Butterfly Wings

Hotel Green Room

"Come on, lazy bum. Wake up."

Kairi...? Sora sat up on the bed he was in somehow, his head aching, and opened his eyes, blinking until the world resolved into a degree of blurry focus.

Kairi was standing next to the bed. "You okay?" she asked. Her voice was starting to sound odd.

"I guess..."

"Those creatures that attacked you are after the keyblade," Kairi told him as he blinked at her. How did she know about that? "But it's your heart they really want, because you wield the keyblade."

"I'm so glad you're okay, Kairi," Sora said.

"Kairi? Who are you talking about?" said Kairi. "I'm the great ninja Yuffie." She turned toward the black-clothed guy standing over against the door frame as Sora's vision started to go into focus. "I think you might have overdone it, Squall."

"That's Leon," the man said, stepping away from the wall.

That was...the guy who'd beat him up. Sora thought he should be afraid, but he was too baffled, and the ringing in his head made it hard to focus on things like that. He realized Kimi-something was there too, further off, sitting by the wall with her sword on the floor next to her and staring into space, looking bored.

The metal key was near the guy, leaning against the wall. "The keyblade..." Sora repeated, remembering the voice whispering the word back on the small island.

"Yeah," the girl who wasn't Kairi and a ninja or something said, "we had to get it away from you to shake off those creatures." Couldn't they have just said that? "It turns out that's how they were tracking you."

"It was the only way to conceal your heart from them," said Squall-Leon, standing there with his arms crossed. "But it won't work for long." He didn't seem particularly bothered by this. "Still, hard to believe that you of all people are the chosen one." Squall-Leon picked up the key and swung it to the side. It glowed white, disappearing, then a similar flash of light appeared in Sora's hand, leaving the keyblade. "Well, I suppose beggars can't be choosers," he said, walking up to Sora.

Sora had enough of cryptic statements, especially from some jerk who had just beat him up and kept suggesting he wasn't good enough. "Why don't you start making sense! What's going on here?" he demanded.

"Well," girl-who-wasn't-Kairi began, "you know there are many other worlds out there, besides this one and where you lived?"

"Riku...he said that," Sora replied. "So it's really true." Ours is just a little piece of something much greater.

"Until recently, it might as well not have mattered if it were true or not," Squall-Leon said. "There was no way to travel between worlds. They were never connected. But when the heartless came, everything changed."

"The heartless?" repeated Sora. Kimi had been saying that.

"The ones who attacked you, you remember?" girl-who-wasn't-Kairi said.

Squall-Leon clarified somewhat, "Those without hearts." Sora remembered the hole in the center of his shadow's monster.

"The darkness in people's hearts—that's what attracts them."

"And there is darkness within every heart," the man finished gravely.

"Hey, have you heard of someone named Ansem?" girl-who-wasn't-Kairi asked.

"Ansem?" Sora repeated. "Who's that?"

"Ansem began studying the heartless when they first showed up. He recorded his findings in the report he wrote," she said.