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It starts with a knot in her chest.
It feels almost like vines, the way the tangles move up the back of her throat and settle cotton-thick in her mouth.
Sora’s ice cream dangles from his hands as he glances at her. If she focuses, she can see the space between his gloves and his fingers where skin used to be. The sunset of Twilight Town is beautiful even when it shines through him.
“Are you okay, Kairi?”
It must be terrible for him to notice. He usually doesn’t.
The world around her dims. All she can feel is her heart, thumping painfully in her chest. The vines squeeze with every beat.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.
They strangle the toothless platitudes crawling up from her heart, desperate to escape. Kairi swallows around a mouthful of invisible cotton.
She forms a patchwork smile from memories of brighter days. She’s careful not to show her teeth. She’s prettier when she doesn’t.
“That’s better! The guys always say that the gummi ship runs on smiles. I bet this clock tower is just like that, too,” Sora says, grinning like he isn’t already half-gone.
Kairi keeps smiling.
There is a single moment where Kairi thinks she’s found Sora. She spent every one of their final moments together carving him into her memory. It took so much effort; her memory prefers to live in silhouettes and blurred colors, not sharp photography.
If there’s one thing she knows, it’s the way he sleeps: dead to the world around him.
The boy asleep on this throne, in a lonesome, gray copy of the Land of Departure, twitches and fidgets in his sleep. As if even in a dream, he’s managed to find a nightmare.
His eyes snap open as Kairi steps forward. Xehanort-laced gold freezes her in place. Her heart screeches in her chest as vines trail up her throat and pierce her skin with invisible thorns. She’d throw up if she could.
But she can’t, so she stands stone-still, a rabbit feebly accepting the lion’s jaw breathing hot and heavy around her throat.
“They killed you too, Princess? Talk about rough,” he says, in a voice deeper and wearier than Sora’s.
He gets to his feet with a dancer’s grace. He saunters towards her, giving her a better view of his glowing yellow eyes. He wears an old copy of Sora’s face, laying claim to the round cheeks and soft chin he had when he was a little less heroic.
Kairi struggles to remember why she’s here. She’s here to visit Ven, right? Or maybe Chirithy? She can’t remember.
The boy stops in front of her. She can’t remember his name.
A skull, a wilted flower, a candle nearly burnt down to the wick…
He peers at her with those molten gold irises. She wants to cry but she can’t. “What, Flood got your tongue?”
Kairi cannot move.
She remembers she’s asleep right as the abyss takes her away.
“You two are just like brothers,” Aqua says.
Like a proper lady, she covers her mouth when she laughs. Kairi studies the way her fingers curl over her lips. She makes a note to copy it for the next time something pierces her shell enough to make her laugh.
Sora and Riku exchange glances. “Brothers, huh?” Sora says. He grins, blindingly bright. “Guess Riku got all the good looks between us, right?”
Kairi recognizes Riku’s smile. It’s the same she wears most days she’s with Sora. The kind of smile that suffers for Sora’s sake. “Yeah, I guess,” says Riku.
She wonders how deep into his skin that knife goes.
“When are you going to realize that your little power nap isn’t actually helping anyone find Sora?” Vanitas asks.
“Shut up,” Kairi replies.
“Make me.”
She flings Destiny’s Embrace at him. He disappears in a flash of shadow before the hit connects. Kairi spins on her heel, searching to see where he went.
Vanitas reappears directly over her head. He drops to his feet behind her and clamps down on her wrist.
The dream shatters in two.
Whenever Sora sees Ven carrying Chirithy in his arms the way a child would their favorite stuffed animal, he turns to Kairi and laughs. “I knew it’d work out for Chirithy. Even if the memories are gone, the friendship never leaves!”
Kairi smiles at him.
When Ven distracts Sora with a new training technique, Kairi takes the opportunity to approach Chirithy. She crouches down until they’re as eye-level as she can get. “How’s life with Ven, Chirithy? Everything you hoped for?” she asks with a small giggle.
Chirithy doesn’t giggle back. Kairi regrets opening her mouth. She goes to apologize, but Chirithy starts with a halting sigh before she can.
“It’s… it’s nice. Really. But he isn’t the Ven I remember.”
“That makes sense. People change as they grow up.”
“It isn’t that. I loved every part of him. His joy, his sorrow, his drive, even his loneliness. Now, it’s like a piece of him that I loved so much is just… gone.”
“Sifted apart, nice and neat,” Kairi mutters.
“But isn’t the messiness what makes love beautiful?” Chirithy asks.
She can’t speak. It hurts.
Instead, she smiles.
This time, Kairi wakes up right as Xehanort is about to kill her. She struggles to free herself, but his magic is powerful, too powerful for someone as pathetic as her to break out of.
From below the cliff, Riku watches. Angry. Unmoving.
Xehanort wheezes when he breathes, each exhale like a radiator gone bad. Her pulse races like the rabbit she is.
She squeezes her eyes shut, waiting for No Name to end her life the way it always does. Always, always and forever, the princess cannot be saved from her destiny.
Xehanort grunts, pained. Something hot sprays across her back where his keyblade should strike.
His magic fails.
She uses her light to wrench her body back onto the cliffside, the solid ground beneath her feet feeling like every prayer she’s ever whispered in these final moments.
She stares into a pair of eyes the same shade of gold as the ones that keep killing her.
Xehanort’s corpse fades to nothing at her feet.
“Well,” Vanitas says, dismissing his keyblade even as Xehanort’s blood still stains its teeth, “I’ve always wanted to do that.”
When Sora disappears for good, it’s in front of all of their friends.
His back shimmers not to light, not to darkness, but to nothing at all. His only hint of existence lives in the broken hearts he leaves behind.
Then the eyes turn to her.
Kairi wonders if this is how trapped rabbits feel before they’re eaten alive.
An empty skull sits on a table, illuminated by a single candle. Other items surround it: a flower ready to wilt, a used match, an empty seashell.
Kairi stares at the painting.
“Can anyone tell me what artistic concept this painting represents?” asks the teacher.
Kairi’s hand shoots up into the air. She’s thrown herself into her schoolwork since Riku left. Can’t be lazy if he isn’t here to begrudgingly let her copy off his homework.
Something about that feels wrong - isn’t Riku a year older than her? - but she decides to worry about it after she’s gotten this question right.
“Yes, Kairi?”
“It’s called a Vanitas,” she chirps. “Symbolic reminders of the transience of life.” Right from the textbook.
Vanitas hums from the desk next to hers. “So that’s what it means.”
Sora’s dead, says nobody.
We’ll find him, they say instead, as if Sora was a piece of homework they all collectively happened to misplace the day before it was due.
Riku says that Sora said the same thing about Kairi - who truly, actually died.
People live in on others’ memories after death, and Sora fought against nature itself to piece her obliterated heart together from the fragments of herself that the other guardians held.
If Kairi could be resurrected, then how much easier could it be to find Sora?
He’s only missing.
Kairi thinks that all the years she spent on Destiny Islands longing to see the outside world were to prepare her for this - joining Olette for the first sleepover she has ever had, side-by-side in the same bed.
Olette was so excited for Kairi to come over. She never had a friend-who-is-a-girl before Kairi. Apparently knowing each other for five hours is more than enough to become friends who share sleepovers.
Kairi’s seen the teen movies. She’s read all the books.
She doesn’t think sleepovers with your friend-who-is-a-girl are supposed to feel like this, with fireworks blooming under her skin because Olette’s fingers brushed against Kairi’s as she rolled over to face her.
Olette is so thoughtful. She offered Kairi a plate of strawberries and ice cream for dessert, with the strawberries cut into cute little triangles just because it looked nicer. She spent five minutes digging through her cabinets searching for the fluffiest spare pillow for Kairi to use.
She is so pretty.
Olette smiles. The sight is so blinding that Kairi buries her face in her pillow, her entire face burning iron-hot. She tilts her head just enough to steal a glance at Olette. Her stomach flips at the sound of Olette’s soft chuckle.
She finally understands why the other Princesses of Light make so many jokes about love at first sight.
She also understands that this is how Sora is supposed to make her feel.
In Kairi’s memory, she knows how this fairy tale ends: with Kairi muttering an excuse about how tired she is, turning her back to Olette, and laying still like a corpse until sleep takes her two hours later. In the morning they don’t talk about what happened, eating their cereal and melon slices in silence.
In Kairi’s dream, she indulges in fantasy. She covers Olette’s fingers with her own, banishing her fear to a world far away from the drowsy confines of Twilight Town, and learns what it feels to kiss someone she actually wants to kiss.
The vines curl around Kairi’s heart. She can feel every pulse, thumping in her chest, echoing in the thin skin of her ears. She’d tear her own heart and fling it off the highest tower in this awful castle if it’d give her a moment of peace and quiet.
Kairi forces her breath to stay even. She trains her expression to remain serene, pleasant, unreadable. Her mind tries to drift from her body; she shackles it in place.
She’s fine.
“What ails you, Kairi?” Aurora asks. Her Princess of Heart powers are gone, passed on to another, but her perception remains.
She was their unofficial leader, once upon a dream. She did not break them from the shared nightmare Maleficent put the Princesses of Heart under, but she coached them through the aftershocks. She helped them understand.
She helped Kairi to learn how to stop seeing her body as a shell, but as something to love and to nourish.
There’s no point in lying, as much as Kairi may want to. “I can’t touch cold things without wanting to cry. I lit the last person who tried to grab my arm on fire. I can’t even go home. Everything just reminds me of another way I failed.”
“We all make mistakes.”
“I wish I could just sleep forever.”
She’s taken to sleeping on Lea’s couch in the apartment he shares with Isa, Roxas, and Xion. They feed her. Wrap blankets around her shoulders. Pretend that she isn’t broken beyond repair.
Aurora smiles the way Kairi should: a beautiful flick of her lips upward, mastered with a painter’s grace, never quite brazen enough to show her teeth. Kairi used to snort whenever she laughed.
“I slept for so long before my prince saved me. It’s frightfully easy. But staying awake? Trying to be the light that guides your loved ones forward even as you feel every pulse of darkness from their hearts? That, my dearest, is the hard part.”
Kairi watches the sun greet the sky, shedding light over the ruins of Hollow Bastion.
With his back to hers, Vanitas watches the moon sink below the horizon.
“Tell me what it’s like to be in love,” Vanitas says.
Kairi tilts her head. “I don’t know. I’ve never been in love.”
“Not with Sora?”
“Everything would be so much easier if I was.” Kairi touches her throat, praying that the vines won’t choke her today. “Tell me what it’s like to be half of a whole.”
Vanitas’s gloves brush against the stone railing they sit on. Seconds later, a rock meets the railing with a sharp clink. “If our union had actually completed… we could have become the world itself.”
The vines recede to where they belong. Kairi can speak again.
She wonders if they bloom where she can’t see, flowers peeking through the space between her lungs. “Did you hate him?”
“Yes,” Vanitas says, but she can hear his uncertainty. He can’t lie like she can.
“Are you sure? Hate and love really aren’t that different.”
“It doesn’t matter anymore,” he says.
At least that sounds like the truth.
Kairi thinks Riku might be in love with Sora. She’s seen the way his gaze softens when he thinks of Sora. She hears the sweet fondness he coats Sora’s name in.
She once asked Naminé if she’s ever noticed the look. Naminé responded with a picture: Riku standing as the only smudge of black in a pristine white room, his hand pressed against frosted glass, his eyes fixed on Sora’s sleeping form. She’s seen devout worshippers face their god with less reverence.
But Sora is still the same little boy-prince who knelt Riku down in the sand and knighted him with a palm frond.
Kairi has always been the princess, and Sora has always known how their tale is supposed to end: marriage bells, doves, happily ever after.
It’s the knight’s duty to silently safeguard their happiness.
Riku does not resent Kairi for having Sora’s affections. He has better reasons to resent her.
He’ll never say it, but she knows it’s true.
Kairi’s flung back once again. She tries to get to her feet and fails, falling face-first into the sand. She spits out the grit in her mouth and grimaces.
Vanitas’s keyblade stares unblinkingly at her. She glances at it before tearing her gaze away, her stomach churning.
She rubs her wrist.
Vanitas grabs a rock and carves another tally mark into a nearby tree.
This makes twenty-seven.
“Are you sure you want to do that?” Chirithy asks. She feels a kinship with the small creature, one that’s only expanded in the gap that Sora’s absence has left within her. “The realm of sleep borders on death, after all.”
With Ven off searching the Realm of Darkness for any sign of Sora, Kairi’s taken to visiting the Land of Departure to care for the castle grounds, managing the tasks Chirithy is too little to do on its own.
Chirithy understands how painful it is to wait. How enraging it is to feel useless.
How empty it is after losing everything.
“Sora brought me back by searching through the Guardians’ hearts, right? If I went to sleep, it’d make it easier for the researchers to comb my heart for any leads,” Kairi explains. The speech leaves her easily, her countless times spent practicing it in the mirror until she believed it herself finally coming to use.
“You don’t need to lie,” Chirithy says softly.
Kairi feels like she’s been slashed in two. She blinks back sudden tears. She didn’t think she’d be found out so easily. “What do you mean? It’s true.”
“You’ve lied so much you almost believe it yourself, don’t you? But you don’t have to hide the truth from me, too.”
Kairi takes a deep breath. Her lungs can’t expand fully, not with the vines constricting them.
The truth spills out. “I’m not strong enough to fight the Heartless in the Realm of Darkness. I don’t know enough about the worlds to find Sora’s friends there and ask them. There’s nothing left of him at the islands. I’m useless. What else can I do but sleep?”
Riku used to call her lazy all the time, back when they were friends. He’d never dare to now. It wouldn’t feel like a joke.
“You can support your friends! What about Riku? He’s leading the entire search. Won’t he need a friend to guide him?”
Kairi can’t stop shaking her head. She feels like a broken doll, forced to repeat the same motions into infinity. “I can’t be that friend. I have what he wants. I can’t hurt him that way.”
“And you sleeping for who knows how long won’t hurt?”
“It won’t hurt him as much.”
Chirithy sighs. “I didn’t want to say this, but… I don’t think this is about protecting him. Sure, you’re doing this for Sora. I think you’re doing it even more for yourself.”
Kairi starts to cry. Her heart hammers in her chest. Every beat pounds against her already-battered emotions.
“I hate myself,” Kairi says.
Chirithy walks over to her. It hugs her leg. That’s all it can reach. “I know.”
Kairi would tear her heart out if she could.
That’s when she remembers that this is a dream, and Kairi needn’t worry about something as silly as the laws of nature getting in her way.
Her hand plunges into her own chest like she’s made of water. She finds her heart easily, hot and waiting for her. Her fingers wrap around its warmth and she pulls with all her strength.
Vanitas watches, and for the first time, she cannot read the lines of his face.
Vines cling to her hand, desperate to keep herself in one piece. Kairi grits her teeth and pulls harder, ignoring the pain flaring through every nerve as the vines wheedle and screech in protest. One by one she rips them away, withering to ash and bone in her chest as she cleaves herself apart.
Her heart, she has come to learn, is not an organ. It is not a beating muscle, the kind of valves and muscle she once spent hours looking at in anatomy class.
Her heart is not a light. Not the simple, peaceful little thing that even pure lights have.
Ven’s heart looks like a fairy dancing in air.
Kairi’s heart is a pink flower, one whose name is lost to her. She stares at the crystalline object in her hand as the last of the vines give their swan song and die between her fingers.
All that she is, held in the palm of her hand.
She reaches out to Vanitas. “Destroy it.”
Vanitas raises a single eyebrow, just as impassive as before. “Really?”
Kairi nods. “I’m sick of it. You destroy hearts, don’t you? Destroy mine.”
Vanitas gets to his feet. He walks towards her the way a snake slithers through grass. “For the record, Ventus destroyed our heart, not me. Maybe you should hunt him down instead.”
Kairi bites back a growl. She stares at the thing that’s ruined so many lives. She wonders if Vanitas is mimicking its silent serenity, the same way he’s mimicked so many of her other emotions.
And she squeezes. She squeezes until her dream-fingers bleed, red dyeing the pink something gory and gruesome. When it doesn’t work, she takes her heart in both hands and tries to snap it in two.
And when that doesn’t work, she throws it against the castle floor with all her strength. It rolls away, pristine and untouched, leaving a trail of blood in its wake.
Vanitas stops it with his boot. He tilts his head as he considers it, before reaching down and picking it up. It glows in his hand, bright and beautiful against his black gloves.
“I thought it would hurt to touch it,” Vanitas says, turning it around and around.
“It hurts me. It hurt Sora, too.”
“Good thing I’m not Sora.”
“Then do what Sora wouldn’t. Get rid of it.”
Again, Vanitas raises an eyebrow. “Do you really think no one would miss you if you never woke up?”
Kairi tries to fight back her tears and fails, just like she’s failed every other battle she’s ever been in. She covers her face in her hands and wails, crying the way princesses never should. It’s ugly and wrenching, shaking her body from head to toe.
It’s better that Vanitas makes no move to comfort her.
Riku watches Kairi as she settles on the laboratory chair. It’s uncomfortable, made of the kind of plastic pilfered from a dentist’s examination room.
He stands like a mourner at the funeral Kairi should have had if Sora wasn’t such a hero.
“You could look for him with me,” Riku says. It’s a waste of his breath. He doesn’t really want her there.
Kairi wonders if the smile she offers him is as cruel as it feels. “It’s better like this. I’d only get in your way if I tagged along.”
She rubs her wrist.
Riku watches.
“Do you really think you’ll dream of him?” Riku asks.
“Do you still dream of him?”
Riku pauses.
“Every night.”
Kairi hides her answer behind a smile. She tries to make this one seem kinder.
She doesn’t know how well it works.
“Are you real?” Kairi asks. She ties the final marigold in place and admires her handiwork. It’s come out beautifully. She tilts it towards Vanitas.
“Does it matter?” The fact that he doesn’t comment is approval enough.
She pulls him up just enough to rest the flower crown on his head. “I guess not.”
And so she sleeps.