Burning Heart - Kingdom Hearts fic!

[eiahmon]

Title: Burning Heart
Rating: PG-13
Disclaimer: Disney and Square owns it all; I only wish I did. Why in the hell cant I come up with these wickedly cool characters and twisted plots? Why?
Summary: Nomura has stated that now that his Heartless and Nobody have been destroyed, Master Xehanort will be reborn. What if he is reborn, but not in the way everyone thinks?
A/N: Xehanort is such a magnificent bastard, but this bunny came to me in a dream and wouldn't go away. I blame it on a clip from Birth By Sleep where he looks at Braig, looking all sad and confused (See my icon for this post). If parts of it seem a bit weird, it's because I'm trying to stay as faithful to the dream as possible.

1.

He was surrounded by darkness, drowning in it, consumed by it, unable to free himself from it.

Where am I?

He struggled to see something, anything, that would tell him where he was, but there was nothing, no light and no sound. He could feel no air on his face, so sound moved across his ears. He was suspended in a void of nothingness; he was unable to see anything, not even himself.

But then... There! A tiny pinprick of light appeared ahead of him, so faint and so far away. He longed for it, and no sooner had the desire coursed though him than he noticed that he seemed to be moving towards it. He moved achingly slow as if he were wading through chest deep water, and he was suddenly filled with terror that the tiny light would wink out before he could reach it, forever trapping him in the darkness that surrounded him. But the tiny light glowed steadily, even as he struggled to reach it. Fatigue clawed at him, and the further he pressed on, the more he wished to simply lie down and forget the light, but he refused. Doing so, he knew, would not end well for him at all. He did not know how he knew, only that it was so.

The tiny light glowed brightly, acting as a beacon, propelling him forward. Yet the closer he moved to it, the harder it became to keep going. It was like something did not want him to reach the light ahead. How much time had passed since he had first seen it? He did not know. It could have been months, years, or mere days. Time had no meaning in the void which trapped him.

… very ill...

He was startled as whispered voices began to fall on his ears, though he could sense no single direction form whence they came. They seemed to surround him, though they steadily grew in volume as he neared the light, which was now much larger, though it was so bright, he couldn't see anything beyond it.

… may not survive...

More whispered fell upon his ears as he moved ever closer to the light, and they grew even more in volume, as the struggle to reach it became nearly impossible. He was so close! He could almost reach out and touch it! He gave one last push forward and reached out with one shaking arm as he noted vaguely that he could see himself for the first time. It felt as though something was trying to pull his hand back, but he kept reaching forward.

He touched the light.

There was a flare that blinded him, and a loud roaring filled his ears as the darkness began to scatter.

“He's waking up!”

The voice, which sounded young, echoed loudly in his head, and he moaned weakly in pain, as he felt himself rising, like he was swimming upward through deep water. The bright light spread outward in all directions, driving the darkness back.

“Hush, Yuta.” said a second voice, which was that of a woman “Run and fetch the doctor, and take Alexander with you.”

“Yes, Mama.”

He moaned again, and he felt something cool touch his forehead. “Hush, child. You'll feel better soon.”

Child? I am a child?

He didn't know; he couldn't remember, and that led him to another, more important question.

Who am I?

Footsteps. “He has awakened, it seems.” said another, male, voice “Can you hear me?”

The only sound he was able to make was another pain filled moan as all the voices bounced around in his throbbing head. The pain was radiating down his neck and outward into his shoulders, and his stomach churned angrily. He felt a cool hand touching his forehead and smoothing his hair back, which strangely seemed to dull the pain some.

“Can you open your eyes?” said the woman's voice, and he felt a damp cloth wipe across them, wiping away the crust and accumulated gunk that had collected there from a long sleep, though he didn't know how long he had been asleep or why he had slept so long. His eyelids felt as though they were weighted down, but he was able to force one eye open a tiny crack, which afforded him a brief glimpse of a brightly lit room, and the blurred outlines of two people before the painful brightness forced him to close the eye again.

An arm came behind his shoulders, and he was gently pulled up into a sitting position, and his aching head was laid against a shoulder. The light that he could see through his eyelids dimmed.

“Open your eyes again, little one.” the woman's voice said softly, and his response was to hide his face in the shoulder that his head was lying against.

There was a chuckle coming from the other man in the room, and then: “I would imagine he has quite the headache.” A second later, he cried out weakly in protest as a pair of fingers fastened onto his eyelids and forced first his left eye, then his right eye, open, one at a time. The light, dimmer than before, but still painfully bright to him, pierced his skull like a lance.

“Hurts.” he managed to whimper, and the fingers released his eyelids, allowing him to close them against the painful light.

“Do you know where you are?” the male voiced asked again, and he was just barely able to shake his head, though even that small movement sent a bolt of pain down his neck into his back and shoulders.

“Do you know the year?'

Another tiny shake.

“Do you know what happened to you?”

Another shake.

“Can you tell me your name?”

A pause and then....

“I... I don't know.”

“You don't know? Can't you remember?”

“No.”

“Can you recall anything? Where you came from, your parents' names, anything?”

He thought for a moment, though it was difficult to do so with the throbbing in his head. “No.” He opened his eyes for a brief moment and sent a pleading glance at the woman whose shoulder he was leaning against. “Why can't I remember?” He squeezed his eyes shut and hid his face again. “Why?

“You've been very ill, young man,” said the male voice “and we feared that you weren't going to make it. You ran a very high fever for several days, and it broke only last night. That might explain why you can't remember anything. As you rest and heal, your memories may return to you. For now that is what I want you to do. I want you to stay in that bed and rest. Let's worry about getting you better, then we will worry about finding your family and home.”

He felt himself being laid back down, and he gratefully sank into the soft mattress beneath him. He heard the man and woman speaking softly to each other as warm blankets were pulled up to his neck and patted around his shoulders.

“Rest, child.” He felt the hand smoothing back his hair again as he fell into a natural sleep.

– Chapter 2
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