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It’s another one of those fair days in Radiant Garden where the sky is bright with pastel blue, the temperature is perfect, the fountains are full with splashing water, and the breeze is sweet. Every flower is in bloom, and in the middle of it all sit two teenagers on a park bench, surrounded by falling pink and purple petals. One is a red-haired girl in a white, frilly dress trimmed with lilac ribbons and bows. It’s a bit of a childish style, but it’s what the other teen remembers of her. The other teen is a one-eyed boy dressed all in black – black coat, black gloves, black trousers, black boots – with grey hair styled to cover his blind eye. They look at each other and she smiles, something he has long lost the ability to muster.
“I’m glad you could make it,” she says, shifting her hand to nudge his pinkie finger with hers.
He entwines those fingers. “As am I. It can be hard to get away from the others sometimes.”
“They’re so protective of you. I wish I had big brothers to look out for me like that.”
“I guarantee you do not,” he says, firm with the echo of feeling that he had when he first told her that. “If we both had such over-protective guardians, neither of us would get here.”
She giggles and it sounds like music. He misses that feeling of butterflies he used to get when she did that and tries to manifest it now. “I’m really glad we’re friends. I want to be friends forever.”
He pauses. In reality, when she had said that, they were children. He’d been scared. Forever was such a long time. They couldn’t live forever. Could their hearts and souls even live forever? Would they always have to sneak out to play, maintain this stressful manner of meeting for all eternity? Those questions had haunted him, and all he had said was, “OK.”
But here in this fantasy of his design, where every beautiful day in Radiant Garden merged into one exquisite moment, where spring didn’t have to end and night never had to fall, he could pretend that he said something else. This conversation would not lapse into awkward silence with her kicking her feet under the bench until she could come up with a new topic to talk about. This time, he could discard his fear of the future and allow himself to believe they would grow up together, and they would continue growing.
“I’d like that,” he tells her, putting on the smile that would complete the scene. She laughs, so overcome with happiness that she jumps into his arms and he catches her in an embrace. She used to be effervescent and uninhibited like that. He wondered if she still was. He had wondered if she even made it out when the whole world fell. Had there been a Heartless with her heart crawling around in the darkness searching for salvation and a final resting place? The appearance of Naminé – the Nobody with her face – seemed to confirm that, but her odd relationship to Sora shed many doubts.
“I’d like to know more about you,” he continues, as she pulls back to grin at him with the face of the older version of herself he inexplicably (Nobody status withstanding) hopes she currently is. “I’d like to change together. I really want to see what this relationship becomes.”
He’d been too young and ineloquent to ever say it in that way, but he’d also been too cowardly to express it at all. Now there was little hope, if any, that they could live up to his old desire (perhaps it was even a current desire – after all, why would he waste time casting his illusions on himself if he didn’t wish for it? How did a being with no heart even go about wanting things that didn’t pertain to completing itself?). And even if they did, he had no frame of reference for where it might go. Every grown-up relationship he’d ever heard of – childhood sweethearts, slow-burning love, friends to lovers – that closely resembled them seemed futile and outlandish and he just had no idea what they would look or feel like. He still had no idea. Ergo his fantasies were always trapped on the cusp of something more that he could never grasp.
“Zexion!” Vexen’s shrill cry echoes.
In a blink, the illusion is gone. Zexion sits on a white bench between fluted white columns in the ever-changing white halls of Castle Oblivion. He’d been so deep in his fantasy that he hadn’t smelled Vexen before hearing him. He looks up now, seeing the blond standing beside him, looking back at him icily. Zexion knows that expression means nothing, it’s just an imprint of the core of Even’s character left on his soul even after his heart was lost.
“What are you doing here? I have need of you.”
Vexen didn’t get access to Zexion’s private illusion, and he never would.
“You didn’t have need of me before,” Zexion replies, standing up, “so I was at liberty to do as I please.”
“If you’re doing nothing, do it in the basement where it’s more convenient to find you when I need to. Lexaeus is also looking for you. Fetch him and meet me in the basement.” Vexen calls the dark tunnel around himself to leave. Zexion sighs and does the same, latching onto Lexaeus’ scent and leaving behind the memory of his fantasy. He ignores the cold, lancing pain that pierces the hollow where his heart is supposed to be.