In the Interest of Others | kingdom hearts

Chapter One

It's the tail end of an era; when the conservative views that dominate the town become outdated and a new bar opens, it's anarchy. You'd think it'd take a little more to shock an entire town, but I suppose the straight-A mathlete coming out as gay was what broke them. Nothing ever happens in Twilight Town. At least, not in the last hundred years or so. Xion used to say we were our own little world, lost and separated from time. It continued and forgot about us. Until now at least.

They say that when you leave Twilight Town for college or what have you, you don't come back. Guess I'm the exception.

The local paper was a less than satisfying job to garner given my big dreams after getting a degree in Journalism, but hey, beggars can't be choosers. It's an office job that pays decently, but I'm stuck staring out the window for most of the shift. Alternating between counting the leaves on the trees to counting how many times my cursor can blink in a minute.

Once every second - 60 times.

The blank word document was the nightmare or a daydream for most writers. There was no in-between. While some viewed it as the start of their big break (everyone said that - Aerith had said it every time she began a new piece) others saw it as a punishing nightmare that you couldn't wake up from. That what I felt. I'd been typing out words but none were right, leaving me to hit the back button so much the lettering of it had worn off.

Being a reporter in a quiet town never sucked so bad.

It wasn't like I could report on a teenager coming out as a gay. It was an ethics thing and a morals thing. 

Riku had shocked everyone at his confession. Of course, it wasn't really his confession. A rumor had started that spread like wildfire when he was caught walking home with the energetic, bright Prom king Sora, it only made sense for the flames to rise. Finally, Riku confirmed it himself and kindly told whoever had a problem with it to shove it up their asses.

Overnight the various parent's that resided in the area, the ones that never left as teenagers, projected outcry, a demand for more control. The outcry came a full day after the other one. A newcomer had blown in, a real mysterious guy that was said to sport some crazy red hair and a tattoo sleeve that came down to his wrist. I'd never met him. All I knew was that he opened his own bar and the town was pissed. Bringing alcohol into a conservative town, I wanted to laugh.

Of all the problems going on in the world, Twilight Town managed to worry about some kid's sexuality and some booze.

Returning to the blinking cursor, I turned off my computer. No matter how many times I repeated the outdated mantra, I long since accepted that no matter what I wrote, it would never go big. Not in Twilight Town. Hollow Bastion? Maybe. Traverse Town? Long-shot, but more manageable. Agrabah was where it was at. All the big stories came from there. Except for sports, however, which all legacies came from the same place. Olympus.

I'd begged countless times to be sent on an away to cover some of the games but money always got in my way. We were a dying paper, surviving only on the local business and paper route. Even still, it was hard not to miss the cutbacks, the empty cubicles and the lingering anxiety that seemed to dominate the massive room.

"Off the clock?" Aerith smiled, peering out from the walls of her own cubicle.
"Almost," I replied, gathering my coat, "Diz wanted to see me in his office."

I wasn't stupid.

I accepted the reality that the chances were, I was about to be fired. I hadn't put out a successful piece for some time. Why keep a dead weight on the payroll? I knew it was only a matter of time.

The walk to Diz's office was long and nerve-wracking. The walls were lined with our century-old success stories. Articles about the sport's team winning framed, about the new mayor, the schedule for the upcoming struggle tournaments. We weren't a tourist town like Hollow Bastion. History wrote that Hollow Bastion had survived a war and grew to be rebuilt from it's a second time. The first had happened before anyone could write about, mostly lost to the course of time.