This is not the first time he has swum to darkness' surface like a man drowning. It is equally not the first time he has opened his eyes on a strange world.
First: check the self. No heartbeat, still, familiar enough, his cards still stored in his soul but much else... time eludes him. A flicker of it on the edges of his being he can feel, hook his fingers just into it enough to tell it to stop, but not enough to twist it, not enough to part the curtains of the future and see. Almost like being newly awakened as a Nobody, again (or was it asleep? The same thing, in his eyes, a card that read the same reversed as upright), with the feeling that he'd have to relearn all he'd discovered before.
Second: check memory. A futile effort, he knows, for he's seen time and time (ha!) again how fickle memory can be. What you remember is often a lie, and even those lies can sometimes become truth, if told long enough. He remembers...
Roxas. No... Sora. Sora fighting him, and Roxas just within, but their hands holding the same blade, both of them bound in fury, and not a single bit of hesitation. He knows they were not friends, that doesn't exist between nobodies, but there's still a... ...
It can't be a sense of betrayal, of course. To feel betrayed would require a heart. A... twinge. Of something. At the idea. Yes. But still. And he still doesn't understand why, why would Roxas choose a caged existence over gaining his own separate self? Or...
Or was it that the boy was betting on something else entirely? What cards had he held...? An ace up his sleeve? He hadn't had time to dwell on the thought. He'd raised his cards to protect himself, then darkness, then... this.
He sighs, exasperated. He notices that the Wheel of Fortune has already found its way into his fingers, and that his fingers had been idly twirling it the whole time. No.
He's not dead, that much is obvious. There's no afterlife for a Nobody, after all. So... another world. He couldn't have opened a Dark Corridor of his own volition, and besides which, this was no world he recognized. A new world.
"A mystery, then," he murmurs to himself. "A spin of the wheel, a gamble... hmm."
And then, one other thing. It's only just now that he notices it. He gently tugs at the sleeve of his coat, pulling it down just enough that he can see his bare shoulder.
Hmm. Another mystery. But again, not the first time... better to go into it with a positive outlook. A new deck of cards, a new game... only thing to do was to learn the rules. First things first: time to explore.
oops I'm sorry for the TL;DR D:
First: check the self. No heartbeat, still, familiar enough, his cards still stored in his soul but much else... time eludes him. A flicker of it on the edges of his being he can feel, hook his fingers just into it enough to tell it to stop, but not enough to twist it, not enough to part the curtains of the future and see. Almost like being newly awakened as a Nobody, again (or was it asleep? The same thing, in his eyes, a card that read the same reversed as upright), with the feeling that he'd have to relearn all he'd discovered before.
Second: check memory. A futile effort, he knows, for he's seen time and time (ha!) again how fickle memory can be. What you remember is often a lie, and even those lies can sometimes become truth, if told long enough. He remembers...
Roxas. No... Sora. Sora fighting him, and Roxas just within, but their hands holding the same blade, both of them bound in fury, and not a single bit of hesitation. He knows they were not friends, that doesn't exist between nobodies, but there's still a... ...
It can't be a sense of betrayal, of course. To feel betrayed would require a heart. A... twinge. Of something. At the idea. Yes. But still. And he still doesn't understand why, why would Roxas choose a caged existence over gaining his own separate self? Or...
Or was it that the boy was betting on something else entirely? What cards had he held...? An ace up his sleeve? He hadn't had time to dwell on the thought. He'd raised his cards to protect himself, then darkness, then... this.
He sighs, exasperated. He notices that the Wheel of Fortune has already found its way into his fingers, and that his fingers had been idly twirling it the whole time. No.
He's not dead, that much is obvious. There's no afterlife for a Nobody, after all. So... another world. He couldn't have opened a Dark Corridor of his own volition, and besides which, this was no world he recognized. A new world.
"A mystery, then," he murmurs to himself. "A spin of the wheel, a gamble... hmm."
And then, one other thing. It's only just now that he notices it. He gently tugs at the sleeve of his coat, pulling it down just enough that he can see his bare shoulder.
Hmm. Another mystery. But again, not the first time... better to go into it with a positive outlook. A new deck of cards, a new game... only thing to do was to learn the rules. First things first: time to explore.