Journey
| Journey | |
|---|---|
| Date of Cutscene: | 19 December 2012 |
| Location: | Hollow Bastion |
| Synopsis: | Chapter 1 Complete -- Bonus Cutscene unlocked. Riku drifts in and out of his thoughts as he tries to put the pieces of his life together. When none of them fit, he must either get a larger frame or a bigger hammer. |
| Cast of Characters: | Riku |
Journey
Theme (Journey OST: Atonement)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pAtYPnCsWzo
He had been thinking about this for a long time.
In the silent hours before dawn.
At practice.
Laying awake as night came to the lonely and majestic castle of Hollow Bastion.
Listening for the sound of echoing footsteps.
He had started a new notebook.
Riku thought about recalling the old one, but eventually decided to leave it in the care of Ivo and the Shard Seekers. He would continue to write in the magical pages, although some sections would forever be locked to only a few. It felt like he was leaving a piece of himself behind.
It felt right.
Very few things did.
Riku looked at the pages spread around him. He was sitting on the floor of his tower bedroom. Minutes before he had been practicing. Minutes before that he had been in the grand library, his hands idly flipping through a book of fairytales.
Fugue.
He was slipping. Losing pieces of time. Now he was here, looking at the pictures that he must have drawn but could not remember. His life had slipped the cogs of narrative continuity. It had done so ever since he had escaped the realm of shadow and dreams with the help of King Mickey and Will Sherman.
...'I'm glad you're on my side.'
The thought struck him in the middle of swordwork.
He couldn't understand why he wasn't sorry.
The picture in his hands was the inside of the TDA offices. Mercade was reading (or possibly asleep) in a chair. A sopping Leida huddled in the corner by the door, Will giving her a towel. Riku put the picture down. Another picture lay near his hand. Reize lay asleep in a garden while Ivo practiced Wutai-style swordsmanship at the behest of Raiya. He went from picture to picture. Sometimes he had them spread out on his bed. A few times he had put them on the walls.
Riku was staring at one. He was standing now, arms crossed. It was Jasmine and Belle. His hand reached out to touch the paper. Instead his hand rested on the smooth crystal. In a dark cavern where the rushing waters of the Rising Falls are muted and distant. Where the petals of a dark flower arch overhead.
"You'd laugh.. Kairi."
Riku shakes his head.
"No. I don't know what you'd do. --"
Questions.
The long fugue that had been his and Will's journey on the boat had left him nothing but questions. He was just starting to understand truly what it meant to have no connections to anyone. To say the words and mime the actions but not to be connected to anything or anyone.
It was frightening to be so alone.
"It's not like I don't remember you. Not exactly."
Why did this feel so much like saying goodbye?
Riku sat up against the dais, staring at the rough cavern ceiling. He brought a hand up to his throat. It was raw, as if he had been screaming. No. He had just been talking for a long time. The pictures were spread along the base of the dais. He picked up another one. Sora. He had replicated the old picture. The expression, the bearing. Kairi was smiling out of the picture at him.
He wasn't in it. Riku was in none of these pictures.
He gathered them up slowly, pausing a moment to touch his fingers to the crystal encasement before he turned to walk back up the winding stone towards the castle proper. At practice he missed the next thrust, knocked off his feet and sent sprawling. He waved away the armored heartless, picking himself up from the ground. He was essentially sparring himself. He couldn't bear to be around anyone else right now.
"Go away."
It went.
It was so easy now.
Riku looked around at the stone platform underneath the castle. The Rising Falls seemed to loom over him, boxing him in with the castle above forming the lid to his cage. He looked down at the sword in his hand, holding it out in front of him and slowly uncurling his fingers. The shadowblade dissolved slowly into tatters of dark vapor.
He felt guilty for hurting his friends. He felt.. something not quite like failure. Disappointment? That he wasn't the hero he thought he could be? Riku started to walk across the platform.
It would be simpler to say that that this was something the darkness had taken away from him. The truth was he had never cared for anyone but his closest friends on the island. He had cared for his parents, and Sora, and Kairi-- and the rest had been... distant.
Not his problem.
Shadows on shadows.
Riku sat on the edge of the moving platform that lazily rose towards the bottom steps of the castle. He watched the Rising Falls surge endlessly upwards, hands braced against the edge as if to vault over the side at any time and just let himself fall and fall. He wasn't sure there was a bottom to the Rising Falls.
He had cared about the promise. It had all but consumed him.
"In your hand-- take this key.."
Riku had lost his way somewhere.
It was funny..
He had always expected Sora to dig him out of it. He had always let Sora be the conscience. The one who cared for nameless, faceless others. Why did he want to destroy Manhattan? To save Kairi. To save Reize and the Shard Seekers. Why Mercade? --because of all of the TDA. They were the only one he really knew.
Shadows on shadows.
He didn't care about people in a general sense. That part of him was missing, or lost or had never been there. Riku tilted his head upwards to look at the darkening sky, watching as the stars slowly shook themselves awake one by one.
So long as you champion those you love.
It didn't really conflict. He could still be a monster and still keep his promise.
Except he wasn't even that.
Riku sat on the stairs just above the darkness sensors in the basement, balancing his head on one hand while his elbow balanced on his knee. He stared down into the unlit cavern where LEXUS materialized, the notepad in his lap showing a blank page.
He was afraid of the strange machine. Just as he had been afraid of Negaduck and all the others who had been called to Mirage Tower. But he was afraid for a different reason than their power or their ability to sow chaos and destruction.
Riku was afraid of them because he understood them as little as he did anyone else. For what little he knew, none of them had private and personal stakes with Manhattan and yet so many of them had aided in it's destruction. Did they have some sort of terrifying apathy towards other life?
All of them were monsters and yet Riku didn't belong with them either.
Riku found himself sitting in front of a mirror. Several torn and slightly battered pieces of paper were taped to the reflective surface. The remains of the bounty that had been raised then banished. He was relatively certain there would be other attempts, or if not that-- that being recognized would get in the way of his search for answers.
He had to find where he belonged.
He had to find the answers. What drove the monsters to do the things that they did? What drove the heroes to reach out to strangers? Perhaps empathy was something that he could learn, if he watched closely and carefully enough. Perhaps the guilt would fade and he would be left with nothing but the pictures.
Maybe this was all because he couldn't stand to look into a mirror anymore. The person looking back at him wasn't somebody he knew. So he gave into that impulse and decided to make that image into a stranger. Into someone that nobody knew. He couldn't be distracted.
He was going on a journey because he had been thinking about this for a long time.
Watching a storm come in from the balcony.
Standing underneath a broken arch looking up and out at the majestic but isolated castle.
Riku looked down a picture in his hand, on the threshold between Hollow Bastion and the roads of darkness leading away into the worlds beyond. He was taking this one with him. It was everyone he cared about-- and if at some point he looked down at the picture and felt nothing, then at least everything would be settled.
His journey would be over.
Did he hope somehow for something better?
He wasn't sure.
It was time to find out.
======================== Fin=======================================
Chapter 1 'Refugee' Complete
Chapter Ranking: B+
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