[Fic] Indicator Light
Feb. 5th, 2021 09:33 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
chirurgiqueTitle: Indicator Light
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Character Focus: Aqua
Rating: PG
Content notes: unreality, revisiting trauma, canon-typical dark themes
Words: 1,557
Summary: In a forgotten room in the Land of Departure, an old possession of Eraqus’s lies broken. Now that its master is gone, it’s his students’ problem. Maybe Aqua can fix it.
At the end of the hallway that shared the door to Aqua’s quarters in the castle of the Land of Departure, there was a room that she had always assumed was a storage room. She had been in there a few times while tidying, and had settled for just sweeping what little floor there was between the door and the ceiling-height wall of cardboard boxes that were presumably none of her or Terra or Ven’s business. But now that they lived in a world without their master, all business was her and Terra and Ven’s business. And when she had dismantled what had seemed to be only the first of many layers of boxes, she had discovered that the makeshift wall had hid not more of the same, but rather an old computer room.
Today, she pushed past the barricade of cardboard that still crowded the entrance and carefully picked her way towards the main console at the back. The floor was littered with cords and cables, and the walls were crammed with precarious stacks of slab-like servers, hives of modems, and dozens and dozens of boxy old monitors, some screens cracked, others murky, all of them coated in thick layers of dust. Each surface was weathered and stained with age, the decrepit metal and plastic seeming to shrink under the weight of time.
She reached the main console and carefully removed its front access panel with her left hand. In her right was her current pride and joy, the console’s main motherboard, fresh and clean and resoldered from scratch. She gently lowered it into place and set about reconnecting its wires. Most of those wires went to other parts that were still nonoperational, but, one step at a time. There wasn’t a real reason for repairing Master Eraqus’s old computer, anyway. It was just that metalwork was a hobby of hers.
Satisfied with her efforts, Aqua straightened, and replaced the access panel over the console’s broken inner workings. She stood there for a moment, hands resting gently on the metal surface. She was wracking her brain for any other task she could busy herself with in the dust-choked little room. If there was anything else she could turn her attention to, she could avoid looking up at the main console’s screen. But eventually she came to the truth that there was nothing left to do in the room but look up and leave.
So she did look up. And on the screen, in defiance of everything about the computer’s dormant state, were the same pale green letters that had blinked to life on the monitor the moment she had first laid eyes on it a month ago.
“Hello! Are you afraid of the dark?”
***
That night, Aqua, Ven and Terra were eating dinner in the castle’s kitchen when the lights went out.
Rain lashed the windows. A groaning sound like a straining ship’s hull could be heard from outside, most likely from the great chains that linked the castle to the nearby spires, swaying in the winds of the storm. Ven laughed kind of nervously.
Aqua stood from the table. “I’ll go check the generator.”
“Thanks, Aqua.” Ven smiled up at her. As she left, he turned to Terra.
“In the meantime, let’s find some candles!”
“Yeah, that’s probably the best plan,” Terra replied. Their voices retreated behind Aqua as she moved into the hall. “Weird that the generator took out everything else. Even the oil lamps are out...”
The hall out from the kitchen was nearly pitch black. Aqua made her way through memory and touch. To get to the magic generator from here, it would be fastest to go down the stairs on the east side, but using stairs with this little light didn’t seem like a wise course of action. It would be better to take the long way around, across the gallery and past her own quarters, then—
Aqua stopped in her tracks. She had reached the corner of the gallery, where the hallway branched. To the left was the path to the generator, but ahead...
Ahead was the way to her room. And past it, from deep within that wing, there was a faint source of light.
***
“Hello! Are you afraid of the dark?”
Aqua swallowed down the dismay that began to rise in her throat. She didn’t know why she had expected anything to be different. The gentle, intermittent pulses of the old monitor’s dull backlight were indifferent to her feelings.
She sighed and turned away from the console, kneeling to move some boxes aside. If she could find the main power cord, she could find where the computer was plugged in, and maybe use that knowledge to discover something else that still had power. Or maybe just unplug it.
She sighed again, and looked back up at the screen. It was foolish to think about shutting off the only light source she had found in the building. But it was hard not to resent the machine and its uncompromising message. Are you afraid of the dark?
“Of course I am.” She sighed under her breath.
There was no fanfare, no spectacle or flash. The pale letters on the monitor didn’t animate or twist. The message that had haunted her for weeks simply blinked off, and was replaced.
“Why’s that?”
She breathed out a laugh to keep from crying. Why? This hunk of metal and glass wanted to know why she was afraid of the dark?
Who wouldn’t be afraid of the dark? The task of finding the generator had kept her focused and distracted, but the more she lingered in this island of thin light from the monitor the harder her shaking hands were to ignore.
The pitch black of the night was all-consuming. In the darkness everything disappeared, her senses and her sense of time. Back then, she had wandered forever in that muted nothingness, with nothing around her to help her keep her shape. With no world to surround you you can become anything, a non-euclidean heart. And she hated what she had become there.
I’m not there. Aqua dug her fingernails into her palms. This isn’t that darkness. This is just my home. And I’m not alone here.
She breathed out, slowly, and relaxed her hands from their claw-like grip. Just as slowly, she raised her head, and stared up at the monitor contemplatively.
I’m not alone here.
***
“So it just asked why?” Terra’s strides were long and loping to keep up with Aqua as they passed through the still-unlit halls. “After it wanted to know for so long?”
“Seems kinda rude.” Ven scratched his head, walking behind and then in front of them, turning to walk backwards and then thinking better of it. “I mean, couldn’t it just be happy that you answered at all?”
“I... can’t begin to understand it.” Aqua shook her head as they approached the door to the storage room. Even though it would have been better to keep the light pouring into the hallway, she hadn’t been able to keep from closing the door when she had left. She steeled herself now, hand on the door handle.
“Hey.” Terra put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t even worry. We’ll all put our heads together.”
“Yeah!” On her other side, Ven linked his arm through the crook of hers. “Uhh... even though something you couldn’t figure out might be kinda lost on us.”
Terra laughed. Aqua couldn’t help but smile, too.
“Alright.” She threw the door open.
The glowing screen of the main console stared through the piles of boxes like an eye. There was still a single line of letters on it, but while Aqua had been gone, the message had changed again.
“Eraqus was afraid of the dark.”
Aqua’s stomach twisted, and she felt her friends tighten their grip on her arms. Was that supposed to be reassurance? Or condemnation?
Unconcerned as always, the message didn’t wait for her to decide how she felt before changing again.
“So you’ll understand that I had to check. But I see how it is now.”
As if getting closer to the inscrutable message would help her comprehend its meaning, Aqua stepped forward into the room. Terra and Ven moved with her, their warm hands firm. The three of them approached the centre console together. As they stopped in front of it, the letters disappeared, and for a moment, the screen went dark.
Then it lit up again.
Thin green lines began to trace, first on the main monitor, then on the adjacent ones, spilling out onto the screens and surfaces of every dusty and forgotten display lying stacked in the darkness. The lines sketched geometric cities, triangular citadels and parabolic gondolas, the outlines of windmill sails juddering as their motion was rendered under the cloudy glass. A dot matrix world unfolded around them.
On the main screen, in the void that formed the sky over the pixel city’s central tower, the letters reappeared.
“If you ever need an exit route, the door is always open.”
Aqua exchanged baffled glances with Terra and Ven.
The message changed one last time.
“Friendship’s a beautiful thing.”
From within the computer, there was a deep, low hum.
And all throughout the Land of Departure, the lights came back on.
Fandom: Kingdom Hearts
Character Focus: Aqua
Rating: PG
Content notes: unreality, revisiting trauma, canon-typical dark themes
Words: 1,557
Summary: In a forgotten room in the Land of Departure, an old possession of Eraqus’s lies broken. Now that its master is gone, it’s his students’ problem. Maybe Aqua can fix it.
At the end of the hallway that shared the door to Aqua’s quarters in the castle of the Land of Departure, there was a room that she had always assumed was a storage room. She had been in there a few times while tidying, and had settled for just sweeping what little floor there was between the door and the ceiling-height wall of cardboard boxes that were presumably none of her or Terra or Ven’s business. But now that they lived in a world without their master, all business was her and Terra and Ven’s business. And when she had dismantled what had seemed to be only the first of many layers of boxes, she had discovered that the makeshift wall had hid not more of the same, but rather an old computer room.
Today, she pushed past the barricade of cardboard that still crowded the entrance and carefully picked her way towards the main console at the back. The floor was littered with cords and cables, and the walls were crammed with precarious stacks of slab-like servers, hives of modems, and dozens and dozens of boxy old monitors, some screens cracked, others murky, all of them coated in thick layers of dust. Each surface was weathered and stained with age, the decrepit metal and plastic seeming to shrink under the weight of time.
She reached the main console and carefully removed its front access panel with her left hand. In her right was her current pride and joy, the console’s main motherboard, fresh and clean and resoldered from scratch. She gently lowered it into place and set about reconnecting its wires. Most of those wires went to other parts that were still nonoperational, but, one step at a time. There wasn’t a real reason for repairing Master Eraqus’s old computer, anyway. It was just that metalwork was a hobby of hers.
Satisfied with her efforts, Aqua straightened, and replaced the access panel over the console’s broken inner workings. She stood there for a moment, hands resting gently on the metal surface. She was wracking her brain for any other task she could busy herself with in the dust-choked little room. If there was anything else she could turn her attention to, she could avoid looking up at the main console’s screen. But eventually she came to the truth that there was nothing left to do in the room but look up and leave.
So she did look up. And on the screen, in defiance of everything about the computer’s dormant state, were the same pale green letters that had blinked to life on the monitor the moment she had first laid eyes on it a month ago.
“Hello! Are you afraid of the dark?”
***
That night, Aqua, Ven and Terra were eating dinner in the castle’s kitchen when the lights went out.
Rain lashed the windows. A groaning sound like a straining ship’s hull could be heard from outside, most likely from the great chains that linked the castle to the nearby spires, swaying in the winds of the storm. Ven laughed kind of nervously.
Aqua stood from the table. “I’ll go check the generator.”
“Thanks, Aqua.” Ven smiled up at her. As she left, he turned to Terra.
“In the meantime, let’s find some candles!”
“Yeah, that’s probably the best plan,” Terra replied. Their voices retreated behind Aqua as she moved into the hall. “Weird that the generator took out everything else. Even the oil lamps are out...”
The hall out from the kitchen was nearly pitch black. Aqua made her way through memory and touch. To get to the magic generator from here, it would be fastest to go down the stairs on the east side, but using stairs with this little light didn’t seem like a wise course of action. It would be better to take the long way around, across the gallery and past her own quarters, then—
Aqua stopped in her tracks. She had reached the corner of the gallery, where the hallway branched. To the left was the path to the generator, but ahead...
Ahead was the way to her room. And past it, from deep within that wing, there was a faint source of light.
***
“Hello! Are you afraid of the dark?”
Aqua swallowed down the dismay that began to rise in her throat. She didn’t know why she had expected anything to be different. The gentle, intermittent pulses of the old monitor’s dull backlight were indifferent to her feelings.
She sighed and turned away from the console, kneeling to move some boxes aside. If she could find the main power cord, she could find where the computer was plugged in, and maybe use that knowledge to discover something else that still had power. Or maybe just unplug it.
She sighed again, and looked back up at the screen. It was foolish to think about shutting off the only light source she had found in the building. But it was hard not to resent the machine and its uncompromising message. Are you afraid of the dark?
“Of course I am.” She sighed under her breath.
There was no fanfare, no spectacle or flash. The pale letters on the monitor didn’t animate or twist. The message that had haunted her for weeks simply blinked off, and was replaced.
“Why’s that?”
She breathed out a laugh to keep from crying. Why? This hunk of metal and glass wanted to know why she was afraid of the dark?
Who wouldn’t be afraid of the dark? The task of finding the generator had kept her focused and distracted, but the more she lingered in this island of thin light from the monitor the harder her shaking hands were to ignore.
The pitch black of the night was all-consuming. In the darkness everything disappeared, her senses and her sense of time. Back then, she had wandered forever in that muted nothingness, with nothing around her to help her keep her shape. With no world to surround you you can become anything, a non-euclidean heart. And she hated what she had become there.
I’m not there. Aqua dug her fingernails into her palms. This isn’t that darkness. This is just my home. And I’m not alone here.
She breathed out, slowly, and relaxed her hands from their claw-like grip. Just as slowly, she raised her head, and stared up at the monitor contemplatively.
I’m not alone here.
***
“So it just asked why?” Terra’s strides were long and loping to keep up with Aqua as they passed through the still-unlit halls. “After it wanted to know for so long?”
“Seems kinda rude.” Ven scratched his head, walking behind and then in front of them, turning to walk backwards and then thinking better of it. “I mean, couldn’t it just be happy that you answered at all?”
“I... can’t begin to understand it.” Aqua shook her head as they approached the door to the storage room. Even though it would have been better to keep the light pouring into the hallway, she hadn’t been able to keep from closing the door when she had left. She steeled herself now, hand on the door handle.
“Hey.” Terra put his hand on her shoulder. “Don’t even worry. We’ll all put our heads together.”
“Yeah!” On her other side, Ven linked his arm through the crook of hers. “Uhh... even though something you couldn’t figure out might be kinda lost on us.”
Terra laughed. Aqua couldn’t help but smile, too.
“Alright.” She threw the door open.
The glowing screen of the main console stared through the piles of boxes like an eye. There was still a single line of letters on it, but while Aqua had been gone, the message had changed again.
“Eraqus was afraid of the dark.”
Aqua’s stomach twisted, and she felt her friends tighten their grip on her arms. Was that supposed to be reassurance? Or condemnation?
Unconcerned as always, the message didn’t wait for her to decide how she felt before changing again.
“So you’ll understand that I had to check. But I see how it is now.”
As if getting closer to the inscrutable message would help her comprehend its meaning, Aqua stepped forward into the room. Terra and Ven moved with her, their warm hands firm. The three of them approached the centre console together. As they stopped in front of it, the letters disappeared, and for a moment, the screen went dark.
Then it lit up again.
Thin green lines began to trace, first on the main monitor, then on the adjacent ones, spilling out onto the screens and surfaces of every dusty and forgotten display lying stacked in the darkness. The lines sketched geometric cities, triangular citadels and parabolic gondolas, the outlines of windmill sails juddering as their motion was rendered under the cloudy glass. A dot matrix world unfolded around them.
On the main screen, in the void that formed the sky over the pixel city’s central tower, the letters reappeared.
“If you ever need an exit route, the door is always open.”
Aqua exchanged baffled glances with Terra and Ven.
The message changed one last time.
“Friendship’s a beautiful thing.”
From within the computer, there was a deep, low hum.
And all throughout the Land of Departure, the lights came back on.
