—but on the outside, you may as well be bone.”

“Why would you target your own family?” Riku asked angrily.  “Is there anything sacred to you at all?”

“On the contrary,” said Xehanort, “I am quite a devotee.”

All of this knowledge had been sneaking onto Riku for some time. It hadn’t obsessed him, but when something reminded him, when a little cloud crossed his mind again… the coincidences piled up, the similarities in their face, the places they both grew up, the place itself in which they grew up, the people, the worlds, the timing—the damn fruit. Riku had grown up picking the fruit. Riku had grown up in a family that spoke about Destiny like it was their religion. Fatalists. Riku had been told the stories.

They had a family legend. Some generations ago, there was a boy born into our family, from your mother’s side, who was taught to climb the trees and toll the fields, and, like every boy we teach to climb the trees, he spent all of his time looking up, at the stars, and dreaming. Even when he was supposed to be wide awake, the dreams flittered in front of his eyes.

One day the boy sailed away, no warning, no reason, no signs. If your great-grandfather were alive, he would tell you this was true. It happened. Where he went, no one could say, nor how he left, because everyone knows that those whose destinies are tied to the Islands can never leave them. But if he left, then perhaps another can. Perhaps he is still somewhere, and still knows the secret to leaving the islands.

Some would paint him as the wandering ghost, searching for the next person to take away from the islands with him. His phantom as long enough in legend to cast that shadow. Some would cast him as the only hope of escape. But everyone ended the story with a laugh.

This wasn’t some spirit or demon, after all. This was their own flesh and blood.

How far a human can fall. We all start out with warm hearts. It’s a shame that we do not all end that way.

Riku’s eyes prickled. He felt betrayed. He had grown up in a tight-knit, story-telling, fruit-picking family, looking up at the stars together, and he felt betrayed. He had grown up with the legend of the boy who escaped, and he admired, and he hoped he would find the same escape that that boy had found to leave the islands and travel to other worlds, and he had, and he felt BETRAYED.

“We grew up with the self-same family,” Xehanort told them. “From what I’ve read in your mind, the generations have not changed them. Well, not most of them,” he added despondently, meaning Riku directly. “We both grew up with the legends of fate. Would you believe I would not have picked you if it were not your Destiny?”

Riku grew pale. “I could have fought you. I could have done better.”

“Yes, more of your inspirational self-talks,” Xehanort sighed. “It didn’t have to be, surely you’ll amount to more than this, Xehanort is always wrong and Kairi is always right. I did not sail away from the Islands, Riku. That is what they told you. That is what I assumed. I was always sailing, from here to there, under the shadow of the night in my boat. I left through a door, on an island no one used anymore. The same door which I had you open to bring darkness to the Islands.”

Riku forced himself to breathe calmly. If he cried, if he got upset, he would go back to believing anything bad Xehanort said about him. He knew how this worked. He knew. He had to calm down.

“We were raised in the religion of Destiny, though we never called it that. I did what I was destined to do at every turn. I received the revelation of what I would be destined to do, the people I would become, those whom I would find and recruit, the truths I would find, the worlds whose light I would take—behind a door of Destiny in the Destiny Islands. How did this islander religion come to be? Surely you know. Destiny is real. It is the very rock of the islands. My path in time was set out for me when I opened the door. And so was yours. I saw your fall to the darkness before you were born to your mother. We always had the same destiny. Star-gazers, fruit-pickers, faith-havers, born of the same people, on the same land—one sky, Riku, one Destiny.”

With his head in his hands, Riku absolutely knew that he could not face this right now.

He left the room as quickly as he would flee a monster, leaving laughter behind him.

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