musefic | Kingdom Hearts fic: Reset

I haven't given up on the AUgust fics, just on being on time for them I'm afraid. (My intent is still to make it through the list of prompts... but I just can't keep up the one per day pace!)

This is the fill for Day 18: Time Travel AU

(I suppose you could argue this feels plausibly post-canon as opposed to true AU, but I think I'm playing fast and loose enough with canon rules that it counts, lol.)

The first rewind happened out of desperation.

When Radiant Garden fell, it fell fast. There was no long, slow lead-up; no quiet stirring in the shadows hinting at worse to come. No warning. The darkness overran it in mere hours, first targeting the people who would have been most able to stand against it, overwhelming them by surprise and sheer numbers before spreading out to the rest of the then-unprotected citizenry.

The first rewind happened out of desperation.

Kairi stumbled into the throne room, falling as soon as she was inside the doors. She was bleeding.

Most of the blood on her clothing, on her hands… most of it wasn’t hers. It was Sora’s. It was Riku’s. Enough of it was hers. Her consorts were gone, and she’d be joining them soon. Her world would be left unprotected. She didn’t want to use the last of her magic on a cure spell for herself that would only delay the inevitable.

This was the last place she could think to go, where she’d felt the closest to the heart of her world. It was half-prayer, half-apology, all desperation when she begged the world itself, the heart of Hollow Bastion here at the heart of Radiant Garden: please give me a way to save them. To save my consorts. To save my people. To save you. Please, something, anything.

The surge of heartless was coming for her. Her keyblade flickered just at the edge of her awareness. She could summon it, but how many Heartless could she take with her? Another ten before she succumbed to her wounds? Twenty? A hundred? Any number would be equally useless.

Please, she continued to beg, even as she grew weaker by the second. Please. Let me save them.

The heartless began to boil from the shadows at the edges of the room, all of them converging where she lay.

She wanted more time. She didn’t even cast the stop spell deliberately; it was like something else pushed it out of her, draining the very last of her magic to do so. If a cure spell would have been a pointless delay of her fate, surely a temporary stop on the massing heartless would be even more so?

The last of her magic drained out of her at the same moment she felt the last of her life ebbing away. The heart of the world connected with hers, soothing her and lending her new strength even as she knew it was too late; they were equally doomed.

Then the clock, the visual component of the stop spell, moved backwards.

Kairi woke up in bed, just like any morning. Riku and Sora were still asleep beside her, which was ordinary for the morning, too.

She barely restrained herself from reaching out to grab hold of them both. A terrible nightmare…

It had felt extremely real. Too real.

Kairi spent the morning in a bizarre haze of deja vu. Everything felt like she’d done it before.

Sora excitedly told her about plans for the day, but she knew every word before he said it. She remembered him, bleeding out in the courtyard, overwhelmed too quickly and completely for any of them to ready a cure spell.

Riku asked her advice on a dispute he’d been asked to help settle, and she already knew every detail from when he’d told her before, except that he never had. She remembered watching a heartless’ claws slash through his throat as he tried to get back to Sora.

She wished she could believe it had been a nightmare, but…

“I think there’s something wrong.”

She’d never been so glad that both her spouses were completely willing to listen to her without question, because while they were skeptical, they also believed her.

“So obviously, we have to find where the heartless came from. Or… will come from. Or whatever,” Sora said.

Kairi couldn’t quite disagree, but… “We don’t know where they came from. It seemed like everywhere.”

“So we have to look everywhere,” Riku said. “And what if we don’t find them?”

“Or can’t stop them,” Kairi added.

It wasn’t enough time for a large-scale evacuation. They had hours at best. They could split up, could rope their friends into the search, but even if one person found the breach the heartless were coming through, they’d be completely overwhelmed instantly.

“How did you get time to rewind?” Riku asked.

Kairi shrugged. “I don’t even know. I cast a stop spell, but it felt like I didn’t even choose to do so. It was some sort of instinct, and the heart of the world connected with me at the same time. I think… I think that was what made it rewind time instead of stopping it. The power of the heart of the world feeding into the spell.”

She almost left it out, but… “I was dying. And I knew the world was going to fall. I think the world knew it, too.”

“Do you think you could get it to do the same thing again?” Riku asked. “I hate to think we would need it to, but… if it would. That might give us the time to figure out how to stop the fall.”

The second rewind was almost as desperate as the first. There was a tinge of hope instead of despair, because Kairi knew it had to be possible.

This time, Riku and Sora were with her.

They’d retreated to the castle chapel this time, a quiet place where they were free to focus.

It felt wrong, to be there, when Kairi knew the heartless would be overrunning the rest of the world. But if she could connect to the world’s heart again, if she could get it to connect to her consorts as well, if it would perform the same miracle for them that it had once before, maybe it would let her save everyone.

So again, she was half-praying to the heart of the world, begging it to help her. To help them.

I need to save everyone, she told it, pushing with all the strength of her own heart. She wasn’t dying, not yet, but she hoped she could get it to listen even without that. I need to save Riku and Sora. I need all three of us together. I need to save the rest of my people. I need to save this world. Please help me to do that. Please give me the chance to save us all.

She felt the moment when the world’s heart responded. It didn’t feel as difficult this time, almost as if it had been waiting for her. It reached into her, and while it did not respond in words, she felt that same infusion of strength and comfort that she’d felt before. From their gasps, she guessed it may have done the same to Riku and to Sora.

The heartless swarmed through the doors. There was no defeating them. Riku yanked Sora into a last quick kiss, then did the same to her. “We’ll do it next time,” he promised.

Then the heartless overran them, the way they had the rest of the world.

This time she was sure it was the heart of the world that pushed the stop spell out of her. It did the same with Sora and Riku, because this time there were three clock symbols in the air. She felt the hot flow of blood below them, even as the impossible cold of the heartless pushed at them from all other sides.

And the hands moved backwards.

They all woke up in bed, but it was the farthest thing from a relaxing waking.

All three of them jerked awake, sitting up, gasping for breath, grasping at the sheets.

“You remember?” Kairi asked, though she hoped it was clear they did.

Both Riku and Sora nodded shakily.

The three of them allowed themselves to indulge in clinging to each other for a few moments.

Don’t think about the sight of blood. Don’t think about the feeling of it underneath you…

Then they had to get to work.

“Does this mean the rewind is always going to work?” Riku asked.

“I think we have to believe it will,” Kairi said. “Did you feel the heart of the world?”

Sora nodded.

“It was easier last time. The second time, for me. Like the heart ‘remembered’ the same way we do.”

“So you think it’s ready to reset us again?” Sora was fidgety, and she couldn’t blame him.

“It is if we fail.” She really hoped she wasn’t lying.

“But let’s try not to do that if we can help it,” Riku said.

Radiant Garden’s keyhole seemed like the most obvious place for the heartless to come from. It was an inherent connection to both light and dark, as well as being a natural weak point. If it had been the source, it hadn’t been obvious to Kairi the first time, but no source had been obvious, so that didn’t mean much.

The keyhole was locked, just like it always was and should have been.

They launched into the search of the entire castle, starting from the bottom and working up. The waterways underground seemed like the next most likely place, considering the depth and the darkness, perfect for hiding shadows.

Every room and passage and hidden niche only accessible by magic took time.

The third rewind happened as they returned to the main level, the heartless already amassed outside the door, the instant they attempted to cross the courtyard. Sora fell, keyblade clattering away across the stone. Thousands of shadows, too many to fight, too many to flee from, all surged over him.

And the hands on the clock moved backwards.

The fourth reset happened in front of the keyhole, Riku trying in desperation to lock something already sealed.

The fifth was in the library, as Kairi tried to find anything to explain what was happening.

Six. Seven. Eight. Nine.

The tenth of the same morning was starting to wear on all of them. It felt like every inch of the castle had been searched. Radiant Garden beyond the bastion had been explored, every dark alley and passage and basement examined.

One instant, there were no heartless. Then they were everywhere.

They ate breakfast. Skipping it did nothing to assist them in their doomed-feeling quest.

Sora put his head down on his folded arms. “I don’t want to watch either of you die again.”

Kairi crossed to the other side of the table, pulling him into a hug. Riku knelt next to the chair, wrapping his own arms around them, as best he could reach. It was an awkward position, but that did nothing to diminish the need for connection.

“Me either,” Kairi said. She was tired of watching her lovers die. She was tired of feeling her world slip away. She was tired of failing her people, whether they knew it or not.

They split up to continue searching for any clue to how to prevent the world’s fall. At least they didn’t see each other die. Instead, they had to find out in the morning what triggered the newest reset.

Eleven, Sora told them, was him, cut down outside the castle walls, investigating whether the heartless appeared inside or outside the castle first.

Twelve was Riku, struggling to get to one of the magical lifts for a better vantage point, seeking a pattern that it seemed didn’t exist.

Kairi was responsible for lucky thirteen, landing wrong after an attempted attack on the first wave of heartless sweeping through the town square. “Damn it,” she said, waking up with the curse still on her lips.

“What if this is eternity?” she said, burying her face in her hands before they even got up. “What if we never figure out what’s going on, so instead we just keep trying and failing, over and over forever?”

The miracle she’d been granted the first time was starting to feel like just as much of a curse.

Fourteen, fifteen, sixteen, seventeen…

They’d started to wait. Just wait. In case that ever gave them a clue what direction the heartless swarms were coming from. It never did. They came from everywhere and nowhere, just appearing, with no pattern or direction to it.

They weren’t learning or changing anything; at the very least, the heartless weren’t somehow benefiting from the resets. Then again, they didn’t have to adapt. They were the ones succeeding every time.

Kairi waited at the highest tower of the castle. It wasn’t the first time one of them had done so, but she was hoping maybe she’d see something new this time. The heartless appearing in one area a fraction of a second sooner. Anything.

Instead it was the same as always. The light dimmed as the heartless flooded every available space, to every side of the castle, to every side of the platform she stood on, in a dome above her.

As they converged, blocking every bit of light from the sun, their eyes still glinted.

Like stars. And the dark between the stars…

She fell choking on her own blood, but woke still thinking about heartless eyes like stars in infinite blackness.

“Who was it this time?” Sora asked, rubbing his eyes. “It wasn’t me.”

“Me,” Kairi admitted. “The top of the castle.”

Riku groaned. “Nothing new in the waterways. Nothing there, then nothing but heartless. They aren’t even coming from the shadows; they appear in the dark and in the light the same way.”

“What if they aren’t coming from here?” Kairi asked. “We’ve looked everywhere, we’ve searched every possible place, and it’s just like you said. They aren’t here. Until they are.”

“So you’re saying we can’t find them because they aren’t here to find?” Sora asked.

Riku sat up. “Then where are they?”

“What could be darker than the space between stars?” Kairi asked. “That seems like the deepest darkness possible.”

All the gummi ships Radiant Garden had were at Kairi’s disposal, and she ordered all of them up immediately.

If anyone thought that was a strange demand, well, it wasn’t the oddest thing a queen could ask.

Then they found the heartless, and no one was going to complain about eccentric royal demands.

Finding the heartless off-world didn’t make the numbers more manageable, exactly, but it made the fight more so. The ships were, in their way, more maneuverable than any of them could be on the ground. There the heartless had the advantage of being able to attack from any direction, while the people they attacked were mostly trapped by gravity. Out here, they could move in any direction the heartless did.

In the end, they didn’t destroy all of the heartless before they descended on Radiant Garden, but they’d destroyed enough. The numbers had dwindled, and the entire fleet pursued the remaining shadows back to the surface.

There were still hundreds. Maybe a few thousand.

Not thousands like there had been. Tens of thousands. More.

They didn’t blot out the sky, or boil up from every open piece of ground.

The fight was long and exhausting. Shadow wisped away on the wind, struck down by keyblades, swords, staffs, spears, spells and any other weapon any of them had.

Every magic-user wound up drained of energy from casting cure after cure, but the injuries were the kind cure could help.

Kairi felt a vague flicker of something reaching out for her own heart. Warmth and approval and gratitude. She knew it was the heart of the world, but this time it did not have to force a spell out of her. No clocks forced to move backwards.

It was almost frightening to go to sleep, the first time in a fortnight they’d fallen asleep on purpose.

All of them were afraid when they woke up that it wasn’t a new morning after all. Kairi pulled the blankets over their heads, making a soft tent around them.

“We did it this time, right?” Sora was the first to ask.

Riku nodded cautiously. “We did. We won.”

Kairi felt tears spring to her eyes. Finally.