Oktoberfest '08 Entry, Conversion by Elisabeth

[blackberet.livejournal.com]

Title: Conversion
Author: Elisabeth
Beta: N/A
Word Count: 2,029
Rating: PG
Character(s): Kairi; Sora, Namine, Roxas (mentioned)
Pairing(s): N/A
Summary: "Humans like to believe that there is that in the world which is pure, incorruptible, somehow sanctified against the evil playing through their lives.  Anyone who tells you that is lying."

****

Amazing, isn’t it, how fast humans adjust.

A month at a new job, and you’re giving advice to the recent hires as though you’ve been working there all your life.  A week in a new city, and you’ve comparison-shopped the three nearest grocery stores and found the cheapest, the cleanest, and the one most likely to have good fruit out of season.  A few days at Landel’s Institute, and already you’ve got that unsilenceable voice inside your head:

What if they’re right?

 

At first she was bewildered, as anyone would be.  As you would be, waking up in one of those identical unfamiliar beds in one of those sterile, antiseptic little rooms in Hell.  Had worried about the others.  Had worried about her clothes.  You never know what will worry you here, whether it will be the dire or the trivial that will keep you awake at night, prowling the pitch-dark halls like a beast of prey.

A beast that is prey, always keep in mind, no matter how often you try to tell yourself you’re seeking it.

She was used to waking up in strange places.  She found it surprisingly easy to accept this new one, although its appearance (so much like a…hospital?) made her uneasy.  She was quick to find people she knew.  Or thought she knew, anyway.  Can one—could you—ever really know in here?

She started off fearlessly, because she didn’t know any better.


 

She was surprised by the number of familiar faces.  Almost as soon as she’d stepped outside her door she’d seen someone she knew, and the next day there were two more—her doppelganger and her missing half.  And then there were other faces, people she had thought were enemies, even.  And new friends.  There was another face she would have wanted, more than almost anything, to see, but the copper-haired girl quickly learned that Landel’s is not a place in which you get what you want.

Time quickly started to take on the air of a summer camp.   It wasn’t as interesting as being allowed to while away days inventing games at the seashore, but she found it more fun than school, with a music room and a library and good food to eat.  Even the nights could be a kind of adventure.  It was a little fun, especially when she still thought she was safe from the kind of monsters that had plagued her for so long, when she didn’t know just how much Darkness there was here.

You, if you lacked a young girl’s resilient, oblivious innocence, might not find the experience so close to pleasant.

It was easy for her, at first.  Seeing Landel’s as just another world, another challenge, something else in her life to be escaped on her way back to those long-missed islands.  Any day now, she kept telling herself, they would find the key.  Daydreams of that beach—of their lives before that raft, lazy summers, of the sun, the sand, the waves and the laughter—got her through the early days.

But it wasn’t long before all that changed.


 

She had just five days of innocence there—more, I imagine, than you have had in your entire miserable life, but still not enough.  Purity of heart counts for nothing here.  It’s not enough to save you.  It’s not enough to keep those around you from harm.  It’s not enough to prevent your being strapped down flat on your back on a table with that man looming over you, touching your hair, pulling your shirt collar down, penetrating you, that needle stabbing into your heart and then raw agony, oh God, the pain, make it stop make it stop makeitstop and your screams and tears and—

—but that, of course, was how she reacted.  You, perhaps, might not be so brave.


 

Darkness.  It was there in her world and it was there in Landel’s too, in spades.  That rage, hate, fury, violence, deception, corruption, sin, the irrational evil to which humans are compelled to give in.  Perhaps you think you’re not susceptible to such a terrible force, but you are.  Oh, you are.  Press you hard enough and you’ll abhor, you’ll lash out, you’ll kill.  The Darkness is swirling around you, all the time, in your heart, in everyone’s hearts—all but hers.

Until that night, at least.

Landel’s is not the first institute in the world to combine torture the bold expansion of human scientific knowledge; it’s simply the best at what it does.  Amazing how effective such a simple treatment can be.

One of just seven young women in her world with a pure heart.  A rare distinction to have, and one that was all too easy to lose.  The copper-haired girl who simply hated her gray uniform and wanted to go home and play with her friends had become Pandora inching open the box, Eve feeling her teeth crunch through that first bite of the apple.  Darkness was no longer an intellectual abstraction.  It was a part of her being now.  Humans like to believe that there is that in the world which is pure, incorruptible, somehow sanctified against the evil playing through their lives.  Anyone who tells you that is lying.  All it takes to prove it is a medical table and a syringe.

The very next night, that once-innocent little girl went out armed.

 

With the Darkness came things she’d never felt before.  The morning after she ate and smiled and fixed other patients’ hair, for God’s sake, but something was different.  Now there was fear.  Paranoia, even.  Edginess.  All crowding her head.  And what she never admitted to anyone, even herself—sudden flashes of irrational anger.  Moments in which she wanted to hurt someone.  To lie.  To destroy.  To—

—to punch a woman in the face.

—to prove she wasn’t weak, at any cost.

—to become a Heartless.

—to lose control of her own body.

—to claw half-open her best friend’s arm.

But she didn’t want to think about those moments.


 

And then came the uncertainty.

 

It might have been that dark little voice in her head first, or it might simply have been the nurses.  She couldn’t remember afterwards who first suggested the idea that her entire past was absolutely absurd.  But every day, in one way or another, she found it being reinforced—doctors, nurses, everyone with any power at Landel’s was convinced the copper-haired girl had reached unprecedented heights of schizophrenic delusion.

“A lot of little girls dream they’re princesses.  Most of them, I’d even venture.  An orphan girl washed ashore on a beach and adopted by kind parents—the Mayor and his wife, even—who finds out she’s really the rightful heir to the throne of a distant land; it’s a classic story.  And you’ve even talked about having magical powers, don’t you?  Being able to open some sort of special door?

“You must have watched Disney movies as a child, right?  And you imagined that you were just like one of those princesses.  When you became ill, those fantasies just began to seem real to you, didn’t they?”

Didn’t they?

“A spaceship that travels among worlds?  Made out of blocks of gummi candy?  You’re quite an imaginative girl!  You seem to be able to adopt almost anything as part of your story.  Did your family take vacations a lot when you were younger?  Your file says you moved around quite a bit—perhaps that explains your feelings of having been kidnapped, don’t you think?”

Didn’t she think?

“Now when you say that girl Sarah is your shadow, don’t you really mean something more like she’s in your shadow?  After all, she’s a year younger, and you and Matthew are really so much more outgoing than she is.  Sometimes people have friendships that are so close they almost feel like two halves of the same person, but they aren’t really.  You’re just you, aren’t you?”

Wasn’t she?

“A sword made out of a key?  My, that certainly sounds like it would be an impractical weapon.  And “paopu” doesn’t sound like any kind of fruit I’ve ever heard of.  And fantastical creatures, those “Heartless” and “Nobodies”—they sound like something out of a video game!  Dear, these things may feel real, but they certainly don’t sound very real, do they?”

Did they?

 

No, they didn’t.


 

And always there was that name, the one they always called her no matter how many times she recoiled and wanted to scream out her real one.  Claire.  French and Latin origins, meaning: “clear.”  Gradually, things were starting to become clear.  Gradually, she was starting to become Claire.

You, perhaps, would not have been so foolishly confident in your own fabricated identity even for that long.  Ask yourself, really ask: just how plausible is your life?


 

Her friends at Landel’s, the ones who shared her delusions, tried to hold her back, but she refused to be deterred from her recovery.  She was making such wonderful progress, the nurses said.  Really what it was was that she was tired of having to be perfect.  The others “from her world” all expected her to be pure, always all smiles, even though they knew—they knew!—what had happened to her.  In the real world, she didn’t have to try to live up to their expectations all the time.  She could embrace the Darkness as a legitimate part of herself, feel that failings didn’t make her unredeemable, be whole.  If she was Claire, she didn’t have to think about what she had lost.

So she began to slip away from them—or, perhaps, slip toward reality.  And once she began, she moved fast.  She met her real parents one Sunday—the couple she’d imagined as the Mayor and his wife—and felt their love and approbation.  They showed her pictures of her school, her friends, her room, and she began to be able to put the pieces together, to figure out how her imagination had perverted the reality of her life.  Things started to make sense.

She tried to tell her old friends about it, but they didn’t seem interested; all they ever wanted to talk about was the Destiny Islands.  That boy kept trying to tell her that she’d forgotten him once before, and surely this time, too, she’d snap out of it and remember and be the girl they all knew she was again.  She didn’t want to be that girl.  She wanted to wear all the cute clothes they’d shown her in the pictures.  She just wanted to be normal again.  She wanted things back the way they were before all this nonsense about princesses and hearts and keyblades.  So what if these friends weren’t in the picture anymore?  They’d recover just like she had, or they would stay wrapped up in their immature daydreams forever.  If that was what they wanted to do, fine.  She was ready to start high school.  And she’d decided that the closest she ever wanted to get to that “Princess of Heart” trash again was Homecoming Queen.

Her recovery took barely a month, and then she was headed back home.  She and her parents all swore up and down to the effectiveness of the treatment routine at Landel’s Institute; the fantasies she’d believed in so strongly when she’d first arrived seemed like idle fancy now.  She didn’t quite remember her real life, but the copper-haired girl was more than willing to learn.

She didn’t bother to say goodbye to the others.


 

Amazing, isn’t it, how fast humans adjust.

A month is all it takes to change you completely—eradicate your entire conception of your past, your life, your identity.  She was Landel’s first such success, but she wouldn’t be its last.  Without her, her old circle had…well, it had lost heart.  It was easy to convert them.  And once the recoveries began, others followed hard on their heels.

So, please, I invite you—try to outrun it.  Struggle to believe what you think you know about yourself.  Hold on to that childish identity fantasy, if you can.  But it won’t be long before that unsilenceable voice comes to you:

What if they’re right?