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“No, I don’t think a Heartless made these,” said Roxas, frowning as he ran his fingers along the gashes in the wall.
Xion tilted her head. “What makes you say that?”
Beneath Roxas’s fingertips, the gashes were jagged and bumpy. Narrow, too. And there were five of them torn into this part of the wall in total. Honestly, nothing indicated that these hadn’t been left by a Heartless. But…
Roxas shook his head. “I don’t know. I just got this feeling.” He couldn’t place it exactly, but somehow the claw marks (and he knew they were claw marks, he knew it on sight and he was sure of it, though he had no idea why he was so sure) reminded him of somebody he knew. He could almost make out the vague shape of that somebody in his mind. It definitely wasn’t the shape of any of the Heartless he’d seen before.
Weird, though, was that he couldn’t match the shape to anyone else—he was pretty sure he’d remember if anyone he knew had the kind of distinctive silhouette he was imagining. He tried describing it to Xion, but gave up partway through, realizing there wasn’t much point in trying to explain something he could barely make sense of himself. Uncertain, he drew his hand from the claw marks in the wall and continued to search the castle together with Xion for this recon mission they were on.
When Sora sees the marks on the wall in Beast’s Castle shortly after his arriving, something flashes at the back of his mind. Kind of like how he had to blink back tears when Hayner, Pence, and Olette saw him off back at Twilight Town, this feeling comes from a place Sora doesn’t understand. He’s never been here before. He remembers all the worlds he’s visited in the past, could probably list them off on both hands. But this world wouldn’t be in that list. He’s never been here.
He’s never been here but the steps he takes toward the wall echo steps taken before, and when he reaches up to touch the gashes, he feels the texture at the tips of his fingers before they even touch the wall. There’s a sadness, too, not on his fingertips but caught in his throat, welling up in his eyes. He… he knows what these marks are, and he knows who left them, too.
Standing behind him, Donald and Goofy don’t see the tears fall from Sora’s eyes. He’s quick to wipe them away, does it with the back of his hand once he pulls it back from the wall. He doesn’t get it. As far as he remembers, Beast had courage. He’d used his claws to shield Sora from the Heartless in Hollow Bastion—when Sora didn’t have the Keyblade any more. Beast had protected him. So why, then? Why’s there a twinge of loneliness and guilt in Sora’s heart?
…It wasn’t until a little while and a long hallway later that Roxas found himself with another piece of memory he couldn’t place, and a strange sensation in his chest to go with it. He and Xion had barely snuck past the walking, talking candelabra when a roar erupted throughout this part of the castle. It roused the walls and carpeted floors—and ruptured something in Roxas’s mind, too.
Xion jumped at the sound. Roxas didn’t. For one thing, he’d heard the roar on his first mission here, but now he was realizing that that wasn’t actually the first time he’d ever heard it. The first time he had heard it, he’d been in good hands, in the company of a friend. Safe. That roar had given him strength then and it gave him strength now.
“You’re brave,” whispered Xion, when Roxas pressed on toward the west wing.
Roxas set his hand on the handrail of the stairwell and cast a glance at the upper landing. The master’s quarters would be up ahead.
“I’m not so sure we have much to be afraid of, honestly,” Roxas replied, whispering not out of something like fear, but more out of politeness for how quiet it was.
“Let me guess—you’ve just got a feeling about it?”
Pausing halfway up the steps, Roxas turned to smile at her. “Yeah. I guess I do.”
A swipe of his claws and Beast drives the Shadow Heartless away from Sora, Donald, and Goofy. Sora steps forward, smiling, about to say thank you, but he stops at the sight of Beast’s expression, his heart thudding in his chest. His voice catches and the thanks goes unsaid. Not everything’s the same.
Sora blinks, trying to keep the tears from falling and not doing very well at it. This again. It’s happened so many times by now that his eyes are sore with it. Wiping away the tears just makes it feel worse—the crisscross on his gloves drags over the reddened skin in a way that makes him wince. It’s so stupid.
It’s so stupid that he feels like this is his fault. He knows it’s not. Beast isn’t different because of something Sora did. But the heavy beating in his chest has turned into the kind of ache you get when you feel bad, when you feel really, really awful, for something you’ve done, or something you let happen. In a locked box at the back of Sora’s mind, a box he doesn’t have the key to, there’s this sense that he once stood here in Beast’s Castle and watched and did nothing as everything Beast cared about was taken from him by the cruelty of a silver tongue.
It’s funny, what you can remember and what you can forget and how fragile memories are. When Roxas and Xion finally made it to the doors at the end of the west wing—and Roxas leaned forward to peer into the gap between them—any memories he had of strength and safety and friendship were suddenly wrenched away by a startling outburst of rage from within the chamber.
“Well, Roxas?” Xion asked. “What did you see?”
Roxas pushed away from the doors, shaking his head. ““There was a… weird monster inside.”
Xion went to take a closer look, but Roxas encouraged her to get away from the doors. “I don’t want him to see us here.”
His memory must have been wrong, or misplaced, after all. What made him think the master of the castle might have been a friend? All Roxas saw, peering into the chamber, was an anger he did not recognize and would never have had any memory of anyway. Well, that’s nothing new.
“Do you think he’s fighting the Heartless, like us?” Xion said, eyes wide.
Roxas frowned. “It’s too soon to say.”