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It hurts.
One foot in front of the other.
It hurts.
She can't stop. She can feel it behind her. Feel it reaching, claws scraping lines across the bare skin of her shoulders, scars sinking deep into flesh and sinew and bone, ripping her open and laying her bare for the blackness of the world to seep in to her empty heart.
It hurts, it hurts, ithurtsithurtsithurtsithurts-
One foot in front of the other. There is nothing left in her barren soul.
In the moments where she allows herself a moment to pause, to rest her aching, weary legs, she stares up at the inky dark above her, searching for any speck of light above her, any sign of stars. Sometimes, when her head swims with exhaustion, she can see little pinpricks above her, but those nights are worse. Once she had felt hope when she saw those sparks. Now she feels nothing but the bitter taste of loss.
The sparks blur, twist, and Aqua becomes aware that her eyes burn from staring up at them. Her chest spasms with a hunger she cannot remember not feeling. When was the last time she felt full? When was the last time she was rested, full, peaceful?
When was the last time she had been whole? There had never been anything but this neverending walk, nothing but the pain in her feet and the exhaustion in her soul.
Who even was she anymore?
It hurts.
She was Master Aqua. She was an apprentice of Master Eraqus, a partner to her friends Terra and Ven. She was a Keyblade wielder. She was strong.
She was exhausted.
She was beaten down.
Was she even a Master anymore? Her home didn't exist anymore, her friends lost to the ever present dark threatening her every step, her Keyblade long gone in a final token of affection to a young man she wasn't sure she'd ever see again.
Could she be a Master of nothing and a partner to nobody?
Her eyes blurred. At a time, there might have even been tears.
It hurts.
-
She wasn’t sure when the tendrils stroking along her ankles started to feel inviting rather than terrifying. There had been a point and time when she would have been horrified by the way the darkness felt brushing across her skin, threatening to grab her and drag her off the path and into the darkness. Or at least, she thought there might have been. She thought she remembered the sickening, sharp touch of ice. When it touched her like this, soft and cool and promising her an end to her ceaseless wandering, it was hard to remember.
The false moonlight of the sandy shore was just enough to stare out at the shoreline, see the way the water curved along the horizon, the way the surf lapped at her stocking-covered feet. Her shoes lay abandoned somewhere behind her. It felt good on her warm, swollen toes, soothing blisters she thought should be there. She wished she had Master Defender, though she couldn’t quite remember why that was its name or where it had gone.
She knew it had belonged to her Master, a man she had respected and trusted without question.
She knew her Master was dead, struck down by a boy she had once considered her closest friend.
She couldn’t remember what he looked like.
Hours passed, and yet she still sat there on that darkened beach, head bowed, staring sightlessly at the dull gray metal, mindless of the way her tears warmed and cooled the metal.
What had the boy looked like? The boy who had killed her Master, shattered a part of her soul?
She pictured blue eyes, the color of the ocean beneath a moon, but her brain stopped at that point as though it was an insurmountable road block.
“What else?” she whispered, her voice too broken from lack of use to make more sound.
He had brown hair- or was it silver? Maybe blond. Somewhere in the torn crevasses of her mind, she could picture blond hair, short and spiky and puppy soft, but when she tried to put the blond and the blue together, it didn’t seem to fit quite right, as though the blue was wrong, even though that shade of blue was all she could remember.
Trying to remember made her head hurt, and so she quit. It did her no good to dwell on half-remembered mysteries, not when they made her ache like this. Sometimes, she had learned, it was just easier to let things go without the fight.
At her feet, the waves lapped a little higher on her ankles, threatening inch by inch to pull her out to sea.
How she wished she could just lay back in the sand and let the ocean take her away.
-
There came a day- or a week or a month or maybe a year because she had always been down here, really, so what did the days matter really?- when the darkness didn’t frighten her anymore.
No, why had she ever thought that the dark surrounding her had ever meant her anything but kindness? Now when the tendrils surrounded her, the soft cool smoke sneaking into her lungs and caressing her heart, she relaxed into it with relief. It had never been there to tear her down, no. No, it had always meant to rip away the parts that brought her pain, to lift her up. The light that she had fought so hard to carry in her burdened soul really did nothing but cause her pain in the end.
When she tried to think of that boy, she no longer got stuck on blond hair or blue eyes. How easily she had allowed herself to be deluded by her panic, how her pain had twisted the truth in her mind. There had been two boys, of course. One strong like the earth and the other quick as the wind. But neither of them had blue eyes. Where had she ever gotten that idea from? They both had amber eyes, glowing like warm coals. Just like hers.
They were so beautiful, her two boys, one with hair made of sunlight and the other with moonbeams. She missed them terribly down here, but she could sense that they would be joining her soon. It was safe here, in the dark, so very far away from the light that threatened to tear her soul apart.
She was so grateful that the shadows had shown her the light. Where would she be if they hadn’t? She no longer needed her Master’s lost soul, poor fool that he was. Placing his faith in his sword, in his light, had been his downfall in the end; she could see that now. She trusted nothing but her claws and the comfort of the dark now. Her clawed hands brushed icy streaks out of her face, tucking them back out of her way as she slunk along the jagged, rocky paths.
Something was pulling her along, guiding her feet at every crossroads. It was instinctive, the way she followed the familiar roads toward the ocean. Something was waiting for her on that shore, or someone would be soon enough.
Her feet sunk into the sand, leaving footprints from the end of the stone path to the shoreline. Whatever intended to be waiting for her… she would be waiting for them first.
She was, and had always been, a hunter. And whatever had decided to try to hunt her…
Would regret it.
-
It was hours before anything stirred. The girl, arms soaked in blood red and inky black, with claws stretching her fingers into razor-sharp crescents, waited, crouched by the shoreline. She might have looked like a gargoyle to any passing person, had anybody actually been living in the darkness to walk by. She waited, muscles couled like a cat, amber eyes glowing in the darkness like warning flares.
A sound, footsteps through the darkness. She tensed, her head swiveling toward the sound, every muscle poised to strike.
He was standing there, across from her, close enough that she could taste the bitter taste of his light on her tongue, not alone for the first time in an eternity. The boy she had gifted her only chance at freedom. A splash of color on a dark horizon, his hair like starlight, holding his hand out to her with a soft smile, like they were friends. He smiled like he knew what she had suffered for the last ten thousand, million, trillion steps across a world razed to ash by hopelessness. His eyes sparkled like stars beneath a silvery-white moon.
His smile was soft, warm, like home. It was familiar. For a moment, she imagined a tuft of rowan hair, the glint of armor on his arm, the sound of laughter under a star-strewn sky. Her heart felt like it was being torn open. The girl wanted to know why, why the thought of this stranger threatened to rip her chest apart. Who was he? Who was she?
The boy took a step closer to her curled form, said something she couldn’t hear past the roaring of the ocean- or was that her own ears, the blood in her veins calling out to kill the boy in front of her.
She wanted him to suffer. She wanted him to feel the ache in her bones, understand the terror in her chest at his light. She wanted freedom, to go home to her boys, to bury herself in silver and gold and hide in the darkness their bodies created.
She wanted him to burn, the way the blood pumping through her threatened to set her body alight.
Her teeth bared, hands curled into claws, she leapt across the empty landscape with all the strength in her tattered soul.