Kingdom Hearts fic: Kept Safe

[mistressofmuses]

Getting this one up after midnight my time, oops!
Still a bit behind, so this is the fill for Day 10: Exiled AU.

I do hope to write a second part to this later in the month.

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The one thing that everyone agreed on was that Kairi needed to be kept safe.

Her heart contained the purest light that Radiant Garden had to offer, the most perfect fragment of the worlds’ own heart, and keeping that safe was of the utmost importance. With that light safe, it did not matter what else happened to Radiant Garden. It could be corrupted by the oncoming darkness. It could fall entirely. Anything could be overcome eventually as long as Kairi, and the heart within her, was unharmed.

...

Best to remove all possibility of contact, to ensure there was truly no chance of someone doing her harm.

The one thing that everyone agreed on was that Kairi needed to be kept safe.

Her heart contained the purest light that Radiant Garden had to offer, the most perfect fragment of the worlds’ own heart, and keeping that safe was of the utmost importance. With that light safe, it did not matter what else happened to Radiant Garden. It could be corrupted by the oncoming darkness. It could fall entirely. Anything could be overcome eventually as long as Kairi, and the heart within her, was unharmed.

Naturally, this meant she could not remain on Radiant Garden. The last, emergency reservoir of light had to be elsewhere.

They considered other places to send her.

Another world nearby, so that she could still be visited by loved ones? The idea was discarded. Too risky, they reasoned, because if anyone was visiting her, that opened her up to the darkness they needed to protect her from, should one of them be compromised.

Somewhere farther away, then? There was a lovely little world, made up of chains of islands, far enough to make visiting difficult, but a peaceful place. Perhaps she could be sent there, to assimilate into the world’s population, kept safe primarily by her anonymity? Rejected in part. A remote world had some appeal, but entering into a ‘normal life’ anywhere introduced too many variables. Too many risks.

Better to remove all possibility of contact, to ensure there was truly no chance of someone doing her harm.

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Kairi spent the day in the library. She spent nearly every day in the library. It wasn’t like she had much choice.

Her home was comfortable, she supposed. She didn’t have much to compare it to, except for vague memories of having grown up somewhere else. Somewhere with people. There certainly weren’t people with her now.

All her basic needs were taken care of. There wasn’t anything she needed that wasn’t provided to her. Food appeared in the kitchen for her. As she grew up, new clothing appeared for her in her bedroom. She had a bedroom, with a comfortable bed. She had the library.

The rest of the building was centered around that library, a tremendous room with a maze of shelves containing books on every topic she could imagine. Kairi had read thousands of books over the years, and there were still always new ones waiting. She knew she’d never reach the end of them, no matter how fast she read. It was comforting, in a way. She had the sense she’d been told to read, that it would be up to her to learn, in the absence of company. It was also possible she’d imagined that conversation. It was hard to know.

Rising above the rest of her home was a tower, with a twisting spiral staircase that led up to a platform, with a room containing glass lenses at the center. From the books she’d read, she thought it might have been a lighthouse once, though the light had never been lit for as long as she’d been there.

The home wasn’t a prison. Kairi had read enough to know what a prison was, that it was somewhere you were locked away, not allowed out of. She could leave her home if she wanted to, and she did, often. On nice days, she would walk down to the beach, strolling along the perimeter of sand and rocks that ringed the small island her home was situated on. She collected shells, or picked flowers, or watched fish swimming just off shore.

She could leave her home, but there was no way off the island. She’d climbed up to the top of the lighthouse tower and stared out over the waves in every direction, but there was nothing to be seen. Everything faded into dense fog some distance from the shore, impossible to see through. From what she’d read about weather, she gathered that it was strange for there to be a perfect circle of fog obscuring everything for years on end, but it was also clearly the norm for her island.

Kairi could lay on the sand and stare up at the stars at night. At least there was no fog above her.

Some of the books said that the stars were really suns with other worlds orbiting them. If that was true, there must be infinite worlds out there. She wondered if there were people there, looking at the world she was on. She wondered if there was anyone as alone as she was.

It was a weird impulse, to try and relight the lighthouse. It had been years with the light gone dark, so it wasn’t like anyone needed the light. Still, when she pulled a book from the shelves, and read about how lighthouses were meant to help and protect and guide… that felt so much like something she was meant to do.

She found what she needed. Driftwood for a fire, the right kind of stone to strike a spark. It took more research and quite a while to succeed, but she had all the time she needed. The feeling when the spark finally took, and she was able to build up the fire was… elation, she thought. Something she’d read the definition of.

She adjusted the lenses, magnifying the light from the fire, sending a beam out to hit the fog.

Kairi wrapped a blanket around her shoulders, and stared out at the fog, where the light from her lighthouse refracted against and into the bank of fog. No one else could see the light, but she could. It was satisfying to know she’d been the one to create it.