☾ head east.
His summer is one drawn-out goodbye. A breathing stillness where he spent his entire June trying to fight the emanating static of the archaic, the outmoded past in lieu of a malleable future. The future was a Rorschach ink blot in the nexus between a question mark and an exclamation point, sequentially blatant and altogether indecipherable. Six ways to Sunday, Isa knows exactly what he’s in for and they embed their disquiet in raw bouts of pseudo-tournaments and tips about magick combos, like power could be taught instead of burdened with. It took a whole month for Sora’s vessel to take him back home. He departs like an exodus en masse, just a flickering aura as if he was the incontrovertible messiah, shivering in light, and then straight back to Destiny Islands with gummi ship in tow. It’s midnight now and somewhere in the midst of August, he exists. There’s all the people he’s rescued, everyone who still needs their salvation, and he’s only a keyblade wielder with gawky limbs and surefire alacrity. The formula for an indomitable protagonist was never so measly, but even a closed circuit destiny is bound to give him a leeway for being self-sacrificial.
Sora’s a boy who died for villains and heroes and the absolution of nothing, and that’s something. After the Mark of Mastery Exam, his life feels somewhat translucent, partially incorporeal with the itch of unfinished business. It’s insatiable, the last keen of an echo in the visible sound spectrum, unceasing. As far as listening to his gut went, Sora was trapped in a constant cliffhanger of the good and the awful and the mediocre, and he can peg which one’s which, anymore. In the place beyond his bones and sinew and muscle, he knows where his heart will always be. And that’s enough to leave, making a last-ditch effort to liberate someone marked for the slaughterhouse. It’s Xehanort’s words against him and his friends, but there’s no way he’s gonna’ let his voice get caught in his throat and rationalize it down to quivering palms and indelible anxiety. That isn’t his nature. He’s lived through fifteen years of unvarnished instinct; he can survive another leap of faith. And he goes.
It’s been real.
The World that Never Was is stagnant as always. Nothing palatable, nothing clear, only formless shapes rising out of the haze, the skeletons of apartment complexes with detachable appendages, windows swung open like every house could be a home. The glass shivers, a precursor to the chill, striking him right where the sun won’t ever shine. No one lives in a town where there are no people. Not really. Not in a place where sincerity doesn’t bleed through the cracks in the pavement, not when existing in the limbo between reality and inexistence with a sense of self is a phenomenon. The sky is a rash of dysphoria, dying shades of phosphorescent blue and dusky black, and he’s standing right in the place where he became whole all over again. There is no settling, this time around; no Roxas to encounter and spiel colloquial jargon at in a two-bit prizefight, because the demons aren’t coming from within. Time is a manifold liar. At some point in the horizon of their lives in tandem, he’s gotta’ confront Isa, disentangling himself from the cloying mist, from the circumference of his fate. His pulse is elliptical in his throat, and somehow, they’re both right back where they started again.
“Hey, Isa. Long time no see.”
